The Two Thieves Crucified With Jesus: Encapsulates Everything
My pastor today said that the encounter between Jesus and the two thieves as they all hung on crosses crystallized everything he had been trying to say throughout the sermon. I’ve always loved this story as well, because it hits on so many crucial aspects of my views on redemption. So here is Luke 23: 32-43:
32 There were also two others, criminals, led with Him to be put to death. 33 And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on the right hand and the other on the left. 34 Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”
And they divided His garments and cast lots. 35 And the people stood looking on. But even the rulers with them sneered, saying, “He saved others; let Him save Himself if He is the Christ, the chosen of God.”
36 The soldiers also mocked Him, coming and offering Him sour wine, 37 and saying, “If You are the King of the Jews, save Yourself.”
38 And an inscription also was written over Him in letters of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew:
THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.
39 Then one of the criminals who were hanged blasphemed Him, saying, “If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us.”
40 But the other, answering, rebuked him, saying, “Do you not even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this Man has done nothing wrong.” 42 Then he said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.”
43 And Jesus said to him, “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”
So here are some quick observations:
==> Notice the theme of jeering. For me, that is the worst aspect of how “we” treated Jesus when He was physically present. It is one thing that the religious authorities whose prestige was threatened by His teachings, rationally decided to kill Him. That’s obviously reprehensible, but understandable. But yikes, while the Son of God is there, dying on our behalf, people went further and mocked Him? That still gives me the willies.
==> Even as He’s hanging there, dying an agonizing and slow death, Jesus asks for forgiveness for the people who have done this terrible deed. And why? Because He recognizes that they truly don’t realize they are murdering God. When I start getting snippy with some of the commentators on these Sunday posts, I need to (as always) look at how Jesus Himself handled people who, shall we say, weren’t fighting fair.
==> However, lest we conclude that nobody gets punished because Jesus just gives a blanket apology for all, there definitely seems to be the implication that only the repentant thief is spending that day in paradise with the Lord. This is interesting on several levels. First of all, it is crystal clear evidence that you don’t need to “live a good life” to get into heaven; what’s important is that you get yourself right with God before you die, and the way you do that is to humbly acknowledge your own guilt and Jesus’ innocence (and Lordship).
Secondly, notice what the cynical thief is doing. He’s not so much saying, “I don’t believe you are God.” Rather, he’s demanding that Jesus prove it. Now why is this interesting? Because–if we are going to analyze the gospel account at face value, which is the only sensible thing to do if we’re in the middle of analyzing a gospel account–Jesus has already been walking around, performing daily (?) miracles for years, including raising Lazarus from the dead. Indeed it was the latter miracle that made the religious authorities realize they needed to kill Jesus quickly, lest His fame become unstoppable.
I fully admit that when it comes to a legal code that “libertarian” judges would promulgate in a free society as I envision it, that offenses would be defined with respect to violations of property rights; somebody’s “attitude” would have very little to do with it, except to distinguish an accident from a crime. Yet when it comes to God’s criteria for which people should be “saved,” I think it makes perfect sense that a repentant thief would receive preference over someone who was jeering and yet hadn’t stolen anybody’s property during his life. Those are entirely different realms and it makes perfect sense to me that the human judge shouldn’t reward/punish somebody’s humility/willful arrogance, but that God would.
==> Last point: Undergirding my view of the infinite justice of God’s system, remember: I conceive Heaven as spending an eternity in the direct presence of God. In contrast, I define Hell as spending eternity in the absence of this personal communion. So it’s not that the mocking thief is being cast into fire because Jesus is spiteful, rather it’s that he himself chose to reject Jesus and so is getting the fate he picked.
Don’t Mess With Mises
On the plane back from Canada I was going through the relevant portion of The Theory of Money and Credit for my online class. I thought this passage was pretty funny:
The most important results of research in the social sciences leave the multitude apathetic, but any set of figures awakens its interest. Its history becomes a series of dates, its economics a collection of statistical data. No objection is more often brought against economics by laymen than that there are no economic laws; and if an attempt is made to meet this objection, then almost invariably the request is made that an example of such a law should be named and expounded – as if fragments of systems, whose study demands years of thought on the part of the expert, could be made intelligible to the novice in a few minutes. Only by letting fall morsels of statistics is it possible for the economic theorist to maintain his prestige in the face of questions of this sort. (pp. 187-188)
Murphy on Stossel on SEC
Yikes with all of my traveling I almost forgot to tell you that my clip with Stossel is supposed to air tonight (Thursday) at 9pm. I think I’m the second guest of the episode.
Also check this out–it alone makes my bondage to Mark Zuckerberg worthwhile.
Insider Trading Bask
Any examples of clearly absurd prosecutions for “insider trading”? I’m going on John Stossel’s show and that might come up.
Mankiw vs. Rothbard
This was a Mises Daily I had last week that I forgot to post. An excerpt:
In a recent New York Times piece, bestselling textbook author, Harvard professor, and Mitt Romney advisor Greg Mankiw offered four principles of tax reform that are almost universally endorsed by professional economists, even extremely free-market ones.
In the present article, I’ll critique Mankiw’s views from a Rothbardian perspective. The ostensible consensus viewpoint among economists on fixing the tax code shows the perils of groupthink.
A Subset of Frequently Asked Questions About My Christian Faith
Before I jump into today’s post, the standard disclaimer: This is narcissistic for two reasons: (a) People in the comments of previous posts usually frame it as, “But Bob, you still haven’t explained how you can reconcile your faith with objection #12…?” and because (b) I am quite an amateur in these matters and don’t pretend to speak for “Christians.” So that’s why I frame this stuff as, “Here’s how I think about it…”
Q: “OK let’s assume your arguments (as presented to the hypothetical Landsburg, for example) establish the existence of a God. How do you know it’s the God of the Bible? Why are you a Christian and not, say, a Muslim or a Buddhist?”
A: I tried to give some answers to this question here and here. Let me summarize some of the biggest factors in the current post:
According to the gospel accounts, Jesus claimed He was the Son of God, and in fact God Himself who assumed human form. In my understanding, none of the other major religious figures did this. So if I already think (on other grounds) that there is an intelligent Creator of the universe, who communicates with humans, and then I come across stories of this guy Jesus claiming that He was sent by God etc., then I prima facie want to hear more from this guy; maybe what he’s saying is true.
I don’t know enough about the other major religions to say whether they are consistent with Christianity or not. For example, I think from 30,000 feet Muslims, Jews, and Christians believe in the same God, though they have different names and stress different things about Him. So it’s not that I think (say) an orthodox Jew is “wrong”–of course not, since Jesus Himself was raised as an orthodox Jew! Rather, I just think Jesus was the Messiah for whom the Jews were waiting. (I don’t know enough about Islam to say how it relates to Christianity.)
I looked into Buddhism when I was in grad school during this transition phase (I can’t remember if it was before or after I dropped my atheism) and I found it just didn’t resonate with me. I realize this is a very big paraphrase, but I concluded that Buddhists basically say, “Stop stressing out about the world, just stop caring what happens. You are upset that bad things happen, but who’s to say that it’s bad? Maybe it’s good. And really, to be truly at peace you should drop these notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ altogether.” In contrast, I took the Christian view to say, “Stop stressing out about the world, God is in charge, and He is omnipotent and infinitely good. Yes bad things do happen, but He has a plan that will allow those admittedly bad things to redound to the greater good in the long run.” Those are very different views, even though superficially they sound the same.
As far as Zeus etc., I am not aware of masses of people who claimed to have seen firsthand his mighty works and then were willing to die instead of renouncing those views. In contrast, the early Christian martyrs would have known if Jesus really came back from the dead, or if that were something they made up in order to win converts to their cause. I am prepared to believe that people will lie for a cause, but less willing to believe that they will be willingly tortured to death for something they know is a fraud.
Q: “Why don’t you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster? What about this lady who claims she saw intelligent dolphins? If we believe you about God, are we supposed to believe her about dolphins too?”
A: Just about everyone except Objectivists agrees that the moral teachings attributed to Jesus are very wise (though some would quibble about how literally we are to apply them). I personally am a pacifist, and go even further and think that loving everyone and holding no grudges is a wonderful recipe for happiness on this Earth. So I think that when it comes for advice on how to live, the Biblical character of Jesus of Nazareth is the best teacher of all time.
There is obviously nothing like this regarding the FSM or the dolphins that lady reported. If she told us the dolphins told her all these wise sayings, which at first sounded crazy but in retrospect–like after growing in wisdom through decades of living–they sounded truer and truer, then yeah maybe I would give her story more credence. But as it is, she sounds as crazy to me as she does to the atheist, and I don’t see any reason to inquire further.
To repeat, I WAS NOT offering my personal experiences as evidence that should sway anybody else. The reason I offered those things was so that my atheist/agnostic opponents would understand why I had such conviction in my beliefs. Someone brought up an alien analogy, and that’s a good one. Suppose some guy literally was visited by aliens when he was out hiking in the mountains; he went into their ship and saw all kinds of advanced things etc. Now if then tried to argue with astronomers and other scientists about the existence of extraterrestrial life, he obviously couldn’t cite those experiences. But he would be quite sure that when some guy tried to “deduce” that the universe couldn’t possibly support alien life, that this guy was making a mistake in his reasoning.
So it’s a similar thing with me, and the arguments we have every week on this blog. I can use my reason to spot (what is obvious to me) a non sequitur in someone’s “knockdown” argument against the Bible or whatever, but beyond that I have personally communicated with God (or so I believe) and so that’s why I’m all the more sure that I am right on this question. I didn’t even bring that stuff up for a long time, because I knew the scorn to which I would be subjected (like Landsburg saying my arguments were “insane” not to mention the kudos from Major Freedom). Back to the alien analogy, the guy who had been personally visited probably would bite his tongue too, knowing full well he’d be painted as a nutjob if he said, “I know they’re real! I talked to them!” But we can all understand that those experiences would drive home the point, for that particular guy.
Q: “Why does your God let innocent children die of cancer?”
A: This is a classic conundrum and great thinkers have shed much ink on it. Let me give a very quick reply that will sound incredibly flippant and heartless, but I actually think is correct:
Once again, we have to seriously entertain the hypothesis that the God described by the Bible exists. Now if that is true, there is a sense in which He personally kills everyone who ever lives. In other words, suppose the 10-year-old boy who dies from cancer instead lived to be 120 and died of “old age.” In that scenario too, God killed him. That’s because God is responsible for everything that happened.
Now one might follow up and say, “*sigh* OK fine Murphy, but why do little kids have to suffer? Why can’t they just go peacefully in their sleep?”
But who’s to say how much suffering and pain we experience in an absolute sense? Look, no matter how God designed our universe and the human experience, so long as there were some variation from life to life, then some events would be “painful” compared to others. Now it’s logically conceivable that we could live in a world where the following torment is a possible thing that could happen to you:
C-3PO: His high exaltedness, the Great Jabba the Hutt, has decreed that you are to be terminated immediately.
Han Solo: Good, I hate long waits.
C-3PO: You will therefore be taken to the Dune Sea, and cast into the pit of Carkoon, the nesting place of the all-powerful Sarlaac.
Han Solo: Doesn’t sound so bad.
C-3PO: In his belly you will find a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.
Han Solo: On second thought, let’s pass on that, huh?
There’s another element to this. Some cynics (like an economist from the University of Rochester) wonder why Christians even take minimal effort to preserve their lives. After all, if paradise awaits us once we die, then why go to the doctor or put on seatbelts? What a bunch of hypocrites these Christians are! (Or actually, as Landsburg suspects, they don’t really believe the stuff they chant on Sundays.)
Now I’m skipping some steps in the argument, but related to Landsburg’s criticism, I have seen other cynics wonder why a loving God who “just wants a relationship with us” would subject us to a painful testing ground on this miserable planet. So here’s what I claim: You can say that it makes no sense for the Christian God to allow kids to die early. Or, you can claim that it makes no sense for the Christian God to subject us to decades of toil on this Earth subject to scarcity, evil, etc. But, it doesn’t really make sense to level both accusations simultaneously. Even though it is OBVIOUSLY devastating when any parent loses a young child, if the Bible is correct, then the Christian parent hopes (and “has faith that”) when he or she dies and enters paradise too, the child will be there and the parent will be so grateful that God, in His infinitely good plan, allowed that child to enter paradise that much sooner. From that eternal, heavenly perspective, the eight-month battle with leukemia or whatever it was, will literally be like a momentary blip in contrast to the eternity of inconceivable joy, basking in the presence of God Himself.
I don’t mean to downplay how awful things are in this world; they really are. But what I’m saying is, think of “the worst thing that ever happened in human history.” No matter how God designed things, we would still be able to carry out that task, and then cynics would wonder, “Why did God allow such a bad thing to occur?”
Big Government “Conservatism” Doesn’t Work in Foreign Policy, Either
Someone on Facebook posted the below, presumably because the person likes Ron Paul and wants to out every other Republican candidate:
But I’m more interested in the spectacular failure of Gingrich’s analysis. (And note, his complaint is that Ronald Reagan isn’t doing enough abroad, in his role as Command-in-Chief of the mighty U.S. military.)
Gingrich praises what Truman accomplished, and contrasts it with Reagan’s limited achievements. And yet, if Gingrich could just look a few years into the future, the record would be:
TRUMAN: Ushered in Cold War.
REAGAN: Ushered in fall of Soviet Union.
Incidentally, I know many Austro-libertarians will say, “No way Murphy! Reagan was a big warmonger! He spent way too much on the military! The Soviet Union fell because of the calculation problem.”
I would agree with the specific claims of such an objection, but my general point against Gingrich is still valid. He thought Reagan was being too weak on the international scene–he pulled the Marines out of Lebanon, remember, something that if Obama did would be “giving in to the terrorists”–in contrast to Truman’s assertiveness. He wanted Reagan to “accomplish” more, not seeing that Reagan’s ostensible passivity was paving the way for the USSR’s downfall. It’s easier for economic problems to lead to social unrest, when the population isn’t worried about getting nuked from a foreign conqueror.
Also, I really think this moment was a turning point in world history. (Really, watch it and listen to the crowd’s reaction.) So I do think Reagan is rightly credited by his fans for doing a lot to bring down communism, it’s just they vastly overrate the power of physical might and vastly underrate the power of ideas.
Megan McArdle on the Heartland Institute / Peter Gleick Affair
Wow this is pretty interesting. I kept hearing allusions to “fakegate” and leaked/stolen documents from the Heartland Institute during the last week, but I was too busy to really read up on it. Well today I spent a good hour catching up, and holy cow there are some interesting twists and turns. As the Dude would say (if I remember the quote), a lot of ins and outs, lotta interested parties.
I don’t have time to walk you through it now; I may write up a more formal post for a dedicated website. In the meantime, Megan McArdle has been awesome on this issue. Go to her archives and start at the February 16 one, then start working towards the present. McArdle gives her reasoning for suspecting a forgery early on, and her commentary on Peter Gleick’s confession–as well as the hilarious response by the “climate realists”–is superb.
The reason I like McArdle’s take on this stuff, is that she actually sounds like she is coming to the issue with no axe to grind. Obviously there are pro-Heartland people who are going ballistic at “these blatant criminal acts” etc. etc., and of course good old Joe Romm says (a) they started it and (b) all’s fair when it comes to saving the planet. So McArdle is refreshing in this context, because she explains what the basic facts are and then comments on them in a pretty straightforward way.
Disclosure if it matters to anybody: I was a paid speaker at (what I think was) the first Heartland conference on climate change. I summarized my work on the economics of climate change, most of which you can see in this Independent Review publication. After that talk, Heartland didn’t invite me back to future conferences (at least as a paid speaker). I was hoping the leaked documents would explain what I did wrong, but alas, nothing there…
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