Positively Job-like

I note this week, already in grief and pain, the appearence of a nasty rash.

After first reacting, John Cleese-style, clenched fist to the sky, upon further reflection, I reached for Phyllis Tickle's Divine Hours to regain composure.

It's something I've been striving for all week while enduring pinched nerves. Some relief has come pondering examples found in Roy Sorensen's "A Brief History of the Paradox, Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind."

Nothing beats a problem like how Achilles can never pass a turtle if the turtle has half a room's headstart to refocus the mind.

In Sunday school class, studying Brennan Manning's demanding "The Importance of Being Foolish," I introduced a more practical problem whose solution reflects against where one might fall on an arbitrary Christianity scale, that is, 10, 25, 50, 75 or 100%.

Testing the premise, I introduced an editorial from our local rag by Dan Thomasson who asks "When is a pharmacist not a pharmacist." He writes, "A rape victim walks into a pharmacy with a prescription for a morning-after pill that will prevent any possible pregnancy and is told politely that it wil not be filled, that she will have to go elsewhere no matter how inconvenient. That is, if the pharmacist has the decency to return the prescription."

'R' opened our debate: "I'm a lawyer who indeed resigned from a firm and opened my own so I could fully stand by my convictions."

'J' responded: "I'm uncomfortable with the State legislating a requirement to fill prescriptions presented to a pharmacist if it violates his conscience."

'ZZ' offered: "I'm concerned a person with convictions may also decide he won't serve people of color, and due to such a possibility, a legal mandate to fill all presented prescriptions is necessary."

Most of us admire persons who stand up for their convictions although we also recognize there are times when the State needs to intervene for the common good.

In relation to Manning, and our scale of Christianity, what might Jesus ask of us in this situation? Might He back the pharmacist who acting out his faith convictions denies the prescription or might His compassion for the suffering of the victim and consequences of the rape trump the pharmacist's legalistic discernment of what is required by Scripture?

Might there be more than one answer? Perhaps this might be decided upon a case by case basis resisting any consistent universal solution.

As Sorensen points out, the 19th century German philosopher Ludwig Wittenstein "poked fun at the logicians who trumpeted contradictions as intellectual disasters. In real life, when people discover they have fallen into contradiction, they unceremoniously patch up the problem -- if they do anything at all." Wittenstein predicated "a time when there will be no mathematical investigations of calculi containing contradictions, and people will actually be proud of having emancipated themselves from consistency."

One of my heroes, Bill James, the great baseball statistican, has climbed that plateau by publishing an astonishing essay entitled "Underestimating the Fog." Despite this new self-questioning, James remains the guru of statistical player evaluation and prediction replacing forever the gut instinct utilized by old-timers. His approach revolutionized the game - Billy Beane of the A's is his foremost student yet the knock against his A's has been the James approach can only take you so far but not over the top. What Theo Epstein and the Boston Red Sox have proven is that the statistical approach combined with more money than is available to the A's can create a dream team that not only reaches the top of the standings but stays there indefinitely.

What James admits, however, after a lifetime devoted to the reliability of stats is his methodology is flawed; that (1) the database to calculate accurate numbers isn't sufficiently large (for example, a pitcher may only pitch 100 innings in a year) to accurately predict future performance next season; and (2) he has significantly underestimated the luck factor - that is, no matter what happens during any measured time period, all factors are influenced to a significant degree by luck than any other available measurable outcomes.

In contrast to Wittenstein and James' openness to inconsistent solutions, Douglas Groothuis, in his review of Christopher Hitchens "God is not Great," writes without any doubt that, "The Bible proclaims that there are many false gods. Christians have no need to defend religion, in general, since Christianity by its very nature claims to be the exclusive truth and final revelation of God in humanity - Christians, consequently, can accept many of Hitchens attacks on religion [condemnations of Mormonism and Islam] as criticisms of false gods without thereby engaging in special pleading of their own view."

If we theorize where these three authors might think about the pharmicist, we might safely guess the philosophical Sorensen would deduce there is no one right or wrong answer; the methodical Bill James may offer a statistical but admittedly flawed guess; while the assured Groothuis might deny the prescription without any moral compunction to offer any explanation to the victim.

I'm unsure, as of yet, where Manning might fall on this question, although by listening to the music of his ragamuffin disciple, Rich Mullins, I'm leaning towards the idea that Manning might opt for the kind of radical Christian compassion Rich embodies.

I stake a personal theology and subsequent worldly actions upon the instinct Jesus provides the prescription to alleviate the immediate suffering of the needy human being in front of Him. If that means any person of like-mind falls at the 50% mark, I'm satisfied with the implication on this plane we'll never know the right answer but perhaps may find out on the next.