Jamaica Day 1.5

Hello All (even though it will probably only be Betsy and Mom who read it),
We all arrived here in Jamaica safely! Our plane ride from Atlanta to Montego Bay was not restful. There was an infant in the seat infront of us (Will, Ryan, and Nathan) two rows infront of Mrs. Wolffe and Catherine. Screaming is too mild of a word to describe what this little one did for the entire duration of the flight. Customs was uneventful; We got through and found a taxi to take us to Galena Breeze. One sweaty two and half hour bus ride later and we had arrived! It was a bit of a surreal expireince for all of us as none of us had left here thinking that we would ever be back. But we are, and it is as beautiful as ever. I am writing this in the large open air dining room over looking the ocean. It is a hot day on the island, 94, and probably about the same humididty percentage. We are staying realitively cool as the breeze off the ocean is very refreshing. And yes, I am trying to brag.
After arriving last night and getting settled in, we had a delicious dinner of jerk pork and chicken. There was another group here, but it was there last night. We spent the night hanging out by the pool, learning a new version of UNO from the summer interns. We fell asleep on the roof of the utlitly shed star gazing. We went to bed early, 9:30. We have spent most of the day installing old programs like: thinking things, mario typing, and the original printshop. It is the first time any of us have worked with floppy disks in a while. All in all it has been a pretty lazy day as the staff has been flipping the camp for the group of 30 that is arriving from Ohio. Tommorow we are going to be at Church and continuing our installs.
That's all for now from Jamaica.

What If continued

One of my earliest posts asked the question "what if Jesus knew exactly what He was talking about?" I have been reading John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus lately. He constructs an argument to prove that Jesus' teachings are a very functional foundation for all ethics. He goes so far as to claim that Jesus' ethical system is universal and sociologically viable. He points out that all though the Church(which I am a part of) often pays lip service to this truth but does not flesh it out in its actions. We ask questions like What Would Jesus Do, but in reality we are terrified of the answer.
What I am realizing about ethics is that more than anything it is an epistemological issue. Ethics is asking what is the right action. However, such a question is unanswerable unless we first answer the question what is right.( which is a cosmological question) And at an even deeper we must ask how can we know what is right. Now we have arrived at epistemology, how can we know reality? The answer to this question inevitalbely defines our ethics.
If all of this seems as abstract to you as it does to me, let me bring it to a more concrete example: "You have heard it was said LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AND HATE YOUR ENEMY. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; in order that you may be that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you what reward have you? Do not even the tax gathers do the same? "
Befor I go any further, let me preface this for all of you who are thinking: "here goes Nathan on one of his pacifist arguments again." This is not about war, I promise. What we have here is a very basic ethical statement by Jesus: the right course of action is to love your enemy and be loving to towards those who do not reciprocate. Yet, the Church has argued for two millineia over the meaning of these words. The split has not come over an ethical disagreement, but an epistemological one. When someone reads these words, they have two choices 1) reject what Jesus is saying because it does not appear to be practical, or viable. 2) to accept that it is true, even though it may seem irrational.
The first response is a typically arrogant human response, and all too often it is my response. As Yoder puts it, this argument says that "it is by studying the realities around us, not by hearing a proclamation from God that we discern the right." To reject Christ's ethical statement is to say that it can not be true. The way that its veracity is tested is against what the natural world seems to order. To reject Jesus' claim as "unpractical" is the epitome of arrogance. It is to say that my experience is more capable of informing reality than God, and therefore I reject God's revelation because it does not compute with my experience of reality. It is to say that I know reality better than God.
The second is to acknowledge that truth may be outside of your sphere of experience. To say, I do not feel that this is true, or have not experienced it to be true, but still esteem it to be so, is to admit that truth may lay outside your ability to define. What we see in all of this is that morality is a question of how you understand truth. Thus morality is an epistemological issue.