It’s never been surprising to me why Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasters in the world. He has obviously worked on the skill of conversation–not easy amid all the preachiness and outrage of today. His pacing is good, people don’t talk over or past each other, and you get a sense of who each guest is as a human being. Every week he keeps millions of listeners engaged with episodes that are nearly half as long as the average audiobook.
But over the last year or two I witnessed, in real time, a tragic change in the mood of Joe Rogan’s podcast. His signature ability to host people with a variety of views, the very thing that made him interesting, has practically vanished from his show.
Then, a few weeks ago, I was heartened to see someone who I knew held different political views than those Rogan has been championing so vociferously in almost all his recent episodes. Great, I thought, Joe is finally getting out of his slump. But alas, in that one episode he avoided the subject of politics–and any opportunity to be challenged.
My takeaway is not so much that Rogan is a coward, but that few media personalities can withstand the terrible self-reinforcing feedback loop that goes with the enterprise. It traps them into telling their audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it. Audience capture is the neologism that describes this phenomenon–a term that, tellingly, has entered the parlance since the advent of podcasting.
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The Christian faith teaches us to pray and then say, “Praise God,” even if the answer is different from what we wanted. In the words of Daniel’s three friends, “God is able to save us but even if he doesn’t we will stay true to him” (Daniel 8:17-18).
As a practicing Christian, something about that teaching has always sat heavy with me because it can feel as if it lets God off the hook. But recently I heard something that brought clarity to the conundrum. A group of us from church watched a short presentation by Pete Greig. He believes God does answer prayer but that we all exist in a labyrinthine ecosystem of 3 W’s: World, War and Will.
World–Our world has to work a certain way for life to continue. Except for occasional miracles, God must remain true to the laws of nature or we would experience utter chaos. This affects how our prayers are answered.
War–Satan (original meaning: the accuser) works against God in individual situations, although Christians believe Satan will ultimately be defeated. This also affects how our prayers are answered.
Will–Despite our best intentions, our perspective is finite, and sometimes we are praying outside the will of God. Again, this affects how our prayers are answered.
While the 3 W’s don’t eliminate all the tension–tension is an integral part of faith–it reminds us that we do not exist in a vacuum. Each prayer we breathe is interrelated to countless parts of our lives, not to mention the lives of people around us.
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One of my personal goals is to be less judgmental and that people could feel mercy and acceptance from me. It occurred to me the other day that I often feel judgmental toward people because I feel indignant toward them. How can they do or think or say that, and I don’t! Sometimes, if we’re honest, we are judgmental because we secretly wish we were experiencing something of what they’re experiencing. If you think about it, a close relative of judgment is envy.
Of course, if the other party’s actions are truly wrong, the end results can never be attractive. Once we see things as they are, we either accept the merit of those we have been judging and join them, or we see the pain they are headed for. Either way our heart softens toward them. We certainly don’t get bent out of shape with any form of judgment, or of envy, which is its evil twin. Compassion and goodwill are the beautiful antidotes to judgment.
But this is the problem, Gideon, it’s all very well to happily accept God’s will from a position of life handing you ace card after ace card. Loving parents, ace card, born in first world country, ace card, from a religious or ethnic community that values family and the marital bond, ace card, no substance addiction, ace card, having any say about what work you do, what you earn, and what your conditions are, ace card, good personality or looks and stability lead to good marriage which leads to good family of one’s own, ace card. Well, yeah, God doesn’t answer my prayer, praise God. How about we try it this way, born on the outer sections of a rubbish mound or in an urban slum in the river flood zone in Manila, mother depressed due to various factors and so left to wander the streets and alleys at age two and three, mocked by the other children, little bit of school but drop out due to contempt of staff, work as rubbish scavenger, when we’re both 18 my girlfriend becomes pregnant and has baby, now problem is she will leave me for a still poor but richer man if i don’t get more money, due to earlier errors now only available option to me is sell shabu methamphetamine at street level to if lucky earn minimum wage of under $5-10 a day, I start selling, eases the pressure for several months, girlfriend starts being nice-ish again, then the president, who was elected on the back of the protestant Christian vote saying he will kill and dump so many drug dealers that the fish in Manila bay will grow fat, tells the police to kill all drug dealers and four armed men kick down the door of my shack and I start running praying to God to spare my life, get shot seven times and mortally wounded, lying in mud, overflowing effluent, and own blood – but hey, praise God. Do you see the problem?
There’s two more points I would like to make. Firstly, no, the canonical Bible does not have the consistent position you state it does, on whether God will do what you ask, or will do what God pleases regardless of what you ask, it says various contradictory things at different places. There’s multiple examples of this, Matthew 7 ask and it will be given etc., John 14 ask for anything in my name and it will be given etc. There simply isn’t a consistent message from the Bible on this issue.
Secondly, there is an alternative Christian tradition that was only really recovered through 19th and 20th century finds in Egypt of an early Christian tradition that was completely suppressed by the Catholic Church, and which didn’t make it into the NT canon. It is radically different, and I think does resolve this issue. It separates Jesus from the Old Testament tradition, and posits that the supreme God was not responsible for the material world and obvious suffering in it, and that that was basically a terrible mistake by an errant angel, and that Jesus Christ rather than being the same substance or an aspect of the creator of the material world actually came from the supreme God to help people out of all the problems created by physical creation. This Christian tradition is not hamstrung in the same way by the problem of evil, and it also consistently logically answers the issue of answered and unanswered prayer: the material world is inherently harmful, what did you expect, don’t do evil yourself and focus on the spiritual world.
Valid questions, Neil, and ones I also think about sometimes. Several things to consider: is it perhaps better to light a candle than curse the darkness? If for no other reason than to make our passage in this often tumultuous life easier. Second, it is interesting that the most destitute people often have stronger faith than those who have all or most of their material needs met.
Ace card receivers, which includes those who for whatever reason coped with an honest encounter with the nature of the physical world, will naturally emit light. I imagine, Gideon, your house literally glows at night. Do the multitude need a lie to cope? Maybe. If so those who don’t should make sure it’s the best lie going around, and one that requires being shamed into praising a posited author of one’s own misery is not the optimal lie. The most destitute have a stronger faith for the same reason that I, as a teenager, came to burn with one – utter desperation. A desperate person will say or do nearly anything to try to relieve their situation.