Green Day - Viva la Cliche

Green Day just came out with a new album.  Yay.  I remember listening to them in middle school.  Lots and lots of distortion, fast drum beats, people that looked my age but were actually in their late twenties-early thirties.  Y'know - cool stuff.  Their last album was mildly preachy, which is an interesting break from their earlier stuff, which interpreted punk rock to mean youthful rebellion.  Now it means leftish political movements.  Noam Chomsky is SO punk, apparently.  Most of what they said on American Idiot was old hat.  Like, forty-odd years old: Americans are naive, Christianity culture is the enemy of freedom, evangelical children become self-professedly messed-up anarchists, blah blah.  One song that got my attention was Jesus of Suburbia, simply because they mention Jesus by name and identify him with an American subculture.  They refer to "make believe" and a "hurricane" of lies, the loss of faith - things that represent a new sort of atheism whose demographic seems to be students, internet users, and Englishmen.  It didn't really bother me because I did see that there is definitely an American evangelicalism that doesn't understand its own faith very well, and whose sincerity, due to its cultural prevalence, is at times questionable even on its own terms.

But this new album is a different.  Frankly, it's just boring and kinda hard on the ears.  Practically every song is railing against Christian faith, the most explicit is probably East Jesus Nowhere, which has its own website.  It does not appear to reflect any actual experience.  It's just a very loud, obnoxious, straw-man opinion, assuming a skeptical outlook, calling Christians stupid, gullible, etc.  My favorite line is "I want to know who learned to breed all the dogs who never learned to read."  Coming from Billy Joe Armstrong, that's pretty funny.  The strangest thing about the new atheism is that highly illiterate people begin to fold their arms and roll their eyes at people who are pretty well connected with the history of western thought. There are, of course, ignorant and educated people on all sides, but I'm referring to the actual tenet of the new atheism that "religious" people are ignorant.  That's called bigotry.  Only the most deep-seated knee-jerk ideologies begin to posit ad hominem reasons for dissent.  "You'd have to be crazy to think..."  "Those x people who think y are so z."  Of course, in this demographic, it's usually something more like, "You Christian *&^%s are so full of bull$41T.  God is ded!!one1!  Get over yourself!!!?!?/!1?!"  I'm aware that Green Day is trying to shock people, to be contrary, to be authentically other than the culture.  They simply fail to do so.

Boring.  Repetitive.  Old.  Ironic.

Durban II, Henri-Levy, and Calvin

This is the most reasonable article in support of Israel that I have ever read.  It outlines in just a couple of pages why we should be cautious in our denunciations of any human rights violations (without even mentioning the obvious target of philosophy), why the world is not taking much greater atrocities with the same "seriousness," and most surprisingly of all, defends a position first put forward (to my limited knowledge) by Slavoj Zizek, I believe in his book On Violence.  That solution is inaction.

Henry-Levi points out perspicuously that many of the denunciations of Israel have to do more with the fact that it is embroiled in a peculiarly religious conflict than with any notions of actual "racism."  The very idea that "blasphemy" could become an offense to the international community, and that criticism of religion (Islam in particular) should be defined as "racism" is deeply troubling.  I would find this impossible were I not familiar with the cowardice of western liberalism on the one hand and its brazenness on the other.  We could see ourselves (in the west, mostly Europe), were Durban II taken seriously, either defending Islamic ideology in the name of pluralism or crushing all true forms of religion by that same name.

Though it's a good article, it inadvertently highlights the trouble with liberalism in the west.  In its caricatures of religion, it finds itself trying to come to grips with the most militant forms of faith, and never dealing with the day-to-day realities of man's search for meaning.  Either we get inundated with attempts to blame the west for religious militancy, because guilt is the liberal ablution, or we get inundated with ridiculous attempts to "discredit" "religion," because clearly nobody who is not liberal is rational.  This post is not a defense of conservatism, which is not a whole lot better.  Rather, I just find this vomit-inducing dichotomy to be unnecessary and insulting to the vast majority of believers, especially the Christian ones.  I note Henri-Levy's use of the word "Church" as a catch-all to denote representatives of religion, and to draw parallels with Voltaire.  We are not here dealing with anything even remotely like the church of Voltaire's day.  The political power of Christendom was very unique, and the subsequent wars of religion were over that power - which, frankly, was an illegitimate power according to Luther and Calvin, if not Zwingli, whose death on the battlefield drew little sympathy from Luther.  We are dealing with a specific set of ideologies in conflict, and the Christian religion does not exacerbate their conflict - on the contrary, it renounces it!

I can understand, frankly, why (though I do not condone it) someone would want to label criticism of religion "racism."  Many people in religious circles did not come to faith by any action of their own, and they don't feel at liberty to abandon it by any such action either.  I feel that way about my faith, being of the Reformed tradition.  I wouldn't call someone a racist for criticizing Calvinism, because I don't expect them to understand it in the least, and because I understand that there are much greater evils than the criticizing of reformed theology that can be described as racism.  Those things ought to be dealt with on an entirely different plane, and it is shameful that some would dilute the term by coopting it for their agenda simply for its linguistic and legal power (again, as liberals are also wont to do - this one is from their playbook).  This all reinforces the now old and obvious dialectic between fundamentalism and liberalism.  They cannot exist without one another, and nothing in between can exist for either of them.  Neither is responsible for the other in any personal or legal sense - I think it's more appropriate to say that they deserve and create each other.  It's just a shame that the vast majority of people who stand in between get stepped on by governments who think themselves righteous, whether that be through their ecumenism or their rigidity.

Have we any rights?  Not really, according to those whose tradition made up "rights" to begin with.  None, at any rate, except the right to remain silent.

It Wasn't Supposed to End This Way

As the New York Times gives us stories tracking the progress of Obama's administration, vaguely disappointed with the slowness of American politics (after a year of relentless coverage of every word of the campaign), it also gives us headline news - a top story on their site - about how nice it is for owners of old dogs to see Stump win the dog show.  "It's absolutely a victory for older dogs," says Garrett Russo.  Meanwhile, in the real world, modernity is ending in the strangulation of a new and horrible pharisaism.

Dutch politician Geert Wilders - an elected official - is being banned from entry to the UK for expressing his opinion that Islam could be, and I don't want to sound biased here, as there is really no evidence for this claim that I'm aware of, as a reader of the New York Times, a violent religion.  He is being charged with "hate speech," the most absurd, truth-defying, abuse-inviting legal concept yet produced by the modern world.  According to the Guardan, the Home Office said that it would "stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred, and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country."  Now, I don't know what century the Home Office is living in, but last time I checked, this was the information age, and the best way to stop ideas is not preventing someone's bodily presence in the country.  Assuming that they are aware of this, one can only think that this is an intimidation tactic, and that they are not merely stopping hatemongers from entering the country, but stopping the spread of ideas by promising repercussions.  That makes it very important what constitutes political "hatred", what is normal - so that we may define what is "extremism" - and what constitutes a "violent message," as this appears to be more of an indictment of Islam for violence than a message itself, unless you count the definition of violence that Zizek has recently ridiculed in his perspicuous writings.

Fox News gives us another story on Prince Harry, who is being sent to a class about how mean racist remarks are.  Or rather, he must attend an "equality and diversity course" for saying racist things.  I really don't understand how this helps anything.  Racist remarks are bad, granted, but racism is not simply the result of ignorance - nor is it something you can control as simply as sending someone to a course on it!  Is equality and diversity taught?  Is it just a concept that you can learn, like algebra?  One does not make those comments because one does not know that they are offensive, but because one does know that they are offensive, and one wishes to be so.  You might do it because you want to fit in with a crowd defined in part by its exclusions, or because you've been personally harassed, or because you belong to a group whose racial boundaries coincide with class boundaries and feel injustice from other races, or because you've never met someone of another race and find them strange.  The level of ignorance here is staggering - unless, and here my thesis comes again, the re-educators are aware of this, and are just making a big show of condemning racism.

In another episode here in the good old U. S. of A., where the people solve their own problems, an organization for the protection of Asian Pacific Islander is suing Miley Cyrus for taking a photo using her fingers to pull her eyes into a slant.  It is not a photoshoot - it's her and some friends making a racist gesture together in front of a camera.  It's not very nice.  Someone should tell that young lady - Cyrus is 16 years old - that she's grounded and teach her that some people might be offended by such behavior coming from a figure as famous as she.  Or you could just sue her for 4 billion dollars, because you don't care about Asian Pacific Islanders, the constitution, Miley Cyrus, or anything but your own self-righteousness, and perhaps your bank account.  They're calling it a civil rights violation.  It is bad to do that sort of thing - it's a form of discrimination, and wrong in a similar manner to Cyrus' objectification of the female body, which is dehumanizing to girls in general and especially hurtful to those who will find themselves not looking like this decade's version of perfection.  But I don't see how a $4 billion lawsuit fixes anything, or even sends the right message.

Modernity has begun to end, and it's not ending because we're coming to any real conclusions about truth, morality, justice, beauty, or power.  We are, in essence, boiling everything down to power politics.  The rampant agnosticism and the strange immanence of people's personal digital-pet gods (more akin to Pullman's demons than any actual understanding of an actual God) along with ubiquitous communication technology are the symptoms of a rank individualism that is not so much creating a harmonious world as a predictably splintered world - shattered to monadic monarchs of their own little realms.  And the smaller the pieces become, the smaller the minds that go with them.  This will end, or the west will end, because the political consequences of such a mindset are starting to show.  The fact that one can, without at least superficial inconsistency, condemn the idea of another person on completely normative grounds - like an inquisition - and consider oneself a fair-minded, liberal thinker, defending freedom and making the world a better place for all is a terrifying thought indeed.  At least it is to someone who still reads.

BART Cop Shooting of Oscar Grant

I've recently been following the story unfolding in the shooting of Oscar Grant.  From the live videos shot by passengers on the trains of San Fransisco (known as BART), it looks like an unprovoked assault and murder of an unarmed African American passenger.  It just doesn't get a lot worse than that.  The shooting was supposed to be a mistake, but I really think that makes very little difference, after viewing the video.  Mr. Grant was clearly being abused no matter what the situation, and if he had been shot with a taser gun, Officer Mehserle should still be in jail.  That our justice system has allowed him bail is atrocious.  That the officer with his knee on Grant's neck was not charged is absurd and revolting.  That any of this even began to happen shows that San Francisco police are not trained well and there are some who ought to be weeded out.

Afghanistan is the Wrong Move

I am glad Obama is President.

That said, one part of Obama's policies that gave me serious pause was renewing the war in Afghanistan.  Before I landed on Obama as my choice among the meager pickings for President, I was for Ron Paul.  The reason was that he understood the meaning of the phrase "humble foreign policy," which is, no unnecessary intervention in other countries - and that rules out most intervention.  A recent raid in an Afghan village shows exactly what the problems are.  19 civilians were killed, only six of them Taliban.  The raid was a secret operation, so of course, when the villagers heard a disturbance and their neighbors crying for help, they came out to defend one another against robbers.  What they found were American commandos.

Obama is going to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan.  What Afghanistan needs is for its government to take responsibility for its people, and for those people to have confidence in their government to take action against terrorists and militants.  Perhaps they are weak, and perhaps they require the support of our powerful military to prop them up while they learn to stand on their own two feet...

But USAID has been working in Afghanistan for years, developing the country for the stated purpose of making terrorism a less necessary option for the people there.  Yes, necessary.  People resort to terrorism much more often than (as was the case with the very rich Bin Laden) they simply volunteer.  For the mass of terrorists, this is the final straw.  When education is good, peace rules, food and the essentials are available to a population, terrorism does not have nearly the same attraction, as there is less anger to fuel it.

Have we learned nothing from Iraq?  Does not the presence of thousands upon thousands of additional American troops fuel the sort of hatred and resentment that fuels these fruitless modern wars?  Is this Obama's economic stimulus plan?  And secret operations within the country seriously undermine both our credibility and that of the Afghan government.

And those are just the political problems.  What about justice and national sovereignty?  Can you even imagine if the national guard killed 19 people in a remote town just to get at a couple of militants in America?  There would be massive outrage, political consequences, firings, trials - you name it.  Now imagine if they were Russian troops who killed American citizens who threatened Russian interests in our country, neglecting to warn our government or anyone in the village for the stated reason that we might be sympathetic to those interests.  Is this not insane?  But for some reason, there is an asymmetrical understanding of justice in the world today.

But of course, I neglect the justification.  Namely, that anyone opposing the ideology of liberal western freedom is entitled to none of the rights it has forcefully taken upon itself to protect.  I wonder, does any state have the authority to revoke the right to life?  Did the state give that right in the first place?  What about liberty?  These questions are no longer asked, though they came to light more clearly during the immensely unpopular Bush administration.  I fear that oppression may come on Obama's coattails for those who do not find his speech as fair-minded as he intends it to be.

A New Presidency, A New Playing Field

Barack Obama is now President of the United States.  Yesterday, he overturned rules that made it illegal for USAID to give money to organization promoting abortions overseas.  While this has been batted back and forth between Republican and Democrat demonstrations for three of his predecessors, it does not change the breathtaking implications for this move, and the huge moral burden it places communities in the third world that are attempting to promote sexual ethics, especially in countries with sky-high HIV rates.  Sexual ethics are the cornerstone of the abortion debate, even though the left is not interested in actually debating this issue (Obama said so himself).  To recap (briefly), choice is not a legal argument - it is a begging of the question, as it is the function of law to prevent certain choices from being made.  Thus, the only question is the justice or injustice of the action, and as it is only in this perverse modern world that people debate what is a human and what is not (never, ever erring on the side of all candidates being human), it is a fairly straightforward issue.  If we must speak of rights, the right to liberty does not usurp the right to life - that's very simple.

Obama has also issued a mandate to close Guantanamo Bay.  That is more like it!  The suspension of habeas corpus and the use of torture must be stopped, and as it is our reputation of adherence to our own principles that has been hurt, it is appropriate for the renewal of that reputation to occur on America's most valuable principle - the peaceful transfer of power - with the destruction of a symbol of the old ways.

Obama has his economic work cut out for him, and while we have now approved $700 billion with the potential for 825 more (totaling over 1.5 trillion dollars!) in aid to the private sector, there must be some sort of way to keep the economy from eating itself in this process of propping up failing institutions.  I hear every day about layoffs, and it makes me nervous.  I hope that Obama, in his work to keep existing companies (and even industries) from collapsing, he and his legislators will consider the absolutely essential matter of entrepreneurship.  There is no business without new business.  Unless, of course, we want to have a workers' revolution, which sounds fun, but I've nothing to wear.

I have been reading the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer lately.  He is a fascinating character - a pacifist who attempted tyrannicide.  Bonhoeffer was a very strong Christian, and the left makes an attempt now and then to appropriate him for their own ideas.  His books make that impossible.  I mention him because there was no one more outspoken against the cooption of the church by the state during the rise and reign of the Nazi Party.  It is not the Church's job to support the state, and if the state courts the favor of the Church, she must be on her guard.  Justice is her concern, but power is not, simply because there is only one leader of the Church.  As the brave German pastor Martin Niemoller put it, "Christ is my fuhrer."  So if there is good to be done by the government, it ought to be done according to God's law and God's justice - justice for the poor, the alien, and the widow - but the Church must remember that its duty is not the destruction of evil, but the salvation of souls.  The gospel must be preached as the gospel, for the gospel.  It makes me nervous when prominent Christians become ceremonial parts of western politics, not because there is anything evil about the politics, but because the Church must remember old Christendom, when power became the Church's new God, and Christ, the servant of all, was forgotten.

The New Evangelical Other

Brian Flemming recently came out with a new documentary called The God Who Wasn't There.  I have not seen it.  I don't want to see it.  This post is dedicated to its marketing campaign.  This ridiculous little flick is billed as an expose, a brutal truth-telling escapade, a revolutionary documentary, etc. etc.  The tag-line is "Bowling for Columbine did it to the gun culture, Super Size Me did it to fast food, now The God Who Wasn't There does it to religion."  Note the use of the word "religion."  This movie is not talking about "religion."  It has a great big picture of Jesus' supposed face on the cover.  It raves about how it "pulls no punches" with Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.  The trailer only mentions Jesus' name.  It's talking about Christianity, which, in the modern west, is referred to as "religion" not because the arguments leveled against "religion" apply to all "religions" but as a semantic undermining reminder of the particularism of Christianity's truth-claims, and a subtle reaffirmation of the unfounded notion that to be an atheist or an agnostic is more open, cleverer, and less attached to dogma, which is nonsense to anyone who is willing to think about it.

This movie is bigotry, plain and simple.  It simply treats Christians ("the religious") as the Other, treating us as if we were ignorant, and pissing all over our beliefs without consulting a single respected scholar of those beliefs - not that I want them to.  Why would I want a documentary filmmaker, in the days of willful bias, to go and talk to a true Christian scholar like Wright, Gundry, the O'Donovans, Milbank, or any one of hundreds of skilled historians and theologians, only to do a malicious clip job on their interview without even attempting to do justice to them (such as Expelled)?  They act as if this has never been done before!  It has been done since Christianity saw its advent!  It has been done literally for millennia!  Voltaire made the exact same attack over two hundred years ago, and there has been a heavy and constant flow of "ground-breaking" "never before seen" idiocy ever since Enlightenment scholars realized the public would buy it if they rewrote history around a materialist framework without actually doing any new research.  But of course, this is all very clear - we get a new one every few years, so what's the big fuss about?  The difference between this movie (and the recent atheist movement) that makes it much more dangerous than before is that in all its condescending rhetoric, it is in reality meant for the unwashed masses.

You are meant to believe that if you do not believe in God, you must be smarter than someone that does.  You are meant to fear people that believe in God due to there irrationality and lack of judgement, as evidenced by their belief in God, which is irrational.  The same argument, incidentally, was made by John McCain, questioning Barack Obama's judgement over his association with William Ayers - if you do x, you are irrational and cannot be trusted with y.  Zizek notes in his In Defense of Lost Causes that this case was made against subversives in a certain communist regime, where, if you were not communist, you must be insane, as only someone who was not sane would ever dream of being anything but a communist, and the patients were brutally treated accordingly.  Sam Harris openly advocates the shunning and ridicule of Christians, as if the arguments were just so clear that it should be regarded as a pathology at worst or childishness at best, to be thought immature - the argument is so repetitive that it numbs the mind to have to point it out again and again, and no actual intelligence or information is required for it to take hold.  You just are smarter than those silly religious nuts.

This is extremely dehumanizing to those who still believe in Christ.  The term "belief" has been so mangled that even speaking of "belief in Christ" conjures up arguments about irrationality and lack of evidence.  My point here is not that you respect someone's right to believe that for which there is no warrant - not at all.  My point here is that the discussion has diminished into this hostile top-of-the-lungs shouting with fingers in ears that is not prepared to admit one iota of transcendental truth simply from an irrational unwillingness to reconsider the terms of the argument.  I believe Jacques Lacan said (though one does not need him to point it out) that he who determines the terms of the argument wins.  Well, the materialists have their terms (unaided empiricism), and they are determining them through this backwards propaganda which, in the name of science (that is, the unbridled marketplace of ideas), hypocritically presents one side of the story as not only irrevocable truth, but suppressed, newly discovered truth!  In the mere trailer - the TRAILER - of the movie, it is stated that evangelicals cope with the reality of Jesus' non-existence, which is apparently being spoken about for the first time (otherwise, why would anyone go see this stupid movie?), by ignoring it - as if they all knew and just didn't want to talk about it.  As if they didn't just disagree.  As if, again, you were smarter and more honest than they, humble viewer.

Here's a thought - go read a book.  Go invest your time in some good old cool media, which is what all those people they're interviewing do, instead of allowing people with agendas to force-feed your senses.  Instead of making fun of people for believing in Jesus, why don't you go read the book of Romans, or read some up-to-date scholarship (with a bibliography - emergent church crap doesn't count) just to see exactly how dumb it is - to live in that ignorant evangelical world.  Don't read Matt Taibbi's barbed account of a backward, cultish church - go spend a Sunday morning at a local Anglican or Presbyterian Church, and talk to the pastor.  You will find a) that you actually don't know anything about archeology, b) that neither does Sam Harris, c) that one's ideas are deeply affected by all kinds of unscientific experiences - including yours, and d) that Christians are no scarier than anyone else, and that you will, more likely than not, receive free food when you're hanging around the older ones.