Unconventional Wisdom

Duns Scotus

2009-11-07T21:19:00.001-08:00

I like Duns Scotus. I just started reading about him, and while his style (Liebnizian logic meets Aquinas format) leaves something to be desired, and he is distinctly papish, and he may or may not be responsible for beginning the whole modern problem of divinity qua being instead of the other way around (depending on whether you believe certain new interpreters), he believes one very important thing. He disagrees with Thomas Aquinas that theology is primarily theoretical. Duns Scotus believes theology is a "practical science," science used in the classic sense. He believes that theology ought only to deal with those things which affect Christian practice in some way. That, I think, is not only right, but is a necessary corrective for the way things tend to be done in the university.

It corrects some of the hyper-pragmatism in the church as well. There is an awful lot of non-theological practice in the church today. Totally unreflective support for certain political dogma, certain cultural practices/capitulations, certain media as means for the spreading the gospel that have not been submitted to any theological test. Why do I think that's important? Because without faith it is impossible to please God. The knowledge of God and the service of God are inseparable - you cannot have one without the other. This is most certainly the conviction of the Reformation, as articulated in the Scots Confession. I think we should pay heed.

No Longer the Good Guys

2009-10-23T05:10:00.000-07:00

This article in the NY Times confirmed some of my concerns about the recent tiff between Fox News and the White House. One should not confuse this with any previous tiffs between Fox News and the rest of the media, much less Fox and MSNBC. No matter what you think about Fox (and I don't think highly of them at all), they are legitimate opposition. There seems to be a strange sense in the Obama Administration that a "legitimate" news network looks and acts a certain way, and that if you do not meet that form, you aren't one. That's not correct. It is never right to silence criticism simply because it is criticism.

Fox is putting lots of pressure on the administration, and catching every un-dotted i and every un-crossed t. The solution is not to delegitimize them as an organization (which, let's face it, is quite impossible if you consider their viewership), much less to exclude them from press events, but simply to run a tighter ship. Why did Van Jones have to resign? What were Acorn's employees thinking, aiding prostitution? Why doesn't Congress listen a little harder to the very very large conservative element in the country? The majority in congress is deceiving - it doesn't represent the actual political demographics of the country. Political ideologues should keep that in mind.

Now, the administration can have whatever opinion it wants about Fox. And if an underling voices his frustration with the network, that's fine. I can almost even see the legitimacy of saying they're not a real news network, if you don't mind the blowback from such a statement. But excluding Chris Wallace's show from a round of Presidential interviews? That's not acceptable. That's censorship - it is Bush-like. The unbelievably smug statement from Dan Pfeiffer, deputy communications director at the White House was, “We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization.” You do not get to decide what is a "traditional news organization," Dan et al, and what on earth is a "traditional" news organization, anyway? And what qualifies it as the only one worth talking to? I was under the impression that most "traditional" news coverage was hopeless rotted out with rank corporate bias anyway, so maybe you should actually be talking to the independent press, if objectivity is what you're going for.

This disturbed me too: "Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of mostly liberal columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Mr. Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation."

Keith Olbermann? And not Chris Wallace? Chris Wallace makes Keith look like Pravda. Keith's interviews with Obama have not contained a single hard-hitting question. He goes out of his way to allow whatever the President says to stand, even if there's an obvious followup. Maureen Dowd has not been terribly hard on the administration - I sort of wish she would take it to Obama like she did to Clinton. Let's look at an interesting point of fact: the most objective opinionator in the news at the moment is a COMEDIAN. Jon Stewart does not kiss up to Obama. He makes fun of him and the ineffectiveness of democrats just like anyone else. Obama has been happy to go on the Colbert Report, which was great (if not trying), but my point is that there does not seem to be a lot of objectivity to be had. Obama's comments on Fox bother me most not because they are simply repressing opposition, but because it shows an amazing lack of awareness about news networks in general.

Obama appears to be quite effective in managing his press, but not so in actually closing down Guantanamo Bay, managing the economic crisis, or keeping his promise to end the war in Iraq. In fact, he went back into Afghanistan - one of the most disappointing things so far. But that's not number one. The most disappointing thing, which the media has simply failed to notice, is that he has kept all of George Bush's expansion of executive power. That is the greatest threat to our country's future, in the humble opinion of this political science major. Perhaps that's why he needs to silence his opposition. Let's face it - it's a move away from democracy, and it is remarkably short-sighted. Presidents never seem to think beyond their own term until the last minute. Let's just hope he doesn't declare any national states of emergency.

Apple Mice

2009-10-21T19:35:00.001-07:00

You should be able to click both buttons at once. Lots of programs need it - especially games. Having no buttons is cool... except when buttons are, in fact, the whole point of the input device. I am reminded of the Onion's pretend Mac laptop with a giant clickwheel instead of a keyboard. It looks so much more intellectual!

But really, my first complaint is my last one: I want to click both buttons. I want to hold one button and click the other one. I want to click a different button without having to raise my other finger, which, if you play the piano, you will know is a common cause of tendonitis. Touch surfaces are awesome - hooray for them - but a mouse is a mouse, not a phone.

...yet.

The Brothers Bloom: Go See It (SPOILERS! WATCH MOVIE FIRST!)

2009-10-17T19:09:00.001-07:00

Seriously, though. If you read this post before watching the movie, the movie won't have the same effect on you because I want to talk about the ending. Consider yourself warned.

I must register my objection to the strange objections to The Brothers Bloom. It is purported simply to be a stunt. The Italian Job was a stunt, but I meet all sorts of people who liked it (I could take it or leave it). I loved the Brothers Bloom because when you address the question of where meaning comes from in your life, you begin to speak to me. I loved Adrien Brody's character. I loved how much he was reflected in Rachel Weisz's character. I thought the ambiguity over whether their romance was real was heartbreaking, and the fact that Brody could sort out those emotions and the play-acting enough to let all that seep through really made my day. I also thought there was some fantastic acting and film-making involved.

But the objection usually seems to be that the movie is without content. Maybe if art is without allegory, then sure. It didn't come out and say to your face that Stephen stood for your upbringing, and Bloom is you, and Weisz is what you sure hope you're life is, but can't convince yourself. I suppose if it had been less entertaining, perhaps those things might have come through more clearly. What really really fascinated me about the story (and here's where I go all crazy and postmodern on everybody) is that Stephen's death is exactly analogous to Zizek's reading of the crucifixion. God dies so that you might have life, and the fiction of God in Zizek's psychoanalytical interpretation of Christianity makes himself real precisely in his death. The story we tell ourselves about him comes to life only in that positive absence. It's an ingenious theory, and it's possibly the only even near-legitimate reason-based solution I've ever seen to the crisis of meaning in modernity. There are lots of stupid, uncompelling solutions that miss the point, but that one really hits the nail on the head. The whole movie is contained in the moment when Bloom goes away soaked in what he assumes is fake blood, but which turns out, upon aging, to be real. And what this means is that he - Bloom - wasn't faking it all along. That is real poignancy to me.

Zizek: "The point of the Incarnation is that one cannot become God--not because God dwells in a transcendent Beyond, but because God is dead, so the whole idea of approaching a transcendent God becomes irrelevant; the only identification is the identification with Christ." (The Monstrosity of Christ, 31) "For subjectivity to emerge--not as a mere epiphenomenon of the global substantial ontological order, but as essential to Substance itself--the split, negativity, particularization, self-alienation, must be posited as something that takes place in the very heart of the divine Substance, i.e., the move from Substance to Subject must occur within God himself." (ibid., 59)

I do not believe this is what happens in the crucifixion - but I do think it is the only coherent understanding of it a non-believer can achieve. The conversion experience is not one of infinite absence, but of reconciliation. But that would be a different movie.

A Fact of Life

2009-10-15T17:34:00.000-07:00

Fact: Maureen Dowd isn't funny.

You don't have to disagree with her or anything - she's just unfunny. She uses prepubescent techniques. Her signature device appears to be creating imaginary scenes and populating them with her enemies - sort of like Dante's Inferno for dumped high schoolers, except political.

Some examples from a recent column:

“If there’s someone weak,

if you’ve sprung a leak,

if the world looks bleak,

if you hide and seek,

who ya gonna call?

OBAMABUSTERS!”

"You can hear a receptionist chirping: 'Cheney, Cheney & Cheney. Who would you like to target today?'"

*gags, dies*

It's painful to hear somebody with sauce this weak insult Sarah Palin's intelligence in the same piece - it's cheap as dirt. Her editor should have lit that piece on fire. Why do I care? Why did I use this blog entry to say this? Because she writes for the NEW YORK TIMES! I would be embarrassed if this garbage appeared in my alma mater's school paper! I've been reading David Foster Wallace lately. That guy had more insight, humor and subtlety in his footnotes than Maureen Dowd has in her whole column. There's a lot of talent out there - why aren't they writing for periodicals?

Life Hurts

2009-09-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

David Bazan isn't a Christian anymore.

I know it's old news. I guess since it's getting more publicity now it's on my mind.

Something that has bothered me more than anything ever is that the smartest people I know are doubters, agnostics, drinkers, self-destroying artists, and almost anything but evangelicals. Most of the evangelicals I know either can't think in a straight line or only think in straight lines. I'm an evangelical Christian, and I hate all the equivocating that goes on around it when I talk about it with others.

Today I was approached by a middle-aged Jehovah's Witness. Looks like evangelicals are not the only people who have this problem.

Still, I want to be a cool, nice, unassuming agnostic more than anything. It's so easy. You simply give up all the stuff that you once believed - which is, let's face it, begging to be given up - and just walk away, right? Just go do the things you think are meaningful.

But that's where it all breaks down. You go do things that you think are meaningful, and then, at least in my case, all meaning melts from the bottom up - like a plastic toy on a stovetop. If life has a purpose, you can't live in search of one - does that make sense to anybody? That's not just me assuming stuff in order to be happy because it has not always made me happy. In fact it frequently makes me crazy. It's just an obvious fact of life that's hard to admit. At least in private.

I'm afraid to listen to David Bazan's new album. I will, but I'm afraid. Why? Because I think he'll make me into an atheist? No, because I'm afraid the reasons he abandoned his faith are the same ones everybody has - it's not intellectually satisfying, or it doesn't seem believable (sort of like Bud Lite isn't actually "drinkable"), or God couldn't possibly be good in a cruel world, or I believe other things more strongly that preclude it... you know the routine. Who doesn't? Bazan noted in an article written by my former roommate for a college publication that evangelicals are afraid of being atheists. That's true. Every evangelical Christian in America has a secret, inner interlocutor that argues with him about why he is a theist, and most actions, conversation, and thought occur along this dialectic. It's totally irrational, but that's how it goes - not irrational because we should all be theists for some supposedly obvious reason, but because it's stupid that we define our faith with that sort of negative method. But we do - neurotically. Evidence? Richard Dawkins is a New York Times best seller in a country that is something like 3% non-religious.

My inner atheist died a sudden death about a year and a half ago. It happened when somebody much much smarter than myself just told me the gospel. That was it. He went away and has barely bothered to call since he left. I suppose I'm a religious fanatic now - one of those unenviable people upon whom others believe in order to believe themselves. Again - a traceable pattern, even by atheists like Zizek, who first alerted me to my own practice of this sort of thing. Not subtle or secret.

I don't know why somebody can struggle with an argument for years, receive no new information, try desperately to think one thing, then fall on the other side of the argument and be satisfied with the result. You have to write off all the past struggling as denial - as valuing to an insane degree something that has turned out, simply upon sudden decision, to be garbage. I know that my faith is implausible. I have done unheard of mental gymnastics to make myself doubt even credibility itself in order to maintain my belief. None of that stuff did much good, as that's not what the Bible is talking about when it refers to faith, and had my good friend not told me the gospel, I would probably still be doing the same thing. I still struggle with feelings of meaninglessness after all that - don't get me wrong. It's not easy to beat your mind into submission with your mind, and it leaves scars. But the fact of the matter is that the Word of God is a phenomenon that you can actually experience, and I don't mean in a pentecostal church with emotional music and lots of shouting. I mean in a cinderblock basement classroom, lit by fluorescent lights, sitting on a desk after a beautiful lecture on Christians dying and enduring torture for their faith under Hitler, one can ask, "Dr. Burnett, why won't my brain make the leap you just told it to? Why is it that Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer could find no wiggle room in their doctrine when threatened with death, but I can't even form a cogent theological sentence that I will even state honestly." He just told me that the distance I was struggling so hard to cross with my mind is the distance Jesus Christ already crossed for me - that this was, in fact, the whole point.

Plausible? That didn't really make any difference - or any sense - at the time. Still doesn't. I'm not trying to tell you, as will many Christians who have latched like barnacles onto the postmodern turn of philosophy, that plausibility doesn't work or is simply relative. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I'm just saying that when God has actually spoken to you, you hear it. My grandfather once said, "People mistake dreams for visions all the time, but nobody ever mistook a vision for a dream." Interesting statement; if you try to apply it as a criterion for visions, you will quickly find that everything you've ever experienced can only qualify as a dream. I had a vision. There is no question. That's why it's a vision. The statement isn't a method. It's just a truth. Incidentally, he had one too.

I don't much care for all the different ways people talk about the Bible. They read all the parts that don't make a whole lot of difference, or apply to them only tangentially, and think themselves very deep for "realizing" this or that doctrinal truth. I recommend 1 John: They wrote what they had seen, touched, witnessed. They (and we) write about it that their (and our) joy may be complete, and that we might witness the same thing. You can accept that at face value, or you can, with truth and sincerity, write 18 volumes on it and die trying to explain it. Or you just won't hear it, and then I truly don't know what to tell you, because if it's me speaking, I've failed already.

Life hurts. I still think that matters. More than ever.

Lockerbie and Dostoevsky

2009-08-20T07:13:00.000-07:00

Today the so-called "Lockerbie bomber," the man who was convicted of destroying Pan Am flight 103 which crashed in the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people, was freed. This has brought about a truly interesting phenomenon - MSNBC and Fox News are saying almost exactly the same thing over and over again as they watch the caravan glide from the prison to the airport. It's a "miscarriage of justice," he's a "man who caused so much pain," we ought to "condemn the Scottish judicial system for being corrupted by diplomatic interests," it's "arbitrary," it's "a shame," we are "gutless" for not condemning it, the victims are victims once again, etc. etc. Scottish law requires that his release be considered on compassionate grounds if he is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Magrahi, the terrorist, had prostate cancer, and was thus released to die in his home country of Libya, where he will be unable to receive the advanced care that might actually prolong his life.

The hard left and the hard right agree, and that should give everyone pause. Nobody on any network currently covering the story can even comprehend the idea that one might have compassion on someone who is dying in spite of his crimes - except, believe it or not, the citizens of Lockerbie. A couple of Scotsmen from Lockerbie were interviewed on CNN, and they admitted that an average citizen has no means of judging whether or not an international businessman committed a terrorist act. They said they believed that compassion was important - something that ought to be practiced. The American news anchors simply couldn't abide such things. They erred on the side of "justice," often eschewing any language of uncertainty and simply stating that a man who killed hundreds was being freed. They also didn't buy that compassion was the motivation, questioning the Scottish judicial system and alleging corruption, as if compassion were impossible!

I find this American response dumbfounding, discouraging, and appalling. Even if the worst case scenario were true - that Megrahi did kill all those people (CNN had a man running through a text list to emphasize how many it was, in case viewer had just joined us and wasn't angry yet), that he was being released on some unrevealed motivation, and that he would receive a hero's welcome at home in Libya, why is it so inconceivable that the West might wish to be seen as compassionate towards those who do us wrong? It amazes me that nobody finds it discomfiting that America with one voice has taken the position of Ivan Karamazov - that no one who commits a crime against humanity ought ever to be forgiven, even by God. Fox News indignation manufacturer Megyn Kelly even declared that the man had been dealt a death sentence "by God or by nature." The trouble with this position is obvious: this sort of act is not inhuman in the slightest bit. It is very human. Human beings are prone to create horrors according to their own addled judgements. How does the old saying go? "To err is human, to forgive is divine."

I have little else to say. We ought to rethink our posture towards justice before we find a low-level demon at home to laugh at us. American media is so voyeuristic at this point that most of the news anchors currently employed make a living by getting our dander up. Keith Olbermann tries to make you feel righteous. Chris Matthews tries to make you feel like a man of common sense against the idiotic masses. Bill O'Reilly tickles your rage at every possible injustice. Sean Hannity raises your fist to shake it at the inhuman liberal Man. Nancy Grace chases ambulances to find out who is responsible so you can click your tongue. We're a nation of pharisees with our eyes lifted to heaven, thanking God that we're not like that tax collector over there. We ought to be ashamed and we ought to be more merciful. We ought to put all the aforementioned men and women out of a job, or at least force them to report facts without their ratings-driving opinions.

We clearly do not live in a Christian nation.

"un-American" is un-American

2009-08-10T10:08:00.000-07:00

"After highlighting a handful of extreme tactics—in Maryland, protesters hanged a member of Congress in effigy—Pelosi and Hoyer proceeded to accuse the protesters of engaging in “un-American” behavior, perhaps forgetting that the far more extreme tarring and feathering of British officials was a favorite pastime of America’s pro-independence radicals."

So writes Reihan Salam on the Daily Beast, and he is right. I haven't written anything on my political blog for a while, but this brings me out of my slumber to point out a simple fact: it is not Republicans that engage in cockamamy American nationalist rhetoric - it's just politicians in general. Democrats just have different visions of how Americans ought to be forced to behave, which is, of course, the implication of labeling someone "un-American."

The most un-American thing one can do is take the citizens of the land of opportunity and make them do something that they do not feel is in their best interests. The whole point of America's founding was to break free of tyranny - specifically, unjust taxes and religious oppression. These are the two things that face us in both the Democratic and the Republican party - for the former in the form of absurdly high taxes "for our own good" coupled with rampant anti-religiosity, and for the latter in the form of absurdly high taxes "for our national security" and a pseudo-Christian national morality. Here is my take: America does not have a national identity, and it doesn't want one. In fact, if it is to have a national identity, it would be the one that says to our unsolicited government benefactors, "We've all learned to be and do what we believe in for reasons that you don't have to agree with - now why can't you leave us alone?"

Why am I not a leftist? Because I don't think the government is capable of stopping exploitation and oppression - I think if western history is any guide, it is only capable of perpetrating it. Why am I not a conservative? Because I don't think any value anybody holds ought to be inserted into some coercive nationalist creed. I think that a church should be able to stand right down the street from a mosque, that both people should be allowed to slander each other, and that in this freedom, meaningful dialogue is more likely to take place than if some artificial environment is invented that has nothing to do with the actualities of either religion. The one truly stupid thing Barack Obama ever said about religion was that it needed to learn to state its moral injunctions in a common rational language so that it could be affirmed by everybody. That shows remarkable ignorance as to the real differences between religions - and most importantly, the total dilution of religion that takes place in Enlightenment modernity.

So is national healthcare a good idea? Not if it means telling me how to live my life. I do not want compassion from another human being or institution that invents the need it fills. I think it's a great idea for the government to provide an option for those who cannot otherwise get healthcare - that sort of action is in its very mandate. It is an ancient truth that the justice of a ruling institution may be measured by how it cares for orphans and widows. But the way Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer frame the debate, fusing that simple idea with this ideological drivel, requiring some invented moral conformity to their version of American nationalism, you would think we were in the Bush era all over again. Take note: western politics tends toward totalitarianism when it is following the modern impulse.

Green Day - Viva la Cliche

2009-06-09T06:10:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-03T18:18:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-30T18:07:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-29T19:08:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-24T16:45:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-01T16:46:00.001-08:00

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.

Proposition 8: Common Ground

2008-11-11T17:55:00.000-08:00

I recently found this video on the passage of proposition 8 online. It’s an independent video – a guy just going around and asking people at prop 8 protests what they think about it, why they think what they do, and what they would say to those who voted yes on proposition 8, banning marriage for gays in California. The most interesting thing going on here was the speculative form of counter-argument used by those arguing against the measure (and this set of individuals, from the research I’ve done, is a fairly representative sample).

The reasons, according to opponents of the measure, that people voted it into law fall into a few categories: emotion, religiosity, and ignorance – or some combination of these. Now, I don’t know that I would support proposition 8 myself if I were living in California, just to put my cards on the table, but those who believe gays have a right to marry need to realize that they will not change many minds as long as this is how they argue against it.

Arguments against emotion – saying that others must hate and fear gays to think x, y, or z – necessarily formalize the meaning of these words. I have met very few people, Christians included, who actually hate – meaning visceral and intense feelings of hostility or aversion against another person – anyone for being gay. The word “hate” in its political context has simply come to mean “otherize,” which is still a very bad thing, but if you’re trying to understand what it means to otherize someone in a tribalistic fashion, look at the predominant behavior of the left towards the orthodox religious. It usually consists in irrational or superficial arguments, terminology ("extremism," "fundamentalism," "magical thinking") and political rationales. It happens in every political system, institution, or group of people. As for fears, each one, such as the loss of parental control over the education of one’s children in the public school system, needs to be weighed individually before calling them irrational.

Arguments that ignorance rules the behaviors or prejudices of others are highly insulting to the other party, but in a classic case of the irony of western liberalism, are actually misguided acts of intellectual compassion. A liberal who says you’re ignorant and that’s why you’re prejudiced is simultaneously degrading your intelligence and upholding your virtue, assuming that, if you just knew a little more, you would agree with them and do what’s right. They’re avoiding saying you’re just an evil person. Of course, the paradox is shattered when you ask what it is you don’t know, because given that you have all the facts and made the opposite decision, the liberal is forced to assume that you are just a bad person, full of hatred that comes from some ill-defined psychological quirk or irrational belief system, and you have a plethora of options as to which illegitimate source they think that comes from (sociology, psychology, biology, you name it).

This brings me to the argument against religiosity, because that’s really where it all ends up. Liberalism as a moral system is sustained by condescension. This does not have to have a basis – in fact the vast black hole of deterministic explanation may be referred to without source, study, or argument ("everyone knows...") as evidence against the position of faith. Ironically enough, this means that the intellectual basis for arguing against religious prejudice is profoundly emotional, as it contains a vanishing point beyond which the religious person is no longer worth talking to, a hopeless case, irrational – or to put it in very clear terms, dehumanized.

So where should this argument go? What are the terms upon which a proponent or an opponent of proposition 8 could actually meet and have a meaningful conversation? Well, for starters, we could talk about the tradition of marriage and the power of the legislature to define it, because that’s the real common ground here. Ask the question “what is marriage?” and you will find two radically different points of view, but not so radical that there are no points of contact. Keith Olbermann, in his special comment on this issue, clearly believes marriage is about love and companionship in a lonely world. James Dobson clearly believes that marriage is about building a family unit and a social institution with many more purposes than that, including raising children – hence the “fabric of society” argument. To properly understand the disagreement, you have to stop the ridiculous, thinly-veiled bigotry on both sides, and engage the actual concerns behind the issue. I am not going to make a call which way that would go, because there are excellent arguments for both positions, and pretty simple resolutions that could be brokered between the two. My concern in writing here is to bring to the foreground the collateral damage that occurs because of unthinking street-side shouting matches. Never conceive the position of your opponent without asking them – you will always mischaracterize it, especially when you’re angry.

Shifty Teaching

2008-10-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

Brian McLaren recently spoke at an event at Willow Creek church called “Shift.” He likes to talk about things shifting in the church, and being open to new ideas, and rethinking things. Rethinking is great in the Hegelian sense – using that which came before to inform the terms of that which comes next, never wasting the thoughts of the past, being aware of history – but of course, that’s not what McLaren means. He means tearing down what’s there and putting something else up – something with more square-footage.

Shift was also the name of a monkey in the final book of the Narnia Chronicles, The Last Battle, who dressed up Puzzle the donkey with a lion skin. He only ever showed Puzzle in low light, which was enough to terrify all the other animals with the mere implication that Aslan had come back. With his fake Aslan, Shift went on to manipulate the animals into doing things the real Aslan would never have asked them to do – they lost their freedom almost immediately, never realizing that the burdens being heaped upon them in Aslan’s name were never intended at all. At one point in the story, Shift is making deals with the Calormen, whose god is Tash, not Aslan, and in order to justify this in the Narnians’ minds, he makes up a new god called Tashlan, saying that they’re all the same anyway.

Lewis’ analogy – a simple story for children – is not even one remove from what McLaren is doing. I don’t think he’s a conniving manipulator like Lewis’ ape, but from what I can hear, he isn’t talking about any God that I’ve ever met. Liberal theology is disguised in the low light of vague orthodoxy. It’s not arrogant to tell the truth – it’s arrogant to deny it on the grounds that your intellect is operating on a plain that turns Christian mysteries into particularist dogma. McLaren’s generosity towards clear theology simply disguises a pitiful dressed-up donkey – the best that human rationality can come up with – that has no jaws for the wicked, no strength to protect the weak, no confidence to direct the lost, and no power to give up for the sake of mankind. Liberal theology of this kind tries to turn what we see into a portrait of God instead of believing in the God we cannot see who has the power to change it. It is no wonder that Lewis names his harmless donkey “Puzzle,” because that’s all human reasoning can give us.

This problem is not new. Pilate’s question to Jesus, “What is truth?” is the same question many now ask the void they perceive. In the early part of the twentieth century, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer fought boldly against those who put their confidence in human reason to “discover” God and His nature. Barth’s exceptionally clear thinking on the matter in his commentary on the epistle to the Romans chases modernity right down to the all-out skepticism in which it threatens to evaporate now, half a century later. To be very frank, I don’t believe McLaren and the emergent church movement, or most liberals for that matter, really understand what “post-modern” really means any more than their much-belied detractors. If they did, they wouldn’t view it as a quick-fix to homophobia, and they certainly would cease immediately to refer to Christianity as a “grand narrative,” if they value Christianity at all.

Post-modernity, in the terminology of Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition, is, by definition, the pronunciation of the end of grand narratives. McLaren’s insistence on this term follows the pattern of the fundamentalist reaction to modernity, which, in the face of scientific rejection of biblical myth, proceeded to claim that the myths were scientific, alienating anyone who claimed them to have some other status – even when that status had support in the writings of the early church. I will never understand why the church insists upon jumping on the latest ship to have a hole blown in its hull instead of remaining in the ironclad that was originally bestowed upon it.

The times are changing, but then again, the times are always changing. I take exception with the emergent church, with liberal Christianity, and with fundamentalist evangelicals because they are all cut from the same cloth: ideologies lacking self-awareness. Christianity accepts the irrational necessity of orthodoxy as easily as it accepts the paradox of human will and the omnipotence of God. I continually refer to G. K. Chesterton’s view of orthodoxy as a “thrilling romance” – the only truly subversive act in a chaotic world. McLaren’s puzzling church appears to have forfeited the power to save – I am so tired of hearing keynote speakers say of Heaven and Hell, “yes, we believe in those things, and they’re important, but…” Are they important enough to be the main point? Is Christ’s sacrifice, whose point was our salvation by the grace of God, important enough to be that in reference to which everything other doctrine, point, and sermon has its meaning? I do not want to be caught hauling wood for a donkey in a tent when the Lion returns. When we say He is Good, we don’t mean He has anything in common with us.

A Stingy Orthodoxy

2008-10-17T17:13:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading The Great Derangement by Matt Taibbi. Taibbi is a very gifted writer – I laughed out loud a couple of times – and he has to be given credit for his sheer guts. Taibbi subscribes to the Bill Maher school of anti-religion, interested more in ridiculing that which he finds ridiculous than in engaging the best elements of a given movement. But this is just the means, and not the end, of his book. The idea he puts supports in his book (or perhaps, which formed after having the idea of faking membership in John Hagee’s megachurch) is that popular distrust of politics and the media drives people into highly deranged ways of making sense of the world they live in. 9/11 truthers and Hagee followers, he argues, are like soldiers taking orders from mid-level officers who themselves have no idea what’s going on, but who are bold enough (and perhaps find it necessary) to take a position.

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this book is that while Taibbi, an atheist, is deceitful to an unsettling degree (participating in evangelism, church retreats, small groups, and worship services – even undergoing baptism), I found myself agreeing with his assessments of a large number of the customs of the fundamentalist Christian subculture. Sure, he picks on things that are not central (much less essential) to Christianity, but I kept found myself saying, “but that’s not Christian, that’s just those Christians.” I found myself thinking that perhaps what we need is not broader minds about what’s right to do in the church, but much, much narrower ones.

Isn’t it ironic that the group claiming to return to the “fundamentals” is the one that has ended up with the most unnecessary garbage in this orthodoxy? I guess that’s what happens when your movement is merely reactionary – but the same thing goes for the liberal church, the Pentecostal church, the Baptist church, and just about every other denomination. It’s not that each one is just too narrow-minded – it’s that none are nearly stingy enough with what they admit to be true, much less a doctrine of the Christian religion. Prohibitions on alcohol and dancing (and in some denominations, on musical instruments in worship), backwards ideas of God’s judgment usurping God’s grace, hand waving at choruses and whispering during prayer, and possibly the touchiest of all – speaking on “tongues,” which, frankly, bears as much resemblance to Acts 2 as cutting a fish in 5000 pieces has to the Jesus’ feeding of the 5000. These are not the substance of Christianity. Is there no room for a sober-minded individual to think on the truth of the gospels and orient the contents of his actual life without even being interested in these things? Is the gospel for human beings as human beings, or only for those already deeply entrenched in these outward symbols – like Pharisees praying on the sidewalk?

Brian McLaren has exactly the wrong idea here. What we need is not some liberal inclusion of all parts of the body of Christ, nor some conservative rejection of everything that doesn’t flow from one side of a paradox, nor even “revival” that enflames hearts and numbs minds. We need to be concerned with the Truth and its contents as nothing more than a matter of truth – not politics, not spiritual health, not “relevance,” but just truth as truth. Truth of any sort has an affect on one’s life. Why treat the gospel like some advanced form of lifestyle rhetoric? That’s not what it is.

I welcome comments on this post. I’m interested in other ideas about this because it’s a pretty big about-face for me. Taibbi’s ridicule of many of the things I already found ridiculous hammered home the importance of calling a spade a spade in the church – certainly speaking the truth in love, but not letting people off the hook when they’re acting ridiculous, much less playing along. We who believe something is misguided yet act as if it is not – we are hypocrites in our silence. We who teach ourselves, do we not also teach others? God’s name is blasphemed among unbelievers because of us.

Angry Mobs and Politics

2008-10-10T20:35:00.001-07:00

In terms of politics, there is only one thing worse than an absurd, relentless distortion of the truth: a huge number of people who believe it. There are those who actually believe the ads that McCain is running without checking a single fact (it doesn't count to go to a candidate's personal "fact checking" site). But people can think whatever they want and say whatever they want, right? It is, after all, our First Amendment right to be able to tell filthy, rotten lies to people and for them to believe those lies. People have told and believed lies in the past - and elections have been won and lost that way. But it's just politics, right? Who can even sort that stuff out?

Well, there's a new dimension to the "negative campaigning" that I thought was such a ridiculous issue to fuss over a few months back. When Hillary's campaign was lying to the media that Barack was a Muslim, those with brains did not take it seriously, and those without brains were considered a harmless minority. Same goes for his experience, which is not as much as others' but hardly within the level of worry that they were trying to create over it - especially after the Biden pick. We could still focus on issues and positions, and it was the lies that tried to play on unverifiable subjective judgments and evaluations.

Well, John McCain did not see it coming, apparently, that people might be much more credulous than even he anticipated. You see, the Democratic candidate for President has not committed "treason." He is not a "traitor" or a "terrorist." (read that twice, those of you who don't get it yet) But these sorts of terms have been thrown carelessly around by Fox News and other highly reputable news outlets for a long time (ad nauseam), taking the form, usually, of leading rhetorical questions, quoted accusations, and panel discussions with "experts."

You might say, then, that the media's chickens are coming home to roost. If you were so inclined. If you use what they say as just a flimsy prop for a staunch political position, as we thought that most gullible people did, then fine. You can be dishonest, but at least you're not hurting anyone prior to election day. But what nobody anticipated was that anyone would BELIEVE this garbage, swallowing it whole, and regurgitate it with some weird, juvenile, revolutionary outrage! Traitor? Terrorist? Seriously? These things are being yelled angrily at McCain rallies around the country! With candor, no less! What are you idiots - henchmen from a bad monster movie? Do not go get your pitchforks and torches and storm Obama headquarters - someone actually has to tell you, it appears. Are you the morons whose position is actually affected by Barack's middle name? Really? Are you the ones who think that he goes home and reads the Quran every night? Seriously? Have we finally found the people who will actually vote for John McCain because Michelle Obama implied that she was not proud of her country at one point? You would really base your decision for the chief executive of this country on THOSE criteria? Are you out of your collective hive mind?

Where do you even begin arguing against those ideas? Back at the basics of politics? Of media narratives? Of basic logic? No, you have to go all the way back to linear thinking - reasoning skills that lead to conclusions. You can't start with complicated things like syllogism or analogy. You have to go back to second grade, where one child proclaims to another that when he goes home, he's going to fly to his secret base in his rocketship, and explain to his admirers that Andy actually doesn't have a rocketship or a secret base, and why you shouldn't believe Andy when he says things like that. Maybe eventually you will be able to install inductive reasoning in their heads.

I'm no longer disillusioned with the media or politics anymore. It all seems so futile when you find yourself disillusioned with the electorate. Idiots.

Palin's Abuse of Power Stories

2008-10-10T20:23:00.000-07:00

Check it out:

The New York Times version of the story versus the Fox News version of the story. The first has a straightforward headline. The second puts "Abused Her Power" in quotes, which gives it ambiguity. The first tells the story in a straightforward manner. The second qualifies every piece of anything like accusatory material with some back-peddling clause at the end of the sentence. It also records the denials of the McCain campaign that question the inquiry's objectivity, immediately after stating that it was a bipartisan panel. The first one is journalism.

Just thought I'd note this. There are lots and lots of people who will still vote for Palin even though the one thing she had (though I don't think even this matters) - her "executive experience" - shows that she abuses the executive powers she is given. Yet another way she is exactly like a poorly educated Bush.

Well, that pretty much settles it for me.

Good News for People Who Love Bad News

2008-10-10T20:10:00.001-07:00

There’s a great Modest Mouse album by this name, a phrase repeated in the song Bury Me With It. After howling about the things he’d rather die than lose, Isaac Brock croons in his quavering signature vocal style, “Good news for people who love bad news / We’ve lost the plot and we just can’t choose.” There is no more apt description of this political season. While I’m not persuaded that anyone but a small segment of the population gives any real credence to the filth being spewed about in the media right now (it’s not mudslinging, it’s filthspewing), it’s really clear to me that if this truly is the timber of American political discourse, we have lost the plot and have no basis upon which to gain enough traction to make a decision.

The long and the short of it is that we ludicrously pampered Americans (and anyone who has ever lived in the third world country will understand just how pampered we are) love to hear bad news. We can’t get enough of it. We are no longer dealing with “narratives,” which is just such a generous word for the things being said on the news. It’s the political equivalent of the trend in American entertainment which Zizek condemns such vehement terms – the endlessly boring attempts at greater and greater transgression of values and laws left so far behind that we’ve come full circle into viewing virtue itself as a transgression (environmentalist terrorism, anyone?). But of course, a virtue enacted in the spirit of transgression burns out as quickly as any of the others (just ask any lefty college student). It has to be done as an adherence to a meaningful norm and not in the spirit of revolution.

Politics has not progressed quite to this level (though you could argue that Ron Paul’s success was the sort of transgressive virtue identified above). We are still in that stage where people both subscribe to and are entertained by nonsense like the Bill Ayers scandal, the Palin trooper scandal, the Michele Obama hates her country scandal, the Obama is a Muslim scandal, the Reverend Wright scandal, and on and on with the idiotic horseshit. They should just preface every night’s coverage with the title “Electiongate.” I hope and pray that this use of last syllable of “Watergate” as a suffix denoting a scandal never makes it into a dictionary etymology. That would be a little death for the English language.

Possibly the hardest part about all this is talking politics. It has become a fruitless endeavor. Why? Because every –gate becomes a sandbag around the entrenched mind of someone whose mind is already made up. It is impossible to talk to anyone about these issues because it is impossible to argue with “Barack Obama is a secret Muslim” or “Sarah Palin can’t put a sentence together.” Someone defending this points is already being irrational, which makes it impossible to bring a rational point to bear on it – and believe me, I’ve tried.

The most disappointing thing that has happened for me as media coverage accelerates towards November actually occurred on the Daily Show – which I normally love. In a blatant rehash of a joke made by Bill Maher (known for his highly biased objectivity) John Stewart and John Oliver did a segment on how undecided voters were stupid. Now that’s interesting. After lambasting the media for inane coverage of irrelevant events, interviewing author after author on their subtle views of the most complex crises to face America since the Cold War and the Great Depression, and ridiculing American voters for being simple and naïve, now the ones who are still deliberating are the stupid ones? What, are we supposed to support the guy who doesn’t moose hunt? The guy who isn’t old? The guy without an atrocious accent? Having been given irrelevant facts, and being made to dig for the real ones in the sewage of attempts to discredit both candidates, all the while under the monstrous shadow of the ignorant electorate’s irrational voting habits that really make the practice seem kind of futile, the ones who haven’t made up their minds are the STUPID ONES? How about the sandbaggers? They forget that for every Sean Hannity, there is a Keith Olbermann. For every moral outrage on one side, there’s an offense to pluralist justice on the other. It’s just one ideology battling another, and neither one is terribly self-aware.

So why was that the most disappointing moment? Well, it’s no fun to be the bad news. Makes you feel like you’re on Nancy Grace. God forbid.

Double Feature: Palin-Biden, Abortion

2008-10-02T20:30:00.000-07:00

I have two things to say. So I posted twice. The first one is about the Palin-Biden debate. The second one is why Barack Obama is backwards on abortion.

Palin Biden.

This was a good debate - substantial where it needed to be, low on the stupid narrative garbage, and as the New York Times put it, "polite." I don't have a whole lot to say because it wasn't very surprising. Biden put out a tempered and, aside from a "bridge to nowhere" reference, not terribly Bidenesque performance. I thought he did an outstanding job defending his record, Obama's record, and the general credibility of their ticket. He didn't convince me that it's a good idea to be a socialist, but that's not what this election season is about, apparently. It's about who's not naive.

I'm afraid I'm a little biased against Palin because I find her vernacular to be like a heckuva lotta fingernails on a gosh-darned blackboard, but she performed very well for someone who reminded everyone she was only five weeks into her foray onto the national scene in the middle of a vice presidential debate. Palin is the Bush of this Republican ticket, and McCain is its Cheney, except in a more honest order than our present administration. Palin is there to reel in voters who don't believe anything John McCain says with regard to being conservative, evangelical, and sympathetic to the middle class, and she's doing a swell job. She didn't convince me that we're "winning" in Iraq, or that withdrawing our troops from this unaffordable, ridiculous war is "surrender," which term implies such a thing as "victory," and that someone would have defeated us (the terrorists? Don't they win when I recycle?). Everyone needs to figure out that stating one's thesis is not an argument for its truth. But of course, Palin is not arguing (most people can't follow arguments). She's just being. We have entered the age of ontological debate. It's really, really dumb.

So why do I say this was a good debate? Because the debate itself was quite well-managed and clear. It showed us exactly what the candidates think. Neither one of them gives us any indication that they know anything about the economy beyond the difference between Wall Street and Main Street, and Palin even got those mixed up (a gaff! omg!). That we should secure our money from the greed of irresponsible investment banks by paying $700 billion of our money to irresponsible investment banks just doesn't sound like a very good idea to me. In fact, it sounds like ten rich people own Congress. How about we reverse the executive decision of President Nixon to take us off the gold standard, make our money worth something again, and let the market lose its imaginary earnings and rebuild itself on something substantial? Yeah, people will get hurt, but frankly, that's pretty much water under the bridge already - the irresponsible loans were made, the banks have failed, there's no use in propping up the dead horse we're flogging.

The candidates also demonstrated what we already know, which is that Palin has no foreign policy experience whatsoever, and that Biden, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, does. A lot. So... that's not debatable.

Palin claimed to be an expert on energy, stating that she wants to both oppose those mean old oil companies while also promoting drilling in Alaska. As a free market capitalist, she needs to figure out that disincentivizing something while simultaneously legislating it is a leftist thing to do. It's also kinda weird to criticize Barack Obama's proposing nearly a trillion dollars in government spending while supporting a bailout of... nearly a trillion dollars. She's also got a Miss South Carolina problem with regard to sentence structure, which is kind of a low blow, but I'm not about to vote for another potential President who still can't say the word "nuclear." NEW and CLEAR! Think of it as a window cleaner! This should be the shibboleth for public office - you have to be able to pronounce the word designating the most devastating force America has at its disposal in order to make decisions regarding it.

Betcha ten bucks not a single news outlet passes up the "extra credit" comment.

***

Abortion.

I’ve been putting off this post, but I had an interesting conversation with my pastor that really made me think about this issue. So I went to see what Obama thought about abortion, and I found his speech to Planned Parenthood on YouTube.

So much for raising the political discourse on abortion.

On a recent decision in which Justice Kennedy apparently opined for the court that in a certain kind of abortion, the woman’s health is at risk (against, apparently, the uncited multitudes of experts). Obama evaluated thusly: “As we’ve seen time after time these last few years, when the precedent says otherwise, when the science is inconvenient, when the facts don’t match up with the ideology, they are cast aside.” He said later, “We know that five men don’t know better than women and their doctors what’s best for a woman’s health. We know that it’s about whether or not women have equal rights under the law. We know that a woman’s right to make a decision about how many children to have and when without government interference is one of the most fundamental freedoms we have in this country.” This explains why Barack has missed the point so profoundly on this issue. It is not, for the very large part of American pro-lifers, about a woman’s equal rights under the law at all. It is about that third thing that we apparently “know.” A woman may choose how many children to have – just not to end the life of a child, in which case she infringes upon what is taken by all to be a self-evident and inalienable right: the right to life.

There is nothing scientific, progressive, or civil about holding the position of “choice” on matters of justice. It’s a catch-all argument. When you legislate in favor of justice, you legislate against a person’s choice to perform injustice. The question is solely what is just and what is not. It is obviously unjust to take innocent human life, so the question is whether the life of an unborn child is human. I have never heard a single convincing argument that it could be anything else. Perhaps all those things that make a person human are socialized into them. Perhaps humanity is one’s self-consciousness or freedom. But any way you rationalize the choice to end an unborn life, you simultaneously rationalize barbarism toward other forms of innocent, helpless human life, which is particularly relevant in law.

The whole question of women’s rights is superfluous to this issue. Most pro-lifers are in favor of women’s rights – which is to say, equal rights for women. That sex results in pregnancy is not a legal issue. That women receive paid maternity leave undoubtedly is. It is a transparent caricature of the pro-life position to pretend that it has to do with dominating women and not with a child’s life. It is a diversion.

The strangest thing about this is the position that Obama took with regard to the moral question involved. He calls it a tough issue, “trusting women” to consult with their clergy, their parents, and their doctors to “prayerfully” make the decision. That’s fine logic for a pluralist society, so let’s apply it to any other issue of morality or justice and see where it gets us. Can I prayerfully decide to shoplift? Can I consult with my clergy regarding incest? That our values are so decentralized and unenforced is a tragic truth, to be sure, but to privatize value to the degree that Obama is attempting is not so much misapplied ideology as simple hypocrisy. Nobody thinks that way about unpoliticized good and evil, especially not Barack “failed-policies-of-the-Bush-administration” Obama. How can one get indignant about the fact that people get too indignant? It’s this weird meta-ethics of liberalism that could ultimately succeed in defeating the very notion of justice altogether, were anyone to apply it consistently (which, being for the most part decent human beings, they do not).

In Case You Forgot

2008-09-30T18:34:00.001-07:00

There are two sides to the ridiculous media storm (I’m not convinced it’s anything more substantial than that) leading up to the Presidential Election of 2008, and neither one of them is a helpful, or even a very different response to the supposed “watershed event” that occurred on September 11, 2001. That was supposed to have changed politics forever, and in one way – the way that nobody ever talks about anymore – it actually did.

Perhaps you will remember the commercial that came after September 11 that said those events changed the America forever, showing a city block in New York. It faded out, then faded back in, and the street was filled with American flags. That is exactly how it changed us. We lost the one thing that ever made our existence as a nation any different from every other nation on Earth. We lost the beautiful disunity of freedom.

But you see, people who live in America didn’t lose this at all as an ideal. They lost the option for it. They lost the country that represents it. Those who love freedom no longer live in a free country – they live in this new awful United States where your freedoms are taken by the powerful for whatever designs their party believes to be “transcendent” enough to merit their loss. Many have been fooled by it, but there’s something new in the air – that strange tacit objection that can only occur with political dissonance between government and people. We have entered a new age of discontent, and it is not Osama Bin Laden’s fault. We – that is, our leaders – could have chosen any response after 9/11. This is what was chosen. Bin Laden and the Muslim world are a scapegoat for statecraft, just as the victims of 9/11 were a scapegoat for Bin Laden’s leadership aspirations.

Conservatives suddenly believe in government intervention in economy, foreign regimes, civic affairs, and energy independence. Liberals suddenly believe in national unity, pluralist faith (and arrogant pride therein), and international government benevolence. There’s a whole morality to each side of this – conservatives adhering to simple patriotism, the promotion of democracy worldwide, and the western nuclear family unit, while liberals fight for de-institutionalized individual identity, secular humanist modernism (as if there had never been a post-modern critique), and the sacralization of the environment. These strange syncretistic “platforms” (as some would like inappropriately to call them) are a battle not for the freedom or the rights of man, but for the content of the “American Values” in this newly founded nationalism.

Don’t buy it. There is nothing American about patriotism of the kind being promoted here – this tribal team-building exercise that has been going on for the last seven years. Specifically American patriotism is the ability to fight abroad for your family, under the flag of your country. It’s the ability to think on the things that matter to you instead of being fed things that ought to matter to you. Once we had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now we have the right to remain silent. It’s biopolitics 101.

September 11 was an attack on the American people. So was September 12. No one has come to our rescue so far – just a bunch of flatterers trying to get us to “band together.” There is no cynicism in the hope for real freedom – only the dissatisfaction that has fueled political change every time Alcibiades and his kin have taken the public stage. Mass society has yet to be done without falsehood. Let us hope we realize it can’t be done before we start another proxy civil war.

***

Possibly the best quote of this political season:

"It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag."

-Matt Taibi on the RNC

Freedom.

2008-09-28T17:38:00.000-07:00

Night Drive

by Seamus Heaney

The smells of ordinariness

Were new on the night drive through France:

Rain and hay and woods on the air

Made warm daughts in the open car.

Signposts whitened relentlessly.

Montreuil, Abbeville, Beauvais

Were promised, promised, came and went,

Each place granting its name's fulfilment.

A combine groaning its way late

Bled seds across its work-light.

Af roest fire smouldered out.

One by one small cafés shut.

I thought of you continuously

A thousand miles south where Italy

Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

Your ordinariness was renewed there.

I recently returned from a wonderful road trip across the U. S. to visit people that I love, and it did nothing if not renew my ordinariness. I arrived back home after ten days with that hint of unfamiliarity that makes you focus on what you're doing. I don't know if it will still be there when I wake up tomorrow, but I hope it is - I certainly feel like I earned it.

I had so many rich experiences. I watched the sun set on Tennessee first on the right, then the left, then the right again as I wound down the hairpin turns on the western side of the Appalachians. I walked through Nashville with someone beautiful, and we met a slightly tipsy homeless man in need of a hug just blocks from the mecca of Christian commercialism.

I accidentally stumbled into a gay bookstore in Nashville. Did you know there's such a thing as a gay bookstore? I knew there were gay sections in regular (straight?) bookstores, but I did not know there were gay bookstores. Well, there are. I did not see a straight section.

I saw my brilliant old roommate and his lovely wife in Peoria. They own two large, heavy, real swords (!) now. They are for decoration/defending against intruders. As I left the apartment, I added "Must allow decoration with medieval weapons" to my mental list of attributes necessary for the woman that I marry. No flails on the ceiling fan? I'm returning the ring.

Over the next week, I had meals and various unhealthy beverages with lots and lots of loved ones, and I was amazed at how talented and diverse they all were! A TV producer/editor, a theologian, improv players, a pastor in training (he also fights forest fires... with his mind), writers, thinkers, and creators of all kinds. I am so blessed! And I love every single one of them even more than I admire them. I can't think of a better way to spend my vacation - I feel so recharged!

After Wheaton and Chicago was the unpleasant part of the trip. I got caught in Chicago traffic that cost me two hours and crossed Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where I booked a room at a Super 8 Motel in Somerset, PA. Something there was so dirty that a toenail I had clipped a little too short got horribly infected and still hurts like the Dickensons. It only hurt like the Dickens before, but infection made it worse. I slept for three hours (waste of 70 bucks) and made my way down to Harrisonburg, VA, where a one more wonderful experience awaited me.

I hadn't seen my high school English teacher since I graduated from our little missionary school in Nairobi. He was just about the same as I remember him - though his two beautiful African girls are now in third and fourth grade and know everything about everything and will tell you all of it without solicitation. I am certain that I was exactly the same way. I have of course matured greatly since then (*ahem*) - moving right along...

Mr. L and I talked about everything from the Phillies (going to the playoffs baby!), to the election (ridiculous in every way), to the Mennonite church he goes to, and somewhere along the line, we got into what it means to be living in America instead of Kenya. Something began to stir in me like it usually does whenever I talk about it, but this time it was different. This time, I'm an adult.

I've noticed something about people who come back to America from Kenya. Kenya, for many expats, seems to represent freedom. This is ironic, because America hold freedom to be its political ideal, whereas when Kenyans speak of freedom, they mean freedom from colonialism. But there's another kind of freedom there that is altogether unfamiliar to most Americans. Maybe it's just the wildness of the undeveloped terrain, or maybe it's the chaotic urban centers where you have to push a little to make your way, or maybe it's the dissonance of one culture so starkly contrasting with another that it creates a neutral space in which one's identity gains an untethered ambiguity - but whatever it is, people come away renewed. Kenya is like salt, bringing out the ordinariness where one has begun to feel dry and tasteless. It doesn't begrudge you your human irregularities where the sterility of drywall and air conditioning have cut them off at right angles. It's peace that is peace, not just stasis.

The west is a fantasy land. We have so much that we have crossed a threshold and started to lose things again. The curve for satisfaction is a bell curve, not an exponential curve. Sometimes, when your lifestyle has gone so far beyond your biology that you feel like a pair of eyes with fingers, convenience and entertainment are like saltwater to a parched tongue. There is no reason to let things get that far when there are still children on the streets of Africa whose fight for survival deprives them of basic education. I am going off to grad school soon. I aim to settle down somewhere someday, and when that happens, I want to be free - the kind of free where all you think of when you're home is others, and all you think of when you're gone is home.

No Clapping

2008-09-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

The New York Times need to hire this guy so that he can walk down the hall and defenestrate this guy. The New York Times is a brilliant paper, but only the former writer is doing anything to repair political discourse, or at least to make us aware that it's broken. The latter article by John Broder criticizes Barack Obama's debate technique, saying "He exudes disdain for the quips and sound bites that some deride as trivializing political debates but that have become a central part of scoring them. He tends to the earnest and humorless when audiences seem to crave passion and personality. He frequently rises above the mire of political combat when the battle calls for engagement."

So... which part of that is bad? It becomes clear through the article that Mr. Broder is interested in seeing a political cock fight, not a debate on substantive issues. He likes it when Obama "shoots back" with pithy verbal sucker punches, instead of his usual "alloofness and windiness." He wants a candidate that will destroy his opponent with fascist applause lines instead of proferring and defending ideas that will win the minds of our country. It's just cynicism.

All over the country I talk to people about their political ideas, and I hear the same thing over and over: Americans are stupid. There is the pervasive sense that most American citizens vote on nothings like verbal gaffs and past acquaintances instead of methods and solutions that make the most sense to them. I don't actually believe this. I think the reality is much simpler - believe it or not. American's aren't stupid: they think all other Americans are stupid. It's hard to defend the idea that a country is actually full of imbeciles. It is much easier to recognize that both sides of the partisan divide ridicule and debase one another , which always leads to the adoption of the most antagonistic method possible. Keith Olbermann and Sean Hannity deserve each other.

How about we stop the commodification of political discourse? It's a very simple matter. Turn off the television until the debate comes on. Then, mute the debate during commercial breaks, and turn it off again when the debate is over. Also, don't clap. Ever. That should be a convention in American politics. It ought to be considered rude and ignorant to clap at a debate. Perhaps then, people will actually be able to hear what is being said, and the candidates will feel like they're allowed to say it.