OK- this is strange

Reuters: "Turkish TV gameshow looks to convert atheists."

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - What happens when you put a Muslim imam, a Christian priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk in a room with 10 atheists?

Turkish television station Kanal T hopes the answer is a ratings success as it prepares to launch a gameshow where spiritual guides from the four faiths will seek to convert a group of non-believers.

The prize for converts will be a pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen religion -- Mecca for Muslims, the Vatican for Christians, Jerusalem for Jews and Tibet for Buddhists.

Turkish religious authorities are not enthusiastic. Although Turkey's government is formally secular, the vast majority of Turks are Muslims. The TV program may have trouble finding an imam to appear. But its producers are undeterred.

"We are giving the biggest prize in the world, the gift of belief in God," Kanal T chief executive Seyhan Soylu told Reuters.

"We don't approve of anyone being an atheist. God is great and it doesn't matter which religion you believe in. The important thing is to believe," Soylu said.

Now let's take a harder look at that last statement. I've heard it a lot, even here in America.

"It doesn't matter which religion you believe in, as long as you believe."

Really?

Imagine a parent saying to a child, "It doesn't matter what you eat for supper, as long as you eat something."

Child: "Okay, I'll take pizza and chocolate ice cream - forever."

But that wouldn't matter, would it, as long as the child is eating something?

Math teacher: "It doesn't matter what your answers are on the exam, as long as you write something."

Employer: "It doesn't how you spend your time on the job, as long as you show up."

Why are we so willing to dismiss religion with a wave of the hand - "anything I believe is okay" - but won't accept such a non-standard in any other arena of life?

I'm going to give an answer I know in advance will make some readers hackles rise. It's because to the vast majority of Americans today, their religion is a hobby rather than the ordering principle of their lives. Consider that this statement actually is acceptable: "It doesn't matter what your hobby is as long as you have one."

One man's hobby is golf, another's woodworking. One woman's hobby is gardening, another's crafts. No one thinks his/her hobby is better than another's, and they're right. Hobbies, in the long run, don't really matter. That's why we call them hobbies.

But rare indeed is the religion whose doctrines don't insist it doesn't matter in the long run - the very long run of eternity. So if someone treats one's religion no more importantly than a hobby, then he simply isn't taking his religion seriously.

To say that what we believe, religiously, doesn't matter as long as we believe something betrays, I think, a covert belief that death is the end of existence. If there is no life after death, then not only is one religion as good as another, so is atheism. Or, as the apostle Paul put it, "If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die'" (1 Cor. 15:32).

However, if one does take seriously the possibility that we survive the death of our bodies in some meaningful sense, then the choice of religion becomes centrally important. For the three great monotheistic religions all teach that right beliefs in this life are of eternal importance for the next. Consider the orienting claims of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

Judaism: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4), some translations thus: "... the Lord is our God, the Lord alone."

Christianity: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (Gospel of John 3:16).

Islam: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet."

Now, one could, I suppose, maintain that all three are wrong and that eternal life, if it is to be gained at all, is achieved another way than taught by them. Yet the alternatives of world religions are not encouraging in that regard.

Buddhism, for example, teaches that when one dies one is immediately reborn as someone or something else until, eventually, final liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth is the attained by entering a state of Nirvana, the literal meaning of which is "to extinguish." Buddha himself made no claims about Nirvana other than that it was "indescribable" and "unutterable." Not much there to stake a hope on, I'd say.

As for Hinduism, its teachings on eternal life don't differ much from Buddhism's, they simply describe it differently and Hinduism does affirm the existence of deity - deities, in fact, since Hindus are generally willing to acknowledge the existence of any god you care to name because specific beliefs about God or gods is not considered essential. Like Buddhism, Hinduism seeks release from birth/rebirth until the Self is ultimately subsumed into universal identity "as a drop of rain merges with the sea."

Frankly, that doesn't float my boat, either. I want to be me in the afterlife - a better, perfected me, oh please, but still me. And I want you to be you, too.

Only Judaism, Christianity and Islam can hold out any hope for me in that regard. But they do not agree on how eternal life with God is to be achieved. Though Christianity is the child of Judaism, there are obviously some starkly defining differences, mainly the affirmation of the divine identity of Christ, but not only that. As for Islam, it formally claims that both Judaism and Christianity are corrupted religions resulting from revelations from Allah, but which were adulterated and changed by human sinfulness.

Each has, through history, excluded the others from validity as a way to life eternal. And yet, in that more than any other thing of life, it is most important to be right.

So how to choose, and on what basis? Well, this post is long enough, so I'll take that topic up another day.

Everything you think you know about Honduras is wrong

Let us keep the people of Honduras in our prayers as they struggle to retain their democracy in the wake of the entirely unconstitutional power grab by their thankfully deposed former president, Mel Zelaya. I traveled over most of the country in 1989 and in this post will explain why the "template" of historic Latin American military coups does not apply here.

First, there has not been a military coup. It was Zelaya who attempted a coup by placing the issue of his own succession in office on a referendum. The country's constitution forbids more than one term for a president or the amendment of the constitution by referendum (amendments have to begin in the national congress). Zelaya's plan to hold a referendum to endorse his own succession was struck down by the Honduran supreme court. The congress, including almost every member of his own party, opposed it. The Honduran attorney general stated it would be illegal.

Even so, Zelaya had ballots printed in Venezuela and demanded the army distribute them, as the army always does for national elections (for why, keep reading). The supreme court ordered the army to retain the ballots under lock. Zelaya ordered the army's chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, to distribute the ballots. The general refused. Zelaya fired him. The supreme court ruled the firing illegal and ordered him reinstated. Zelaya refused.

With the army refusing to help him overturn the constitution, Zelaya literally decided to take matters into his own hands. Last Thursday he led a mob to the warehouse where the ballots were being kept and had his followers start handing them out.

Recognizing that a constitutional crisis was now well developed, the supreme court, with the agreement of practically every member of congress and the attorney general, ruled that Zelaya's term of office was ended. The court directed the army to remove him physically from office if he refused to leave on his own. This the army did, packing him onto a plane to Costa Rica.

Note this well: the Honduran supreme court was the primary actor here. It ordered the army to enforce its ruling. All the rest of the Honduran government supported this.

As I explain below, the Honduran military has historically had a role in its society very different from what we estadounidenses understand our own military's place to be. I'll go into some detail, regarding the Honduran constitution's specifications, as an endnote. Suffice here to say that it is very different from our own Constitition and we err massively when we view events of the past days through our own domestic template.

It must be pointed out that at no time did the Honduran army ever control the organs of government. No military officer ever declared himself el jefe. The Congress immediately swore in its majority leader, Roberto Michiletti - who is of Zelaya's own party! One has to wonder what sort of coup allows the deposed president to be succeeded by the next-leading member of his party!

A post at the mostly left-wing DailyKos blog punctures the media's and administration's template about how a "military coup" has destroyed democracy in Honduras. Says Kos's writer:

You could not be more wrong about what is happening in Honduras; personally I blame the US media. Then again, when have they covered a story, much less an international news item, correctly in recent history? And at the end of the day, that is what this is about, recent history tainting the current situation based on out-dated USA-Latin American memes.

He also cites a blog by Honduran blogger, Rschenkel:

I want to remind everyone that this was not a military coup, this was the arrest and destitution [sic] of a criminal president, with the help of the military. Proof that it is not a coup, is that as of this moment we already have the Constitutional State of Right re-established, with a new president, and new cabinet. Let us Hondurans be, we have already defenestrated what was causing us such stress, division and unrest, and we will reunite ourselves, to again perform our right of suffrage in 5 months.

Back to Kos, which has some penetrating questions:

So why are people here on this site and USA media asking for Zelaya, who was removed per provisions in Honduran law, be restored so he consolidate power under a system that haunted Latin America for most of the last century?

Why does the USA media support the over-throw of Latin American constitutions, why is this site doing the same?

Where are the pictures of the 100,000 people marching against Zelaya in Tegucigalpa? Where are the stories of the local support for the constitution, the laws set in stone, instead of just accepting Zelaya's worth as bond, why is no one looking into the events leading up to his ouster?

Why is everyone here and the media just accepting the old tried but true meme of Latin American coup d'état without realizing this was an action by the sovereign people of Honduras to preserve their constitutional government?

Why, indeed?

The role of the Honduran army in its society

I lived in Honduras for six months in 1989, assigned to US Joint Task Force Bravo, stationed at a Honduran air force base Soto Cano in the Comayagua Valley. I did not live in the nearby town so I didn't rub elbows with everyday Hondurans most of the time. The Honduran civilians working for JTF-B were well educated, from the higher economic levels of society. As director of public affairs, I had a Honduran secretary, a recent college graduate with outstanding command of English.

But I did get around the country from one end to the other, north, south, east and west. My commander, a US Army colonel, was completely fluent in Spanish and had served at the US embassy in El Salvador. Since the principal mission of JTF-B was civil affairs and civil assistance, this colonel spent a lot of time on the road visiting Honduran battalion commanders. (Honduran battalions were posted on individual bases around the country. Honduras has no large army bases like the United States.) My colonel always took a handful of principal staff with him, of which I was one.

Why was it necessary to spend so much time coordinating with Honduran battalion commanders? Because unlike much of the rest of Latin America's armies, the officer corps in Honduras has always been of the people, not the upper, ruling classes. This is in marked contrast to El Salvador's military, as my boss explained, where the officers came from the upper classes and jealouslydefended the uppers' privileges and power.

But in Honduras, going back to the 1840s, battalion commanders had not only a military-command responsibility, but a civilian law-enforcement responsibility. They were closely equivalent to American sheriffs in many regards. Because of their ordinary roots, battalion commanders, officers and their soldiers were much less "classed" than elsewhere in Latin America. There never formed a significant rift between the people and the military.

The Honduran army has long had a traditional role as keeper, and sometimes guardian, of civil order and has been viewed by the people as such. I remember one battalion commander we visited who almost every day went for walks for an hour or two somewhere in his district, mixing with the people, sometimes with a staffer accompanying him, sometimes not. He was highly respected and warmly regarded by the people.

Another battalion commander, whom I'll call Rodrigo, spent about half his time supervising his battalion's construction of civil-building projects in the district, especially schools and water management works. This officer was sharply critical of JTF-B's management of civil-engineering projects for villages and small towns because, he said, we did too much for the people. We needed to involve them more so that they "owned" half the project. We stayed the night at his base, arising early the next morning only to find that Lt. Col. Rodrigo had canceled the morning's activities with us. In fact, he wasn't even there any more.

Most, maybe all, the Honduran lieutenant colonels I met were graduates of the US Army's Command and General Staff College at Ft Leavenworth, Kansas, or of the School of the Americas, then located at Fort Benning, Ga. Many were graduates of both. These schools served to strengthen and deepen Honduras' democratic traditions, especially teaching them of the United States' entrenchment of civilian control of the military. Here's a plain illustration.

Just after returning from Rodrigo's base in late summer 1989, the other principal staff officers and I were summoned to the task force's SCIF, the Secret Compartmented Information Facility, a super-secure room in the intelligence office area. It was the only place on our compound where were could be positive that the our conversations could not be overheard.

There we learned the reason for Lt. Col. Rodrigo's mysterious disappearance overnight. He and the other battalion commanders had converged on Honduras' capital, Tegucigalpa, to confront the army's chief of staff. It seemed that this general had decided to mount a coup of some kind - probably not the full-scale coup Latin America was known so well for, but a significant seizure of power nonetheless. When the battalion commanders got wind of it, they went the capital, entered together into the chief's office and forced him to resign on the spot. Not a shot was fired and the country's civilian government remained intact.

What the Honduran army did last week in shoving Zelaya, a would-be puppet of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, out of office was not a coup by even the wildest imagination. It was Zelaya who was trying to mount a coup, by using an unconstitutional referendum (with ballots printed in Venezuela!) to justify remaining in office as long as he wanted. No one in government, including his own party, supported Zelaya.

In fact, the Honduran Supreme Court actually ordered the army to remove him, a perfectly sensible development because of the historical role of Honduras' military in civil order. In fact, the army was constitutionally required to do so, see endnote.

If the media and administration had stopped to consider Honduran history and culture (or had the State Dept. paused even to consult its own experts), they would not (one supposes) have been so quick on the trigger to denounce the Hondurans' salvation of their own democracy. But instead, they practiced "ready-fire-aim," though there is no evidence that they actually aimed.

A highly informative site, written by Hondurans, is here. This post by a Honduran writer explains, "What we Hondurans want."

The BBC invited Honduran readers to leave their comments on an open thread. Very revealing.

Endnote:

Ad fontes: CONSTITUCIÓN DE LA REPÚBLICA DE HONDURAS

Translation by Google (yeah, I know). Since I was once reasonably fluent in Spanish, I have massaged it a little herein; my glosses are in brackets [ ].

Let's consider the following facts seriatim (italics added throughout):

Chapter VI, Article 237: "The presidential term is four years... ." There is no provision for self succession.

Article 42 forbids inciting, encouraging or supporting the re-election of a president, which Zelaya was unambiguously doing.

The Honduran constitution makes no provision for impeachment as we understand the process. However, Article 239 provides that,

No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President.

This re-emphasizes that a president may not succeed himself in office - having "already served as head of the Executive Branch," Zelaya was constitutionally inelegible to remain in office. Article 239 continues,

Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform [Sp.: reforma, or amendment], as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.

Since the constitution strictly prescribes a single term for the president, and since Zelaya was openly campaigning for a second term, the country's supreme court properly ruled, on purely constitutional grounds, that Zelaya must "immediately cease" in his function as president.

Chapter 10, Article 272:

The Armed Forces of Honduras are a National Institution of a permanent nature, professional in essence [character or nature], apolitical, obedient and not deliberative [that is, do not set policy].

They are established to defend the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Republic, keep the peace, public order and the rule of the Constitution, the principles of free suffrage and alternation in the presidency of the Republic.

Consitutionally, it is the military that is charged, in concert with civilian organs of government, to ensure that the one-term limit of the presidency is enforced. It is the military that is constitutionally charged with ensuring the intregrity of national elections.

Therefore, the removal of Zelaya from office by the army was not merely appropriate, it was actually constitutionally required that the army do so.

Furthermore, when the army's chief of staff refused to send Zelaya's ballots to polling places, Zelaya personally led a mob to the warehouse, stole the ballots and had his minions start to distribute them. This act also violated the constitution.

Update: Carlos Alberto Montaner, writing in the Miami Herald:

Almost by unanimity, the Honduran Congress, supported by the Supreme Court, had removed him for breaking the law and ignoring the rulings of the Electoral Tribunal. But that was a technical excuse. The deep truth is a lot more dramatic: Zelaya, obstinate and rash, intent on being reelected at any cost, heedless of all the warnings of the judiciary and the legislature, intended to drag the nation in the direction of Chávez, something that in Honduras would have been the beginning of a huge economic and social Via Crucis. ...

What we're seeing in Honduras is not a clash between uniformed men and civilians, or between putschists and innocent functionaries. Nor is it a return to the lamentable past of military governments. We are witnessing a conflict between two ways of understanding the function of the state and the role of the political leaders. Chávez's way -- an incipient ruling concept that Zelaya irresponsibly assumed in Honduras -- is a variant of state-run collectivism, a political stream that does away with the separation of powers that is part and parcel of republics. It exalts the personalist style, eliminates replacement of the leader, and adopts anti-Western positions that are expressed in dangerous alliances with countries like Iran and North Korea.

As I have written, what happened last week in Honduras was the salvation of democracy and the sovereignty of the Honduran people (also guaranteed by its constitution). Zelaya was a Chavez protege. What would that have meant for Honduran democracy? Well, here's Chavez's record.

Are you in the boat? Who's with you?

One day in the life of Jesus:

Mark 4:35-41 -- On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, "Let us go across to the other side." And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him.

A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. 40 He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?"

And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"

This isn't really a story about how Jesus could command storms on the sea. It's a story about remembering that we are in the boat and that Jesus is with us even when it doesn't seem terribly apparent.

Faith, to be faith at all, can't be easy. Do you have faith that two plus two equals four. Of course not. It just is, and that's that. Do we have faith that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown? No, it's simply a fact and that's that.

Faith is what we believe in when the evidence is not necessarily conclusive. Where there is no room for doubt, there is no need for faith. But faith does require evidence and reason, otherwise it's just wishful thinking.

Faith's greatest challenge is when the stakes are highest, when the storms set about us and adversity threatens to drown the old and familiar.

Some the early churches used the metaphor of a boat to describe the church. So the disciples’ boat is the church itself, and the disciples are all believers. We are all in the same boat. Adversity will come, recessions will come, illnesses, deaths, discords, disputes all will come, sooner or later. Such are the seas that we sail as disciples.

We are all in the same boat. And we need to remember that Jesus is with us. We have eternal purposes. Storms will pass and they, like all things of the church, must be surrendered to the lordship of Christ.

What is in control – fear or faith? Faith in Christ is betting your life that Christ really is Lord. That is what the disciples finally did.

But we are deceived to think that if we had enough faith we could overcome all our problems miraculously. Thinking that faith is for miracles is wrong. We are not given faith to be served by God, but that we may serve God. Faith enables us to believe that Jesus is with us in our boat, and to act accordingly. Our faith is not just something we affirm; it is how we act and what we do, and how we live and what we give! We sin, sin even in faith, if we just ask for miracles rather than use what God has already given us to row the boat.

So, what are we looking at, the winds that push us or the Christ who is with us? Paul wrote, “We live by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5:7). The reality of Christ is discerned with faith’s eyes, says Paul: “we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor 4:18 ).

Weddings

Earlier this month, I attended the wedding of my nephew in Pennsylvania. It took place at an Episcopal church. The order of the service was held my attention since United Methodists and Episcopalians are "kissing cousins," having both been born about the same time from the Church of England (that is, soon after the end of the American revolution).

The priest followed the order of the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer (BCP), which is their reference work for worship in the same way that we Methodists us the Book or Worship (BOW). I was intrigued at the inclusion in the wedding service of the old "if anyone objects to this wedding, speak now" etc.

Into this holy union N.N. and N.N. now come to be joined. If any of you can show just cause why they may not lawfully be married, speak now; or else for ever hold your peace.

Now, this is not religious language at all, of course, but legal language. In fact, a wedding ceremony is really a legal, contractual process that churches have overlaid with religious language. Many people do not know that getting married in a church by a priest or pastor is a relatively late development in Christendom. The great reformer Martin Luther, for example, was not married in a church and the habit did not start to become popular until late in the 16th century.

Until then, weddings were seen as civil procedures that could be (and almost always were) sanctified or sacramentalized by the Church. Couples got married by a civil magistrate of some kind and later a priest would bless the union. Sometimes this blessing took place on the wedding day and sometimes on the first anniversary.

Much of the litany we use in wedding services, both in the BCP and the BOW, reflects contractual language of the age of feudalism, when weddings formed obligations between the bride's and groom's families and were closely concerned with division and inheritance of property. For example:

In the Name of God, I, N., take you, N., to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.

Any lawyer will immediately recognize that this is legal language, and nothing but, with only the name of God invoked at the beginning to put a religious gloss on it. "To have and to hold" is a property-law term of ownership. Then the bride repeats the same words to the groom and voila, the contract is sealed. In feudal days, these vows formed legal contracts between the two families as well.

Anyway, at my nephew's wedding no one objected to the wedding and priest continued thus:

I require and charge you both, here in the presence of God, that if either of you know any reason why you may not be united in marriage lawfully, and in accordance with God's Word, you do now confess it.

Neither of these charges are found in the UMC's Book of Worship. I have never included them in any wedding I have officiated nor, for that matter, would I agree to do so. By the wedding day itself, it's a little late for someone to pop up and say the couple shouldn't get married! What am I supposed to do, tell everyone to have a seat while I hold a hearing and render a decision? Sorry, "not my yob." And as for either the bride or groom self-disqualifying, I figure that if they show up at the altar, that answers the question.

In fact, nothing demonstrates the feudal source of wedding services today more than these two charges. They were included, 1,000 years ago or so, not for the benefit of the marrying couple, but to demonstrate publicly at the ceremony that all was legal and proper.

As I said, though, neither of them are included in the UMC's service. Nor, for that matter, is there any nonsense about asking "who gives this woman to be married to this man." The bride is not property and therefore cannot be given to anyone. However, I am quite comfortable with including "who presents this woman to be married to this man," which is altogether different. I have never officiated a wedding when the bride didn't want dad to hand her over to the groom no matter how "liberated" or financially independent she was. If dad was not there (deceased or deeply estranged) she still wanted a male relative to do so. Which is fine!

Finally, I do not "pronounce" the couple husband and wife, I "announce" that they are now husband and wife.

Memorial Day, Veterans Day - don't confuse them

As a retired Army officer, I tend to get pretty exercised at the widespread notion in the media and public commemorations of Memorial Day that this day is set aside to honor living veterans. It's not. That's done on Nov. 11, Veterans Day.

Memorial Day is to honor and give thanks for the service, dedication and sacrifice of members of the American armed forces who gave their lives in the service of their country. We also honor those who survived their service but have died since.

Which is to say that Memorial Day is set aside to honor the memory of dead, not thank the living.

Memorial Day as we know it grew from diverse strands of decorating the graves of Civil War dead, begun in various towns just after the war ended. One tradition says that Southern women, mainly widows and bereaved mothers, began laying flowers on graves of Confederate dead before the war ended. Many people today think that this tradition continued as a separate Southern practice called Decoration Day, while it was the North that practiced Memorial Day.

While not exactly wrong, it's not altogether true. Beginning with a proclamation by Gen. John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, Memorial Day was first widespread observed in 1868 to honor the dead of the Civil War. Graves of both Union and Confederate dead at Arlington Cemetery were decorated with flowers.

By 1890, all the states of the former northern Union recognized the day, but it still honored only Civil War dead. Southern states did not join in observing this day, continuing to honor Confederate dead on other dates (not uniform across the South). People generally think that this day was called Decoration Day, but I cannot find any citation to confirm it. (The old CSA memorializing of Confederate dead is still on the books of many Old South states; it is June 3 here in Tennessee.)

After World War I, the dead of that war were added to the honor roll of Memorial Day, then almost immediately the dead of all American wars. At that, the Southern states joined in and there has been a unified observance since.

Memorial Day was generally an observance by the several states until President Lyndon B. Johnson issued a proclamation in 1966 designating May 30 as national Memorial Day. There the day remained until Congress passed legislation in 1971 called the National Holiday Act. The Act made Memorial Day and most other federal holidays always occur on a Monday. Whether this served to strip the day of its solemn meaning I'll leave it to you to evaluate.

Unlike Veterans Day, Nov. 11, Memorial Day is a unique American holiday. The other English-speaking nations observe Nov. 11, the date World War I ended, just as we do. However, the observance is called Remembrance Day in Canada, Australia, Bermuda and some other lands of the former British Empire. New Zealand observes Nov. 11 in a low key way, the main observance being ANZAC Day, April 25. In the United Kingdom Nov. 11 is also commemorated in a low-key manner, the main observance being the second Sunday of November, called Remembrance Sunday.

In these nations, commemorations accomplish in one day what Memorial Day and Veterans Day do in America.

Cool pic of the day

An amateur astronomer has taken the photo of a lifetime - the space shuttle transiting between the sun and the earth.



That is definitely the cool pic of the day. More here.

"Money doesn't bring you happiness . . ."

Four wealthy Yorkshiremen vacationing on the French Riviera reminisce about how happy they were when they were dirt poor:



Now, Conor Clarke, writing from England, asks, "What Makes Us Happy? Not Jobs.."

Joshua Shenk's Atlantic essay on happiness has gotten plenty of response (see David Brooks in yesterday morning's New York Times), but one thing that I find striking about the piece is how little focus there is on material gains as the right route to happiness. When the doctor in charge of the Grant Study lists the factors that predict happy aging -- education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, maintaining a healthy weight and employing "mature adaptations" -- there is no mention of career success or even career stability. Relationships matter; incomes don't. This comports pretty well with my general understanding of self-reported happiness studies and gives me a chance to print my second favorite graph in the history of economics:

Clarke points out that though this graph portrays Britain, the same results are found around the world. Even though Britons' (and Americans') material circumstances have been improving, often quite substantially and rapidly for the last 50 years or so, we do not claim to be happier now than we did back then.

It would be a mistake to infer, however, that material sufficiency has no relation to happiness. In 1943, Abraham Maslow promulgated his theory of human "hierarchy of needs," a tier of life conditions that Maslow said are necessary for life itself, at the bottom of the tier, and for human flourishing and happiness, moving up to higher-level needs.

At the bottom, of course, are the needs essential to live at all - food, air, water, sleep and other life-essential things. These are physiological needs shared with any other creature. Above them are human-specific (mostly) needs - safety employment, family, and so on. As the tier rises, the needs become steadily less bodily and more psychological - respect, achievement, creativity, and so forth.

Happiness, to Maslow, resulted from being able to meet the higher-level needs, which was in turn dependent upon meeting the basic type of needs. Persons chronically hungry or fearful of their safety are quite unlikely to describe themselves as happy.

Unless ...

As influential as Maslow's work was and deservedly remains, about the same time he published it a man named Viktor Frankl was developing his own theory. Frankl, though, worked as a captive of Nazi Germany, held in concentration camps, where his whole family died. Building on work he had begun before the war, he used his experiences in the camps to refine a psychotherapy built on the hypothesis that the very fundamental human needs are neither bodily ones nor material ones at all. The basic need is to have meaning and purpose in one's life. That is, Frankl turned Maslow's pyramid upside down and claimed that Maslow's higher needs are actually the most elemental.

Frankl's postwar book, Man's Search for Meaning, was named one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century by the Library of Congress. So it is. And therein lies the key to why people on all points on the economic spectrum can say they are happy, or not.

It is simply this: Material prosperity is not a bad thing (as some of Left would have us believe), but neither is it good, in itself, to be pursued as the object of life (as some on the Right would have us believe). Things, even an abundance of them, cannot make us happy (though severe, ongoing lack of Maslow's basic needs can prevent happiness). Frankl is right: it what we make of life that makes us happy, which is why, even in the direst of physical circumstances in the Nazi camps, he was able to cling to the conviction there was meaning in his suffering. He relates another inmate's insistence that if the camps' survivor could not find meaning in life after the war, there could be no meaning to the camps. To the contrary, Frankl insisted, if there was no meaning in the camps, there could be no meaning to surviving them.

A common theme among the writers of the classics is the unhappy, if not suicidal, wealthy man. One need consider only Charles Foster Kane, subject of Orson Welles' 1941 classic, still ranked by the American Film Institute as the best American movie ever. Stupendously wealthy, surrounded by every material blessing money can buy, Kane nonetheless becomes an embittered old man who finally dies alone, as unhappy as a man can be.



What went wrong in Kane's life? As this clip shows, he suffered from self-inflicted deterioration of the relationships that should have been most important to him, the only ones that could have sustained him and provided meaning for his passion.

That is the key: relationships. And I'll take a look at that in the next installment.

Star Trek 2009 not quite a bullseye . . .

... but it's still pretty good.

I may as well jump on the Star Trek review bandwagon and post mine. I went with the fam last evening to see the new ST movie. Is it really a prequel to the other movies and the 1960s TV series? No, it's not, any more than Casino Royale, in which James Bond receives his double-oh designation, was a prequel to the other Bond flicks.

In fact, like Casino, ST 2009 hits the reset button on the franchise. Let me discuss that before I talk about the merits of the movie itself. There are some spoilers here, but get real - how can there really be spoilers when you know in advance that the movie's main intent is to show how Kirk and Co. wind up on USS Enterprise? Yes, they win (as the always do) in the fight with the bad guy and live to tell the tale. So here goes.

James T. Kirk is born in space at the beginning of the show, aboard an escape rocket fleeing the doomed USS Kelvin, captained, for 12 minutes, by Kirk's father, who sacrifices himself to save the crew. We next see Kirk at age 10, having swiped his father's antique Corvette for a joy ride while the Beastie Boy's "Sabotage" plays over all. Kirk, pursued by a cop on a flying motorcycle, drives the 'Vette off a cliff, jumping clear at the last moment.

Herein lie the first clues:

• The Vette is a 1966 model, the same year that the ST TV series debuted. The Vette is destroyed. Does this mean that the legacy is also being thrown (mostly) off a cliff? Why, yes, yes it does.
• The song symbolizes that director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are indeed sabotaging the Star trek legacy in order to sart over.

There is other proof within the storyline of the movie, but that would be giving too much away here. Suffice to say that at movie's end it is literally impossible for this movie's story future trajectory to merge with that of the TV series or the previous ST movies. We'll see how that works out. If this film's sequel is as sorry as Quantum of Solace was to Casino Royale, then the reset won't work too well.

So I suggest enjoying the movie as escapist entertainment rather than viewing it as a true prequel or another in the ST series. There are enough trekkie things in the show to establish a good connection with the series' legacy, such as a tribble sitting on Scotty's desk when he first appears, but in the end they do not matter. The movie should have been subtitled, "Starting All Over."

Leonard Nimoy's appearance as "Spock Prime" (so credited at the end) is a nice touch, as is his uttering a few lines from the older movies. It works just right. I thought it quite satisfying when he identified himself to the young Kirk by saying, "I am Spock." After the TV series was canceled, Nimoy tried to run away from it and establish a career as a serious dramatic actor. He even published a book in the mid-1970s called, I Am Not Spock. But, in the winter years of his life he has come to admit that Star Trek has defined his career (actually, he realized this long before now - the sequel to I Am Not Spock is I Am Spock, appearing 20 years later).

The Villain: Eric Bana as the destruction-bent Romulan, Nero, is excellent. He doesn't top Ricardo Montalban in Wrath of Khan, but nonetheless Nero is a worthy nemesis. And his threat is properly galactic: he wants to destroy every planet of the Federation and thanks to Spock Prime, he can (a zipped lip on that one, too).

The Enterprise crew:

Zachary Quinto as young Spock is excellent. Karl Urban as Bones is "excellent-minus," very good, but not quite as good in his part as Quinto is in his. Uhura and Spock have a thing for each other? Who knew? In the TV series it was Nurse Chapel who was enamored with Spock, IIRC, but her role long ago got beamed away. Zoe Saldana plays Uhura very well. Chekov and Sulu are presented competently, if not exactly inspiringly. Young Scotty, we learn, was a chowhound with an overdone Scottish brogue.

Ah, but what of Chris Pine, paying the major role of James T. Kirk? Sorry, bad idea. IMO, he just doesn't cut it. It's not that he acts the part of space cadet, then Enterprise officer, badly, he just doesn't act them as Kirk. You can pretty easily imagine young Spock maturing into Nimoy's Spock, and young Uhura and McCoy and the rest becoming the personalities we already know. But Pine's Kirk in unimaginable to become Shatner's Kirk.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

But how is the movie as a movie? My wife, who is no sci-fi fan, enjoyed it. My eldest son, who is very familiar with the ST legacy, and my young daughter, who is not, also liked it a lot. As for me, I'll put it this way - I'll probably spring for the DVD when it comes out, but I won't pay hard-earned coin to see it in the theater again. There are times to movie seems too frantic and plot developments too forced. But it's enjoyable and pays enough tribute to the legacy to justify seeing it in theater once. So I recommend it. Overall, I give Star Trek 2009 seven out 10 NCC-1701s.

New Madrid fault earthquake risk downgraded

The Tennessee Conference's listserv email included an entry this morning on the discovery that the New Madrid fault (pronounced MAD-rid, not muh-DRID) does not pose near the risk of catastrophe that scientists heretofore believed. This is good news, for in 1811 and 1812, massive earthquakes along the New Madrid fault literally changed American history. Centered in southeast Missouri, these quakes were near the top of the most violent in historical times in North America. They created Tennessee's Reelfoot Lake and in some places caused the mighty Mississippi River to reverse course.

The earthquake of December 1811 served as the signal to American Indian tribes from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border to send war parties to Ohio to unite in battle against white settlers and US troops under the great Shawnee war leader, Tecumseh.

Tecumseh, accompanied by his brother Lowawluwaysica, had been forming his battle coalition and alliances for many years. Lowawluwaysica had a reputation for prophecy and finally changed his name to Tenskwatawa, "One With Open [speaking] Mouth," better to reflect it. Under his and Tecumseh's urging, many Indian tribes became staunch rejectionists of Euro ways and accommodation with whites. In their long-range travels, they told the tribes that they would receive a signal all at the same time, both in the heavens and under the earth.

In March 1811, a bright comet appeared. Tecumseh interpreted it as a sign that his time to lead the combined tribes against the whites was near. Tecumseh had actually been born the same night that a large shooting star streaked through the sky. "Tecumseh" is of Algonquin origin and means, "Goes from place to place" (I have also seen it translated as "panther across the sky").

Then in December of the same year a mighty earthquake shook the eastern half of North America. So powerful it rang church bells in Philadelphia, it was the signal Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had promised.

With nothing moving faster than a horse in those days, the battle alliance among the tribes did not form exactly quickly. In 1812, the United States became embroiled in its second war with the British, who initially worked well with Tecumseh. Their relationship soured, however, when Maj. Gen Henry Proctor took command in the west. Proctor was not nearly as an astute tactician or strategist as Tecumseh. The result was the Battle of the Thames in October 1813, in Ontario, Canada, in which Tecumseh was killed.

Tecumseh is the most highly-regarded and historically respected person ever to have been an enemy of the United States. During times of peace, he enjoyed excellent relations with white military and civilians alike. He was fluent in English and was regarded universally as a true gentleman, a man of his word and entirely civilized in manner and demeanor. He was fierce and relentless in war, but never cruel, and he never took vengeance against captives. For many decades after his death, the United States heaped honors upon his memory and name. The US Navy named a warship Tecumseh in 1863; three more would follow. The Canadians have also given his memory many honors.

Tecumseh's body was never recovered. There are reliable reports that he had predicted he would fall in the battle and that, knowing what the US troops would do to his body, he shed all the trappings of generalship and went to battle dressed as an ordinary warrior. He told his close guard that if he fell, one of them would have to come immediately to prod his body with a charmed implement, after which he would return to life and lead the Indians to victory. However, the warrior who was running to Tecumseh's body to do so was shot to death en route. At that, the Indian army immediately dissipated.

Just after the battle, the American troops made a concerted effort to find Tecumseh's body, but almost no one knew what he looked like. They also expected his body to be clad in the symbols of a supreme war leader. Reports are that frontiersman Simon Kenton, employed by the US troops as a guide, was tasked to identify the body since Kenton had personally known Tecumseh for many years. Kenton did locate Tecumseh's remains but deliberately passed the corpse by, then found a body dressed as a lesser war leader and said it was Tecumseh. Immediately, US troops set upon this body and abused it in a sickening manner, stripping flesh to cure into leather and confiscating weapons and regalia. Today, only the elders of the Shawnee tribe know where Tecumseh's body was finally interred.

Now back to the New Madrid fault.

Scientists have spent long hours and many years attempting to predict the next big earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, but a study published in the March edition of the journal Science suggests that all the hype may be for nothing. ...

Utilizing data acquired over an eight year period from GPS antennas mounted in strategic locations throughout the earthquake zone, research teams from both Purdue and Northwestern found that the fault system was moving about 0.2 millimeters, the width of a fishing wire, per year. Calais said that sizeable earthquakes could only be expected when there was at least 2 millimeters of movement or more.

“There must be enough movement to accumulate strain for a big earthquake to take place and that just isn’t happening here,” Calais said.

As Clarksville is definitely inside the danger zone of a large earthquake from the fault, this is good news.

Endnote: Most references to Tecumseh refer to him as a "chief." However, Tecumseh, a Shawnee, was never a chief. Chiefs were elected by the Shawnee. Although the Shawnees held Tecumseh's skills as a war leader in high regard, most Shawnees rejected his program of strict rejection of accommodation with the encroaching whites. Tecumseh himself never claimed the title of chief.

The minority of Shawnees who allied with Tecumseh completely broke with him after the disastrous result of Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811. Tecumseh was not present for this battle; it was initiated by Tenskwatawa, who led Shawnee warriors to attack US troops who were trying to recruit neighboring Indian tribes to ally with them. The battle's failure caused Tecumseh to lose faith in his brother, whose influence as a prophetic figure was permanently diminished thereafter.

The best biography of Tecumseh is, in my opinion, Allan W. Eckert's volume, A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh. I also recommend his earlier book on the life of Simon Kenton, The Frontiersmen: A Narrative, a history of the opening of the Ohio River valley. 

The latter book includes the untrue story that Tecumseh became enamored with a settler girl named Rebecca Galloway, promising that if she married him he would adopt the ways of the whites and live as a white for the  rest of his life. Ultimately, they parted by mutual agreement. However, Eckert explains in Sorrow why this story is untrue, even though he had accepted it as historical in Frontiersman. Even so, the legend still has wide currency.

Why do we love Susan Boyle?

Susan Boyle is a an unemployed 47-year-old from obscurity, now with tens of millions of Youtube hits of her appearance on Britain's Got Talent.

In the off chance you haven't seen it, don't delay. Click the play symbol below and be transported.



Now, why has she become such an international phenom? Sure, she sings extremely well, But let's face it, not exceptionally well. Sarah Brightman need not look over her shoulder.

I think Sarah Boyle resonates because she has come into prominence at exactly the right time and context for her. In the past several months the masters of the universe have not only fallen from grace, they have fallen, period. In both Britain and in the US, the elites - financial, business and political - have proven to have feet of clay and have tumbled from their exalted heights. It doesn't matter, within this context, that we should have known all along that they were and are only human. They had both claimed from above and had been granted from below their pedestals.

When they fell, where did that leave you and me? What of the ordinary people, who live ordinary lives? The folk who just go to work every day, try to save for retirement while educating their kids, maybe get to Disney World every few years, and for many months have suffered a tightness of the gut, wondering whether they'll still have a job at the end of the month?

You know, the men and women whose equity assets got slashed and burned when the masters of the universe overreached and the economy tanked? Is there a comeback?

Susan Boyle says yes. Forty-seven, jobless, never married, living the kind of life that Henry David Thoreau would have said was one of "quiet desperation." By her age, the brass ring is not even in sight for most of us. Within our grasp? You must be kidding. We're just trying to get our kids through college, get another year or three out of the clunker and hope home prices recover before we're upside down down on our mortgages.

But take a shot at the top? At forty-seven? Sorry, we missed that elevator long ago.

Then walks Susan Boyle naked onto the international media stage. Not naked as in unclothed, of course, but naked in vulnerability, naked of armor, naked to scorn, naked to ridicule. Naked to derision, which she in fact got at first, though the traditionally reserved Brits choked it down for the most part. A target with no protection.

You, Susan Boyle, are an ordinary woman. What do you think you are doing here? You are one of the little people. If you were destined for stardom, it would have happened twenty-five years ago. But today? At 47? Ain't. Gonna. Happen.

There is no way to misunderstand that such is exactly what judges Piers Morgan, Amanda Holden and Simon Cowell (how well we of the colonies know Simon!) were thinking.

It cannot be overlooked here that Susan Boyle is, shall we say, physically unprepossessing. Her ordinary looks (ordinary? nay, actual homeliness) only reinforced the initial perception that she was a lightweight in the talent department, though not exactly light of weight, if you get my drift.

And then she sang.

And the ordinary Everywoman triumphed.

And everyone knew it within seconds.

They rose from their seats, clapping and shouting in surprise, joyous, celebratory surprise.

Because she was one of them, singing to them, singing for them. Singing about them.

Singing about their lives: her choice of songs can't be dismissed. Of course, she chose one that would best showcase the abilities of her voice as well as hide its limitations. But there are dozens of songs that could have done that, maybe hundreds.

Go read the lyrics to "I Dreamed a Dream." The beginning:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by,
When hope was high and life, worth living.
I dreamed that love would never die,
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.
Then I was young and unafraid,
And dreams were made and used and wasted.
There was no ransom to be paid,
No song unsung, no wine untasted.

The ending:

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living,
So different now from what it seemed...
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed...

The song is a capsule of the Ordinaries' lives of the past fifteen years. It is not an inspiring song, but depressing. The words are of dreams broken and hopes shattered. So why did it lift us up and offer not only solace, but inspiration?

Because Susan Boyle in her person gives lie to the words she was singing. The masters of the universe have fallen, but we're still here. And we will triumph.

Some important Sango service opportunities still open!

We still have a small number of volunteer church positions open for volunteers to serve our church and the cause of the Gospel. Especially if you are looking for the a way to exercise discipleship in our faith community, please let Pastor Don know which of these important services you would like to do!

Each position if fully described below. They are

Community Outreach Team Chief

Secretary of the Church Council

Justice Ministries Team Chief

Visitor Followup Assistants

Sunday School Congregational Representative

Community Outreach Team Chief

If you have a heart for God and a desire to bring the Gospel to others, this is the ministry for you!

Formerly known as the evangelism coordinator, the community outreach team chief works within the larger Inviting and Welcoming Team to imagine and coordinate ways to bring the Good News of jesus Christ to the local community, and to help invite the community's residents to become part of our worshiping community.

The community outreach team chief will work with Pastor Don, Jodi King, Joseph Nicholson and Mary Ann Leath (Inviting and Welcoming chairperson) to develop continuing and event-driven ways to keep Sango UMC in the local awareness as a gathering of people devoted to serving the cause of Christ in the world.

Secretary of the Church Council

The church council meets a minimum of once per quarter and at other times as called by either its chairperson (Ed Long) or the pastor,

The secretary takes the minutes of each meeting and provides a word-processed file to Peggy within two weeks after each meeting. (The secretary is not responsible for maintaining the library of minutes.)

The secretary also serves as a full member of the church council with vote.

Word processing skills and use of his/her own computer to finalize the minutes is a requirement.

Justice Ministries Team Chief

If you have a desire to help the needy and love your neighbors as yourself, this is the job for you!

Justice Ministries are those that use the people and resources of the church to work for right ordering of relationships and resources in the greater community.

One example is the FUEL ministry, by which Sango UMC people provide food staples to families in need whose children attend Sango Elementary School. Another example is the Scamper, which benefits Habitat for Humanity.

The Justice Ministries team Chief serves on the leader team of the Council on Ministries. He or she ensures that groups and persons responsible for each of our justice ministries are resourced and on track for successful completion of each program of activity.

The team chief serves as a member of the church council with vote.

Existing justice ministries' chairpersons are presently filled. Those ministries are:

Missions (LaDonna Dowdy)
FUEL (Wanda Cumberland and Cindi Pope)
Room in the Inn (Gordon and Ardell Shippy)
Sango Scamper (Theresa Ellis)
Craft Fair (UM Men)
Angel tree (Mary Ann Leath)

Visitor Followup Assistants

We need a small team to make sure that we speedily identify visitors to our church and contact them to thank them for being our guests, as well as to invite them to broader participation in the life of the church.

Principal responsibities of visitor followup assistants is to work with Mike and LaDonna Dowdy to make sure that every Sunday the pew pad registers are gleaned for visitor information, a follow-up note is written to first-time visitors, and register pages are then passed to Pastor Don for recording and pastoral followup. Vistor followup usually also includes other simple gestures of welcome and hospitality.

If we have three more persons/couples to volunteer, then this will take only 2-3 hours per month of your time. But the benefits to the church, as well as to people seeking a faith community, can be immense!

Sunday School Congregational Representative

This person serves as the "ombudsman" for matters relating to the total Sunday School programs of the church. He or she will need to be an active member of a Sunday School class with regular attendance and be an advocate for strong Sunday morning education for all ages. She or she will need to serve as an "honest broker" in representing the interests of Sunday School classes to and from the church staff and lay leadership. Principally will work with Jodi King.

How low can it go? I don't mean the Dow!

Click on image for larger view

No, this is not a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which has been doing pretty well (relatively speaking) for most of this week. This is a chart of the aggregate, global intensity of hurricanes since 1974. This chart is from Climate Audit website, where we learn that, "Global hurricane activity has decreased to the lowest level in 30 years." Click image for a larger view. The chart displays data using "a well-accepted metric called the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index or ACE for short."

Remember when the "consensus" was that global warming would make hurricanes worse? For example,

According to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR4), it is “more likely than not” (better than even odds) that there is a human contribution to the observed trend of hurricane intensification since the 1970s. In the future, “it is likely [better than 2 to 1 odds] that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical [sea surface temperatures].”

And again:

The Effect of Global Warming

Two factors that contribute to more intense tropical cyclones-ocean heat content and water vapor-have both increased over the past several decades. This is primarily due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests, which have significantly elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere. CO2 and other heat-trapping gases act like an insulating blanket that warms the land and ocean and increases evaporation.

Finally:

[A]re storms getting stronger, and if so, what's causing it? According to a new paper in Nature, the answer is yes — and global warming seems to be the culprit.

But now the consensus has evaporated. Last month the NOAA announced,

“There is nothing in the U.S. hurricane damage record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts.”

Original NOAA paper here. To be accurate, the paper focuses on the dollar amounts of hurricane-induced damages rather than the meteorological intensity, but it does specifically rebut the notion that global warming has increased intensities and this increased losses. In fact, hurricane intensities have actually decreased since the mid-19th century:


So why the record low intensities? Climate Audit explains:

During the past 2 years +, the Earth's climate has cooled under the effects of a dramatic La Nina episode. The Pacific Ocean basin typically sees much weaker hurricanes that indeed have shorter lifecycles and therefore — less ACE . Conversely, due to well-researched upper-atmospheric flow (e.g. vertical shear) configurations favorable to Atlantic hurricane development and intensification, La Nina falls tend to favor very active seasons in the Atlantic (word of warning for 2009). ... Through March 12, 2009, the Southern Hemisphere ACE is about half of what's expected in a normal year, with a multitude of very weak, short-lived hurricanes. All of these numbers tell a very simple story: just as there are active periods of hurricane activity around the globe, there are inactive periods, now for almost 3 years.

And I'll give them the last word:

Under global warming scenarios, hurricane intensity is expected to increase (on the order of a few percent), but MANY questions remain as to how much, where, and when. This science is very far from settled. ... The perceptible (and perhaps measurable) impact of global warming on hurricanes in today's climate is arguably a pittance compared to the reorganization and modulation of hurricane formation locations and preferred tracks/intensification corridors dominated by ENSO (and other natural climate factors). Moreover, our understanding of the complicated role of hurricanes with and role in climate is nebulous to be charitable. We must increase our understanding of the current climate's hurricane activity.