Pastor Don's Blog

North Korea: What do you do when your god dies?

2011-12-20T10:07:00.004-06:00

That's "god," not "God:"

Found at Video: The weeping North Koreans

Don’t just sample the clip for 10 seconds. Watch to the end and drink in the full spectacle of grown men, prostrate, screaming in grief at the death of their subjugator. I take it state media beamed this out to show the world how unlikely a North Korean Spring is; it might be their first honest moment. Count me in with Michael Totten and Dan Foster in thinking these histrionics are more genuine than we’d like to believe. After all, lesser cult leaders like Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite have asked and gotten more from their followers than this; surely a few tears were in order in Pyongyang upon learning that God is dead. The whole point of totalitarian conditioning is to draw this reaction without needing soldiers to stand just out of frame pointing rifles at the crowd. Go figure that it actually works on some people.

You cannot reason someone out of something that they were never reasoned into.

The god is dead. Long live the new god!

Totalitarianism must evolve into a religion to survive. The cultic center of the religion must be the dictator. In Lenin's Russia, the religion was communism. Lenin and the party changed it to Marxism-Leninism, but Lenin did not live long enough to become a true cultic center.

Lenin's successor, Stalin, did, with all Stalinism's attendant horrors. After Stalin died in 1953, the Party determined that no general secretary would become a cultic figure again. Instead, they substituted a theology of an Ideal Time and a reformed humanity, the goal being formally announced in 1964 by GenSec Leonid Brezhnev as the attainment of True Communism.

Marxism is an eschatological ideology (a godless religion in its own right, really). The ideal time is when "the workers control the means of production" after the capitalists have been violently overthrown. Lee Harris explained the basic tenets of Marxism, and its fundamental flaws, in his excellent essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing." Suffice it to say here that Marx considered revolution by the oppressed both essential and inevitable for true socialism to be established. This was a political version of Judgment Day, when the wicked capitalists would be judged and destroyed so that the pure in heart (the heavily romanticized working classes) could attain the Ideal Time.

This appealing but basically foolish ideology held power in the USSR for 70 years, abandoned long before its end by almost all the working classes themselves and most of the ruling class. Soviet communism became a shell game in which commissars and higher ranks lived large and the masses merely lived. Its Ideal Time, however, was hammered home by the propagandists as just around the corner. True Communism was always coming soon, a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

That year, 1964, really marked the beginning of the long decline of Soviet communism because non-cultic True Communism required an exhaustively worked and intellectually rigorous theology founded on rationalistic, not cultic, bases. That eliminated Stalinism once for all and Brezhnevism never got started. But without a cultic figure the center would not hold. Brezhnev ruled from 1964 until his death in 1982. After his death, the USSR went through general secretaries like a kid eating candy until it dissolved in 1990-1991. Brezhnev's 18-year tenure is what made the USSR last as long as it did after Stalin's death.

The Party's problem with trying to remake the empire on a non-cultic, intellectual religion was that the state had to devote great efforts and resources into reasoning and educating its people into the religion, beginning the arduous process in pre-school and never ceasing it.

Cultic tyranny's major efforts are domestic, to maintain the regime and its supporting apparatus. Foreign and military endeavors by cultic dictators tend to do poorly because the apparatchiks are selected and elevated based on their loyalty to the leader, not their basic competence in their duties. So: for Stalin, the Great Patriotic War; for Saddam Hussein the Iran War, the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War - all bungled jobs by their cultic leaders.

It was not until the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ejected cultism from its ideology that the USSR became genuinely dangerous to the West. Brezhnev was never a cult figure, instead he was the leader of a triumphant, missionary religion. True Communism brought the USSR into nuclear-military-superpower status. It was under the banner of True communism that the USSR sponsored "wars of national liberation" in Asia and Africa and sought to subvert the governments of Europe and many others. Soviet-sponsored terrorist cells flourished in western Europe, such as the Rote Armee Faction in West Germany. Blessedly for the West and the world, Brezhnev was not succeeded by young, vigorous true believers but by aged Party-climbing apparatchiks who each had not long to live, until Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary. Gorbachev, however, was no true believer and True Communism had no thrall over him. Even before the Berlin Wall was hammered down, he and almost the whole regime were mightily glad to be quit of it.

Intellectually and religiously both, True Communism simply sputtered out, having been built on foundations of sand to begin with. Having exhausted itself into reasoning the people into True Communism, the state never recognized that people who are reasoned into something can be reasoned out (or reason themselves out), and there were more than enough smart Russians to figure out the flaws and inherent, fatal contradictions of the whole, phony system. (The coerced member states of the USSR pretty much never bought into this Russian religion in the first place.)

And so the whole intellectual, rationlistic-but-fragile edifice of True Communism could be brought crashing to ruin by, for example, asking the very simple question, "Who will carry the sewage under communism?"

"Take Kiev, for instance, and see how much of its one and a half million inhabitants arranges his own sewerage system, in his free time, and cleans it and maintains it in good order.

"Who, under communism, will bury the corpses? Will it be self-service or will amateurs carry out the work in their spare time? There is plenty of dirty work in a society and not everyone is a general or a diplomat. Who will carve up the pig carcasses? And who will sweep the streets and cart off the rubbish? . . . Will there be any waiters under communism? . . .

"And finally, for someone who at present has not the slightest idea about how to set about sewage-cleaning, like Comrade Yakubovskiy himself for instance, has he any personal interest at all in the arrival of that day, when he will have to clean up his own crap all by himself? . . .

"What, exactly, does an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Secretary of the District Party Committee stand to gain from this communism? Eh? Plenty of caviar? But he’s got so much caviar already that he can even eat it through his [rear end] if he wishes. A car? But he has two personal Volga cars and a private one as well. Medical care? Food, women, a country house? But he already has all these things. So our dear Secretary of the most Godforsaken District Party Committee stands to gain bugger-all from communism!"

North Korea decades ago ceased to be communist in any sense of the word. Kim Il Sung's objective was never communism, it was dictatorship, a goal he achieved brilliantly. Since then the overriding imperative of the regime has been simply stated and easily enforced: maintain the status quo for the regime no matter the cost in lives and treasure to the rest of the country.

What will change with the apparent succession to the throne of his grandson, Kim Jong Un? Let us hope nothing will. The country is making plenty of trouble in the world now. May its cultic religion remain, for if North Korea's dictator(s) ever get converted to a theology of True Communism, there will really be trouble, indeed.

A 9/11 10th Anniversary Video Memorial

2011-09-10T15:31:00.001-05:00

Best viewed full screen.

Clairvoyant science and the Deep Blue God

2011-07-03T16:36:00.003-05:00

Can computational physics inform us of the foreknowledge of God?
An Answer I call "Deep Blue Theism."

On July 1, my wife and I drove to Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., to pick our daughter up from her completion of the Governor's School for Computational Physics. There are 12 Governor's Schools every summer in Tennessee at various state university campuses (see here). They are for "for gifted and talented high school students" who have just completed either their sophomore or junior years.

During the closing ceremony, Dr. Jaime Taylor, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics and professor of physics, explained briefly that a growing field in computational science is what he called "clairvoyant science."

"Clairvoyant science" is a term so new that Googling it in quotes yields only four results and none of them are relevant to what Dr. Taylor meant. Even so, almost certainly you are already familiar with clairvoyant science and encounter it frequently.

Dr. Taylor's example was Netflix. When he logs on to Netflix, he said, the site always recommends unviewed movies for him based on what he has already watched. This is a crude form of clairvoyant science.

My Netflix account does that, too, of course, but I would say that Amazon is much better at it because it encompasses many different products or services than Netflix and seems for me to do a better job at the clairvoyance part.

But Dr. Taylor's department carries clairvoyant science a step further. They have developed the computational skills to offer students a refined curriculum of classes based not only on what courses they have already taken, but on the grades they received. Furthermore, their educational clairvoyant science can predict, plus or minus one letter, what grade the student will earn in those courses.

Now, I would say that plus or minus a letter grade is a huge variance. I could achieve the almost the same accuracy just by predicting everyone will receive a B. But the point is that the computational methodology will only become evermore refined and accurate. One day it will be able to predict a student's grade not to within a letter, but within a point or two. And yet the computer model itself has no effect whatsoever on the determining the student's grade, of course, even though it "knows" what the grade will be.

This kind of technology helps us understand how God can know the future without predestining it. Being able coherently to invalidate the proposition that God's knowledge of the future necessarily predetermines the future is critical if we are to understand what does it mean to say, "God knows everything."

When most Christians say, "God knows everything," they are imagining "everything" too narrowly. "Everything" in fact encompasses much more than they think it does.
Now put on hold hold for a moment the predictive ability of the implications of these computational methods and let's turn our attention to the game of chess.

Supercomputing and predictive ability

In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer became the first computer ever to defeat a world chess champion by beating Garry Kasparov, who held the title at the time.

On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2 (wins count 1 point, draws count ½ point). The match concluded on February 17, 1996.

Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded (unofficially nicknamed "Deeper Blue") and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½, ending on May 11. Deep Blue won the deciding game six after Kasparov made a mistake in the opening, becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.

Whether the tournament was actually a fair one is still disputed (just as IBM's Watson computer victory in Jeopardy last February was not really fair, either). Deep Blue was designed and programmed only for chess. It's strengths were its brute computing power and programming customized for nothing but playing chess.

It was capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second, twice as fast as the 1996 version. ... The Deep Blue chess computer which defeated Kasparov in 1997 would typically search to a depth of between six and eight moves to a maximum of twenty or even more moves in some situations.

Deep Blue could not predict what move Kasparov would make next with certainty, but it could calculate the hierarchy of possible moves in likelihood order because its database included the complete move sequences of 700,000 grandmaster games. Deep Blue simply outcalculated Kasparov. The wonder, perhaps, is not that Kasparov lost but that he lost so closely.

What if clairvoyant science computational methods had been built into Deep Blue? Not only would the computer have been able to draw upon the record of 700K games to assess Kasparov's possible moves, it would have been specifically able to refine the likelihood of moves based upon Kasparov's actual play so far in that very tournament, not just the Russian's games among the database. Deep Blue would have learned as the games progressed, knowing more in, say, the third game, than its vast database initially contained before the first game. Had that been the case, surely Kasparov's defeat would have been more pronounced.

However, even a computationally clairvoyant Deep Blue could not have exercised deterministic control over Kasparov's moves, even though as the game progressed and he steadily lost, his possible moves certainly did decrease in number.

Which simply means that the flow of the game would be free, bounded only by the rules of the game, but the outcome would be certain. Deep Blue would win without question but Kasparov's moves would be his to decide. No move would be directly predetermined by Deep Blue. Even at a game's end, when Kasparov might have been down to only his king, Deep Blue could not have predetermined whether Kasparov would move his king one more time or simply tip it over and concede, though Deep Blue might have been able to offer very profitable advice to onlookers on which way to wager.

I am wondering whether a combination of clairvoyant science and Deep Blue analysis of enormous numbers of potentialities can provide new insights to understand what it means to say, "God knows everything."

My thesis is that God indeed does know everything, but that "everything" in God's knowledge is infinitely greater than theology has classically conceived and Christians have conventionally thought.

God's knowledge, human will and future events: the classical position

Classical theism is probably the dominant theology among most Western church people. In classical theism, God “is believed to have created the entire universe, to rule over it, and to intend to bring it to its fulfillment or realization, to ‘save it,’” wrote Langdon Gilkey in Christian Theology, an Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks. However, classical theism is based on Greek philosophy at least as much as Scripture and perhaps even more. Most church people do not realize that classical theism's main claims about God - God's changelessness, power, knowledge and goodness - are derived from Plato and Aristotle as much (or more) than from Genesis through Revelation. The historical reasons for this are not relevant to this post; perhaps another time.

Long before the Protestant Reformation, Catholic Scholasticism developed Aristotelian formulations of God as absolute, changeless, eternal being or actuality. Tthe dominant theology of the RCC was that of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who had taught at the University of Paris. His theology of God derived heavily from Aristotle's development of the Unmoved Mover.

The idea of God's impassive immutability remained in the Reformation, though the Reformers, especially Martin Luther, revived Plato's philosophy to buttress their arguments, mediated via the writings of St. Augustine (354-430), who had been trained extensively in the Platonic school. The Reformers emphasized God’s sovereignty as unchallenged, his power as absolute, his knowledge as unbounded and God's character as wholly righteous and gracious. (This last point was of course affirmed by all sides.) Hence, the Protestant Reformation was almost as much a continuation of the centuries-old squabble between Aristotelians and Platonists as between Christian apologists.

God, the Reformers insisted, has absolute priority and sole decisiveness in events of the created order. Always known as powerful in the Jewish and Christian traditions, God was now understood as absolutely omnipotent, able to do anything God chose. This, of course, required that God's knowledge be unlimited, for the exercise of divine power necessitates that the deity be unrestrained in knowing just what he is exercising power about.

This connection inevitably led both Martin Luther and John Calvin to reject entirely the notion of human freedom. They both insisted (independently, they were not theological collaborators) that God's power cannot be divorced from God's will and that God's will cannot be divorced from God's knowledge. Hence, God's power = God's will = God's knowledge.

According to John Calvin in his book, Institutes of the Christian Religion,

All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God [who] so overrules all things that nothing happens without his counsel. Events are so regulated by God, and all events so proceed from his determinate counsel, that nothing happens fortuitously.

In Calvin's theology, human beings are inherently unable to make free choices. The world proceeds along a path preselected by God and has no role to play except to follow a divine script that is unchangeable down to the tiniest detail. In this view, human beings are puppets on God's strings. We are "free" only to do what God has already ordained to be our nature.

Though not a systematic theologian like Calvin, Martin Luther came to the same conclusion. Luther wrote in Bondage of the Will,

God knows nothing contingently, but that he foresees, purposes, and does all things according to his immutable, eternal and infallible will. This bombshell knocks ‘free-will’ flat, and utterly shatters it.

Classical theism, then, views the past, present and future as equally concretized in God’s knowledge. Thus, God’s omniscience equals his omnipotence, since unless God determines every detail of the world, something might happen that was not immutably known to God in advance. But a God who can be surprised, classical theism insists, is no God at all.

But this is a very narrow understanding of what it means for God to know something.

A closer look at God's omniscience

When the claim is made, "God knows everything," a faithful Christian or Jew would be hard pressed to say otherwise. There are ample Scriptural references of the knowledge of God. Psalm 139 is perhaps the most complete single reference, in which the Psalmist observes with wonder,

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Yet to say, "God knows everything" begs, What is "everything?" This is the question that tripped up Luther. Having adopted the Platonic view that there is no difference between the past, present and future to God (a view that I don't think is very Scripturally supportable), which means that there is only an "eternal now" to God, Luther equated the "eternal now" with everything.

But that means necessarily that the eternal now can consist only of what is real. Consider the question, "Does God know Santa Claus?" Well, God knows our Santa Claus story and all its lies we tell our children every December. God knows the man who dresses up in a red suit and sits in the mall the day after Thanksgiving. But how can God know Santa Claus? There is no Santa Claus for God to know!

So: That which is not, is not knowable.

What then does it mean to say, "God knows everything?" It can mean nothing except that God knows everything that is knowable. This is possible only for God, of course, but the fact remains that the knowable is what is, not what is not. God knows the Santa Claus actor in the mall as a thing in itself because the actor is real in himself. God does not know Santa Claus as a thing in itself because Santa Claus is not real as a thing in itself.

Please note a distinction I am making. I might say with equal validity that God does not know my grandchildren because I do not (only yet, I hope) have any grandchildren. But my grandchildren, though they do not exist, do not exist in a critically different way than the way that Santa Claus does not exist.

I can envision a future in which I have grandchildren. I can also envision a future in which I do not. I do not know either future absolutely, but I know them both potentially (or as Luther would put it, "contingently."). And if I can know them potentially, so can God. Luther is thus so simply proved wrong: if I can know something contingently, then necessarily God does, too, else we are left with the stunning proposition that I can know something God cannot know.

Therefore: God knows contingencies (potentialities) as fully as actualities.

Though God does not know absolutely my grandchildren, because they do not exist, hence are not actualities, God does know the nearly unlimited permutations of possibilities of a future in which my grandchildren are born (or not). Since clairvoyant science helps us understand how God can foresee a future event - say, my grandson's first home run - without predetermining it, it is self evident that God can also know every possible alternative to that event, such as a groundout instead of a home run, or a walk, a ground-rule double, game called because of rain, whatever.

All of these things God knows contingently, to use Luther's word, contingently because none of them have yet occurred. Because God knows every possible alternative as the future unfolds means that it is not necessary for us to postulate that whatever God knows must come to pass as the Reformers thought. Their concept of God's knowledge was far too narrow. God knows in advance not only the potentialities that will become actualities, God knows every possible alternative to each actuality. God conceives of what might not happen as fully as he conceives of what does happen.

God therefore cannot be "taken by surprise." No matter what happens, God has already fully foreseen it and is just as prepared for it as if he had directly caused it.
Back to Santa Claus. My grandchildren are potentially real as things in themselves while Santa Claus is not. Thus, my grandchildren are potentialities that may become actualities, while Santa Claus is not. God can envision and prepare for a future in which I have grandchildren. But this cannot be said of Santa Claus.

The Reality of Time

"Time flies like an arrow," goes an old joke, "while fruit flies like a banana." Because classical theism holds that God lives in an eternal now while human beings and indeed the entire created order exist within the arrow's flight of time, in which there is a definite past, present and future, then some thoughts about time are in order.

Both modern science and the Bible agree that the universe had a definite beginning in time. The universe is expanding. The predominant view among scientists is that the universe will continue to expand without ever stopping and then falling back together. That is, we have had the Big Bang but the universe won't have a "Big Crunch." Time is unidirectional, it has no "reverse." Time moves only forward.

It is within that structure of time that human being live, move and have our being. Classical theism holds that God is outside time. Yet if God is to interact with his creation then God must be able to operate within time's arrow; God must be able to enter into time's arrow as well as be apart from it.

That God interacts with humanity within time's arrow is well attested by the Scriptures. The movements of God within human history in the books of the Jewish Scriptures attest to it. Peter's sermon in Acts on the day of Pentecost also makes no sense unless God is accomplishing his will within human frameworks of time and understanding.

There are ample biblical passages that can reasonably be read to indicate that God either admits or implies that he does not know something because the arrow of time has not reached that point yet. That is, of all the potentialities God is preparing for, none have actualized as concrete events, hence are not knowable absolutely, only potentially. Here are examples, all using the NIV:

Gen. 2.19

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.

The implication is that God did not know what names Adam would give the creatures.

Gen. 6:5-6

The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.

Other translations say that the Lord "repented" that he had created human beings. The implication is that God did not know in advance how rotten people turned out to be, else why would he regret or repent of creating us? Why would he be troubled if classical theism is right - that everything always turns out exactly as God plans it?

There are many other places in the Bible where God repents of what he has done, for example, 1 Samuel 15, where the Lord repents that he had made Saul king of Israel. Again, if God exercises the meticulous control over creation that classical theism insists he does, then God must be repenting over things that he knew in advance would happen.

Deut. 8:2

Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.

This verse says that God sent the children of Israel into the wilderness to discover whether they would be capable of being God's people. Of course, the 40 years in the wilderness had another purpose, to teach the people humility before God. But is there not clearly the implication that at the end of the 40 years God would know something he did not know at their beginning? If the verse does not mean that, what does it mean?

Isaiah 5:2-4, in which Israel and Judah are the vineyard of the Lord (see v. 7)

He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. ... Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit. 3 “Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. 4 What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad?

Clearly, God expected his chosen people to produce good fruit, but they did not. In this passage, God wonders what else he could have done for them and expresses puzzlement at why they turned out bad.

Can we take these and the many other passages like them into account and still maintain that God is in control of human and cosmic destiny?

Can we postulate that God does not know everything, past-present-future, absolutely and yet is still absolutely going to accomplish his cosmic purposes?
I think we can, and I think we can in a way that honors both the Scriptural teaching of human free will and still affirms that "God's power = God's will = God's knowledge."

The Clairvoyant, Deep Blue God

Having asked earlier how much more lopsided Kasparov's match would have been with Deep Blue had Deep Blue's programming included computational clairvoyance as well as database analysis, I am prepared to try to answer how we can affirm the (at least apparent) biblical teaching that God does not absolutely know absolutely everything in advance. So permit me to explain my premises.

Premise 1
"But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (2 Peter 3.8).

However within time's arrow God operates when dealing with his creation, God's understanding of time is nonetheless radically different from ours. God's "now" cannot compare to what now means to us mortals. As the Psalmist wrote, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain."

So we must be mindful of the fact that our own knowledge will always be woefully incomplete and our language inadequate to the task. But we must do the best we can, always in humility.

Premise 2
God knows everything that can be known and knows it absolutely. Everything that can be known includes all actualities and all potentialities. God's knowledge of what happened during the Exodus is just as certain as what happened on your last birthday. And God's knowledge of what is happening with the remotest hydrogen atom in the most distant galaxy is just as complete as what is happening in your mind while you read these words. But God does not know Santa Claus because Santa Claus is neither actual nor potential.

Premise 3
Because God's knowledge of the future includes all its potentialities, human beings really do have freedom to choose among multiple potential courses. The possible choices are neither unlimited nor unbounded. That is, our freedom is finite in potential and limited in actuality. Kasparov did have freedom to choose how to move his pieces, but only within the rules of the game.

"Choose this day whom you will serve," Joshua admonished the people before they crossed into the Promised Land. The choice is real, and so is the choosing.

Premise 4
Every event, no matter how minute, is influenced in passing from "potential" to "real" by three things:

A. Its antecedents in time, the past events that created the finity of possibilities. But the past cannot be the only influence because then there would be no novelty in the world.

B. The nature of the thing in question. This nature both opens and closes potentialities: things must be and become what they are but cannot be or become what they are not. There is freedom in the becoming, though. "Birds gotta sing and fish gotta swim," but they do not all sing or swim the same, even within the same species.

C. The will of God for each potentiality. In every event, no matter how minute, God is willing the event to its finest possible fulfillment. As the Isaiah passage above indicates, God's will does not always come to pass, at least not wholly or perhaps not yet.

Because God foresees every possibility, God's will is always active and always present. Not everything that happens is God's will, but God's will is present (hence, can be sought) no matter what happens.

This is a key point: Just as the more stuff you buy from Amazon, the more accurate Amazon predicts your next purchases, God learns as time passes, as the verses cited above indicate (and there are others). That is, God's "certainty" range of knowledge of future events is increasing while the "potential" range of his knowledge of future events is decreasing, enabling God to be more effective in shaping events as they transition from potential to actual.

Premise 5
God adjusts to circumstances as they become, which are not always as he intended. Example, Matthew 19, in which Jesus says to some men who had questioned him about divorce, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning."

The Law of Moses was a gift of God and explained God's will. Here Jesus says that God did not intend "in the beginning" that husbands and wives should divorce but permits it because of the intractability of human sinfulness.

God makes temporal adjustments to his will to account for the facts of creation. God's ends do not change, but his means for accomplishing them do, based on how creation's freedom plays out within the parameters God has set for it.

Shakespeare must have figured this out: "There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will—" (Hamlet, Act 5).

Premise 6
If there is anything that God does not know absolutely, as the Scriptures seem to indicate, God's knowledge of the future is infinitely greater than human knowledge of the present. Which is to say that even God's uncertainty of future events is indescribably superior to our certainty of past or present. Paul would seem to affirm this in 1 Cor. 1.25: "For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength."

No matter which possibilities of billions or more turn out to become reality, the "clairvoyant science, Deep Blue" God has already entirely foreseen them in all their permutations. Gregory Boyd put it this way in Satan and the Problem of Evil:

God perfectly knows from all time what will be, what would be, and what may be. And he sovereignly sets the parameters for all three categories. Moreover, because God possesses infinite intelligence, his knowledge of what might be leaves him no less prepared for the future than his knowledge of determinate aspects of creation. ...

Because he is infinitely intelligent, he does not need to “thin out” his attention over numerous possibilities as we do. He is able to attend to each one of a trillion billion possibilities, whether they be logical possibilities, what would be, or what might be, as though it was the only possibility he had to consider. He is infinitely attentive to each and every one. Hence, whatever possibility ends up coming to pass, we may say that from all eternity God was preparing for just this possibility, as though it were the only possibility that could ever possibly occur. Even when possibilities occur that are objectively improbable – and to this extent surprise or disappoint God – it is not at all the case that he is caught off guard. He is as perfectly prepared for the improbable as he is for the probable. [Italics added]

God has a will for the universe and everything within it. Yet everything within creation has a will, too, even if only a mechanistic one. Freedom is real but always exists and is exercised within the boundaries inherent in the created order. God, having created this order to begin with, is greater than it is. Nothing can happen in the universe that God cannot foresee, but to foresee is not to know absolutely in the sense that classical theism conceives of it.

Even so, from our human perspective perhaps it is a distinction without a difference except for a very critical one: we are not predestined at birth either to heaven or hell as the Reformers believed. Of all the freedoms we have to choose or not, there is only one that matters eternally. It is simply whether we will say yes to God. It is God's will that no one should perish (2 Peter 3:9) but we do have the ability to reject God's grace.

Just as Kasparov's choices of potential moves was diminished by the loss of every piece, eventually the universe's potentialities are narrowed until the only possibility that is left is the final fulfillment of God's will. Then it truly will be that "the old order of things has passed away" (Rev. 21).

The problems

Classical theism protects the unbridled sovereignty of God at the expense of human freedom and morality. While one might like to assert, "God is in his heavens and all is well in the world," the world is manifestly not well. The book of Job strikes directly to heart of the problem: if God is as classical theism describes him, why do the innocent suffer? Whence come war, disease, massively-destructive natural disasters and all the other evils of life?

In God at War, Gregory Boyd posits,

Assuming (rightly) that God is perfectly loving and good, and assuming (wrongly, I hold) that divine omnipotence entails meticulous control, the problem of evil ... becomes simply unsolvable.

Resolving the problem of evil is far beyond the scope of this post, but classical theism is unable to answer its basic conundrum: if God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, then Job is right - God has some 'splaining to do. The usual approach, as Rabbi Kushner explained in his bestselling Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People, is to adjust one's concept either of God's power or knowledge in order to protect at all costs God's goodness. For if God is not purely and absolutely good, then we are lost. We would have no basis to trust God and while we should fear him there would be no reason to worship or love him.

My concept, rough as it is, of "Deep Blue Theism" avoids this conundrum, though certainly difficult questions remain. Chief among them is that Deep Blue theology must allow for God's direct intervention in human affairs and into individual human actions, of which there are many examples in Scripture (notably, for example, God's convincing Joseph not to send Mary away but to take her as his wife). If I allow for these and other Scriptural examples, why not allow for it all around?

Another problem: I have expressed that there are natural constraints on human freedom built into how we are created. In what sense, then, are we meaningfully free before God since God has already limited our freedom by the way he created us?

Finally, I wrote that "God's 'certainty' range of knowledge of future events is increasing while the 'potential' range of his knowledge of future events is decreasing, enabling God's will to be more effective in shaping events." If that is so, then we would expect the world to be conforming evermore to godliness. But that seems be a hard claim to support empirically.

All this is to say, however, that human freedom in relation to God is difficult to understand. Classical theism does not even try and this is, I think, its fatal failing. Classical theism is all about God and not much about God's creation. But self-evidently, God is not about himself but about his creation - in the giving of the covenant at Sinai, for example, in John 3:16 and in Matthew 20.28, "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." God is deeply and personally involved in the world in the most intimate ways possible to the extent that he is willing to accept that his will can be thwarted in order to preserve our ability to love him back (understanding that God's will can only be thwarted temporarily).

But a question lingers: Could God choose to exercise the meticulous, micromanaging control over every instant that classical theism says he does but that Deep Blue Theism says he does not? The obvious answer is yes, God could do that if God wanted, but an even deeper question is thereby provoked: would it be loving of God to do so? "Yes" is far from an obvious answer to that. Love is inherently relational. A puppeteer may love his puppets but most assuredly they do not love him back. Love desires willing responses, not robotic role playing. So no wonder that God advised his people, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart" (Jer. 29.13).

1 John 4.8 says, "God is love." 2 Timothy 2.13 says that even if we are unfaithful to God (hence unloving), God remains faithful (hence loving) to us "for he cannot deny himself."

God is love. God cannot be not-God. Hence God cannot be unloving of his creation. And so, wanting each of us to seek him all our hearts, God does not close the future, but opens it to permit us to shape it along with him and all the attendant uncertainties that go along with that - and he cannot be or do otherwise, "for he cannot deny himself.

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Directions for Theresa and Sam

2011-06-20T14:09:00.000-05:00

Here are a few photos and a video for you.

This is the ramp right from Hiway 96 onto Fairview Blvd/Hiway 100 South. It is not well marked. But if you go under the bridge straight ahead it will merge with 100 North, so don't go under a bridge!

This is the top of the ramp merging onto Hiway 100 S. As I mentioned earlier, there is no merge lane at all. Be careful for traffic coming from the rear.

Stay on Hwy 100S for 3.2 miles or so after merging. They are tearing up a stretch of the road thru "downtown" Fairview:

Just keep on trucking!

A little movie action for you, showing where to turn.

What's the most epic photo ever taken? - Quora

2011-05-28T17:38:00.003-05:00

What's the most epic photo ever taken? - Quora

The answer is a photo of Earth taken from the edge of the solar system.

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken from a record distance of 3.7 billion miles, at the edge of our solar system. It was shot and transmitted by the Voyager 1 spacecraft almost 13 years after its launch.

See also my Google Docs presentation on Genesis and the Origin of Life.

Jesus's parting gift

2011-05-23T11:10:00.002-05:00

Jeopardy's Watson computer: Just a high-speed moron

2011-02-16T16:35:00.000-06:00

Here is the Youtube of IBM's computer, Watson, beating its human challengers like a mongrel dog on Jeopardy last night. Look carefully at the clues? Notice anything?

Almost none of the answers on the game board required any kind of abstract reasoning to answer. In fact, you could put a human with practically no knowledge of the subjects on the board in front of a computer connected to Google and that person could simply type in the nouns of the clues and get the same answers.

Example - the first question of the game:

And the Google:

Strip out Watson's blinding speed, and it is no smarter than human beings at all. Watson, for all its engineering impressiveness, simply did only what computers have always done: collate at blinding speed (and compute mathematical probabilities to choose an answer). It does not matter that Watson was not connected to the Internet since its mass-memory unit holds 16 Terabytes of data, processed by a 2,880 processor core. As my own computer professor said (many years ago!), "A computer is just a high-speed moron." There is nothing about Watson that I have read so far that obviates that observation.

I think its programmers must have realized this since they artificially crippled Watson by design. Note that Watson was programmed not to buzz in unless it computed an answer of at least 50 percent "confidence" of being right. This was an entirely artificial barrier. Why not 75 percent? Or 25 percent? Or any level at all? Watson is so blindingly fast that it could have buzzed in for every question before either champion (making their presence merely ceremonial, which it almost was anyway). Then Watson simply could have given its top answer, regardless of confidence level, and the computer still would have got 90% of the questions right.

In other words, if the game had allowed Watson to give uncrippled answers, it would have always answered first and would have won even more decisively. But then, with access to the same amounts of data resources through Google, I could beat the two champions if the game always allowed me to answer first. In fact, I'd win under the same confidence crippling as long as I could answer first - because clearly Watson will always be able to buzz in faster than a person.

So what does Watson really prove? From a technical, engineering and programming perspective, it's an amazing achievement with enormous potential for a wide range of applications ranging across broad multi-disciplinary subjects and problems. As for the Jeopardy game, there's less than meets the eye. Count it as a proof-of-concept exercise. What it did not do was reason abstractly. It just collated amazing amounts of information very rapidly. But we already knew that computers are faster than we are for specified tasks. That's why we build them to begin with.

Sorry, Prof. Reynolds, the Singularity has not arrived.

Update: Good discussion on this at The Speculist, including this nugget:

@stephentgo: Repercussions of IBM's Watson unknown, but any job that involves answering questions by phone will soon be at risk. http://bit.ly/hp91hW

"He has a demon, and is mad"

2011-01-12T06:34:00.011-06:00

Nine years and a few months ago someone asked me whether I was surprised that 19 Islamists had hijacked four airliners and killed almost 3,000 people. The question struck me as odd. Why is anyone ever surprised of the evil men do? "There is no one who does good, not even one," said the Psalmist, and so why should we be surprised that some commit actual evil?

We have learned again, from Tucson, that we civilized people cannot constrain the devil that stalks the human soul. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" asked the Shadow, so far be it from me to psychoanalyze Jared Loughner. Best leave that to Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, whose flashing-quick diagnosis of Rightwing Derangement Syndrome for Loughner surely was the fastest-ever solving of the "motive" side of the means and opportunity triangle. What the psychs will discover about Loughner I leave to them.

"He has a demon, and is mad."

Yet how odd that in our postmodern conviction and scientific certainty that we can easily find the answer, we gloss right over one that no one seems willing to utter, mayhaps 'cept I: "He has a demon, and is mad." Of course, that was an accusation made against Jesus, and is today an excellent summary of the mainstream-media commentary (such as the NYT's Paul Krugman's) on the Jedi mind-control that they claim the Right's "climate of hate" exercised over the hapless Jared Loughner. So we mustn't take it too far.

I retreat from such rhetorical arguments. In arguing that, "He has a demon, and is mad," I am not trying to argue the literal existence of demonic beings who actually enter the bodies and spirits of human beings, taking "possession" of them and controlling their actions. The modern mind has no room for that. I refer instead to sickness of the mind and of the soul, a spiritual sickness that aligned itself with the evil that is out there.

Evil is within us, but not only within us

French philosopher Paul Ricouer argued in his book, The Symbolism of Evil, that one of the things taught by the temptation stories of the Bible is that evil resides within the human breast but not only there. There is an "externality of evil," as he put it, symbolized in Genesis by the serpent. Within these texts is a strong subtext, not only in the Bible but in cultural myths around the world that there is a seduction of the human mind and the human body by the "tragic" of creation into which we are born, "which is already there and already evil" (his emphasis). There is, he says,

... a mystery of iniquity which is not reducible to the clear consciousness of actual evil, of the evil beginning in an instant; it points toward an underlying peccability which, as Kierkegaard says in The Concept of Dread, endures and increases quantitatively. That underlying peccability is like the horizon of actual evil... .

"Peccability" means that we mortals are temptable. Because of this fundamental fact we will be tempted by an externality much and yield to it often - usually, happily, on harmless things like another piece of chocolate but not infrequently to evil itself. When we yield to the harmful rather than the merely frivolous it is sin, indeed, too often mortal sin which, as we saw in Tucson, can be lethal as well.

This is not a modern world view. We have exorcised sin conceptually from our vocabulary, our discourse and hence, our understanding of the human condition. "He has a demon, and is mad" is eye-rolled for the former part and medicated for the latter - psychiatry today exorcises pharmaceutically, not ritually. And yet for all its chemically-reliant wonder, no mental-health professional will ever be able to explain away that the human being is predisposed to cooperate with the iniquitous, a cooperation that not merely endures but increases until it forms the horizon of actual evil, evil that erupts so tragically.

The human condition is tragic

"Tragically" is a key word, for the ancients did not use it as we do, simply to mean "sadly." The Greek playwrights knew tragedy as the unfolding of human character, hence human events, not as they are predestined but as they are predisposed. Tragedy is not random or accidental. It is the result of human striving, whether for good or ill, not exactly inevitable but not altogether avoidable. Even the heroic can be tragic.

Always, the ancients knew that the tragic is woven inherently in the human condition because they understood what we have progressively dismissed: that "there is no one who does good, no not one," except now and then, here and again, but almost never as a habit. Virtue, said Aristotle, is excellence made habitual, which is exactly why virtue is so rare: the habits of man are rarely excellent and left to themselves, without rigorous moral training or an externality of constraint to the good, will always become corrupted.

What makes the human condition tragic in this sense is that evil is never temporary and triumphs are never permanent. Salve of compassion, care and grieving is being applied to Tucson, but some must be saved for the next venue. For certainly another there will be.

Update,Jan. 13: This is very similar to what President Obama said in his speech the evening of Jan. 12:

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind.

That is very close to what it means to say, "He has a demon, and is mad." Bad things happen for which facile, "just so" stories offer no insight or understanding, especially if we agree with progressivism's mantra that, "people are basically good." This is a very modern world view, dating only about 130 years back. But it is empirically, provably false considering only the history of humanity of the last 100 years.

The president's quote from Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness," is actually quite appropriate because the light of human reason and ability is simply too weak to overwhelm the darkness of the tragic of creation and the human condition. That is the primary, bitter lesson that Job must learn by the end of the book, as well as that human understanding is exceedingly partial, fragmentary, incomplete and usually misguided.

So how can the darkness be overcome? Again, Scripture gives us the answer: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

Is Jesus just a fictional character?

2010-12-27T17:42:00.000-06:00

James Hannam:

The thesis that Jesus never existed has hovered around the fringes of research into the New Testament for at least a century but it has never been accepted as a mainstream theory. This is for good reason. It is simply a bad hypothesis based on arguments from silence, special pleading, and an awful lot of wishful thinking. It is ironic that certain atheists will buy into this idea and leave all their pretensions of critical thinking behind.

A huge amount has been written on the internet and elsewhere about the "Christ Myth." The only in-depth refutation in print is Shattering the Christ Myth (2008), which goes into great detail. However, some academic historians have taken the time to rubbish the idea that Jesus never existed and a few other books on the subject have appeared over the years.

In this four-part series, it is not my intention to study the minutiae of the various arguments. Instead, I will focus on three central contentions often advanced in discussions about Jesus. These are 1) the lack of secular references, which I cover in this installment; 2) the alleged similarities to paganism, which I deal with next; and 3) the silence of St. Paul. Finally, in the fourth part, I will bring all these arguments together to show how ideas similar to those that deny Jesus' existence can be used on practically any ancient historical figure. With this in mind I set out to "prove" that Hannibal never existed.

Part one is here, part two is here.

What sort of star did the wise men follow?

2010-12-26T17:56:00.003-06:00

A fascinating analysis of just what was the star that led the wise men to Bethlehem is given at Bethlehemstar.net. I talked about this in the service this morning. I urge you to read the whole thing at the site, but here is my summary.

After Jesus was born, wise men, or Magi, from the east made their way to Judea. Being astronomers, they had read the stars and concluded that a new king had been born to the Jews. This is related in Matthew chapter 2.

No historian today claims that there nothing happened in the sky that corresponds to what the wise men saw. Just what it was has been a scientific quest for about 400 years, since Johannes Kepler developed the first mathematical description of how the heavens worked. Kepler, whose equations are still used by NASA and astronomers around the world, himself spent may laborious hours trying to calculate the position of the planets and stars above the ancient Near East in the year of Jesus’ presumed birth, 6 BC. But he found nothing.

Since Kepler, many others have suggested that the star Matthew describes might have been a comet or a supernova, but there are no records of such events at this time anywhere in the ancient world, especially in China, whose astronomers were detailed and meticulous record keepers.

Jesus was presumed to have been born in 6 BC based on a book by the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, whose book, Antiquities, says that Herod died in 4 BC. Since clearly Jesus was born in the time of Herod, Jesus had to have been born before 4 BC, a year or two before.

But in fact, Herod did not die until 1 BC. This date is in fact what Josephus wrote, and is stated in manuscripts of his book relate dated earlier than 1544. It was in 1544 that Antiquities was first set to the printing press. In that first edition, the typesetter erroneously set the wrong year of Herod’s birth, and this edition became the standard from which all subsequent editions were made, including the one Kepler used.

Computers today solve Kepler’s equations in a snap. And what astronomers now know is that in September, 3 BC, the planet Jupiter came into conjunction with the star Regulus. That is, when viewed from the earth, Jupiter and Regulus appeared to touch or come very close together.

Jupiter is the largest planet. The ancients called it the king of planets. Regulus was called by the Romans, Rex, Latin for king. In Persian its name was Sharu, which also meant king. To an ancient astronomer, for the king of planets and the king of stars to come together would have been weighted with portents. But Jupiter and Regulus did this not merely once, but three times over the course of the next year.

After appearing to touch Regulus, Jupiter’s path moved beyond. But after a few months, earth caught up with and passed Jupiter in its orbit. Jupiter then appeared to move backwards in the sky. This movement is called retrograde. All planets’ paths retrograde when seen from earth, that’s why they are called planets, which is Greek for “wanderer.” So Jupiter went back and touched Regulus again. Then the earth moved on and by September of 2 BC, Jupiter had retrograded once more and had touched Regulus a third time.

To astronomers as skilled as those of Babylonia heritage and learning, which the wise men almost certainly were, this three-time conjunction of the king of planets with the king of stars would have started them packing. But why did they decide that the Jews had anything to do with it?

All three conjunctions took place within the backdrop of the constellation Leo, the lion. The lion is the symbol of the Jewish tribe of Judah, which takes it name from a son of Jacob named Judah. In Genesis chapter 49, Jacob gives his son, Judah, the lion as his symbol and then dictates that only Judah’s descendants shall provide the rulers for subsequent generations. King David was a member of the tribe of Judah and so was Jesus’ father, Joseph, according to Matthew chapter one.

The wise men were obviously conversant with the relationship of lions with the tribe of Judah and Judah’s parentage of all the kings of Israel. The wise men may well have been (though probably weren't) Jews themselves, since a thriving Jewish colony remained in Iraq until a generation ago even though the Jews’ captivity in Babylon was ended in 538 BC. The kingly conjunctions of Jupiter and Regulus within the constellation of the lion were all the wise men needed to start heading toward the Roman province of Judea, which we know as Israel.

But what they did not know was just where the new king was to be born. So they stopped at the palace of the Roman vassal, King Herod, to inquire. Herod’s counselors quoted a prophecy from Micah that said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.

At Herod’s deceitful urging, the wise men went to Bethlehem, only five miles from Jerusalem. In the sky, Jupiter had just begun a third retrograde, this one, however, not to be followed by a conjunction. The thing about planetary retrogrades is this: just as a planet appears to reverse direction, it seems to stand still in the sky.

Here is what computers using Kepler’s equations show. Jupiter’s full stop for this retrograde took place on December 25, 2 BC. If you had been in Jerusalem on that evening, you would have seen the kingly planet Jupiter motionless in the sky almost due south, directly above Bethlehem.

Why is Christmas on Dec. 25?

2010-12-26T17:25:00.002-06:00

The urban legend that many Christians think is true is that early Christians appropriated the pagan, Roman Feast Of Saturnalia of Dec. 25 and converted it into the Christian holy day.

Nope. Saturnalia was not established by the Roman emperor until AD 274, when the date of Jesus' birth had already been set (though not widely celebrated) for three-quarter century.

It is the Western church that celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25. The Eastern church does so on Jan. 6, the date of Epiphany in the West. But curiously, the reason the West celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25 is the same reason the East does so on Jan. 6.

And that reason is (most likely) actually the dating of Easter, not Saturnalia.

Read it all here: "How December 25 Became Christmas," by Andrew McGowan.

Jesus' other father

2010-12-23T09:23:00.002-06:00

He was faced with a detestable duty. He was a man of compassion, even of tenderness. But he was also a man honor, of a stern code. His obedience to the Law was unwavering. The moment he learned that his fiancé was pregnant he knew that it was the end. The end, certainly, of their engagement, and perhaps even the end of her life.

It was two millennia ago in the Roman-occupied land of Judea. The man was named Joseph. His fiancé was Mary. She was going to have a baby and it sure wasn't his. Compassion, honor and duty dueled within Joseph.

He could not pretend there was no problem. She had obviously betrayed him. The whole town of Nazareth was watching.

Finally, Joseph decided Mary would have to pay the price for infidelity as his honor and the Law required, but on terms formed by Joseph's compassion. He would break his engagement to her and send her away without fanfare, leaving her to fend for herself. It would clear the slate, restore his honor and was least hurtful to the young woman.

What the outcome would have been by Joseph’s plan we don’t know, because God revealed to him what was really going on, and Joseph changed his mind.

Joseph dreamed of an angel, who informed Joseph that Mary’s unborn child was of the Holy Spirit. The angel gave Joseph instructions: take Mary home as his wife and adopt Mary’s child as his own, giving him the name Jesus, a common and undistinguished name then, meaning,“God helps.”

These things came to pass. In Joseph’s day, when a Jewish man gave a name to the child born to his wife, it confirmed the child as his own. Maybe others knew that Joseph was not the baby’s natural father, maybe they didn’t. It didn’t matter. When Joseph named the baby Jesus, he was also giving to Jesus his own identity, his own lineage. That is why Jesus could truly be said to be of the line of David, because Joseph was of David’s line and Joseph adopted Jesus as his own son. “This child belongs to me, this child is my child, ” is what Joseph proclaimed when he named the child Jesus.

In the Gospels, Joseph is treated somewhat cursorily. Mary gets a lot more play. Joseph never speaks. Joseph hears, Joseph dreams, Joseph acts and Joseph obeys, but not even one syllable he ever uttered is related. Mary is the one with the speaking part. Her role is the most sought after in Christmas pageants.

Another pastor told me of one afternoon before the annual Christmas program, when a mother phoned the church office to say that her son, who was to play Joseph in the children's play, was sick and wouldn't be able to be there. “It's too late now to get another Joseph,” the director of the play said. “We'll just have to write him out of the script.” And they did. Joseph is easy to overlook and leave out.

In 1993, my wife played Mary in the Christmas pageant at our church. She got the part really because they needed our newborn daughter play the baby Jesus, there being no other small infant in the congregation. Mom and baby, Mary and Jesus, were a package deal, couldn’t get one without the other. But any guy off the street could have played Joseph. In fact, the pastor asked me, “Don, did you want to play Joseph or should we get a man from the choir to play him?” I said I would, but talk about feeling like a fifth wheel ... .

But more is going on with Joseph than is first apparent. A recurring theme of St. Paul is that Jesus' followers are adopted by God and made children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ. This should make us reconsider the significance of where Joseph fits in with God’s work. Joseph’s adoption of Jesus is highly significant.

What if Joseph had said no to the angel and had sent Mary away anyway. Can we imagine Jesus growing up in the home of an unwed, single mother, both Mary and Jesus outcast from society? How would Jesus have conceived of God as his heavenly Father if Joseph had never taken on the role of Jesus’ earthly father? It took courage for Joseph to claim Jesus as his own.

Before God adopts us into the family of Christ, God sent his son to be adopted by Joseph into the family of humankind. Joseph affirmed on behalf of all humanity that God belongs with us, "God with us."

Joseph adopted the Son of God as the child of humankind, and through Christ God adopts human beings as children of God. There seems to be a symmetry of salvation and relationship at work. We see in Joseph’s story that we and God belong to each other in the one whom Joseph named Jesus, “God helps.”

Bethlehem Today: Hamas Central

2010-12-22T16:31:00.002-06:00

I am 55 years old. When I was born, Christians in Bethlehem numbered almost 90 percent of the people living there. Now it is less than 10 percent and falling. Christians in Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank are ruthlessly oppressed by Islamists. Most Westerners are unaware that Hamas controls the town, with the Palestinian Authority of little influence. During the week I traveled there in autumn of 2007, 100 Christian families were physically kicked out of their houses by Muslim Palestinians while the PA police literally stood by and watched. I did not see it. I learned it from non-Israeli Westerners living in Jerusalem, one of whom I spoke with having personally assisted some of the families in their new refugee status.

Hamas might (or might not) intend to leave just enough Christians in Bethlehem to make sure the thriving tourism business of Western Christians stays profitable. By New Year's, almost 1.5 million tourists will have visited Bethlehem this year, a record. They bring an enormous monetary inflow into the West Bank. More Eastern European and Near East Christian pilgrims visit than Americans, but Americans are very numerous and tend to spend more money each. The gift shops are clean and well stocked (I bought my home's Nativity set in one) and are operated by Christian Palestinians, but they own the businesses in name only. They stay in business only by the forbearance of the PA, who taxes them heavily. Any Christian business operator and all Christian tour guides must be politically vetted by Hamas PA in order to operate. These Christians will unfailingly assure you that relationships among Christians and Muslims in the West Bank are simply superb. And then they will quickly move on to another topic.

The Israeli security fence, erected because of the Second Intifada's bombing campaign against Israel, separates Bethlehem from Jerusalem. Traversing means passing through a military-grade checkpoint. Driving from Israeli-controlled Jerusalem into Hamas-controlled Bethlehem was unencumbered. Vehicles pretty much breezed right through. The Palestinians have no fear of Israeli suicide bombers coming to devastate their buses or restaurants. After all, there are no Israeli suicide bombers.

I took the photo above from the Palestinian side of the checkpoint. As the backed-up traffic shows, there is no breezing through from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. Vehicles and pedestrians are inspected. Tour buses generally get through pretty quickly since not even Hamas is dumb enough (well, yet) to try to plant a bomb or terrorist aboard one, which would end tourists and pilgrim coming to the West Bank, a far too expensive outcome for them to accept.

Near the checkpoint proper there are instructions in Hebrew, Arabic and English. All street sings in Israel are in those three languages.

The Palestinians put up propaganda on their side of the security fence.

Another example:

The Israelis put up propaganda on their side, too, but of a definitely peaceful sort:

I found the mural ironic, since whatever they Israelis and Palestinians have, "love and peace" ain't it, on either side.

Most of the entire West Bank is enclosed by a security fence, about 700 kilometers. About six percent of the distance is a wall rather than a fence because of the density of the buildings present. The fence generally follows the "Green Line," but the Green Line is ill defined in some places. The Green Line, btw, is the ceasefire line agreed to in 1949, at the close of Irael's war for independence. It is not actually a border of any kind. It is called the Green Line because it was drawn on the negotiators' map with a green pencil. Really.

This shot of the security wall was taken near the unused Jerusalem airport. Rock throwers shut the airport down some years ago. They threw rocks over the wall above at airliners landing or just onto the runway, the horizontal, flat gray feature just below the wall. Any pilot who may be reading can imagine how eager airline pilots were to land on runways covered in rocks.

Despite the international controversy about the fence/wall, it would be very hard to find an Israeli of any political stripe who would call for its removal. The fence was erected by a government very reluctant to do so, and was opposed by both Labor and Likud. But the bombings of the Second Intifada, begun in 2000, became so severe that the people demanded the barrier go up. Since it went up, terrorist violence inside Israel has fallen by 80-95 percent, depending the on the region of the country.

The barrier has made life harder for the Palestinians, who complain that it has degraded their quality of life. The typical Israeli responds, "Our lives come before your quality of life." Hard to argue with that.

Yossi Klein Halevi, a prominent Israeli journalist, said the barrier should be named the "Yasser Arafat Memorial Wall."

But back to Bethlehem. During the 4th century Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. His mother, Queen Helena, traveled across the Holy Land and managed to identify many of the precise locations of significance in Jesus' life. ("Why yes, your Highness, you're right: this is the place where Jesus fed the multitude!") One of those places was the birthplace of Jesus. Since that day, Christian shrines have been been successively erected atop it and other identified sites. Most of the present Church of the Nativity dates from the Crusades. This is the interior of the Crusader section.

The traditional birth site of Jesus is well below this level, the site of a (presumed) small cave in the rocky hillside.

During my time here, a large group of Eastern-church pilgrims came through. They were clearly overwhelmed with emotion. Most of them knelt on both knees and kissed the star embedded in the floor and left to the left, crying. I confess to have been stricken emotionally at two sites I visited, but this was not one of them (neither was the Church of the Resurrection).

Bethlehem is in economic boom times now, but Islam is overwhelmingly powerful there, with Hamas' brand on the rise. Hamas' candidates in fact won a majority of municipal elections in Bethlehem. Since 1995, only Christians are permitted to be the town's mayor, but present Mayor Victor Batarseh was hand-picked for the office by Hamas. Batarseh previously was known for his atheism, militant Marxism and very active membership in the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP assassinated Israeli Cabinet Minister Rehavam Ze’evi in Jerusalem in 2002. Bartarseh has since held that the assassination “was legitimate retaliation for Israeli state terror.”

Occupying the majority of city council seats and with Batarseh as mayor, Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, is in iron control of the birthplace of the Prince of Peace. His followers there subsist at leave of the Islamists or, if they are able or compelled, move out of the West Bank. It is too dangerous to remain, just as it was for Jesus 2,000 years ago.

Related: "Bethlehem belongs to Hamas," in Israel Today.

If the Nativity happened today

2010-12-19T08:00:00.002-06:00

Belief in nothing, or no thing?

2010-12-15T14:56:00.003-06:00

Paul Wallace at Religion Dispatches uncovers the fundamentalism of New Atheism, personified by the truly elementary atheism of Richard Dawkins, who for some reason is taken seriously by pop culture as a serious thinker.

Wallace cites Denys Turner, a professor of theology at Yale:

“Atheists reject too little,” Turner writes, “This is why their atheisms lack theological interest. The routine principled atheist has but tinkered with religion.” This statement, with which I agree, will be unpacked in the remainder of this essay. In order to speak more specifically about this, I decided to investigate a single atheist’s stated beliefs. Since I have a few Richard Dawkins books on my living room shelf, and because his point of view is known to many, I decided on him....

In The God Delusion, Dawkins presents his central argument against the existence of God in the fourth chapter. His thinking goes something like this: The universe is a complex thing. Therefore the God of the Christians, who, Christians say, made the universe, must be at least as complex as the universe God made. Therefore we are left with an even bigger problem than before: Who made this ultra-complex God? A hyper-complex megaGod? It makes plain sense, according to Occam’s razor, to stop before we get to the first God. The complex universe is enough. Ergo, in all likelihood, God does not exist.

This argument, which boils down to Well, who made God, then?, assumes that God is a thing like any other thing. It assumes that God must exist in the same way the moon exists, in the same way Dawkins himself exists. As Terry Eagleton wrote in his now-infamous review of The God Delusion, Dawkins seems to think that God is “a celestial super-object or divine UFO,” a creature like other creatures, only bigger and smarter: a kind of uberthing, but a thing nonetheless.

If God is a thing like any other thing, then his argument is really good: Any thing-making machine, which is itself a thing like any other thing, must be at least as complex as the thing it makes. In the case of God, the problem is worse, because of the standard Christian claim that God not only created the universe, but sustains it as well. So, if God is a thing like other things then Dawkins’ point is well made.

But nowhere does Dawkins get outside of himself and ask, Is my assumption that God is a thing like any other thing really necessary? On what is this assumption grounded? Where did it come from?

The problem is that God is not a thing. One problem for New Atheists is that they have literally never proceeded past an understanding of God that is more mature than childlike. Their so-called atheism is literally childish.

Another problem for New Atheists is not so much that they reject certain attributes of God, but that...

Most atheists reject far too little. They only have to be one kind of atheist: The atheist who stands against some kind of ridiculous super-object in the sky, who stands against a child’s theology. Christians, who, like Jews, are commanded to have no gods before God, do not have the luxury of disbelieving in so few things. In Turner’s words, "In order to deny every kind of idolatry possible, a Christian must be every kind of atheist possible." We are required to have faith in no thing at all; only then will our faith have any chance of finding its true home in God.

We can and should have faith in no thing while making sure not to believe in nothing.

Instant MBA - or lesson therefrom

2010-12-15T11:17:00.002-06:00

"INSTANT MBA: Find Out What Employees Are Good At And Assign Tasks Accordingly."

Today's lesson comes from Geoff Vuleta, C.E.O. of Fahrenheit 212, an innovation consulting firm in Manhattan:

"I try to uncover what people are really good at doing and then give them a [snip] of a lot of that to do. I really, truly believe in that.

I am the sort of person who’s never really believed in obsessing over trying to get people to do things that they are no good at anyway."

What are you good at? Are you doing a lot of it? One of the most damaging things to individual productivity is trying to take care of many different things. Remember the saying about the hedgehog: "The hedgehog knows how to do only one thing, but he does it extremely well."

Christian discipleship's full flower is found in exactly the principle that Mr. Vuleta explained. While there are general obligations of discipleship that rest upon all those who want to follow Christ, the New Testament makes it abundantly clear that, to borrow Paul's analogy, some of us in the body of Christ are eyes, others are hands, some are feet. None do everything the body needs, but all are necessary.

What are you good at in Christian discipleship? Unless we follow the Bible's teaching of how to discover it, we won't. The central key is to discover your spiritual gifts. You can even do this online now at the UMC's web site page:
http://www.umc.org/site/c.lwL4KnN1LtH/b.1355371/k.9501/Spiritual_Gifts.htm.

Spiritual gifts are:

* Christian vocations given by the Holy Spirit to believers to shape and form their living as disciples of Jesus Christ

* Vocational capabilities that may be, but are not necessarily, related to skills, abilities or knowledge a believer already has

* The decision of our Lord in which person receives which gift - the Spirit knows us better than we do!

* Incredibly liberating and spiritually rewarding - they are the primary means by which we find our place in the Kingdom of God!

Remember: God does not call the qualified, God qualifies the called. How is God trying to "qualify" you? Through the spiritual gifts. Find out what you gifted for and do a lot of it!

But it wasn't "incest" incest!

2010-12-14T10:01:00.007-06:00

There is a straight line to be drawn from July, 1961 to the arrest of Columbia University Professor David Epstein this month for charges of an incestuous affair with his own daughter.

The daughter, we are told, was 20 when the alleged affair began. The 1961 connection is not with the deed, but with the nature of how some people are dismissing the allegations as trivial.

A commenter on Columbia's newspaper site wrote, "Wait, why is consensual incest a crime? It might not be appealing to everyone, but if they're adults and they consent, who cares what they do?"

A commenter at Huffington Post wrote that a "four year prison sentence is extreme -- considering they are both consenting adults."

Salon writer Tracy Clark-Flory observed that there "are no allegations" that the daughter didn't give consent. "It isn't a clear-cut case of child abuse," Tracy wrote.

Whoopi Goldberg defended Roman Polanski's rape of a minor girl by claiming, "It wasn't rape rape." So I guess that this wasn't incest incest. Or something. That mere consent should determine the legality of a sexual act is a direct outgrowth of July 1961.

It was then that Enovid was first marketed as an oral contraceptive. From then on, it was known simply as The Pill. The Pill was the first contraceptive both to approach 100 percent effectiveness and to be entirely under control of women. We are only beginning to see the enormous changes that have been wrought by its invention and widespread use.

Of course pregnancies occurred prior to marriage before The Pill, but compared to today very few births did. Weddings "back in the day" legitimated the sexual union of a particular man and woman under the guidance of the greater community. In granting this license, society also promised structures beneficial to children arising from the marriage and ensuring their well-being.

Society's stake in marriage as an institution is the perpetuation of the society itself, a matter of much greater than merely private concern. Yet society cannot compel men and women to bring forth their replacements. Because of The Pill, the causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage have been severed in a fundamental way. Since 1961, the marriage rate has plummeted while cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed. (Almost every couple of the dozens of weddings I have officiated were already openly cohabiting.)

Today, weddings are much more symbolic than substantive, having become for most couples mainly a shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any more is give to a man and a woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.

A direct outcome of these changes was greater acceptance of homosexuality followed by the move toward homosexual "marriage." Because The Pill enabled men and women to have sex without sex's usual result of pregnancy, the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt. If unrelated men and women can decide on their own whether to have sex outside society's interests or control, why can't gays? This is exactly the reasoning of the Supreme Court's 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, which struck down state laws against sodomy. As R.S. McCain explained,

Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion described "an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex." The court overturned its own precedent in the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick case. In Bowers, which had upheld Georgia's anti-sodomy law, then-Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that there had been laws against homosexual behavior "throughout the history of Western civilization" and that such laws were "firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards." In Lawrence, Kennedy cited that statement by Burger and rejected it as dubious, contending that the Bowers precedent "demeans the lives of homosexual persons."

And so seven years later the question is seriously asked: if both unrelated straights and gays can on their own decide about sex, why not an adult father and adult daughter? Genetic danger? That answer's been laughable since, well, July 1961.

How Prof. Epsteins' case will resolve legally I won't predict. Under New York's law, consent is irrelevant. The act itself is illegal. But I will predict that if it goes to trial his defense will rest strongly on Lawrence v. Texas, claiming that incest's prohibition is based on religious texts and traditions of precisely the sort that the Supreme Court set aside in 2003. While this might not prevail in state court, who can deny that it might prevail in a federal appeal?

As a society we are coming to believe in nothing except our own personal autonomy. The problem (that is, if we can still assume there really is a problem) is simply one of preference: "Incest," wrote that Columbia commenter, "might not be appealing to everyone." The standard is only what one likes or not. Therefore we may decide for ourselves what is morally right or wrong, and in nothing more so than sexual conduct. So the fracturing of America continues.

Endnote: The Pill did not alone engender the changes in socio-sexual mores of the last 50 years. There were two other lethal arrows into the heart of traditional marriage. One was socio-commercial feminism, which encouraged women on the one hand to postpone or pass up marriage and childbearing in order to have careers outside the home, and on the other hand to be as sexually active as they imagined men to be.

The other arrow was the rise to pre-eminence in academia of post-liberal Christian theology and Bible scholarship, which has intentionally sought to free society from the Bible rather than help lead it to follow it. Massive numbers of papers and books have been written since the mid-twentieth century attempting to show that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are patriarchal, oppressive documents that tell less the story of humanity's struggle with the divine, than they record proto-Marxist class and gender struggles of power, exploitation and domination. So today, anyone who expects a biblically-based argument for certain sexual mores to be taken seriously is living in dreamland.

(Some of this essay is drawn from an op-ed I wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2004, which you may read here.)

Update: "Switzerland considers repealing incest laws." I'm glad I don't try to write humor; it's almost impossible to write satire now because real life outdistances the imagination.

The upper house of the Swiss parliament has drafted a law decriminalising sex between consenting family members which must now be considered by the government. ...

Daniel Vischer, a Green party MP, said he saw nothing wrong with two consenting adults having sex, even if they were related.

"Incest is a difficult moral question, but not one that is answered by penal law," he said.

And just how "difficult," really, can it be? One wonders whether Daniel Vischer has a little secret.

Update: Well, that didn't take long: Epstein's lawyer, Matthew Galluzzo, told ABC News,

"Academically, we are obviously all morally opposed to incest and rightfully so," he told ABCNews.com. "At the same time, there is an argument to be made in the Swiss case to let go what goes on privately in bedrooms."

"It's OK for homosexuals to do whatever they want in their own home," he said. "How is this so different? We have to figure out why some behavior is tolerated and some is not."

Ditch the Fed? Not so fast!

2010-12-07T10:13:00.001-06:00

True or false: the United States did not have a central bank before 1913, the year the Federal Reserve system was established.

Answer to follow. First, there are growing numbers of voices these days urging either to dis-establish the Fed or to revise its charter (which would not be the first time). Gerald O'Driscoll, writing in the Wall Street Journal, belongs in the former camp. He points out that that the Fed's financial record since 1913 has been far from admirable. Wartime inflation followed almost immediately, then a depression in the early 1920s. The rest of the decade's prosperity is credited to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (and rightly so, I believe), but the Fed's performance during the Great Depression was simply disastrous. Since then, the Fed has hardly covered itself in glory since its charter is to provide price stability and full employment. These are "dueling mandates," say some economists, that set the Fed up to fail one or the other (such as nowadays).

But before we return to the halcyon days before the Fed, let's remember that they were the years of the "Panics" - of 1873-1879, 1893-1897, of 1907. And in fact, the US did have a central bank before 1913. His name was J.P. Morgan.

A severe depression that began in 1893 resulted in a run on gold until the Treasury could not redeem more gold because of statutory limits on reserve holdings. In 1895, Morgan loaned the Treasury Dept. $65 million in gold to stabilize the supply and the dollar, which was at the time linked to both gold and silver.

Another crisis, the Panic of 1907, was caused by a collapse of the stock market when the country was already in a recession. Brokerages and banks found their capitalization, based on the values of stock they held, to be worthless. Faced with impending bankruptcy of the nation's large banks and trusts, Morgan coordinated a plan among New York's bankers and the Treasury department to deposit tens of millions of dollars into still-healthy banks (letting the insolvent ones go under). Morgan and John D. Rockefeller put up many millions of their own money. They also set controls of the money supply among banks, solidified lines of credit and bought out stocks that were sharply falling in price. In other words, a TARP.

Morgan owned U.S. Steel. Before the Panic ended, he had taken over his chief competitor. He sailed right around the antitrust issues by getting President Theodore Roosevelt to guarantee immunity. Morgan bought the company, which saved the brokerage firm Moore and Schley from going under - had it done so, brokerages would have fallen like dominoes across all Wall Street. The Panic then ended almost immediately.

Although Morgan had saved the country from a sure and serious depression, the whole affair repelled Progressives. (Roosevelt, who had at least skirted with collusion to break the law, was himself the leading Progressive of the day).

Movement to create a federal central bank began almost right away, based on making sure that the US financial system would not again be subject to the power of an individual and all the under-the-table dealing that had gone on. Moreover, Morgan was already elderly in 1907 by standards of the day. Members of government realized neither he nor someone both as astute and wealthy as he was likely to be around the next time there was a crisis.

Coincidentally, Morgan died the same year the Fed was created, 1913.

None of this is to toot the Fed's horn or defend it. It is only to show that saying the US didn't have a central bank until 1913 is simply in error. We just didn't have a federal central bank until then.

(The Second Bank of the United States, a private bank whose cozy charter with the federal government expired in 1836, had been something of a hybrid between what Morgan did and what the Fed does now. But its history was not part of the move to establish the Fed.)

Healthier, wealthier, but no wiser

2010-11-30T17:28:00.001-06:00

Poor Richard tells us, "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise."

Well, two out of three ain't bad, I guess.

Over the past 200 years, people around the globe have grown healthier and wealthier. Sadly, we are no wiser.

A fascinating live chart:

Back to Poor Richard to close:

If what most men admire, they would despise,
’Twould look as if mankind were growing wise.

The Iron Harvest of World War One

2010-11-29T13:52:00.000-06:00

Came across this information whilst surfing around. There is a place in Belgium called Houthulst where a lot of combat took place during the Great War. It was near there that poisonj gas was first used in warfare, April 22, 1915. German troops opened dispersant cannisters at their own lines. The wind carried the gas across Allied trenches. Before the day was out, 5,000 Allied soldiers were dead, many thousands more injured.

Still coping with munitions from World War One. Enormous numbers of duds are turned up every year. Many of them are still filled with deadly poison gas.

Today Houthulst has Belgium's largest collection area of unexploded gas munitions. The amount is staggering. There are 18,000 unexploded gas shells, totaling at least 300,000 kilos. It has been estimated that for every square meter of terrain along the old entrenchments, reaching from Belgium's coast through the country and France to the Swiss border, a metric tonne of artillery projectiles fell.

With the dud rate ranging from 25-33 percent of fired shells, Houthulst's still mostly-lethal stockpile grows daily as more ordnance comes to the surface across the region. Only a minority of duds are gas shells. Belgian farmers turn up or discover more shells so frequently that the Belgian army's collection patrol makes two trips daily through the region.

The thousands of shells at Houthulst are stacked in rows upon the ground. Many of the shells at Houthulst are leaking. They are placed in concrete bins, but there are no bunkers to enclose them. A disposal processor nearby x-rays the shells to see whether they contain explosive or gas. The ones that contain gas are drilled and vacuum evacuated into sealed containers. These are taken to Antwerp where the gas in burned at super-high temperatures.

But there is another site in Belgium that may contain a hundred times as much gas shells. It lies on the sea bed near the port of Zeebrugge, only a few hundred meters from the shoreline. This site threatens Holland also because of tidal currents. Millions of tons of munitions were dumped there after the Great War. The dumping went on for six months at a rate of about 340 tomes per day. The government classified all the details and the site was forgotten about.

The location was accidentally again brought to light in 1971 by dredging and is now well known but unmarked; the Belgian government has classified all information about the site. A researcher at the Belgian Free University has calculated that more than 1,000,000 liters of pure poison gas lies there, most of it mustard gas. Mustard gas is not degraded by seawater. If mustard shells start cracking, the hazards will be immense.

World War One, it is feared, has yet to claim its final victims.

Links:

http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-houthulste.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest

http://forums.wildbillguarnere.com/index.php?/topic/7229-houthulst-can-anybody-verify-this/

http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?94760-Legacy-of-the-Great-War

Faith and death in North Korea

2010-11-27T13:46:00.003-06:00

Christianity is a summary-sentence capital offense in North Korea.

"While Interviewee 17 was in the North Korean Army, his unit was dispatched to widen the highway between Pyongyang and the nearby port city of Nampo. They were demolishing a vacated house in Yongkang county, Yongkang district town, when in a basement between two bricks they found a Bible and a small notebook that contained 25 names, one identified as pastor, two as chon-do-sa (assistant pastors), two as elders, and 20 other names, apparently parishioners, identified by their occupations. The soldiers turned the Bible and notebook over to the local branch of Department 15 of the Korean Workers Party (KWP), but the Party officials said it was up to the military police unit, Bowisaryungbu gigwanwon, to investigate.

Tracked down at their place of work through the listing of occupation in the notebook, the 25 persons were picked up without formal arrest by the military bowibu. The interviewee was not aware of any judicial procedures for those seized. In November 1996, the 25 were brought to the road construction site. Four concentric rectangular rows of spectators were assembled to watch the execution. Interviewee 17 was in the first row. The five leaders to be executed - the pastor, two assistant pastors, and two elders - were bound hand and foot and made to lie down in front of a steamroller. This steamroller was a large construction vehicle imported from Japan with a heavy, huge, and wide steel roller mounted on the front to crush and level the roadway prior to pouring concrete. The other twenty persons were held just to the side.

The condemned were accused of being Kiddokyo (Protestant Christian) spies and conspiring to engage in subversive activities. Nevertheless, they were told, “If you abandon religion and serve only Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, you will not be killed.” None of the five said a word. Some of the fellow parishioners assembled to watch the execution cried, screamed out, or fainted when the skulls made a popping sound as they were crushed beneath the steamroller. Interviewee 17 thought, at the time, that these church people were crazy. He thought then that religion was an “opiate,” and it was stupid for them to give up their lives for religion. He heard from the soldiers who took away the other twenty prisoners that they were being sent to a prison camp. He sketched from memory a diagram of the execution scene."

Even the appearance of Christian faith is deadly.

"A young woman, in her twenties, was washing clothes in a tributary to the Tumen River (the border between China and North Korea). When packing up the clothes, she dropped what was believed to be a small Bible. The actual words used by the North Korean authorities were “Christianity book” (kiddokyo chaek). Another washer woman reported the girl to the police. According to Interviewee 4, the informer may not have known that the book was a Bible, but all suspicious activity had to be reported to the police.

The woman and her father were tried and condemned practically in the same sentence, then immediately shot several times at close range with rifles.

Christians are hardly the only people persecuted to death in North Korea. Really, the whole country is. One presumes as well that adherents of other religions, say Islam, would likewise be killed. There is an official state religion, juche, which is not called religion, of course, but includes the deification of the late Kim Il-Sung and his psychopathic son, Kim Jong-Il.

North Koreans are obligated to make what amounts to a hajj to Pyongyang to lay flowers at the foot of Kim Il Sung's enormous statue.

Consider two of the "11 Reasons Why North Korea Is The Most Bizarre Nation On Earth."

#1 The first "Great Leader" of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, is deeply revered in North Korea. In fact, there are over 500 statues of Kim Il-sung scattered throughout the country. Many Koreans apparently believe that Kim Il-Sung actually created the world.

#2 It is said that hanging up pictures of Kim Il-Sung is compulsory for every household in North Korea.

These are some of the reasons that trying to explain the North's recent shelling of the South Korean Yeonpyeong island is a fool's errand. There is really no basis to suppose that there was a reason for the attack at all. Of course the shelling was approved at the pinnacle of the North's government - though not necessarily by Kim John-Il personally, who just may be nutty as a fruitcake anyway - but for what reason? Well, because, that's what, which may be as good a reason as we'll ever discern.

(What does make sense, though, is that the North's disclosure of its heretofore secret uranium-enrichment plant and the shelling are a single, the message being: Yes, we have a nuke program and you don't know what else we have that's still hidden. By the way, we're shelling Yeonpyeong to make sure you understand not to assume we are being put on the defensive.)

David Warren writes, however, that saying Kim Jong-Il is crazy avails of nothing:

The conventional explanation for these and the many other incidents (including many minor ones that hardly make world news), is that the North Korean Great Leader of the moment, is crazy. I fall into this myself, sometimes -- one foot -- but then have to explain the difference between medical and moral insanity.

The "completely crazy guy" theory of history explains nothing, and is useless. Hitler was a crazy guy; Stalin was a crazy guy; Pol Pot was a crazy guy -- but mad only north-northwest. Often from a desperate position, they played brilliantly, cheated brilliantly. ...

The current North Korean position is perhaps as desperate as it has ever been. Such indications as we have are of a prison camp in which the people are quite literally starving, and the whole totalitarian infrastructure might be cracking from withdrawal of some foreign aid. The Great Leader of the moment is thought to be ill, and there could be a "succession crisis." Alternatively, this crisis is being staged, in order to sucker the West into renewing aid, in the belief that a more reasonable leadership may soon emerge.

Of which there is practically no chance.

Thankfulness 2010

2010-11-23T05:56:00.001-06:00

Thanksgiving 2010

View in full screen by clicking here.

Thriving and declining churches

2010-11-17T16:52:00.008-06:00

Below are notes I took at a Tennessee Conference sponsored workshop at Gallatin 1st UMC in April 2008. These points are penetrating and thought provoking! Whether one agrees with them or not, they certainly call for some serious self examination on churches' part. They also tie in with Session 7 of my series, "Why I don't want to come to your church."

You may view the document online here.

Why I don't want to come to your church, session 7

2010-11-17T16:51:00.004-06:00

Index at bottom of this post.

Here are the slides for the third session of this series. You can also view the slides full screen.

Why I don't want to come to your church, session 6

2010-11-10T14:27:00.002-06:00

Index at bottom of this post.

Here are the slides for the third session of this series. You can also view the slides full screen.

Why I don't want to come to your church, session 5

2010-11-03T14:21:00.002-05:00

Index at bottom of this post.

Here are the slides for the fifth session of this series. You can also view the slides full screen.

"And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed"

2010-10-28T09:58:00.011-05:00

During the last week of September, Cathy and I were shopping in the Lowes in Dickson where we saw that the store was already putting up Christmas displays. (Thankfully, as a society we have apparently have moved beyond calling them, “holiday displays.)

I don’t think I have ever seen Christmas displays go up so early. But as we all know, the Christmas season is the major revenue season for almost every business. With the economy as it is, I suppose that businesses want the shopping season the begin as early as possible.

Have you ever wanted to get a “jump” on Christmas? Do you remember being a child and thinking that Christmas Day would just never get here?

Christmas Day was not celebrated by the early church. Easter was (and remains) the foremost Christian holy day, and two millennia ago, no one really knew what time of year Jesus was born. Almost certainly it was not in December since shepherds would not have been in the fields with their flocks in that month. The Eastern Church and the Coptics celebrate Christmas on different days than we do.

The most important thing about Christmas is not when it is, but what it is and what it means.

Christmas means “Immanuel,” God With Us. This is a name ascribed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. When we affirm our faith that the baby born in Bethlehem’s manger was God in the flesh, then we easily see why Jesus is truly God With Us. This is Good News, indeed!

And yet we should not rush too quickly, like the shepherds, to the manger. For while the Gospel is Good News, it is good only because of the bad news that preceded it.

Jesus came to deliver us from our bondage to sin and death. That’s Good News! But the bad news is that we needed saving to begin with. Unless we confront the gravity of the human condition into which we are born we do not grasp the life ring God casts to us in the person and work of Christ.

That is why, in the passages for Advent, getting ready for Christmas is not the point. The point of the season is to prepare for the coming of Christ, not of Christmas. The passages of Advent present the imminent presence of God in the flesh as both awful (that is, “awe-full,” not bad) and wonderful.

"For the glory of the Lord shall be revealed," promised the Scriptures, and the glory of God can hardly be beheld impassively. One either runs to embrace the Lord or runs from him. Neutrality is not even possible.

So the passages for Advent typically include reminders that, absent God’s gracing presence, we mortals are lost in our sins. We are reminded that, “Christ has come, Christ will come again.” And his next advent will not be so innocently or unthreateningly accomplished.

Yet Advent also shows that by being born the baby in the manger God was not going on the offensive against us. He joins us an our ally. In fact, God’s kingly, overwhelming power is found there literally to be defenseless, so much so that Joseph and Mary had to flee the town to save Jesus’ life.

Is there power in such weakness? No, not in weakness per se. Jesus’ Godly power, or our own, is found neither in human in weakness nor in strength, but in faithfulness. It is God who is strong, not we mortals. Compared to the God’s strength, human weakness is inevitable but it is also inconsequential. God knows this, so he did not shrink from being born of woman, just as we are, nor from enduring the travails of human life in all its triumphs and disappointments, its joys and frustrations.

And at the end, death on a cross. But death could not hold Jesus because God is stronger than death.

Manger scenes became a popular artistic motif during the Renaissance. In almost all such paintings, the artists included the cross somewhere in the scenery. Sometimes it was on the horizon outside the manger. One artist, Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556), painted a cross on a shelf on the manger’s wall, such as many homes would have had (left, click image for larger view).

Let us take a cue from those theologically-trained artists. They knew the connection between the manger and Calvary. So did Jesus. As his last trip to Jerusalem loomed, knowing what it portended, Jesus told the disciples, “Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour” (Jn 12:27).

What is the meaning of Christmas? The meaning of Christmas is the cross.

Why I don't want to come to your church - Session 4

2010-10-27T14:00:00.002-05:00

Index at bottom of this post.

Here are the slides for the third session of this series. You can also view the slides full screen.

Why I don't want to come to your church - Session 3

2010-10-20T15:46:00.001-05:00

Index at bottom of this post.

Here are the slides for the third session of this series. You can also view the slides full screen.

Why I don't want to come to your church - Session 2

2010-10-14T11:22:00.006-05:00

Index at bottom of this post.

Here are the slides for the second session of this series. You can also view the slides full screen.

"Why I don't want to come to your church" - Session One

2010-10-13T16:42:00.013-05:00

Index at the bottom.

I posted an introduction to this series earlier. It's about "five tough topics" for church people to grapple with.

Below are the slides for the first session. You can view the presentation full screen here.

Top Muslim Jurist to speak in Nashville

2010-10-07T12:15:00.010-05:00

Anyone who wants to learn about Islam from a highly-accomplished and respected Muslim scholar should make a point of attending a presentation by Mr. Sam Solomon on Oct. 19, 7-9 p.m., at the Gordon Jewish Center's Pargh Auditorium. The address is 801 Percy Warner Blvd, Nashville.

Here is an image of the flyer sent me:

The text reads,

Sam Solomon is an expert in Shari'ah Law - that's Islamic jurisprudence. He spent 15 years studying Shari'ah Law to become an Islamic jurist, and after reading the New Testament converted to Christianity. He is the author of The Trojan Horse (about the threat of Islamic immigration), The Mosque Exposed, The Common Word (about Islamic undermining of the church), and Al-Yahood: Eternal Islamic Enmity and The Jews. One of the leading experts on Islam and Shariah law in the western world, Mr. Solomon has testifed before congress, is a consultant to the British parliament, and has been called to brief world leaders in several nations on matters regarding
Islam.

See bottom of this post for a Google map to Gordon JCC with directions from the church.

Here is an interview (audio only) with Dr. Solomon at another venue.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Related as to topic, see my post, "Why jihad is central to Muslim faith."

Here is a Google map to the presentation. Click on the link at bottom for detailed directions.

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Why jihad is central to Muslim faith

2010-10-07T11:05:00.012-05:00

If this is your idea of what jihad is, you're not alone. This is "lesser jihad," and should be of lesser concern to us than "greater jihad," which, though nonviolent, is far more pernicious
What exactly is jihad and where does it fit into Muslim theology?

The root of "jihad" is judh, Arabic for striving. Jihad in Muslim theology is striving to defend or advance Islam or increase one's faithfulness to Islam. Jihad is not peripheral to Islam. It stands at its very center. Jihad is central to Muslim soteriology, its theology of salvation. Jihad is theologically joined at the hip to sharia, Islamic law, for it is sharia that both commands jihad and justifies jihad.

Muslim scholars and jurists distinguish between "greater jihad" and "lesser jihad," a distinction going back to Muhammad himself. Jihad, says al-Islam.org, has been conceptually corrupted in modern years both by Western usage to mean only holy war and by numerous Islamic groups, contending for power and influence, who have also overemphasized its military component.

According to Farida Khanam, the Arabic word jihad, by itself,

... does not connote the sense of reward or worship in the religious sense of the word. But when the word jihad became a part of Islamic terminology, the sense of reward or worship came to be associated with it, that is to say, if struggle is struggle in the simple sense of word, jihad means a struggle which is an act of worship, the engagement of which earns reward to the person concerned. As the Quran says: "Strive for the cause of God as you ought to strive" (22:78).

Jihad certainly can mean warfare waged to defend or advance Islam. But not just any war Muslims wage is jihad. Unless a war has been declared jihad by recognized clerical authority, it's just warfare, not jihad.

However, in historic Muslim theology, jihad more generally means striving toward equilibrium of Islamic character both within individuals and among the Muslim umma (the people of a Muslim society). Says al-Islam,

Muslims as both individuals and members of Islamic society must carry out jihad, that is they must exert themselves at all moments of life to fight a battle both inward and outward against those forces that if not combatted will destroy that equilibrium which is the necessary condition for the spiritual life of the person and the functioning of human society. This fact is especially true if society is seen as a collectivity which bears the imprint of the Divine Norm rather than an antheap of contending and opposing units and forces.

So how did jihad come to be associated with Islamic warfare?

[F]or Muslims to wield weapons in a war in which Islam itself is defended - as the [Saudi 1979] anti-Soviet fatwa declared - is literally an act of worship. The Muslim jihadi has the right to expect reward proportionate to his sacrificial worship. In military jihad, the ultimate sacrifice is to die, which deserves the ultimate reward, immediate entry by the slain jihadi's soul into Paradise. This doctrine springs from the words of Mohammed himself, who during the battle of Badr told his soldiers, "I swear by the One in whose hand Mohammad's soul is, any man who fights them today and is killed while he is patient in the ordeal and seeks the pleasure of Allah, going forward and not backing off, Allah will enter him into Paradise." (The Battle of Badr," by Tajuddin B. Shu`aib, http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/pillars/fasting/tajuddin/fast_75.html

Jihad, then is actual worship in Islam. As we shall see below, it is not simply part of worship. Jihad forms the very core of Muslim worship. But military jihad is traditionally called "lesser jihad" in distinction to nonviolent "greater jihad." Why this distinction? Al-Islam.org explains,

In its most outward sense jihad came to mean the defence of dar al-islam, that is, the Islamic world, from invasion and intrusion by non-Islamic forces. The earliest wars of Islamic history which threatened the very existence of the young community came to be known as jihad par excellence in this outward sense of 'holy war'. But it was upon returning from one of these early wars, which was of paramount importance in the survival of the newly established religious community and therefore of cosmic significance, that the Prophet nevertheless said to his companions that they had returned from the lesser holy war to the greater holy war, the greater jihad being the inner battle against all the forces which would prevent man from living according to the theomorphic norm which is his primordial and God given nature.

Greater jihad is explained by the Quran along this line of thought:

[H]umans have been created with a sound nature and provided by God with a true religion that enables them to have fullness of life through close communion with God in this world and the next. Each human is a religiously grounded person, created and endowed with a fitra, a ‘sound constitution’ that acts as a kind of internal guidance system and way to God.

But this "close communion with God" can take place only within the Muslim community, the umma. From inception, Islam's commandments have been held to be so difficult that "loners" can't keep them. Islam is "not a personal faith," according to Muslim jurist Sam Solomon. It is a communal faith only. Muslims require the support and encouragement of a broader Islamic community living together just to be Muslim at all. That is exactly the basis on which my Muslim friend at Fort Sill, Okla., Egyptian Lt. Col. Solomon, justified his nightclubbing, drinking and womanizing. "This is not a Muslim country," he told me, and only later I learned his was a serious answer, not a dodge.

What is it that orders the life of the umma? It is sharia, Islamic law dictated by Allah. The keeping of Islam's commandments and preservation of the social order concretized in the Quran and the Hadith (traditions about Muhammad) are made official, legal and coercive by Islamic law.

Sharia is not just religious law, not just social law (what we would call domestic law) and not just political law. It is all of the above and more. Islam formally declares that no aspect of human affairs is excluded from Allah's concern and commandments. So there is not, and never has been, "separation of mosque and state" in Islam (though over the centuries, rulers exercising offices more political than religious have often shed their religious yokes to some degree).

The reason is,

Islam is a din-religion. Din means a complete system of life consisting of beliefs and laws. To know the Islamic attitude of the Muslims towards the laws of the shari'ah, we have to study the Qur'an and hadith. In the Qur'an and hadith we find two different attitudes towards two different aspects of din. These two aspects of din are: a) the fundamental beliefs known as usu-lu'd-din - the roots of religion; b) the laws of the shari'ah known in general as furu'd-din - the branches of religion. ...

In Islamic beliefs, a Muslim is expected to believe only after reflection; and in Islamic laws, he is expected to follow them without any reservations [italics added].

Sharia is therefore inarguable, not subject to intellectual reflection by the ordinary Muslim. Prof. Mark Gould explains,

Certain customs in ritual and law were established as sacred; derivative from the Koran and from the Sunna, they constitute the shari’ah that regulates virtually all aspects of a Muslim’s life. In the words of Islamist Sayyid Qutb, “The basis of the Islamic message is that one should accept the shari’ah without any question and reject all other laws, whatever their shape or form. This is Islam. There is no other meaning of Islam.”

This point of view is also articulated by the moderate, Khaled Abou El Fadl: “I must confess that I adopt the intellectual presumption that Islamic jurisprudence (Shariah) is core to the Islamic experience throughout all ages and places. To me, Shariah and Islam are inseparable, and one cannot be without the other. I also confess that my primary loyalty, after God, is to the Shariah, and not to any particular organization.”

This is an absolutely key point for those seeking to understand the Muslim push against the institutions and democracies of the West: Greater jihad cannot be accomplished in the slightest apart from the dictates of sharia. It is only through the structure of sharia that "close communion" with Allah can be achieved. Absent sharia, striving within oneself to overcome sin and to keep Islam's commandments is not possible.

Only through jihad can a Muslim work his or her way to salvation because it is only through jihad that unnatural tendencies to sin can be suppressed and the natural-born (but sinfully corrupted) innate Islamic character of the human being flower. And jihad can be done only under the rule of sharia. Whether this jihad is greater jihad (non-warring) or lesser jihad (violence against Islam's enemies) is irrelevant to the salvation of Muslim believers; either one will suffice. But salvation through jihad is the basic soteriology of Islam and sharia is its means.

Unlike Christianity, Islam has no concept of original sin - a stain of sin innate to human beings, present in each person even at birth. That means that salvation can be attained only by the believer's deeds in submission to Allah through Islam and Islamic law. If a Muslim believer carries out Islam's commandments, then judgment day will be lightly born. If not, disaster.

A Muslim professor of Islamic studies at The George Washington University explained it to me this way 17 years ago. On the day of judgment, each person will have to cross a bridge from earth to paradise. The bridge spans a chasm so deep its bottom cannot be seen. To fall into the chasm is to fall into Hell forever. If one has faithfully kept Islam's commandments and done well, then one's individual bridge will be so wide it will stretch from horizon to horizon. But if one has stayed in sin, the bridge will be only as wide as a human hair.

While millions of Muslims in the world are mostly secular in outlook, those who take Islam's teaching seriously know that their eternal destiny is always in doubt at every moment. This may seem quaint to North Americans, who are so confidently (and unjustifiably) self-assured of their salvation (if they even believe it conceptually at all) that we hardly ever think about it. But for devout Muslims, earning salvation and avoiding Hell's very real torments is the actual purpose of living this life. It is what gives life focus and meaning.

However, one's eternal destiny is always in doubt. Even considering the bridge to heaven as an allegory, a Muslim can never know how wide his bridge is on any given day. But he does know that waging jihad is the most meritorious act a Muslim can do, and if one's greater jihad expands or further establishes Islam in the world then all the better.

All of this is why Muslims who immigrate to Western countries either self-segregate into Muslim neighborhoods (in old Europe, we would call them Muslim ghettos; modern France has many) or attempt to expand the reach of sharia law into society at large. Salvation is not possible without being surrounded by the umma, living together under the governance and guidance of sharia. More than that, sharia simply is Allah's inarguable command for the ordering of human society. A Muslim, truly to be Muslim, has no choice but to submit to its dictates. After all, "submission" is what "Islam" actually means. To activist jihadis, it matters not whether one has uttered the shahada and become Muslim or has remained infidel. One must either submit to Allah within Islam or submit to Islam itself if a non-Muslim.

And that is why Western Muslims are so intent on making sharia law normative in the West.

Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary is the spokesman for the British group Islam4UK. He told ABC’s “This Week” host Christiane Amanpour on Oct. 3 that it is certain that one day the flag of Islam will fly over the White House and that sharia law will be the law of the land.

Choudary's goal is the same as millions of "moderate" Muslims in the West, whom we term moderate for apparently no reason except they don't set off truck bombs or fly planes into buildings. But this is not a moderate position. It is imperialistic and triumphalist. And it is in fact mainstream among Western Muslims.

As the old liberal bumper sticker used to say, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."

Cohabitation is bad for you

2010-10-03T15:24:00.002-05:00

Dr. Helen cites the Daily Mail:

The Pew Research Center has found that, since 1990, the percentage of new mothers over the age of 35 has risen by five per cent, while the percentage of unmarried mothers has jumped 11 per cent to a record 41 per cent in less than a decade.

But a large number of these women, while not married, are living with the father of the child. Sometimes people say that the couple has a common-law marriage, but this misunderstands what such a marriage is. Common-law marriages are legally recognized in only nine states plus D.C.. In the states that do recognize them, there must be "a positive mutual agreement, permanent and exclusive of all others, to enter into a marriage relationship, cohabitation sufficient to warrant a fulfillment of necessary relationship of man and wife, and an assumption of marital duties and obligations," according to Black's Law Dictionary 277 (6th ed. 1990), cited at the link. Also, statutory law of those nine states plus D.C. are clear that the mere claim of the couple that they are married is insufficient. They must further validate the claim "through their conduct, such as the woman's assumption of the man's surname, filing a joint federal income tax return, etc. ... mere cohabitation cannot, by itself, rise to the level of constituting a marriage." Also, it may be helpful for these men and women to know that,

There is no such thing as common-law divorce. Once parties are married, regardless of the manner in which their marriage is contracted, they are married and can only be divorced by appropriate means in the place where the divorce is granted. That means, in all 50 states, only by a court order. [Emphases in the original]

Today, fewer and fewer weddings are taking place in a church. Relatively, more couples are being wed in civil ceremonies, conducted by secular officials. But, reports USA Today,

While an unmarried mom and dad living together might look like the married couple down the block, unions lacking formal long-term commitments have been found more likely to create problems for kids. Sociologists cite evidence that children raised by live-in parents have a greater likelihood of emotional troubles and poor school performance. A major reason is that unmarried couples are more likely to break up.

Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43 percent since 1960, but cohabitation has increased tenfold in the same period. The pattern of cohabitation is dangerous. Most women agree to cohabit thinking it will lead to marriage, but most men agree to live with a woman so he won't have to marry her. Forty of every hundred cohabiting couples never marry one another. Of the sixty cohabiting couples who do marry one another, forty-five divorce within ten years. And the woman the man marries is, on average, the third woman he has lived with; it is the woman's second man.

Simply put as a general rule, women agree to cohabit and give a man sex in the hope that marriage will result. Men who cohabit do so to get sex and domestic benefits without the commitment of marriage. Isn't there something wrong with this picture?

The negative effects of cohabitation documented by numerous studies include:

Single parents. Three out of four children born to unmarried couples see them split up before age 16, according to the National Marriage Project, a research group based at Rutgers University. The impact of growing up with a single parent is well documented by research: Children are more likely to repeat a grade, drop out of school, become sexually active [early] and exhibit anxiety.

Dysfunctional behavior. Live-in households tend to be less stable. A cohabiting partner is three times as likely to suffer depression as a married person and twice as likely to exhibit aggressive behavior.

Here is an excerpt from 2000 Time Magazine piece, reprinted in July 2007, "Who needs a husband?"

Danielle Crittenden, author of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, argues that women have set themselves up for disappointment, many putting off marriage until their 30s only to find themselves unskilled in the art of compatibility and surrounded by male peers looking over their Chardonnays at women in their 20s. "Modern people approach marriage like it's a Bosnia-Serbia negotiation. Marriage is no longer as attractive to men," she says. "No one's telling college girls it's easier to have kids in your 20s than in your 30s." ...

Michael Broder, a Philadelphia psychotherapist and author of The Art of Living Single, decries what he calls the "perfect-person problem," in which women refuse to engage unless they're immediately taken with a man, failing to give a relationship a chance to develop. "Few women can't tell you about someone they turned down, and I'm not talking about some grotesque monster," he says. "But there's the idea that there has to be this great degree of passion to get involved, which isn't always functional. So you have people saying things like, 'If I can't have my soul mate, I'd rather be alone.' And after that, I say, 'Well, you got your second choice."

"Why I don't want to come to your church"

2010-09-26T09:35:00.006-05:00

Christian Conversation About Five Tough Topics

Index of relevant post at the bottom.

I'll host sessions exploring the topics of the rest of this post, with a focus on how to engage unchurched people in Christian conversation, each Wednesday, Oct. 6-Nov. 17. We’ll start at 6:30, after the family meal. I hope you will come and join in!

Did you know that the fastest growing religious group in America are people severing ties with a church, or maintaining their separation? One in six American adults say they are not of any organized religion, many more than that for young adults. More than one-fourth of Americans say they don’t even want a religious funeral.

Where does that put us? In many ways, it puts us increasingly into the same sort of environment that the apostolic and early churches found themselves—a culture that resists the Gospel and is even sometimes hostile to it.

The worst and most faithless thing Christians could do is adopt a bunker mentality and write the unchurched off. That isn’t what the early church did, and Jesus never told us to proclaim the Gospel only to those who say they want to hear it.

On Sept. 21, I spent the day at a seminar sponsored by the Tenn. Conference called, “Spiritual Conversations.” How do disciples of Jesus engage people who do not know Christ in a meaningful way that opens up paths of God’s grace into their lives?

From this seminar and previous study, and my own spiritual conversations with non-Christians, I think there are five main barriers to the Gospel’s acceptance by greater numbers of Americans. They are:

1. Do your own thing.

Our culture increasingly denies that there are objective standards of morality or right living. People believe that they both should and can decide for themselves what is right or wrong and that one person’s opinion is pretty much as good as another’s. One result is that the Bible is not nearly as highly regarded in the general culture as it once was. Increasingly, people are turning to “spirituality” in lieu of “religion,” and spirituality is highly individualistic and opportunistic.

2. Christian claims are intellectually unsupportable.

Much about the Gospels strikes vast numbers of people as scientifically absurd and plain nonsensical. It is partly our fault! Over the last few decades, churches have often shied away from the fact that Christian faith is founded upon the supernatural power of a God who can be illuminated, but not described, by scientific insights. Instead, we have made Jesus’s resurrection more a matter of metaphor than of historical fact.

3. The evil in the world.

This is one of the toughest problems of Christian faith in the minds of non-Christians. If God is indeed all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful, then why does God permit the innocent to suffer? This question admits of no easy or glib answers. Even people of devout faith often do not know how to address it in dialog with another.

4. Christians are just hypocrites.

Evangelical Christian Ronald J. Sider wrote in The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience,

By their daily activity, most 'Christians' regularly commit treason. With their mouths they claim that Jesus is their Lord, but with their actions they demonstrate their allegiance to money, sex, and personal self-fulfillment.

You or I may not agree we Christians are bad as all that, but no matter: when we give our witness of the Gospel, a large number of people believe we are like that, that we do not really mean what we say and do not live accordingly, either. That makes this perception a hindrance to our witness.

5. “I don’t feel welcome or comfortable at church.”

This goes beyond not being greeted on Sundays or not receiving a follow-up call or visit. Unchurched people can feel like strangers in a strange land when they come here. Frankly, we use a lot of “insider” jargon they don’t understand. We sing songs they don’t know with titles they haven’t heard—what is a “Doxology” anyway?

One result of these five factors and the way they inter-relate is that even church people well grounded in our faith shrink from being forthright to others, especially non-believers, about their faith. It’s not so much that we do not know what we believe, it’s that we often cannot explain why we believe it! And the problem is compounded by becoming tongue-tied when another person starts asking penetrating questions!

So come on Wednesday for the family meal at 5:45, then stay for exploration of these topics beginning at 6:30!

Be happy in your work!

2010-09-25T07:53:00.001-05:00

Mandatory good times on the job seems all the rage these days.

The cult of fun is deepening as well as widening. Google is the acknowledged champion: its offices are blessed with volleyball courts, bicycle paths, a yellow brick road, a model dinosaur, regular games of roller hockey and several professional masseuses. But now two other companies have challenged Google for the jester’s crown—Twitter, a microblogging service, and Zappos, an online shoe-shop.

Twitter’s website stresses how wacky the company is: workers wear cowboy hats and babble that: “Crazy things happen every day…it’s pretty ridiculous.” The company has a team of people whose job is to make workers happy: for example, by providing them with cold towels on a hot day. Zappos boasts that creating “fun and a little weirdness” is one of its core values. Tony Hsieh, the boss, shaves his head and spends 10% of his time studying what he calls the “science of happiness”. He once joked that Zappos was suing the Walt Disney Company for claiming that it was “the happiest place on earth”. The company engages in regular “random acts of kindness”: workers form a noisy conga line and single out one of their colleagues for praise. The praisee then has to wear a silly hat for a week.

Yes, all work and no play make Jack a dull boy! You will go to work and you will enjoy it! For some reason I am reminded of this guy:

Be happy in your work! Or else!

Equations all the way down

2010-09-22T13:24:00.003-05:00

Stephen Hawking is probably the best-known physicist of our day. He is the author of a number of mass-media books about science, including A Brief History of Time, which begins this way:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

The premise of Hawking's latest book, The Grand Design, co-authored with physicist Leonard Mlodinow, strikes me as not much of an improvement of the turtles thesis. Instead of turtles, Hawking has equations.

When the Marquis de Laplace presented his work, Mecanique celeste, to Napoleon, the conqueror complained that LaPlace had not mentioned of God in the text. Laplace replied,"Emperor, I have no need for that hypothesis."

That is the specific premise - nay, the very objective - of The Grand Design, in which Hawking claims that God is not needed to explain the beginning of the universe. "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," writes Hawking. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

It's striking how much this kind of science is coming to resemble science fiction with its own religious overtones. As Mlodinow is quoted:

We don't have a laboratory where we can control what's going on. We can't repeat the experiment and take the data. Also, the universe — since we believe in quantum theory now — is a quantum system.

What Hawking et al have done is written a form of science fiction, using equations rather than prose. All their equations may work out, but that don't mean they actually know more than before or that reality has been discerned to a greater degree. Hawking admitted that postulating a universe of three or four dimension did not resolve mathematically. In fact, using up to 10 dimensions didn't work. So they tried 11 and presto! X = 0. Or something. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, "These are our equations. If they don’t work, we have others."

It's equations all the way down.

In a sense, of course, all mathematical constructs are fictional, that is, creations of the mind. However, some math is purely theoretical in ways that other math is not. Negative numbers for example, have no real-world referent like positive numbers do. You cannot point to a fruit basket and say meaningfully, "That basket contains minus four apples." Mathematicians themselves even refer to "imaginary numbers." That doesn't mean they aren’t useful, but they are only mathematically useful. The square root of -1 is not a concept that has practical application.

I've no doubt that Hawking is impelled by a childlike curiosity about the universe that is so crucial to scientific work. But Hawking has been trying for years to establish in the popular mind his world view, which is not really a scientific one, but scientistic, a non-confirmable belief that science describes reality exhaustively and absolutely. But the scientific method cannot even demonstrate this, much less subject it to empirical verification. Scientism is a religious-type belief in science. As Mlodinow says, "We believe in quantum theory."

This is really a work of fiction, using numbers rather than prose.

And so Hawking claims that the universe simply popped into existence from nothing whatsoever, resting his claim purely upon mathematical constructs that are no less fictional than seventh-grade quadratic equations.

Yet Hawking may have shored up Genesis’ account as much as attacked it. Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss says, "Empirically, we can actually have evidence that the universe came from nothing. One of the key things is that the total energy of the universe is zero, which is only possible if the universe came from nothing. It could have been otherwise. It could have been not zero."

So it would seem that science has confirmed what the Church has claimed since earliest days, creatio ex nihilo, the idea that the universe’s antecedent was nothing at all. (One professor told me that the only reason the Jews didn't write creatio ex nihilo was that they didn't speak Latin.) That being so, a cynic might ask why a fiction of physicists’ equations should be preferred to the fiction of ancient priests' prose, since they both claim basically the same thing. Or perhaps the two accounts are not so separate as we think. Richard Feynman, after all, said that calculus, the basic math of physics, was, "the language God talks."

I prefer the priestly account of creation to Hawking's, since, as Mlodinow pretty much admitted, Hawking's and his concept of the universe's "grand design" is at bottom conjecture. Scientists may be able to describe how I got here, but not why. They can say what we can do, but not what we should do. Mlodinow said that there is no laboratory to research the universe’s beginning. But we live in a real-world lab with certain consequences. So we are better off heeding the wisdom of the prose than the conjecture of equations, even if they are equally false, or true.

Closing thought: Why is Hawking so willing to assume that the universe simply "big banged" itself into existence when we deny that anything else does so? And if the universe simply appeared, just popped into being, why do other such appearances not happen routinely? Why, for example, don't spherical balls (or whatever) just pop up in my front yard or yours from time to time?

But they don't. In fact, the entire universe itself consists only of contingent events that bring forth only contingent entities. But somehow, Hawking is nonetheless willing to say that the universe alone is a necessary entity. I wrote at some length about this argument in "Why God Must Exist."

The Cult of Green

2010-09-13T17:19:00.001-05:00

"There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible."

"Environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths."

So said, respectively, renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, writing in 2008 in the New York Review of Books, and the late author Michael Crichton.

Global-warming environmentalism has indeed become a religion, complete with sin, expiation, ritual and cultic figures. It's deity is the earth itself, “Gaia,” the name of an ancient Greek earth goddess. The most important tenet of Gaiaism is that the earth is itself alive and is a being in its own right.

Gaiaism even has its own Garden of Eden - the earth before the appearance of human beings, when nature was pure, or after we showed up, but before we invented modern civilization. The Fall is the invention of the internal-combustion engine and the use of fossil fuels that followed, especially coal. More broadly, the Fall is consumerism and globalization.

But that Paradise Lost cannot be regained. There is no room for "life more abundant," since abundancy is environmentalism's original sin. Abundancy is expiated by human austerity or, as Dyson put it, "living frugally." Environmentalism's New Jerusalem is not prosperity, but the simple life arranged around a village-type lifestyle where everything is within walking distance of everything else. As British Leftist George Monbiot put it:

Everything we thought was good turns out also to be bad. ... We are killing people by the most innocent means: turning on the lights, taking a bath, driving to work, going on holiday. Climate change demands a reversal of our moral compass, for which we are plainly unprepared

This compass change requires cultic leaders such as Al Gore to guide the masses and give enlightenment to them. Like the Law of Moses, their commandments are to be obeyed from faith rather than inquiry: ‘Lo, I say unto you recycle, drive less, eat organics, drive hybrids, and so forth and so on.’

Environmentalism embraces apocalypticism with true fervor. The entire religion is predicated on the imminent, substantial destruction of the biosphere. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in 2008 that "humanity faces oblivion if it fails to confront global warming." Oblivion, he said. Rising seas, expanding droughts, melting sea ice, increased desertification, scorched crops, mass human suffering and death - all inhabit the same enviro-religious space as Revelation's horsemen of the apocalypse.

Like Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, environmentalism embraces the "children of light" opposed by the "children of darkness." The children of darkness, those who rebelled against God, embodied evil. The children of light, those who apprehended the truth of God, were spiritually pure. This notion has been adopted wholesale by environmentalism. Dyson put it this way:

[R]uthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists - most of whom are not scientists - holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. ... Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment.

"The worldwide community of environmentalists" = children of light. "Enemy of the environment" = child of darkness. (Dyson does not himself promote this belief, but describes what he sees.)

Like traditional apocalypticism, environmentalism holds is that things must get worse before they get better. No matter what we do now, climate change will intensify for decades before being abated. If oblivion is to be avoided, control must be established now. More than mere religiosity is at work here. H.L. Mencken observed, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." That is the true dogma of environmentalism: its gurus want total power over the masses. Monbiot gave the game away: "We can deal with climate change only with the help of governments, restraining the exertions of our natural liberties."

Dyson wrote, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." No wonder: environmentalism has much more potential to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! So environmentalism uses scientific language to mask its neo-Leninism, the desire to control most aspects of the way people live. From there, environmentalism has only a short step to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That's its plan for us, minus the gulags. We hope.

Litany of remembrance for Sunday, September 12

2010-09-12T06:06:00.000-05:00

Remembrance for the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001

Leader: Gracious God, in humility we ask your blessings as we remember a day of great violence nine years ago.

People: You are the everlasting God, whose love extends to all generations. Blessed be the name of the Lord!

We remember with sadness the thousands who died on September 11, 2001, men and women of wealth, blue-collar workers, military members and government employees, airline passengers and crew - all the people who perished in flames and pain.

We are thankful for the bravery of police officers, firefighters and others who selflessly went into danger to rescue the stricken, and lost their lives or suffered injury in their service.

Continue, O Lord, to give comfort to the families of those who died, grace to those who still struggle with anguished memories or the effects of injuries.

May your Spirit rest upon each one who endured that day, and let the assurance of your presence be strong with them always.

We pray for the people of our land and lands far away, who have suffered or died in the wars of the last nine years.

We pray for our military and their families, who have lost their lives, endured separation and hardship and for many of whom the war will never truly end.

We pray for our enemies as you commanded us to do. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ fall upon everyone who wishes us harm. May we never take your favor for granted, but strive always to abide humbly in your service.

Help us Lord, to love our enemies and do good to them.

Is Islam the enemy?

2010-09-11T16:32:00.002-05:00

On this anniversary day we would do well to remember who is our enemy? Who did this and why?

The first plane:

The second plane:

The horror:

Some have said that we are in a clash of civilizations. No. This war - and never forget that it is war - is not a clash between civilizations. It is a war between one civilization, the West, and the barbarism called Islamism. It is impossible meaningfully to call al-Qaedaism or Talibanism "civilization."

The Taliban beat and even shot women who went outside their homes without company of their husbands or a close male relative. They flogged or hanged men whose beards were too short. In Saudi Arabia a few years ago, a girls' school caught fire one night and the decency police (yes, they have them in Saudi Arabia) refused to unlock the exits because the girls were not properly veiled. At least 15 girls burned or suffocated to death.

These kinds of things are not anomalies. They are normative. And they are considered by our enemies to be divinely commanded.

Is Islam the enemy? President Obama, speaking today in Shanksville, Pa. said no. " "As Americans, we will not or ever be at war with Islam."

But before we so quickly and politically-correctly say no, we might consider the words from Mosab Hassan Yousef, "son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder and leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Throughout the last decade, from the second Intifada to the current stalemate, he worked alongside his father in the West Bank. During that time the younger Mr. Yousef also secretly embraced Christianity."

As the son of a Muslim cleric, he says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can't be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Do you consider your father a fanatic? "He's not a fanatic," says Mr. Yousef. "He's a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he's doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn't matter if he's a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.

"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."

However, it really does not matter much whether Islam, per se, is the enemy. The fact is that Islam as a whole is not controlled or much influenced by (mythical?) moderate Muslims. The radicals are driving Islam's train and controlling Islam's agenda. To talk about some golden age of Islam, as if there was a caliphate where everything was unicorns and rainbows, is not relevant in the 21st century.

Islam is what Muslims do. And today Muslims are either trying to kills us, Islamize us, supporting those who are trying to or they are acquiescing to it. Professor Bala Ambati, writing in Duke University's "Chronicle" newspaper, in 2003, put it this way:

Religions are defined not only by ideals but by realities, not just by their deepest and most beautiful insights, but by their adherents' behavior. . . . When moderate Muslims state terrorist attacks are disconnected from Islam, they ignore the reality that Islamic fundamentalist imperialists act in the name of Islam and Muslims, claiming "true Islam's" mantle from conspicuously absent moderates. . . . Until the realization that theocracies cannot be democracies dawns throughout the Islamic world, saying terrorism is disconnected from Islam is a smokescreen employed to abdicate responsibility to face reality. ...

Moderate Muslims must choose whether to let megalomaniacs, liars, misogynists and murderers hijack societies and religion and pilot them into destruction's abyss. Sidelines are not moral high ground. Unequivocally repudiating and forswearing terrorist methods and imperialist aims of Islamic fundamentalism by moderate Muslims is overdue.

Note that he said seven years ago that it was "overdue" for moderates Muslims to seize control of the definition of Islam. This moderates have not only failed to do so, they have not even tried to.

It may be that 900 million Muslims around the world want to live entirely in peace with the West and wish al Qaeda et. al. would go away. It does not matter what they want. It only matters what they do. And they are doing nothing. So for all intents and purposes, there are no moderate Muslims.

Islam, whether promulgated by "moderates" or extremists, is inherently supremacist, absolutist and triumphalist. Moderate Muslims desire for Islam, qua Islam, are insignificantly different from extremists' goals, who merely add militarism and imperialism to the modus operandi. Their ideological wellspring is the Muslim Brotherhood and its financial deep pockets are in Saudi Arabia, whose own Wahhabist ideology is not significantly distinguishable from the Muslim Brotherhood's.

So what that only a tiny percentage of Muslims are violent against the US or the West! Even if only one percent of Muslims in the world want personally to carry out violence against the us, that's still 12 million potential jihadists. And if they are supported by merely 10 percent of Muslims, it means 120 million will help them. And the rest will let it happen and occasionally cluck-cluck that, of course, the killers are not practicing "true Islam."

So to say, "We are not at war with Islam" is to utter nothing meaningful. It does not matter whether we think that. For Islam, as it is being defined today, is certainly at war with us.

Update: I see now that Walter Russell Mead and I are on the same sheet of music. And he makes a good point, one that I should have recognized myself: there are moderate Muslims in the world making a difference (though practically none of them are in the West). The moderate Muslims who matter are killing al Qaeda and its ilk in Muslims lands.

Sunni Iraqis took a long hard look at Al-Qaeda. They watched bombs go off in marketplaces and mosques. They watched reprisal killings of respected tribal elders and innocents. They watched undisciplined groups of fighters, freed from all moral and social restraint, innocent for the most part of any serious religious knowledge, imposed narrow and poorly conceived ideas on society by force in the name of an Islam Al-Qaeda neither understood nor respected.

And the Sunni Arabs of Iraq made a choice.

They saw Al-Qaeda at its best — volunteer freedom fighters come from around the world to fight for them — and they saw America at its worst, incompetent, insensitive, vacillating and violent.

And they chose the United States.

They decided that the future of their families, their children and their values was better served by aligning with the United States against the terrorists and against the fanatics. ...

But as we look back on the nine years since 9/11, one thing needs to kept clearly in view. The more the world’s Muslims see of Al-Qaeda and its agenda of indiscriminate murder, the less they like it.

And many of them are doing something about it. But you'd never know it from reading or watching American media.

Who seeks smaller churches today?

2010-09-08T12:40:00.000-05:00

The Rev. Lewis Parks, professor of theology, ministry and congregational development at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C., has done extensive work with small membership churches and their leaders. He answers who is visiting small churches today, and why. So go read!

Christless Christianity?

2010-09-07T09:59:00.000-05:00

Christian author Michael Horton asks the pointed question, "What happens when we take Christ out of Christianity?" And he argues that to a great degree many mainline churches have already done so:

I am reminded of Saint Augustine's observation: "If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself."

You can read the introduction (by UMC Bishop Will Willimon) and first chapter of Horton's book here.

You can't eat gold

2010-09-06T08:11:00.001-05:00

Prof. Bainbridge wonders whether Fort Knox, Kentucky, actually contains any gold. And the answer is no, because the US gold repository is not on Fort Knox. It simply adjoins the Army post. But let that pass.

The good professor writes:

Ron Paul thinks there needs to be an audit to see if there's really any gold in Fort Knox. The utility of gold as a store of value has always puzzled me, although I must confess to having done less well in Econ 102 than I did in Econ 101, so there you have it.

He then proceeds to relate the story of "Terry Pratchett's wonderful Discworld novel Making Money," in which character Moist von Lipwig, charged with securing the nation's gold, discovers there is no gold. An interview with "crack reporter Sacharissa Cripslock" ensues:

"The world is full of things worth more than gold. But we dig the stuff up and then bury it in a different hole. Where's the sense in that? What are we, magpies? Is it all about the gleam? Good heavens, potatoes are worth more than gold!"

"Surely not!," [said Ms. Cripslock]

"If you were shipwrecked on a desert island, what would you prefer, a bag of potatoes or a bag of gold?," [replied Moist]

"Yes, but a desert island isn't Ankh-Morpork!"

"And that proves gold is only valuable because we agree it is, right? It's just a dream. But a potato is always worth a potato, anywhere. A knob of butter and a pinch of salt and you've got a meal, anywhere . Bury gold in the ground and you'll be worrying about thieves for ever. Bury a potato and in due season you could be looking at a dividend of a thousand per cent."

"Can I assume for a moment that you don't intend to put us on the potato standard?" said Sacharissa sharply.

Eleven millionaires went down with the Titanic in 1912. One who survived was A.H. Peuchen, who said that he left $300,000 in money, jewelry, and certificates in a lockbox box in his cabin. "The money seemed to mock me at that time," he said. "I picked up three oranges instead."

Who else would?

2010-09-05T08:08:00.002-05:00

A New York Times blog reports on an academic study done relating to church attendance. The blogger writes this blinding glimpse of the obvious:

The study specifically focused on the behavior of Catholics and Protestants because they were most likely to attend church on Sundays.

Imagine that!

Might it have been that the researchers specifically focused on the behavior of Catholics and Protestants because they were most likely to attend church at all?

Yah, could be.

What really matters on the bucket list

2010-08-31T08:47:00.001-05:00

The "bucket list" is made up of things someone wants to do before they die, that is, before they kick the bucket. "The Bucket List" was the name of a 2007 movie starring jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as, "Two terminally ill men [who] escape from a cancer ward and head off on a road trip with a wish list of to-dos before they die."

(Actually, you don't "escape" from a cancer ward. It's not a prison. You just tell the staff you're leaving. See ya, so long, adios, adieu. Then you walk out. But I digress.)

Inspiration and Chai blog has a post about the five most important things to dying people.

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives. ...

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

I won't copy and paste the whole post, but I will point out that in my own years in pastoral ministry, and having ministered to more dying men and women than I wish I had to, I think this writer is spot on. Here are his five "regrets of the dying."

I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

I wish I didn't work so hard.

I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I'll add one myself: "I wish I had been more generous." I have known far too few genuinely generous people. My father in law is one, and so was a man of the first church I served named Wilson Herbert. Generous people die easier, or rather, they come to peace with their terminality quicker. They have not spent their lives grasping and clinging to the things they have, so when it is time to let go of life, they manage that much better. Of course there are other things that matter, too - faith or its lack, for example. But the blogger is right:

It all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

There are no independent men or women, no matter how we like to imagine ourselves so. The Book of Job quotes Job, enduing the worst kind of suffering, as saying, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart" this life. But he was wrong. We are born naked, but we died clothed in the love we gave away. At the end, only love matters. And only love lasts. Only love never ends.

The dying churches of America

2010-08-09T14:34:00.002-05:00

The UMC's greatest membership number came in 1968, when The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren merged to create The United Methodist Church. The merger resulted in a membership of about 12.5 million souls.

Since then, the number of United Methodists in the United States has fallen without cease, numbering today about eight million. The average age of a UMC member is 60 and climbing. As I explained in 2007,

Consider some actuarial facts. If indeed the median age is about the same as the average age, 60, that means that of the 8 million UMs living today, one-fourth, or 2 million, will be dead within 20 years, and another million dead about eight years later. So in less than 30 years, we will lose from death alone three-eighths of our present membership, leaving us at 5 million.

That decline does not include the hemorrhage of our youth who, when graduating from high school, graduate from the church as well (an issue affecting all denominations). I don't have the demographic breakdown for that age group as a percentage of the UM total, but the church admits that, relative to the general population, people under 35 are underrepresented.

I should note that the UMC is a worldwide denomination and is growing outside the United States. But I am concerned here with the churches in America.

But not only the UMC is in decline. Almost without exception, the other denominations of the US are falling in number, too. In fact, the fatest-growing religious category that people use to describe themselves is "unaffiliated."

All of this leads Los Angeles Times religion columnist William Lobdell to sketch the broad outlines of the state of American churches.

August 08, 2010|By William Lobdell

Novelist Anne Rice's surprise post last week on Facebook — she announced she had quit Christianity "in the name of Christ" because she'd seen too much hypocrisy — brought cheers and smug smiles from critics of institutional faith, and criticism and soul-searching among believers.

But there's something more at play here than one of America's most famous Catholics — Rice re-embraced the faith of her youth in 1998 and published a memoir just two years ago, "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession" — walking away from the church.

Rice is merely one of millions of Americans who have opted out of organized religion in recent years, making the unaffiliated category of faith the fastest-growing "religion" in America, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The Pew report found that 1 in 6 American adults were not affiliated with any particular faith. That number jumped to 25% for people ages 18 to 29. Moreover, most mainline Protestant denominations have for years experienced a net loss in members, and about 25% of cradle Catholics have left their childhood faith, the study showed.

And in a 2008 study by Trinity College researchers, 27% of Americans said they do not expect a religious funeral.

American Christianity is not well, and there's evidence to indicate that its condition is more critical than most realize — or at least want to admit.

Pollsters — most notably evangelical George Barna — have reported repeatedly that they can find little measurable difference between the moral behavior of churchgoers and the rest of American society. Barna has found that born-again Christians are more likely to divorce (an act strongly condemned by Jesus) than atheists and agnostics, and are more likely to be racist than other Americans.

And while evangelical adolescents overwhelmingly say they believe in abstaining from premarital sex, they are more likely to be sexually active — and at an earlier age — than peers who are mainline Protestants, Mormons or Jews, according to University of Texas researcher Mark Regnerus.

On the bright side, Barna's surveys show evangelicals (defined by Barna as a subset of born-again Christians, which he sees as a broader group with more flexible beliefs) do pledge far more money to charity, though 76% of them fail to give 10% of their income to the church as prescribed by their faith. Various studies show American Christians as a whole give away a miserly 3% or so of their income to the church or charity.

"Every day, the church is becoming more like the world it allegedly seeks to change," Barna has said.

Barna isn't the only worried evangelical. Christian activist Ronald J. Sider writes in his book, "The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience": "By their daily activity, most 'Christians' regularly commit treason. With their mouths they claim that Jesus is their Lord, but with their actions they demonstrate their allegiance to money, sex, and personal self-fulfillment."

How to explain the Grand Canyon-sized gap between principles outlined in the Gospels and the behavior of believers? Christians typically, and rather lamely, respond that shortcomings of the followers of Jesus are simply evidence of man's inherent sinfulness.

But if one adheres to the principle of Occam's razor — that the simplest explanation is the most likely — there is another, more unsettling conclusion: that many people who call themselves Christian don't really believe, deep down, in the tenets of their faith. In other words, their actions reveal their true beliefs.

That might explain why Roman Catholic bishops leave predator priests in ministry to prey on more unsuspecting children. Or why churches on Sunday mornings are said to be the most segregated places in America. It also would explain why most Catholic women use birth control even though the practice is considered a mortal sin.

Culturally, America is still a Christian nation. The majority of us still attend church at least occasionally, celebrate Christmas and Easter, and pepper our conversations with "God bless you" and "I'll be praying for you."

But judging by the behavior of most Christians, they've become secularists. And the sea of hypocrisy between Christian beliefs and actions is driving Americans away from the institutional church in record numbers.

Some, such as Anne Rice, are continuing their spiritual journey on their own, unable to reconcile the Gospel message with religious institutions covered with man's dirty fingerprints. Others have stopped believing in God. Those with awareness who remain Christians are scrambling to find ways, like St. Francis of Assisi, to rebuild God's church.

But remember, St. Francis offered a radical example during a time when the institutional church had grown corrupt and flabby. He was a wealthy young man who took a vow of poverty and devoted himself to the poor. His motto: "Preach the Gospel at all times — and when necessary use words."

A well-informed hunch says American Christians aren't ready for the kind of reformation that will realign their actions with biblical mandates. And in the meantime, the exodus from the church will continue.

William Lobdell, a former Times staff writer, is the author of "Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace."

This is not to say that unchurched people, especially young adults, are not religious. It's that traditional religious practices and structures are not attracting them. This is not altogether to fault the UMC or other mainline churches however. That young people are enbracing "spirituality" in stead of "religion" is just as basically hypocritical as they claim we of mainline churches are. See my post, "Why 'Spirituality' Instead of Religion?"

"Hiroshima Day" - World Council of Churches gets it wrong again

2010-08-09T06:50:00.002-05:00

It's past time for Western churches to stop treating Japan as victim every Aug. 6 and 9.

I know this is a "dog bites man" kind of story, but once again the World Council of Churches has got it wrong with, "Prayers for Peace and Justice on Hiroshima Day."

Let me be clear. I certainly have no problems with prayers for peace and justice. I pray them myself. But the order of remembrance (at the link) promulgated by the WCC is not one that I can in good conscience lead. One reason why is the inclusion of a, "Reading of an eye witness account from Hiroshima," adapted from an account by Murakami Toshio. It is a compelling account, and what he endured was dreadful beyond description. I gainsay that not. But the reading's conclusion is unacceptably incomplete:

We, the people of Hiroshima, crushed by nightmares, exasperation, resignation and hardships, have come to hate war, more than any other people, and above everything else. We have eagerly sought for peace, being so urged from the bottom of our hearts, from our very innermost core. ...

I would like to know whether Mr. Toshio hates that war equally from its beginning as from its end. Does he hate what his country did to Nanking as much as what America did to Hiroshima? After all,

When Japanese forces conquered Nanking, for example, they killed at least 200,000 civilians and probably as many as 300,000 over a six-week period (or so) beginning in mid-December 1937.

Japanese atrocities in Nanking were so terrible that Nazi Germany's Consul to the city personally intervened to save hundred of Chinese, especially women, tens of thousands of whom Japanese soldiers gang-raped and then, usually, murdered.

The list of Japanese atrocities during the war - which it started many years before it attacked Pearl Harbor - is literally too long to list here. For example, During America's campaign to liberate the Philippines, the Japanese command declared Manila to be an open city, a term in international law with the specific meaning that it would not be defended and American forces could occupy it unopposed. This was treachery and deceit: the Japanese defended the city fiercely, resulting in the deaths of 100,000 Filipino civilians. The city itself was devastated just as completely as either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

During 1945, a half million civilians under Japanese occupation were being killed or dying every month because of the occupation.

Japan has never come to grips with its actions and has deliberately refused to face them. Germany, at least, went through such self examination after World War II, and indeed, repentance, that its Nazi past, though not erased, no longer strongly stains the nation of today. Indeed, Germans today have understood their special, historical obligation to face their past honestly and to stand for better angels of human nature today.

Japan, murderer of at least as many people as the Nazis, has never done this and will not do this. Its many years of atrocities: concentration camps, its biowar experiments on Chinese civilians, its deliberate programs of starvation and murder of prisoners, the rapacious pillaging of conquered cities and their peoples, its impressment of foreign women as sex slaves for soldiers - this and more all swept under the Japanese rug with even the barest pretense of acknowledgement that they ever occurred.

So what, exactly, about the war is it that we are supposed to be so morosely prayerful about every Aug. 6? Aug. 6 and 9 are being used by Japan to play the victim card, and when the West plays along it enables the millions of innocent victims of Japanese bushido militarism to be flushed down the memory hole. But facts are stubborn things. Japan and Japan alone is solely responsible for the Pacific and Asia wars and for America's entry into them. The delusion of the WCC and other Hiroshima apologists is that somehow the war could have ended more gently than by the bombings. But as I explained in, "Hiroshima Day,"

Had President Truman not ordered the atom bombings, the US military could have done nothing but intensify conventional bombing and blockading. Hence, Japan could not possibly have been brought to a gentler end of the war than the ending that occurred. Had fighting continued after early August 1945, additional civilian deaths would certainly have numbered in the many hundreds of thousands and probably in the millions by the end of the year.

More likely, though, is that without the atom bombings, Japan would have become embroiled in civil war, which also would have been lethal beyond estimate. Japanese records show that the overriding fear of Japan's high council was the destruction of the emperor's office and line, and the most serious threat thereto was revolution by the Japanese people themselves. The American blockade was so punishing the people that Japan's internal security service, the Kempei Tai, had soberly concluded that revolution was becoming ever-more possible.

I refuse to pollute God's ears with prayers dedicated only to Hiroshima Day and the dead of those cities while ignoring the tens of millions of Japanese-murdered souls who cry for remembrance, but do not get it, certainly not from the World Council of Churches and its allies who have no loathing but for their own civilization. If the prayers of the WCC's service are to be offered, let them be uttered on Aug. 14, the day Japan announced its surrender, or on Sept. 2, the day the surrender instruments were signed aboard USS Missouri. Let our churches no longer be accessories to Japan's blood-soaked silence but instead be voices for the millions of murdered victims of its bloodlust, imperialist militarism.

Richard Fernandez:

[T]ry this quiz. Name the two greatest losses of civilian life in the Pacific war. Hint. In both cases the civilian casualties were greater than Hiroshima’s. In one case the event took place on American soil.

Casualties
Hiroshima 70,000–80,000
Battle of Manila 100,000
Nanjing 300,000

Richard posts these two photos. One is of Manila after the the battle. The other is of Hiroshima. Identify which photo is of which city.

Also from Richard's post, the words of a memorial in Intramuros, Philippines, to victims of Japanese atrocities.

This memorial is dedicated to all those innocent victims of war, many of whom went nameless and unknown to a common grave, or even never knew a grave at all, their bodies having been consumed by fire or crushed to dust beneath the rubble of ruins.

Let this monument be the gravestone for each and every one of the over 100,000 men, women, children and infants killed in Manila during its battle of liberation, February 3 – March 3, 1945. We have not forgotten them, nor shall we ever forget.

May they rest in peace as part now of the sacred ground of this city: the Manila of our affections.

In 1945, Richard's aunt threw her small children off the balcony of her Manila apartment, hoping someone below would catch them, because Japanese soldiers were going into each apartment, bayoneting everyone they found, regardless of age. Nonetheless, Richard kn ow that, “Given enough time and opportunity the masters of the narrative will eventually succeed in making the Pacific War all about American aggression.”

Oh, the first photo is of Manila, the second of Hiroshima. Yet you will never see a Japanese delegation sent to Manila to pray for its people on the anniversary of the battle.

Atom bombings and their context

2010-08-08T06:39:00.000-05:00

I wrote this in 2005. Along with my essay, Hiroshima Day, it forms a necessary background to my coming essay on Aug. 9 on why the World Council of Churches gets it wrong in its call for prayer services for Aug. 6 and Aug. 9 to commemorate the atom bombings of those cities on those dates in 1945.

Bill Quick cites the Japan Times' claim that there was "No rationalization for Nagasaki attack." Says the Times,

If the incineration of Hiroshima was justifiable as a means to end the war and save American lives -- a thesis that even most liberal Americans accept -- what was the justification for the destruction of Nagasaki three days later before Japan had a chance to grasp the message from the first nuclear attack?

First, it is not true that most American liberals (an inapt term for the topic at hand, but let it pass) accept that even the Hiroshima bombing was justified. Even so, it would be helpful to examine the context the two atom bombings took place in, especially from the Japanese perspective.

At the time of the bombing, Japan was ruled by a cabinet consisting of nine men, most of whom were members of the Army or Navy (there was no independent Japanese air force or marine corps). Emperor Hirohito's role in the workings and edicts of the cabinet was strictly prescribed by ancient tradition plus severe restraints emplaced on royal authority as Japan had westernized in the latter half of the 19th century. Hirohito attended cabinet meetings but did not speak. The emperor's real role was to approve the decisions taken by the cabinet, and the decisions of the cabinet had to be unanimous by law and tradition.

Militarists dominated the cabinet in 1945 although there were civilian members who wanted to sue for a negotiated peace. However, all cabinet members were concretely agreed that no peace could be acceptable that did not leave intact the office and symbols of the emperor. Unless that guarantee could be given by the Allies, even the peace-inclined cabinet members were agreed the war should continue. (However, there was never any agreement in the cabinet what other acceptable terms should be.)

It didn't take long for the cabinet to learn what type of weapon had destroyed Hiroshima on Aug. 6. Japanese physicists realized before Nagasaki's destruction that an atom bomb had been used and had informed the cabinet. Although the cabinet realized the bomb added a new dimension to the war, they did not change their basic perceptions on whether or how to continue the war simply because America possessed and used atomic bombs.

One reason was that the destruction of the two cities, while horrific, was by that stage of the war not unusual. As the Times article points out, mass destruction of cities had already become the norm in the war:

Before the nuclear genie was let loose, mass killings had already become a feature of the war for all sides.

On a single night, for example, nearly 200,000 citizens burned to death when U.S. bombers doused Tokyo with jellied petroleum in March 1945. Indeed, in the months before the nuclear bombings, half a million Japanese had already died and 14 million rendered homeless in U.S. firebombing raids on cities.

The Anglo-American firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 left some 39,000 Germans dead in an air campaign Churchill acknowledged amounted to "terror bombing." Hitler's massacres of Jews, and Japanese atrocities in China, reflected a similar disdain for civilian life.

By the time Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reduced to smoldering ruins, 50 million people in the world had already been killed in conflict since 1939.

The point about Japanese atrocities in China is well taken. When Japanese forces conquered Nanking, for example, they killed at least 200,000 civilians and probably as many as 300,000 over a six-week period (or so) beginning in mid-December 1937. The scale of the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not exceptional by that time of the war. The cabinet already realized that atom bomb or not, Japan's cities would be reduced to ash by American bombers. The atom bombs made the task easier but not more certain.

But the threat to the integrity of the emperor and his office was not simply from the Allies. Japan's security arm, the Kempei Tai, had a domestic enforcement arm very similar to that of the Nazi Gestapo. Kempei Tai intelligence had for months been assessing that there was a real and growing threat of revolution in Japan because of worsening subsistence of the people. American submarines and B-29s emplaced and enforced a ruthless blockade of Japanese ports, cutting off access by sea from Japanese holdings in mainland Asia. Bombers also devoted thousands of sorties to the destruction of rail and road egress from Japanese port cities to the country's interior.

These operations made Japan's populace suffer terribly from the interdiction of foodstuffs from Asia. The main effort was actually named "Operation Starvation" and was begun in April 1945. So severe were its effects that,

After the war, the commander of Japan's minesweeping operations noted that he thought this mining campaign could have directly led to the defeat of Japan on its own had it began earlier.

By the time of the atom bombings, actual starvation had not begun in Japan, but the population was experiencing the same privation as if from severe famine. Adults in some parts of the country were consuming fewer than 1,000 calories per day; on July 30, 1945,

Food shortages lead the government to call on the civilian population of Japan to collect 2.5 million bushels of acorns to be converted into eating material. The average Japanese is presently surviving on a daily intake of about 1680 calories, or 78 percent of what is considered the minimum necessary to survive.

. The Kempei Tai was well aware that more than a few revolutions in world history had begun from lack of food and was concerned that the emperor might become personally at risk when children and infants started dying and adults became desperate. The cabinet was regularly briefed by the Kepei Tai on this concern.

What the atom bombings did more than anything was provide the Japanese cabinet - and not all of them - with the excuse to surrender rather than the direct reason. Although American and Japanese historians continue to debate the issue, my readings lead me to conclude that the bombings were seized on by Hirohito and like-minded cabinet members as the handle to end the war to avoid revolution. According to Mitsumasa Yonai, Japan's civilian navy minister,

“It may be inappropriate to put it in this way, but the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, God’s gifts,” Yonai said nearly a week after an American B-29 dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. ...

“Now we can end the war without making it clear that we have to end the war because of the domestic situation,” said Yonai, who was among the six-member inner Cabinet, led by Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki.

“I have long been advocating the conclusion [of the war], not because I am afraid of the enemy’s attacks or because of the atomic bombs or the Soviet participation in the war,” he said. “The most important reason is my concern over the domestic situation.”

This statement was uttered before Hirohito directed the cabinet to end the war on Aug. 14. Hirohito took the unprecedented and then-shocking step of personally speaking to the cabinet, rather than sending written communications, and directing the cabinet to end the war. Hirohito made recordings to be broadcast to the nation on Aug. 15. During the evening of Aug. 14, some militarist generals attempted a coup to seize the recordings and take the emperor into what they termed protective custody, convinced that he had fallen under sway of traitors in the government.

(Hirohito's reputation was remade after the war as the savior of his nation but there is little reason to believe he was neutral between the peace advocates and war advocates. Hirohito was astaunch militarist, who along with other militarists in the government,

... waited, instead, until the foreign enemies gave them a face-saving excuse to surrender in order to prevent the kokutai from being destroyed by antimilitary, antiwar pressure from within Japan. ... It didn’t matter how many hundreds of thousands died as long as the monarchy remained intact.

Hirohito was just as concerned about revolution as anyone, maybe more so since his neck was literally on the line in the question.)

It may still be reasonably debated whether the Nagasaki bombing was too hasty. But it isn't clear that without a second atomic bombing fairly soon that the Japanese would have capitulated as readily as they did. In fact, one reason the American authorities hit Nagasaki only three days after Hiroshima was to deceive Japan that there was no shortage of atomic bombs. In fact, the two dropped were the only two that existed. Additional atom bombs would not be ready until September, but then would be produced rapidly enough to support the Air Force's regular use of them through most of the fall.

In 20-20 hindsight it can be reasonably argued that Japan would have surrendered without the bombings, but many crucial facts we know now were opaque to both sides at the time. There is no doubt that many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of solders and civilians across the Pacific and Asian areas would have died from the war had it continued; discussion of prospective American and Japanese casualties from an invasion of Japan don't consider that hundreds of thousands of other nationalities were perishing every month at Japanese hands in lands still under Japanese control.

However the war would have ended absent the second bombing, or absent it coming so soon, I don't see how it could have ended as quickly or cleanly as it did and it probably would not have ended so absolutely or bloodlessly. The bombings left intact the organs of the Japanese government, which alone were able to order the far-flung Japanese forces to lay down their arms. Had either invasion or domestic uprising or their combination fractured the unity of the central government, America might have been forced to fight each Japanese unit across the Pacific and Asia to neutralize them and there may have been Japanese guerrilla wars for years in Japan and elsewhere by Japanese soldiers. We'll never know, of course.

Legalize polygamy?

2010-08-07T20:33:00.003-05:00

In the wake of federal Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling that overturned California's Proposition 8, that defined marriage solely as the union between a man and a woman, I think it would be useful to ask why not legalize polygamy (or polyandry, for that matter).

Understand: I am not advocating this. But if the US Supreme Court upholds Walker's ruling, as many observers think it will by 5-4 vote (Kennedy being the swing), the the inevitable - indeed, unavoidable - consequence will be that the state has no authority to regulate marriage. That being the case, it will not be possible to offer a legally sustainable argument that gay marriage is okay but polygamy is not.

Polygamy has in fact has vocal though few advocates in the United States for years. The Mormons began practicing polygamy shortly after moving to Utah in the 1840s, continuing with ecclesial endorsement until 1890, when church president Wilford Woodruff ended the practice its sanction. But the practice continued until for new few years afterward. (Presumably, existing polygamous marriages were grandfathered.) Some Mormon advocate re-sanctioning polygamy today (and here).

A post at Blogcritics on "Legalizing Polygamy and Polyandry" states the obvious: "that polygamists and polyandrists see the recognition of same-sex marriage as being a justification for their cause... "

I personally do not foresee a large movement toward polygamy (or "plural marriage," as its advocates call it). But my question remains: once the Court has struck down the states' authority to regulate marriage, what is there to stop it? Nothing.

I'll give the last word to the Chinese:

Above is the ideogram for "two women under one roof," which means "trouble" in Chinese. This may be an urban legend, though. "Yin & Yáng and the I Ching" says that no such symbol actually is used in China, although there are authentic ideograms for one woman under a roof and three under a roof, thus:

Interesting that three women under one roof has such purely negative connotations. And probably informative, too.

Hiroshima Day

2010-08-06T10:47:00.001-05:00

The first atomic weapon used in warfare explodes over Hiroshima, Japan, Aug. 6, 1945

August 6 is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. It and the subsequent atom bombing of Nagasaki led quickly to the capitulation of the Empire of Japan, ending World War II. The history leading up to the bombings is compelling and has been the subject of intense debate here in the United States as well as the occasion for condemnation of America after the war by various factions both domestically and abroad.

My purpose here is not to assess those debates or accusations, but simply to relate the history and its context of the American decision to drop the two atom bombs and of Japan's decision to surrender afterward. How connected, exactly, was Japan's surrender to the bombings? The answer is surprising. The atom bombings, it turns out, did not cause Japan to surrender so much as it gave them the chance to do so honorably (honorably in their minds, that is).

(It must be considered, though, that throughout most of 1945, a half-million civilians were dying monthly at the hands of the Japanese in the Asian and Pacific lands Japan still occupied. Any criticism of the decision to drop the atom bombs must take this genocidal monthly death toll into account.)

Syndicated columnist Austin Bay posted the text of a letter written by James A. Michener to a friend in October, 1995. Michener was serving in the US Army Air Corps in the Pacific when the bombs were dropped. He wrote ,

Never once in those first days nor in the long reconsiderations later could I possibly have criticized Truman for having dropped that first bomb. True, I see now that the second bomb on Nagasaki might have been redundant and I would have been just as happy if it had not been dropped. And I can understand how some historians can argue that Japan might have surrendered without the Hiroshima bomb, but the evidence from many nations involved at that moment testify to the contrary. From my experience on Saipan and Okinawa, when I saw how violently the Japanese soldiers defended their caves to the death I am satisfied that they would have done the same on Kyushu. ...

[I]f you are unlucky enough to become engaged in [war] you better not lose it. The doctrine, cruel and thoughtless as it may sound, governs my thought, my evaluations and my behavior. I could never publicly turn my back on that belief, so I have refused opportunities to testify against the United States in the Hiroshima matter. . . . I know that I was terrified at what might happen and d----d relieved when the invasion became unnecessary. I accept the military estimates that at least one million lives were saved and mine could have been one of them.

I have known a few men who served in the armed forces in the Pacific who completely agree. My father-in-law, an Army officer in 1945, veteran of eight combat amphibious assaults in the Pacific, is convinced that he is alive because the atom bomb canceled the invasion of Japan. My father was assigned to the Pacific Fleet in 1945 and wound up on an aircraft carrier, serving a battle station as a 40-mm antiaircraft gunner. Carriers were primary kamikaze targets.

There are two essential books to understand what happened and why. One is a little-known work of Japanese historians, written eight years after the bombing, Japan's Longest Day . Their focus is on the period between the Nagasaki bombing and the radio address of Emperor Hirohito in which he announced that the war had not turned in Japan's favor. The authors painstakingly document the fact that even the atomic bombings did not persuade all the Japanese high command to surrender. A coup was actually attempted by an army general, who sent troops to occupy the emperor's palace grounds, take the emperor into protective custody and seize the recordings of his statement to be broadcast. The coup failed, of course, but as Wellington had said about Waterloo, it was a close-run thing.

The second book is an award-winning book, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, by Richard B. Frank. A very comprehensive history, Frank documents the Japanese plan for defending against American invasion of the home islands, using Japanese documents and records. But his best contribution is the way he shows the context in which the Japanese bombings occurred.

Frank shows that the most destructive weapon used against Japan in 1945 was blockade, which robbed Japan of raw materials, petroleum and most vitally, food from the Asian mainland. The blockade was enforced by submarines and B-29 bombers, which laid mines throughout the Sea of Japan, concentrating on the approaches to Japan's harbors. Japan's industries were surprisingly resilient to aerial bombing but could not function when their raw materials were so successfully interdicted.

The remains of Nagasaki, destroyed by an atom bomb on August 9, 1945

Frank shows that within a day of the first bombing, Japanese scientists had correctly identified the weapon's type. Even so, no one's first thought was of surrender. The death tolls of the bombings and the extent of their physical destruction were neither remarkable nor unusual by that stage of the war. As far back as March, B-29s had killed far more people in one night of bombing Tokyo than died in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. While the Japanese high council did understand that the atom bomb was an unstoppable weapon, well, so were the vast fleets of American bombers already pulverizing Japan's cities. (The high council, eight men who advised the emperor, ruled Japan without challenge. The Diet was toothless by 1945.)

The emperor and his government were united in a collective, non-negotiable condition for capitulation - that the emperor and his office must remain intact, along with the ancient symbols of his divine authority – something akin to the British crown jewels and scepter; the closest American equivalents are the original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The emperor's line had continued unbroken for 2,600 years and his imperial regalia had been passed down from time immemorial. Together they defined the national polity. Japan Zone explains ,

According to the historical chronicles of ancient Japan, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, AD712) and the Nihon Shoki (Chronicle of Japan, AD720), the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami presented the sanshu no jingi or Imperial Regalia to her grandson, Ninigi no Mikoto. He in turn passed them on to his descendants, the emperors, the first of whom was Emperor Jimmu. The regalia, a mirror, a sword and a curved jewel are symbols of the legitimacy and authority of the emperor. These creation myths also form the foundations of the indigenous Shinto faith.

At the insistence of General Douglas MacArthur, who knew Japan, its history and culture intimately, America covertly promised to leave intact the emperor's throne and regalia long before the atom bombings. The Allies issued Japan the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945, directing Japan to surrender or "face prompt and utter destruction." Only two days later Japan's government rejected the ultimatum out of hand. On July 31, Emperor Hirohito told the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Koichi Kido (a member of the high council) that the imperial regalia would have to be protected at all costs.

Despite the secret guarantees, none of the high council agreed to surrender before the atom bombings occurred. Japan's prosecution of the war never let up. The Truman administration and military commanders began to wonder whether, short of actual invasion, Japan could be brought to surrender. (Several of the high council never agreed to surrender even after the atom bombings.)

Until 1995, very large amounts of American records from the months before the bombings remained classified. These records included minutes of meetings of very high-level American civilian officials and military officers. The more conspiracy-minded of historians claimed that the decades-long classification of these records were meant to conceal the enormous rifts within the government over using the atom bomb, and that the hawks of the government and armed forces had succeeded in quashing objections.

However, when the records were released in the '90s, no such rift was evident. While it is true that a number of officials and generals expressed dismay or reservations later (often years later), they never uttered objections before the bombings.

So why were the files classified so long? The answer is mundane: they showed that not only were US intelligence services intercepting and decoding Japanese communications, they were doing the same with the communications of almost 30 other countries, many allied with the United States, including our closest ally, Britain,

These interceptions included those of non-belligerent nations that still maintained embassies in Tokyo. Their communications to their home governments in 1945 were nearly unanimous that Japan would not capitulate. It would fight to the bitter end.

Another thing that the files revealed was that a serious rift over US policy and plans against Japan was developing before the atom bombings, but not over the atom bomb or its use. The rift was over the prospect on invading Japan. And the neutral nation's diplomatic messages were part of the reason.

American planners' estimates of casualties on both sides following an invasion were shockingly high. The recent bloodbath of the battle for Okinawa evoked a split among the American joint chiefs of staff over the prospect of invasion. Half the service chiefs became opposed to invasion because the human toll was unacceptable. Richard Frank concludes in an online essay that this rift was not quite fully set by the end of July but that, absent Japan's captitulation in August, the president would have decided not to invade the Japanese home islands and would have ordered other means to force surrender.

What could those other ways have included? Even if Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been destroyed by atom bombings, they would not have been spared destruction by massive, conventional bombing. The air campaigns against Japanese cities and lines of communication - rail lines, roads, bridges and the like - would have continued, even though by mid-1945 they were mostly destroyed. Japan's cargo fleet was mostly sunk. Japan had no navy left to speak of. What it did have was thousands of airplanes, millions of soldiers and militia and near-limitless stocks of ammunition, held in reserve to oppose invasion.

Hence, American strategy, absent invasion, could only have consisted of two things:

1. More atom bombings. The atom bombings of Japanese cities would not have stopped with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Manufacture of atom bombs was scheduled to ramp up to at least two per month before autumn and other target cities had already been identified.

2. Tightening the already-choking blockade. It's worth remembering that as late as World War One, blockade as a war measure was condemned as inhumane and even criminal because its effects spread across all the people of the blockaded country, without regard to age, sex, or status as soldier or civilian. Cut off from Asian mainland food stocks, the Japanese were coming dangerously close to actual starvation by late spring 1945. The per capita, daily calorie intake had fallen to significantly less than the minimum required and was declining steadily. Even after the war, typhoons so damaged Japan's rice fields in October 1945 that massive US food aid was required to prevent mass starvation. Had the war still been going on then, as it would have without the atom bombings, the Japanese death toll would have been very high.

As you can see, though, such a "strategy" is no strategy at all. It is a spasm. Had President Truman not ordered the atom bombings, the US military could have done nothing but intensify conventional bombing and blockading. Hence, Japan could not possibly have been brought to a gentler end of the war than the ending that occurred. Had fighting continued after early August 1945, additional civilian deaths would certainly have numbered in the many hundreds of thousands and probably in the millions by the end of the year.

More likely, though, is that without the atom bombings, Japan would have become embroiled in civil war, which also would have been lethal beyond estimate. Japanese records show that the overriding fear of Japan's high council was the destruction of the emperor's office and line, and the most serious threat thereto was revolution by the Japanese people themselves. The American blockade was so punishing the people that Japan's internal security service, the Kempei Tai, had soberly concluded that revolution was becoming ever-more possible. Even the most hawkish of the council were petrified by this prospect, realizing that people who were literally starving could never be reasoned with to endure obediently to their deaths, especially as they watched their children suffer. The council also had no way to ensure that army units would remain loyal to the emperor once the people took to the streets - the soldiers were hungry, too.

Hence, the atom bombings provided an opening for a face-saving way to end the war. Petrified by the prospect of civil revolution, the high council could preserve its honor (as it understood it) by claiming that the atom bomb was a new weapon of such power that resistance was no longer preferable or possible. This was indeed the tack they took. Not every member of the high council agreed even so; some were willing to risk that the American invasion would come before a domestic revolution broke out and that once US troops were ashore, the people would unite to fight the enemy.

Finally, Emperor Hirohito himself broke the impasse, speaking directly to the high council, which had never been done before. He declared that "the time has come when we must bear the unbearable....[so I] give my sanction to the proposal to accept the Allied [Potsdam] Proclamation," that had directed Japan to surrender or face utter destruction.

The atom bombings, then, provided the opening rather than a fundamental reason to accept the Allies' terms. With the assurance that the Americans would neither abolish the emperor's office nor claim the imperial symbols as war prizes, surrender became the only guarantee that the national polity could continue. Hence it was less undesirable than continuing the war, which would have only invited more destruction and then revolution.

The Kit-Kat Jesus

2010-08-05T11:31:00.002-05:00

According to The Telegraph, this is, "A Kit-Kat which supposedly contains an image of Jesus."

"I was amazed. I just took a bite and then I saw the face of Christ in it," the finder told the NU.nl Dutch website. Other witnesses were less impressed. "It looks more like Darth Vader," said one.

Here is an image from the Shroud of Turin, reputed to be the burial shroud of Jesus.

And here is Darth Vader.

I report, you decide. Shroud of Turin gets my vote,.

Learning the hard way

2010-08-02T20:59:00.004-05:00

There is probably no more difficult lesson to learn than that life is not about you.

link

"De-baptized?"

2010-07-22T12:02:00.000-05:00

In the "news of the weird" category comes this report: "U.S. Atheists Reportedly Using Hair Dryers to 'De-Baptize'."

American atheists lined up to be "de-baptized" in a ritual using a hair dryer, according to a report Friday on U.S. late-night news program "Nightline."

Right: hair dryers, the nemesis of God!

Leading atheist Edwin Kagin blasted his fellow non-believers with the hair dryer to symbolically dry up the holy water sprinkled on their heads in days past. The styling tool was emblazoned with a label reading "Reason and Truth."

Kagin believes parents are wrong to baptize their children before they are able to make their own choices, even slamming some religious education as "child abuse." He said the blast of hot air was a way for adults to undo what their parents had done.

Okay, let me get this straight: they are atheists so therefore must believe that baptism is itself a ritual devoid of content. The application of water by priest or pastor in the Trinitarian formula, the invocation of the Holy Spirit and so forth - all these things have nothing real behind them. They are as devoid of divine presence as, say, hitting a golf ball on Sunday morning.

If they really are atheists, that's what they have to believe about the efficacy of baptism. So if baptism both symbolizes and accomplishes nothing real, then how can s-called "de-baptism" do so? There are only two choices here:

1. Baptism is nothing and means nothing. It's a zero, a null set. Therefore, de-baptism is nothing and means nothing. You cannot subtract from zero or take away from an empty set. So exactly what is the point?

2. Baptism does have some reality to it, so by going through motions with this hair dryer, that reality is presumed removed from the life of the de-baptized.

So which of these two, mutually-exclusive conclusions does someone standing before the dryer affirm? If baptism is not real, it can have no hold on you. But if baptism is real, at least in some way, then it cannot be revoked by human word or deed, since baptism is the work of the Holy Spirit with the priest or pastor as effective, but not original, agent. In most Christian theology of baptism, someone can no more be de-baptized than a Jewish man can be de-circumcised.

But all's well that ends well.

Ironically, Kagin's own son became a fundamentalist Christian minister after having "a personal revelation in Jesus Christ."

Bet he's baptized now.

Could be worse

2010-07-22T12:01:00.000-05:00

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I never thought of myself as a horror writer, but thanks heavens I don't write like James Fennimore Cooper.

Some notes about reaching the unchurched

2010-06-20T19:37:00.000-05:00

I once attended a seminar at Hendersonville 1st UMC on connecting with non-religious people. Some of the points made I found somewhat dubious, such as the claim that "Jesus broke away from his religious tradition for a higher good," which I addressed in more detail here.

But here are some points worth thinking about:

Do we present Christianity as a system of beliefs or a way of life? John Wesley said that one may affirm the truth of one, 20 or 100 creeds and yet have no saving faith at all. Faith that saves is not "believing beliefs," not the mere assent to propositions. It is, said Wesley, a conviction wrought in one's heart that in Jesus Christ, all that is necessary for our salvation has been accomplished and that there is no life apart from him.
Don't present Jesus as the answer to problems but as the lover of souls. The deepest need of human souls is not problem solving, but the search for meaning. If you have never read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, I urge you to order it and read it as soon as you can.

Do we have a passion for Christ, or a passion for the church? When we substitute passion for the church rather than for Jesus, we start to prize order, routine and predictability. Jesus said (John 3):
"The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."
The Spirit-led church will often appear unpredictable! As I preached last May,
We will never thrive with top-down leadership, where the pastor and committees decide what the ministries of the church will be, then nominate and elect members to carry them out. We will thrive with ministries that emerge from Spirit-led disciples who are mostly self-organizing.
Unchurched people are not looking for organizational excellence, but a church that is trying, for all its imperfections, to be "worthy of the calling to which it has been called." That means our passion must be for Jesus, not one another.
We should be about attraction, not promotion. This is linked closely with communicating Jesus as a lover of souls. What is it about our faith life and practice that will attract people of our community and make them commit to it along with us, rather than simply participate in an event? Church promotion gains only participants, and very temporary ones at that. If we understand that we should attract people to commitment, not mere participation, then our own self understanding will change.

A Good Shepherd Isn't Who You Think

2010-04-24T16:32:00.003-05:00

My message for April 25:

Why don’t we still have stables at the church?

2010-04-24T15:49:00.001-05:00

The first church I served was founded in 1844, but the Union army destroyed the building during the Civil War. At war’s end, the people bought another tract of land and built a new church. It being 1865, they built a stable and carriage shed in the rear to protect horses and carriages from the elements when the people were at church.

The stable and shed are no longer there.

The sanctuary originally had narrow, wooden benches with no backs, a common feature of churches back then. In the early 1900s, high-backed pews were installed, decreasing seating capacity by almost 100. Soft pew cushions were added about 25 years ago.

No one knows what happened to the benches.

The church was originally lit by oil lamps. It was not electrified until FDR’s Rural Electrification Administration gave assistance. Since the mid-1930s, the church has used electric lights.

The oil lamps are nowhere to be found.

A man in his 80s told me he used to come early on winter Sundays as a lad to light the coal heaters in the sanctuary. A few years after getting electric lights, the church converted to electric heat.

The coal heaters are long gone.

The transoms over the stained-glass windows could be opened for ventilation when they were installed in 1916. Decades later the church added air conditioning.

The transoms were then soldered shut.

Some years before I arrived, the church converted a Sunday School room to a nursery. Before then, mothers were expected to look after their small children at church or stay home with them.

Though the stables had long disappeared when I arrived, the church had no parking lot. It did have a small, graveled-over area that was itself overgrown with grass. People parked on it and on the lawn.

One especially soggy November a woman visitor pointed out to me that she had apparently ruined her shoes walking through the mud from her car. I related this conversation to our lay leader, who was a woman also, but she replied that muddy shoes were a small price to pay to worship God when the early Christians worshiped at risk of death.

The problem is, of course, that there were dozens of churches in the community where one could worship just as well without ruining one’s shoes. Not long afterward, the church built a 100-space, paved, curbed and lined parking lot with a sheltered drive-up.

Each one of these changes was, in its time, very controversial among the members, some of whom resisted them vigorously.

Would you like our church to take out the cushioned pews, uninstall the air conditioning and return to kerosene lighting? Of course not – but it’s important to realize that what we think of as normal and common sense was once widely seen as radical, new-fangled, faddish and unnecessary.

They are universal features now because churches learned that if they did not adapt, people would go elsewhere. When a significant percentage of churches began to accommodate cars instead of horse and carriage, people who drove cars went to them. Churches that held onto stables either closed or made the shift. Same with efficient cooling: people migrated away from open-window churches to air-conditioned ones until the holdout churches understood they’d have to get cool or close.

Today, the “textual generation” is being replaced by the “audiovisual, web-connected generation.” The former learns mainly by reading. But people not much younger than me learn mainly by looking and hearing. The younger someone is, the truer this is. People in their teens and 20s also expect to absorb information by more than one means at a time and interact with one another while they are doing it.

Today, churches are turning to use of multimedia during worship at a rapid pace. Overall, this is less controversial than tearing down the stables was. But like stabled churches had to do, we have to realize that this is the way that society is moving. Churches must adopt this technology or the next generation will simply go elsewhere.

I find this an exciting opportunity, not a daunting challenge. For the first time in literally all the centuries of the Christian era, we actually have a new means to connect the Good News of Jesus Christ with people in ways that have never been possible before. This should fill us with enthusiasm, not timidity!

Easter- So What?

2010-04-04T06:00:00.004-05:00

What's wrong with this picture? Well, a number of things, but let us admit that it is not intended to be a photo-accurate depiction of Jesus exiting his tomb on the first Easter morning almost 2,000 years ago. It's obviously simply intended to illustrate the central claim of Christianity: that Jesus of Nazareth, having been crucified to death (here's why) on Friday and entombed late that afternoon, was raised from death by the power of God on Sunday morning.

Back to the picture. My friends know I am a stickler for accuracy. First, there is no passage in the Gospels that describe Jesus exiting the tomb. He was laid in the tomb on Friday. The stone was rolled across the entrance to seal the tomb. On Sunday the women, friends of his and his mother, went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. The stone was not rolled away for Jesus's exit, but for the women's convenience so they could enter easily.

What the women saw inside were Jesus's grave wrappings, lying exactly as if the corpse within had simply vanished inside them. John's Gospel records, "the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head [was] not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself."

Romans aimed for maximum deterrent effect in crucifixion. Inflicting humiliation was part of the package. They stripped the condemned entirely naked before they nailed them to the cross. Jesus was naked when his friends took him down from the cross. They tried to clean his terribly-savaged corpse (whipped nearly to death by the Romans before crucifixion) and apply funereal spices before the onset of the Sabbath at sundown. They didn't finish. So they covered Jesus's face with a cloth, about the size of a modern hand towel, wrapped his body with a large cloth and then looped a long strip of cloth around the outside (probably torn from the side of the large cloth), loosely so that removing it would be easy on Sunday morning, when the women would return to finish applying the spices.

So however Jesus exited the tomb, he came out naked, certainly not clothed in a Clorox-clean robe. We know this because John says the Christ, arisen,

... said to her [Mary Magdalene], "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?"

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away."

So somewhere, perhaps, a gardener was going to get to work later and wonder had happened to his work clothes.

The story of the first Easter is as familiar to church people as any story we know. Perhaps it has lost its power because of that fact. Each Gospel telling of that first Easter day adds certain embellishments, too. Mark's account is rather sparse, but the other Gospels add more and more detail until by the time we're through we have a virtual parade of folks and supernatural beings practically huddled near the tomb - Roman soldiers, Temple representatives, the women, panting disciples, angels. I almost expect the Marine band to be along any minute. And somewhere in there, almost lost in the crowd, we catch a fleeting glimpse of Jesus, risen from the dead, and everyone uncomprehending of what it means, including the women who saw him and the two men who can't make much sense how Jesus's grave clothes can just be empty.

And it happened way over yonder, in Israel, way back when. What is Easter for in 2010?

United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon served many years at the dean of Duke University’s chapel. He once told of an interview he gave to a student reporter for the Duke University campus newspaper. Easter was approaching. So was Spring Break, which ended on Easter weekend that year.

“I'm doing a story on fun things to do during Spring Break,” said the student-reporter, “and thought it would be cool to mention the Chapel.”

“Okay,” said Reverend Willimon.

“Dr. Willimon,” the student said, “what is the goal of Easter?”

Willimon later wrote that he had no ready answer. A horrible thought went through his mind – an image of a headline, “Preacher says Easter is pointless.”

At right is an iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon long before he danced with the stars. A few years after this day in July 1969, some wag made a poster of this photo (I Google in vain for an image) topped with the words, "So What?"

And this is, in fact, an excellent question to ask about the illustration of Jesus exiting the tomb, above, leaving aside its inaccuracy to the recorded event.

What is the point of Jesus's resurrection? What purpose does it serve?

There's an old story of a preacher who had invited the children up to the altar area one Easter morning for the children's sermon. He asked the question, "When Jesus came out of the tomb that day, what do you suppose was the first thing he said?"

A little girl jumped up, waving her hand and exclaiming, "I know! I know!" She thrust one foot forward and raised her hands triumphantly above her hand, then yelled, "TA DA!"

Is that it? God gets to wow us? Well, I am appropriately wowed. But if that's all there is, then my life is no different and I am no better off.

But, as you might imagine, the apostle Paul got it clearly. In a letter to the church in Corinth, Greece, he wrote (1 Corinthians 15:12-20):

12It is proclaimed that Christ has been raised from the dead, so how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ was not raised, either. 14And if Christ was not raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15Moreover, we are liars about God, for we have staked our reputations that God raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if all the dead are not raised. 16For if all the dead are not raised, then neither has Christ been raised. 17And if Christ has not been raised, your faith does you no good because you’re still in your sins. 18That means that those who died believing in Christ are gone forever. 19If Christ matters only for this life, we are more pitiful than anyone else. 20But Christ really has been raised from the dead; he was the first to be raised of all the dead.

The primary point of Jesus's resurrection is not really Jesus. The point is you and me. The resurrection of Jesus is the surety of a promise. The fundamental promise of God is that he will bring human beings into reconciliation with himself and preserve the righteous to live with him forever. How do we know that we will be raised from the dead? We know because God has already raised Jesus from the dead. Jesus’s resurrection is how God has proved he will keep his promise to raise everyone the dead at the end of the age. In fact, Paul sees Jesus’ resurrection as the actual inaugural event of the general resurrection.

That's why Paul elsewhere says that Jesus is a pioneer for the faith of Christian people. By his resurrection, Jesus blazed a trail. Jesus promised, explained this ahead of time.

"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going."

Now I am not much one for the way that, "Much of modern Christianity preaches a comforting Home Depot theology: You can do it. We can help." One thing's for sure: if we are to be raised from death ourselves, somewhen, not one of us can do it on our own. And yes, I do think that we American Christians are much too narcissistic in our religious life but Easter really is maybe the one Sunday we can ask, faithfully, "What's in it for me?"

Your own empty tomb, someday, that's what. Pretty good deal, I'd say.

Here is a Youtube of His Majesty's Clerkes singing, "The Lord is Ris'n Indeed," by early American composer William Billings.

Why crucify Jesus?

2010-04-01T08:12:00.002-05:00

As Good Friday and Easter approach, Christians across the globe come to re-examine the events of Jesus's last week in Jerusalem, referred to nowadays as Holy Week or Passion Week. The week began in triumph for Jesus as he entered the city being greeted as a nationalistic hero by some of the people who turned out to welcome him by laying their cloaks upon the road in his path, waving palm fronds and calling out praises.

Yet before the week was out, Jesus had been brutally beaten almost to death by the Romans, then driven to a place just outside the city called The Skull, or in Greek, Golgotha. There Roman soldiers nailed Jesus to a cross, upon which he died a short time later.

But what exactly was Jesus's capital offense? Crucifixion was used by the Romans only for that worst of all possible crimes: sedition or active resistance against the Roman imperium -- mutiny, in other words. Mutiny is always a cooperative effort. One person cannot commit mutiny, the crime definitionally involves conspiracy. Under Roman law, the only Roman citizens who could be crucified were mutinous or treasonous soldiers.

Absent conviction of a crime against the rule of Caesar, Jesus might have been executed, but not by crucifixion. The Romans made sure to carry out crucifixions in very public, well-traveled places where the intense suffering of the the victim would serve as a warning to others not to get any bright ideas. Those convicted of capital offenses considered less serious than sedition died a quicker and more private death by ordinary hanging or by beheading.

That Jesus was crucified rather than simply killed proves that the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, found him guilty of an offense against Rome itself. But what?

There are no notes from the trial of Jesus before Pilate. The accounts of the Gospels were written down many years later, decades, in fact. I read them not as verbatim accounts of the procedures but as dramatic accounts to tell the story of Jesus's death and how it came to occur.

But these the accounts of Jesus's arrest, hearings, trial and execution are not mainly theological explorations, either. The Gospel's writers seem to have possessed historical nuggets of the most important events and then tried to fill in some gaps by integrating what several threads of traditions said. Thus, we can understand that the Gospels' detailed conversations between Jesus and Pilate are not so much transcripts of what was said as dialog that is intended to show how and why one event moved to another.

Some historical facts are not disputed. The Sunday before Passover, probably between 30-33 c.e., Jesus and his disciples arrived in Jerusalem. The crowd that greeted them joyfully soon dissipated. Jerusalem would have been packed with Jewish pilgrims from Judea and across the Mediterranean world, come to the city to celebrate passover and make sacrifices at the Temple. Having been under Roman (hence pagan) occupation for many decades, and the pagan Greeks before that, the Jews' nationalistic fervor ran high during the holy season, so high, in fact, that Pilate abandoned his government's center in Caesarea, about 75 miles northwestward, and came to Jerusalem along with a couple of thousand soldiers. Whether Jerusalem was actually a tinderbox looking for a fuze, who knows today, but Pilate certainly thought so then.

Pilate was a very violent ruler. He had little compunction about sentencing people to death. Many hundreds of Jews, if not more, had already died by his command, some put to the sword, others nailed to a cross. The first-century Jewish historian Philo wrote that Pilate was not much worried about niceties of the law such as a proper trial for the accused. Pilate was known to be very suspicious of crowds, having already loosed his soldiers against at least two large crowds of Jews, one instance killing a large number. The Gospels record without commentary a time when Pilate sent his cavalry, swords swinging, into a group (of unspecified size) of men gathered to make religious sacrifices, killing the lot.

That Pilate was eventually fired by his direct boss, the governor of Syria, for being too violent speaks volumes, since Roman rule anywhere was lethally unforgiving of resistance. Pilate was sent back to Rome where he disappears from credible historical accounts.

The level of collusion between the Jewish high council (the Sanhedrin) and Pilate is unclear. It was mediated by the high priest, Caiaphas, in any event. All four Gospels present Jesus as being hauled before the Caiaphas - at his house, not at the Temple - and three say that there were other Jewish leaders present; Luke calls them "the elders of the people, both the chief priests and teachers of the law." Whomever they were, whether they were the Sanhedrin properly convened or not (and I think not), they are only presented as an echo board for Caiaphas.

What did Caiaphas have against Jesus? The synoptic Gospels indicate that Caiaphas's principal charge against Jesus was blasphemy, of which Jesus was undeniably guilty based on the facts as they were at the time, since the only proof of his divinity that Jesus could offer was his later resurrection from the dead. Mark records that early in his ministry, Jesus was accused of being in league with the devil, for which his miracle working was proof. This was a charge tantamount to sorcery, mentioned in the Jewish Scriptures only to denounce it (2 Chron. 33:6 and Nahum 3:4).

Matthew 26 records that after he was arrested and was brought before Caiaphas,

Then the high priest said to him, "I put you under oath before the living God, tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God." 64 Jesus said to him, "You have said so. But I tell you, From now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven." 65 Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, "He has blasphemed! Why do we still need witnesses? You have now heard his blasphemy. 66 What is your verdict?" They answered, "He deserves death."

I think the Gospel of John's explanation, which differs from the others', gives important insights to the dynamics of Caiaphas's relationship with Pilate, showing that the high priest was primarily concerned with preserving the lives of the people. John presents a more nuanced case of Caiaphas against Jesus that makes Caiaphas more concerned with politics with Pilate than internal affairs of religion. Chapter 11 records that Caiaphas was deeply fearful of Pilate's propensity to violence (for excellent reasons, as we have seen). The chapter also says that Caiaphas was willing to plot Jesus's death in order to prevent Pilate from slaughtering the crowds who followed Jesus and then turning his soldiers loose to ravage the country itself. There was Roman precedent for this. Not long after Jesus was born, a would-be revolutionary band of the city of Tzippori (Sepphoris) in Gallilee had tried to throw off Rome's yoke. This was before Pilate became prefect, but the Roman response was crushing. Roman soldiers laid waste to the entire city, crucified several hundred men and sold everyone else into slavery. The shock of this savagery would have been vivid in Caiaphas's mind. It was the sort of thing, or worse, that he reasonably feared Pilate would render to Judea if Jesus continued unchecked.

The crowds Jesus drew were particularly worrisome because they signified that Jesus was gaining a growing following. What if, with the masses supporting him, Jesus attempted to claim the throne of David, to which he was by descent from David entitled? The king of the Jews at the time was Herod Antipas, whose Jewish lineage was suspect and who was a Roman vassal to boot. Antipas was despised by the Jews. To have an inheritor of the line of David (even if only adopted into the line), who had a huge following, make a power play for the throne could have only bloody results.

That Jesus had said and done nothing to demonstrate such intention would have been of no comfort to Caiaphas; as we say nowadays, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." What insurrectionist or revolutionary announces his goals before the optimum time? Jesus knew that such suspicions were harbored against him. In Mark 14, when Jesus is arrested, he demands directly, "Am I leading a rebellion that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me?"

Caiaphas certainly knew that Pilate was deeply suspicious of crowds and had already dealt bloodily with more than one. To both the Jewish leaders and the Romans, a Jew with messianic intentions was foremost a political figure and in the minds of many Jews (and certainly Pilate), a potential military leader as well.

On Thursday evening of what would become known as Holy Week, Jesus was arrested by Temple police in Gethsemane, just outside Jerusalem. His disciples, who were with him, fled, leaving Jesus isolated. Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, traitorously brought the authorities to Jesus to apprehend him. (Or was Judas actually doing Jesus' bidding?)

The simplest narrative of events from then is John's. After being arrested, Jesus was taken to Annas, Caiaphas's father in law. Whereas in the synoptic gospels Jesus appears before a council of some kind and is found guilty of blasphemy at a drumhead court, in John no such council is present nor is there any sort of trial. Jesus, remaining bound, speaks only to Caiaphas, who instead of pronouncing him guilty of some crime, "questioned Jesus about his disciples and his teaching." Jesus doesn't play along. An official present struck him on the face for responding insolently to the high priest.

Caiaphas quickly sent Jesus to Pilate. John relates a long dialog between Jesus and Pilate after Jesus's Jewish captors charge Jesus with nothing more specific than that he was a criminal. Talking to Pilate, Jesus admits that he is a king, although he says, "my kingdom is not of this world." Pilate seems to seize on this confession (of sorts) as a challenge to Rome, but nothing comes of it. Insisting that he finds nothing about Jesus justifying execution, he orders Jesus flogged. Finally, Pilate caves and orders the crucifixion.

For someone whom Caiaphas feared would decimate the whole country because of Jesus, Pilate seems awfully peaceable when he had the chance to get rid of Jesus. He had to be cajoled, even threatened, into it. In John, the Jews present tell Pilate that to release Jesus would be the same as opposing Caesar. Now Pilate is the one being accused of incipient treason!

But Pilate might have been trying all along to shift the blame for Jesus's execution from himself onto the Jewish leadership. It was Passover week, remember, when passions ran high. Jesus still had thousands of devotees who were unaware that he had been arrested overnight. Might they riot in protest? It was a real danger,as Matthew explicitly records the chief priests realized; it was the reason they decided not to snatch Jesus during the daytime. If a riot there might be, Pilate might have thought, best to preemptively divert its rage away from the Romans and onto Caiaphas and company. Pilate would not be able to sit it out, but reporting to Rome that the people were rebelling against their own religious authorities, not Caesar, was infinitely better than the other way round.

But while Pilate was trying to play Caiaphas, the high priest, knowing well Jesus's popularity among the masses (as well as his allies among some members of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus, for example) may well have been trying to set up Pilate to take the heat for him, also. Both men may have wanted to put the monkey on the other's back. This would help explain why Caiaphas gave Jesus such a cursory hearing before trundling him over to Pilate and the resistance to executing Jesus that Pilate gave right back to Caiaphas. Finally, Caiaphas was impelled to back Pilate into a corner with a nearly-explicit threat: if you free Jesus we will report to Rome that you failed to defend Caesar against an insurrectionist, a pretender to your vassal Antipas's throne, whom we do not recognize as legitimate in the first place, but matters not, for, "We have no king but Caesar," Pilate. How about you?

It is a grievous error to blame "the Jews" categorically for Jesus's death, but there is no way to get around Caiaphas's deep involvement. As for Pilate, his intelligence sources would have kept him informed of Jesus for quite awhile. Pilate would not have been caught flat-footed when Jesus appeared before him early Friday morning. The Gospels describe no prior collusion between Caiaphas and Pilate concerning Jesus, but I have to think that they may have already outlined the kabuki dance that began when Jesus appeared before Pilate, who was undoubtedly frustrated that his interrogation of Jesus elicited no actionable confession. Not being given the open-and-shut case that he probably presumed he would have, Pilate, over Caiaphas's protest, ordered a sign affixed to Jesus's cross identifying him as "King of the Jews," a sign probably intended to implicate Caiaphas directly in Jesus's death, for whom else could have made such a charge?

Despite their differences, both Caiaphas and Pilate came to see that executing Jesus was win-win for them. By giving up Jesus to Pilate, Caiaphas would prevent the Jesus movement from getting out of hand before it was too late to prevent the unspeakable horror of Pilate sending a legion or two to teach Judea to stop raising up such troublesome sons. When Caiaphas conversed with Jesus at his house, he may well have been trying to cut a deal with Jesus that would preserve Jesus's life at the price of Jesus agreeing to stop working all those miracles and raising such a following - in other words, to live the ordinary life of an ordinary man, get married, settle down and play nice. It is almost impossible to believe that turning Jesus over the Pilate to be killed would be an easy decision for any high priest, this one included. Whatever Caiaphas actually talked to Jesus about, Jesus certainly swatted the approach away with finality. Faced with such intransigence, Caiaphas saw no recourse but to hand Jesus over to Pilate and make sure that Pilate never gave him back.

As for Pilate, his win would be to stop the Jesus movement cold by the very simple, effective expedient of killing Jesus. After all, he could not continue to send taxes and goods to Rome by destroying the country that produced them.

Jesus, it seems, had become too threatening to be allowed to live. Both Caiaphas and Pilate had the motive and the opportunity that week to stop him but only Pilate had the means to stop him permanently. There was a meeting of mind between Caiaphas and Pilate, and Jesus got caught in the middle.

But here's the kicker: Jesus cooperated with what they had planned for him. There was, unwittingly on their parts, a meeting of minds with Jesus, too. About that, later.

Was Judas actually Christ's accomplice?

2010-03-31T10:34:00.002-05:00

Or was Judas truly a traitor to Jesus after all?

One of the most deeply-rooted traditions in Christian faith is that one of Jesus' disciples, Judas Iscariot, cruelly betrayed Jesus in Jerusalem, guiding Temple soldiers to Jesus and identifying Jesus to them. Jesus was immediately seized and taken away. He was shortly condemned by both the Jewish Sanhedrin and the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

Not long ago a documentary on the Discovery Channel examined the last week of Jesus' life. One scholar posed the idea that Judas did not betray Jesus, but was Jesus' accomplice in carrying out a course of action that went bad in ways Judas did not foresee, but Jesus did.

I don't recall the scholar's name, but his position was based almost exclusively on word studies of the Greek texts of the Gospel's accounts of the events, especially the word translated "betray," which is translated elsewhere as hand over or deliver up - about which more in a moment.

The idea that Judas was traitor has very ample evidence, not least of which is the testimony of the Gospels themselves. Luke identifies Judas as a traitor early:

Luke 6:16: Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. [There were two disciples named Judas. The infamous Judas was termed "Iscariot." This term refers to his hometown of Kerioth, in southern Judah. Hence, Judas was the only one of the Twelve who was not a Galilean.]

John's Gospel also identifies Judas as a traitor:

John 18:5: "Jesus of Nazareth," they replied. "I am he," Jesus said. (And Judas the traitor was standing there with them.)

There are other such specific attestations as well. (The Greek used for "traitor" is prodotes, which has no other connotation.)

"Traitor" is not the only pejorative term used about Judas in the Gospels. He is also called a "thief" in John 12:6; as the "keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it."

So an attempt to paint Judas in more favorable terms has very strong scriptural obstacles to overcome, to say the least. There are, however, some questions that intrigue:

How did Jesus know that Judas would betray him? None of the other disciples knew. Like the other Gospels, John 13 relates that Jesus gathered his disciples for a meal on his last evening as a free man. After an instructional discourse to them, Jesus informed them, "I tell you the truth, one of you is going to betray me" (v. 21). Jesus identified the traitor as one who with whom he would share bread, then handed bread to Judas.

As soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him. "What you are about to do, do quickly," Jesus told him, but no one at the meal understood why Jesus said this to him.

Since Judas had charge of the money, some thought Jesus was telling him to buy what was needed for the Feast, or to give something to the poor [v.27-29].

How did Jesus know he would be betrayed in the first place, and that Judas would be the traitor? The Gospels give no clue.

The Greek word used for betrayal, paradidomi, does not mean only a traitorous action. It can also be translated, according to Strong's Greek Dictionary (a standard reference) as "to surrender, yield up, entrust or transmit," without necessarily implying underhandedness. My Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon indicates the word is multivalent (as are so many Greek words) and betrayal is one of several meanings the word implies. Context is everything.

The King James version translates paradidomi as "deliver up" in other parts of the Gospels. The modern NIV translates it in other uses as "hand over." In Mark 10:33, Jesus foretells that the Jewish authorities will "hand him over" to the Romans, and the word used there is paradidomi, the same word translated as "betrayal" when referring to Judas' deeds.

The ambiguity of the word at least leaves open the possibility that Judas' actions were not actually traitorous. In fact, the NIV translates paradidomi as "hand over" in Matt 26:15-16. Judas went to the chief priests and asked, "What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?" So they counted out for him thirty silver coins. From then on Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over."

(According to some historians, the money Judas was paid was standard bounty money paid to good citizens who identified wrong-doers.)

After Judas left the Upper Room, Jesus completed the Last Supper. Then he and his disciples went to the Mount of Olives, outside the city. Matthew and Mark say they went to there and then to "a place called Gethsemane," where he was arrested. Luke says he was arrested at the Mount of Olives and does not mention Gethsemane. John merely says they went to an olive grove across the Kidron Valley from the city. (The Gospels never refer to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane.) John confirms, though, that the place was known to Judas "because Jesus had often met there with his disciples" (John 18:2).

After a period of prayer and speaking to his disciples, Judas arrived with soldiers from the Temple, sometimes called Temple police because they were more a constabulary than a fighting force. (The synoptic Gospels say it was "a crowd" armed with clubs and such. John is probably more accurate.) Judas identified Jesus to them, and they apprehended him.

Events then proceeded apace. After a tempestuous confrontation with the Jewish High Priest, Caiaphas, and the high Jewish council (the Sanhredrin), Jesus was convicted of the religious crime of blasphemy for claiming messianic identity. This crime was one for which the Jewish law required death, but the Sanhedrin did not have authority from the Romans to adjudge a capital the sentence. And they knew that Pilate didn't much care about what religious offenses Jews committed. So they persuaded Pilate that Jesus was actually attempting insurrection against Rome. For that, Pilate sentenced Jesus to be crucified, a standard punishment for insurrection against Roman rule. The sentence was carried out.

Judas attempted to return the silver coins to the chief priests, then hanged himself. (Acts says, though, that he bought a field with the coins, fell headlong into it and was disemboweled.)

There are the bare facts of what Judas and Jesus had to do with each other the last week of both their lives.

So - did Judas actually turn traitor against Jesus, or did Judas do what he did at Jesus' bidding?

The claim that Judas was a traitor has the substantial weight of text behind it, as I have explained. But it does not answer four key questions:

1. How did Jesus know he would be betrayed, and betrayed by Judas, and why were the other disciples clueless about it?

2. How did Judas know exactly where to lead the Temple police to arrest Jesus?

3. Why didn't Jesus escape away from Jerusalem when he had the chance? The Mount of Olives was the near edge of safety for him, from there he could have easily gotten away across Jordan River, which land John 11 identifies as safe haven for Jesus.

4. Why did Judas try to return the money and why did he commit suicide? Judas was no fool, he surely knew his betrayal would risk Jesus' life and could not have been surprised when Jesus was condemned.

Postulating that Judas has gotten a bad rap and that Judas was actually doing what Jesus wanted answers these questions. So consider some pluses and minuses of the "Judas as accomplice" theory:

A. As the only Judean, Judas was the only choice to be Jesus' messenger or intermediary with the high priests. The people of Jerusalem considered Galileans to be hicks from the sticks - John 7:41 records the incredulity of Judeans that Jesus was a Galilean: "How can the Christ come from Galilee?"
Advantage: accomplice.

B. Passover week in Jerusalem was always a tempestuous time. Tempers against the Roman occupiers ran high then, so high in fact that Pilate left the resort city of Caesarea and moved to Jerusalem for the duration, where he could control his forces on scene. Jesus was loved by many of the ordinary people. That would explain why the high priest didn't want to arrest Jesus during the daytime when the crowds could see.

But it does not explain why Jesus would arrange to meet with Caiaphas at night, nor for that matter why he didn't arrange to meet Caiaphas himself, without using Judas. If Jesus wanted to meet Caiaphas all he had to do was walk into the Temple and say hello.
Advantage: betrayal.

C. If Judas was Jesus accomplice, why did Jesus tell the disciples, including Judas, that one of them would betray him? They all understood what he meant. For Jesus to call Judas a betrayer while actually being in collusion with him makes Jesus deceptive.

Not only that, Jesus threatened that it would be better for Judas had he never been born (Mark 14:21).
Advantage: betrayal (a major advantage at that).

D. But Jesus knew what Judas was going to do.
Advantage: accomplice.

E. Jesus went to exactly the place where Judas led the Temple police and did not attempt to evade them.
Advantage: accomplice.

F. If he was working at Jesus' initiative, Judas had no reason to believe that the Jewish high council harbored lethal intent toward Jesus. Thus, when Jesus was condemned, Judas was overcome with grief and remorse at having had a part in delivering up Jesus to that fate. So he killed himself.
Advantage: accomplice.

G. Judas took the silver coins from the high priests because he was avaricious and wanted to be paid for betraying Jesus,
or
the 30 pieces of silver were "market rate" and a routine matter for the high priests to pay for cooperating with them.
Advantage: neutral.

Outside the Gospels, Judas is mentioned a couple of times in Acts, written by the author of Luke, but that is all. The rest of the New Testament is silent about him. But the Gospels' record is uniformly negative. Clearly, there was an apostolic and early church understanding that Judas was a traitor.
Advantage: betrayal.

The idea that Judas was an accomplice of Jesus rather that his betrayer rests on too thin evidence to be accepted. The verdict of the early witnesses is upheld.

Update: I see I neglected to explain what the reason would be for Jesus to send Judas on a secret mission to have him delivered into the hands of High Priest. According to the ruminations of a couple of scholars on the Discovery Channel, Jesus wanted to force the issue of who he was with the High Priest and the Sanhedrin. Judas, being the sole Judean among them, could most easily act as intermediary with the Temple.

By this idea, the notion to see Caiaphas by subterfuge would have to be a very late idea in Jesus' mind. We could say the Jesus had tried to force the issue of confronting the Sanhedrin by his violent cleansing of the moneychangers from the Temple earlier in the week. And according to Matthew 23, Jesus launched into verbal broadside against the Temple class that we bloggers might say was the mother of all fisking of their religious practice and indeed, their very identity. He actually called them sons of Hell, not a move calculated to win their affection.

But these events did not cause the religious authorities to apprehend Jesus, forcing Jesus to arrange his "betrayal" to them by Judas. Judas thus would have been faithful to the end; he committed suicide from shock that his faithfulness had led to Jesus' death.

What this theory fails to explain is why Jesus was so desirous to stand before the High Priest. It could not have been merely to respond affirmatively to Caiaphas' question that he was indeed the "Son of the Most High." Jesus had been declaring his Messianic identity openly for some time; in fact, driving out the moneychangers was a Messianic act. He had personally forgiven sins in front of scribes and Pharisees for a couple of years or so, angering them because they knew that only God can forgive sins.

Nor does it hold up that Jesus expected the High Priest to confirm his Messiahship, for the Gospels are full of Jesus saying that judgment would fall upon "this generation" (meaning his own contemporaries) for not recognizing him.

There is one reason, though, that Jesus could have sent Judas to do what Judas did: Jesus intended to force his own execution. His death, then, was not the result merely of a good disciple gone bad, but the actual objective Jesus had in mind all along. And in fact, the Church has usually been quite comfortable with the idea that Jesus’ death was a cosmic necessity. But with Judas a true traitor, Jesus' death can seem practically accidental - it might not have taken place if Judas had reconsidered and heeded Jesus' warning, for example. And a near-accident is a mighty thin lifeline upon which to hang the redemption of humanity! So this part of the Jesus story is a buttress of the notion that Judas was Jesus' agent rather than his betrayer.

But there is an even stronger argument against the theory: Jesus kicked Judas out of the Upper Room before he instituted the Eucharist. Jesus and the disciples gathered there for a meal (not necessarily the Passover Seder; John says it was not, the other three Gospels say it was). It was only after the meal was done that Jesus took the bread, gave thanks for it, blessed the bread and gave it to his disciples. Likewise, it was after the supper that Jesus took the cup of wine and proclaimed it was the cup of the new covenant.

There is no question that Jesus saw the Eucharist as a defining ritual for his followers. He told them to practice it often and that he would share it with them again at the eschaton. That Jesus dismissed Judas from the room before the sharing of the bread and cup must be considered, I think, as proof that Judas was free-lancing, not secretly abetting Jesus' plans. To use a later religious term, Jesus excommunicated Judas from discipleship, and discipleship identity in Christian faith is practically defined by partaking of the Eucharist.

So, in my mind, the idea that Judas was actually Jesus' ally rather than his betrayer is refuted.

More plausible was the show's examination of just who was most responsible for plotting for Jesus to be executed, about which another post to follow.

Hurricane season! Oh, no!

2010-03-17T11:28:00.010-05:00

This morning's email included a nugget in the Tennessee Conference listserv with a link to this alarmist forecast: "Hurricane season may be ‘extreme’."

AccuWeather.com is predicting that the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season will be much more active than last year's, and poses an “above-normal” threat to the U.S. coastline.

“This year has the chance to be an extreme season,” said Joe Bastardi, the center’s Chief Long-Range Meteorologist. "It is certainly much more like 2008 than 2009 as far as the overall threat to the United States' East and Gulf coasts."

Every year the hurricane centers swing into action before the official start of the hurricane season to tell all the coast-dwellers that they're in terrible danger. Or something like that. Dire hurricane warnings are de rigeur for this time of year. But disaster-preparedness planners find these warning singularly un-useful. For example, in 2008 similar warnings were issued (and 2008 was an active season as things turned out) but the AP explained that they are of little use.

It's a lot like Groundhog Day — and the results are worth just about as much.

"The hairs on the back of my neck don't stand up," ho-hums Craig Fugate, director of emergency management for Florida, the state that got raked by four hurricanes — three of them "major" — in 2004. When it comes to preparing, he says, these long-range forecasts "are not useful at all."

The AP contacted the emergency management agency in every coastal state from Texas to Maine and asked whether these seasonal forecasts play any role in their preparations for the hurricane season. Their response was unanimous: They're a great way to get people thinking about the upcoming season, but that's about it.

The forecast for 2009 was for an above-average hurricane season, but in fact no hurricanes made landfall in North America and only one tropical storm (the level of storm below intensity of a hurricane) made landfall. In fact, hurricanes have been decreasing over the last several decades.

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 year 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 (click on pic for larger view):

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.

Oh, there has been no global warming at all since at least 1998. But that's a topic for another post.

Greece's annual rocket war

2010-03-02T22:05:00.001-06:00

Two villages in Greece spend a year making 50,000 homemade rockets, sort of like overbuilt bottle rockets, and then on one night of the year they fire them at each other. The objective is to ring the bell in each other's church tower - while mass is being held.

I lived in a small farming village in Germany from 1983-1986. New Years Eve there was a rocket and fireworks extravaganza at the stroke of the New Year. Two of my neighbors, one on each side, shot rockets toward each other's open, second-floor windows for 20 minutes. In the street, rocket duels went on from one end of the street to another for more than a half hour.

Why "Spirituality" Instead of Religion?

2010-02-23T10:33:00.009-06:00

This is not exactly breaking news to those of us in religious vocations: "Young voters want spirituality, but not necessarily religion."

A report entitled "Religion Among the Millennials" produced by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life and released this week found that one in four people 18 to 29 years old are unaffiliated with a religion. But that by no means makes them all atheists or agnostics. While there are always religious people among the unaffiliated, the numbers are significantly higher among the younger unaffiliated crowd. While they are less likely than those unaffiliated and older than them to believe in God, they are more likely to believe in life after death, heaven and hell, and miracles.

In fact, on some measures, the data suggest that these so-called millennials may be more spiritually thirsty than older generations. According to a Knights of Columbus/Marist poll also released this month, being "spiritual or close to God" was the most selected of any other "primary long-term life goal" among those 18 to 29 years old (other choices included "to get married and have a family" and "to get rich"). The rate at which they selected it was significantly higher than other generational groups, and nearly twice that of Generation X.

The Pew report is here: summary page, full report. Glenn Reynolds commented on desiring "spirituality" rather than religion, "Well, that's because religion often tells you to do things you don't want to do, or to refrain from doing things you want to do, while spirituality is usually more . . . flexible."

Well, yeah. "Spirituality" is religious Calvinball, a game featured in the comic strip, "Calvin and Hobbes." The rules of Calvinball are simple: there are no rules. Players make them up as they go along and any player may change any rule for any reason. That's what "spirituality" is.

Now, before you think that I'm digging in my heels like Mel Brooks' character, Governor Le Petomane in Blazing Saddles ("We've got to protect our phony-baloney jobs!"), I'm not. After all, the highest rate of young adults who are least likely to attend a church are pastors' children. (Think of a church corollary to what Bismarck said about sausage and laws and you'll see why.)

Nor is the move away from established churches a new development. Consider this critique and guess when it was written:

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

That was written in 1963 by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as he languished in Birmingham jail. Have we learned anything in the last 47 years? Consider this present-day critique by United Methodist pastor Michael Slaughter on the establishment church's preoccupation with growth for growth's sake:

We had achieved getting behinds in the seats, but I realized that all we had really done was accumulate crowds of spectators who were not moving toward deeper faith and service.

Many people in our churches today profess faith in God, but they embody the values of the dominant culture. They possess a soft-secular worldview rather that the worldview of Jesus. These folks believe in God and profess Jesus, but they trust the materialistic values of secular culture. (From Change the World - Recovering the Message and Mission of Jesus, which I emphatically recommend, temporarily a free
Kindle download)

So I am not exactly criticizing the young adults who retreat from establishmentarian religion, but they are mistaken if they think that self-made "spirituality" is any better. Professor David Bentley Hart explains why:

Even when we have shed the moral and religious precepts of our ancestors, most of us try to be ethical and even, in many cases, "spiritual." It is rare, however, that we are able to impose anything like a coherent pattern upon the the somewhat haphazard collection of principles and practices by which we do this. ... we assemble fragments of traditions we half remember, gather ethical maxims almost at random from the surrounding culture, attempt to find inner equilibrium between tolerance and conviction, and so on, until we have knit together something like a code, suited to our needs, temperaments, capacities, and imaginations. We select the standards or values we find appealing from a larger market of moral options and then try to arrange them into some sort of tasteful harmony.

... Here one may cultivate a private atmosphere of "spirituality" as undemanding and therapeutically comforting as one likes simply by purchasing a dream catcher, a few pretty crystals, some books on the goddess, a Tibetan prayer wheel ... and so forth [making spirituality] indistinguishable from interior decorating

That the establishment Protestant church is failing to carry out its charter (with occasional exceptions) is, I think, undeniable. My prescription for reversing this deadly trend would occupy too many pages to post here. (Walter Russell Mead's essay about the Episcopal church is worth reading, but the leftist preoccupation he describes of that church is not the primary problem of the UMC today, though it is certainly a factor.) The point of this post is that for all the just criticisms that may be made of the American Church, private "spirituality" is not a solution. The hodgepodge of religious sensitivity without religious attachment results in religious-spritual confusion among the Millennials, says the Pew report.

Young adults also attend religious services less often than older Americans today. And compared with their elders today, fewer young people say that religion is very important in their lives.

Yet in other ways, Millennials remain fairly traditional in their religious beliefs and practices. Pew Research Center surveys show, for instance, that young adults' beliefs about life after death and the existence of heaven, hell and miracles closely resemble the beliefs of older people today. Though young adults pray less often than their elders do today, the number of young adults who say they pray every day rivals the portion of young people who said the same in prior decades. And though belief in God is lower among young adults than among older adults, Millennials say they believe in God with absolute certainty at rates similar to those seen among Gen Xers a decade ago.

Exactly how a self-created spirituality that has no norms but ones agreeable to oneself is supposed to lead to eternal life in heaven is a deep mystery to me. This Pew report and another
one released in 2006, both said that young adults (up to mid-twenties was the surveys' cutoff) are becoming evermore strongly inclined toward private spirituality and withdrawing from organized religious bodies. But at the same time they tend to affirm very orthodox Christian concepts such as heaven, hell and judgment by God.

So my question is, can reliance on a self-created "spirituality" be reconciled coherently with orthodox concepts? I don't see how. For if God is going to judge us, it will surely be by God's standards, not ours.

Oh, heavens! Did I just say that God will judge us? Isn't that unacceptably judgmental of me to say that, to say nothing of God being so judgmental? Well, my question is this: if one does agree that there is a God who created the cosmos, then this God must be admitted to have both the power and the authority to dispose of the created order as he sees fit. The key thing is not what we wish to believe, but what has God revealed to us about the way he manages the created order.

Judaism, Christianity (and for that matter Islam) are practically alone among the world's great religions in insisting that what we know about God is known principally through God's initiative in revealing God's self to humankind. This is a key difference between religion, as usually conceived, and spirituality. Because of the individualistic (and basically narcissistic) nature of spirituality, divine revelation is usually not taken very seriously except where agreeable. There is no more common human failing than to imagine that God, however conceived, loves us just the way we are.

It does not work to make up your own code of conduct and think that integrity will follow. When I was in the Army I heard another officer described this way: "He fails to achieve even the low standards he sets for himself." Rare is the man or woman who does not fall short of even their own standards even though people set their own bar pretty low. Even meeting our own standards really means that we fail to become what God intends us to be.

The "do my own thing" impulse of spirituality imagines that religion is restrictive, constraining and oppressing, and that freedom cannot be found unless one frees oneself from religion's ancient superstitions, patriarchy and prescientific ignorance. That these criticisms are by no means entirely without merit makes their lure all the more attractive.

Yet it is no better that modern America as a whole no longer believes that there is an objective criterion by which to judge our choices because there can be no higher good than being able to make a choice in the first place. Therefore, all judgment, whether divine or human, infringes on choosing – and being able to choose apart from any standards but one’s own is a supreme concern of most Americans these days.

This is a purely modern idea. In centuries past, even before Jesus was born, true human freedom was emancipation from anything that prevented one from living a life of rational virtue, which Aristotle defined as "excellence made habitual," that enabled moral and ethical flourishing of both the individual and society. Yet this ideal, in the Gentiles' ancient world, was never more than that and apart from isolated academies never blossomed. Instead, in literally slavish devotion to the gods and political masters, the ancients lived almost entirely in material poverty and spiritual despair, a condition that reached its nadir in "the glory that is Rome."

Freedom is not simply the ability to choose. It is the ability to restrain and find mastery over our inborn will to selfishness and our own foolish or wicked choices. The freedom of God’s Law is freedom from the baser demons of our being so that we may discover the better angels of our nature. We are not free simply because we can choose, but only when we choose rightly.

For to choose poorly is to enslave ourselves to the impermanent, the irrational and eventually the destructive. Simply choosing, unconnected from divine guidance and godly standards, is to choose ultimately to reject freedom, to be enslaved to the bondage of the will, to what Paul called the body of death and finally to choose to perish rather than attain everlasting life.

The role of God’s law is to enable human beings to be released from the shackles of spiritual and mental bondage that prevent us from being saved in this life and the next. Through the teachings of the so-called "Old" Testament, we are guided to the divine goodness, which we can then perceive embodied in the person and work of Jesus Christ. This is not an individualistic endeavor. That formal religious bodies have achieved this goal only imperfectly does not mean that private spirituality is somehow automatically better. (See my 2008 post, "Let's hear it for hypocrites!"

Conclusion
I think what the Pew report reveals is a strong sense of religious yearning that (no surprise) the mainline churches are not meeting. The character and polity of those churches, as we know them today, are legacies of the World War II generation, for whom organization and unity were the way that the Great Depression was turned back and World War II was won. Theirs was a generation of joiners and builders. It is no accident that the boom of large churches followed the end of World War II, the ultimate triumph of massive organizations and systems analysis.

This was the time of what futurist Alvin Toffler called the Second Wave of societies. The First Wave was agriculturally-based and lasted from the end of the hunter-gathering period to the inception of the industrial revolution. Then came the Second Wave:

The Second Wave is the society during the Industrial Revolution (ca. late 1600s through the mid-1900s). The main components of the Second Wave society are nuclear family, factory-type education system and the corporation. Toffler writes: "The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy."

Which almost perfectly describes the UMC today – committee bound, meeting ruled, glacially slow to respond to social challenges, and prizing standardized procedures, uniformity and maintenance of the status quo above almost all other concerns.

The problem is that young adults and our society in general have already moved into the Third Wave, the post-industrial society.

Toffler would also add that since late 1950s most countries are moving away from a Second Wave Society into what he would call a Third Wave Society. He coined lots of words to describe it and mentions names invented by him (super-industrial society) and other people (like the Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, technetronic age, scientific-technological revolution), which to various degrees predicted demassification, diversity, knowledge-based production, and the acceleration of change (one of Toffler’s key maxims is "change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways").

We of the institutional church are failing to comprehend that traditional doctrinal clams can be defended rationally on their own merits and do not require our now-antiquated structure to prop them up. That young adults still respect those doctrines, even if they do not fully embrace them, is evident from the Pew reports. But mainline churches generally, and the UMC specifically, have become their own obstacles in the propagation of our faith.

Hillary agrees with me: Iran's military coup, part 2

2010-02-15T17:48:00.003-06:00

I assessed last Wednesday that a coup by Iran's Republican Guard was an increasing possibility given the increasing domestic disorder there. I wondered whether the massive pro- and anti-government demonstration scheduled for last Thursday would provide an opening for Gen. Mohammad-Ali Aziz Jaafari, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, to both crush the anti-government leaders and take control of the government.

But what is Gen. Jaafari really up to with 10,000 Revolutionary Guards in the capital? Clearly, the regime long ago lost legitimacy among the people and is held in power only by pure power, the foundation of which is the Guards. But what if the Guards are sick of the regime, too?

Now it seems that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is thinking along those lines, too, having announced today that Iran is becoming a military dictatorship.

Speaking to Arab students at Carnegie Mellon's Doha campus, Clinton said Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps appears to have gained so much power that it effectively is supplanting the government.

"Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship," she said. "That is our view."

The TimesOnline reported,

“We see that the government in Iran, the Supreme Leader, the president, the parliament is being supplanted and that Iran is moving towards a military dictatorship,” the US Secretary of State told students in Qatar during a tour of the Middle East designed to increase pressure on the Islamic Republic to end its nuclear programme.

“The civilian leadership is either preoccupied with its internal domestic political situation or ceding ground to the Revolutionary Guard and that’s a deeply concerning development.”

John Wesley's warning

2010-02-15T16:00:00.003-06:00

The Rev. Kevin Watson of the UMC asks what is the current state of affairs in United Methodism by the standard that John Wesley warned must be upheld.

In 1786, the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, looked back on the revival begun during his lifetime. He seemed to think that it was well enough established that it would not immediately vanish after his death. However, he was not content with the survival of a lifeless sect that hung around, but failed to renew souls in the image of their creator. He wrote in “Thoughts Upon Methodism”:
I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out.
This passage is one that haunts me. It is as if Wesley continues to challenge all who call themselves Methodists to continue to have the zeal to “spread Scriptural holiness” that the early Methodists had. I can’t read this quote without asking myself the obvious question: Is the United Methodist Church in America a dead sect, does it have the form or religion without the power? Or have we held fast to the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which we first set out?

Watson's inquiry is in four parts and it is not until part 4 that he offers his own answer.

Answering this question is sadly easy. The answer is clearly no. We have not maintained a Wesleyan discipline in the United Methodist Church in America. My feeling is that for most Methodists discipline means either: not much, or a book (as in The Book of Discipline). But for Wesley, the Methodist discipline was a commitment to a process that enabled Methodists to grow in holiness. It enabled them to experience transformation. Far to many Christians today are not being transformed. They are no different today than they were 12 years ago. (There are of course always exceptions to the rule, and thank the Lord there are still many people who have been deeply changed by their relationship with Jesus Christ.) However, wherever people are not being transformed and renewed in the image of God, it would seem that Methodism has the form, but not the power of godliness.

What do you think? Read the whole series, in order, here, here, here and here.

A military coup coming in Iran?

2010-02-10T16:51:00.002-06:00

Early this month Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad promised "a telling blow against global arrogance," on Feb. 11, tomorrow, which is the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. What did he mean?

The Western rumor mill runs amok. It is fueled by the report that,

[Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali ] Khamenei, whose public statements should be taken seriously, is promising some sort of devastating “punch” against the West on Thursday the 11th, the same day as the Green Movement is calling for a monster protest against his regime.

One possibility is some sort of blow against Israel, the "Little Satan" of the Islamic Republic's dementia. (The "Great Satan" is the United States.) After all, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened Israel with destruction.

An attack by Iran against Israel tomorrow seems highly unlikely. By now the preparations would have to be a very late stages and would such a threat seem real, I would think Israel would have already taken countermeasures. A strike against Israel by Iran's proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are much more probable but not necessarily likely. Hamas needs no motivation but its recovery from Israel's December 2008 offensive against it. As for Hezbollah I have no new insights but my gut is that they aren't prepared for an another offensive, either.

So what is up for tomorrow? The most likely event is a crushing domestic attack against Iranian demonstrators. As noted, there has long been planned for tomorrow massive street demonstrations against the regime. These would coincide with the traditional public-square celebratory events of the Revolution. Amir Teheri notes that Atyatollah Khamenei is being kept away from the official demos and that,

Today Iran is in a decidedly insurrectionary mood. With hundreds of figures from past governments, including two former presidents and one former prime minister, having joined the opposition, along with scores of former lawmakers, there is every possibility that even supposedly loyal crowds could switch sides on the spur of the moment.

So what is a diabolic, power-mad, tyrannical regime to do?

The Khomeinist establishment, or at least what is left of it, has been debating strategy for the anniversary for weeks. The more radical faction — led by Gen. Mohammad-Ali Aziz Jaafari, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, and backed by Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — has been urging a mass crackdown against the opposition. According to sources in Tehran, Jaafari has presented a plan code-named “Tanzih” (Eradication), which envisages the arrest of some 3,000 opposition activists, including former president Mohammad Khatami and former prime minister Mir-Hussein Mussavi. The plan would also authorize the Revolutionary Guard and the paramilitary Basij (Mobilization) street fighters to crush any mass demonstration by force, even if that means producing a bloodbath.

General Jaafari is said to favor a “Chinese-style” crackdown to silence the growing pro-democracy movement. During the past six weeks he has been shipping units into Tehran and its environs and positioning Basij fighters, often in civilian clothes, at sensitive points. By Thursday he will have over 100,000 men in the capital.

The "Khomeinists" simply means the inheritors of the central figure of 1979s Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, 1902-1989.

But what is Gen. Jaafari really up to with 10,000 Revolutionary Guards in the capital? Clearly, the regime long ago lost legitimacy among the people and is held in power only by pure power, the foundation of which is the Guards. But what if the Guards are sick of the regime, too?

Jaafari is still fairly young as strongmen go in Iran, being only 52. He is not even relatively liberal in Iran, having been a signatory of a letter in 1999 to then-President Mohammad Khatami, warning him that Khatami's liberalizing policies were threatening to undermine the government. It was understood as a thinly-veiled threat of coup. Today, Khatami is a leading figure of the opposition and could loom large in Jaafari's crosshairs.

It cannot be expected that Jaafari secretly is sympathetic with the opposition and its anti-government demonstrators. Yet his record for the last 10 years at least also shows that his great fear is not the fall of Khomeinist regime as presently constituted, but that civil unrest mutate into civil war.

Amir Taheri wrote on Feb. 5,

The anti-regime movement started as a protest against the alleged rigging of the June election that produced a landslide victory and a second four-year mandate for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The crowds' initial slogan was "Where Is My Vote?" The movement's accidental leaders, including former Prime Minister Mir-Hussein Mousavi, who insists that he, and not Ahmadinejad, won the election, tried hard to keep the protest confined to limited demands such as a recount of the votes and, ultimately, a run-off in accordance with the Election Law.

Over the past eight months, however, the movement has developed beyond those objectives. The initial slogans that focused on vote rigging have all but disappeared. Their place has been taken by unambiguously anti-regime slogans such as "Death to the Dictator", "Freedom Now", and "Iranian Republic, Not Islamic Republic!"

So will Jaafari move tomorrow to implement a "Chinese Solution" to the opposition? That has to be the most probable course of events.

But not the only possible one.

Jaafari is no dullard. He is well educated and experienced. It might have occurred to him by now that the regime is the problem. By accounts, it was Jaafari's idea to use the IGRC to crush the opposition tomorrow. A substantial number of Guards would have been deployed in the capital to protect the Islamic parades and demonstrations, anyway, so Ahmadinejad et. al. were probably receptive to raising the number to 10K to end the opposition once and for all.

But Jaafari may read tea leaves better than Ahmadinejad and company. Leading figures of Iran, including former members of the Khomeinist regime, have increasingly distanced themselves from the present government. Some have openly criticized it, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani being one. Furthermore, Jaafari has said that the political role of Turkey's generals has some appeal to him. (More than once Turkey's generals have taken over the government to prevent civil war. They have always returned it to civilian rule.)

Clearly, at least to observers, Iran's status quo is not sustainable. Ahmadinejad and Khamenei may not realize it but I am betting that Jaafari does. So which way will the cookie crumble on Feb. 11?

Don't be surprised if the Chinese Solution is implemented against the opposition followed by an announcement that that the IGRC has taken Khamenei and Ahmadinejad and other figures to a secret, secure site "for their own safety" until the situation is stable. In the meantime, Jaafari will be in charge while 10,000 of his Guards patrol the streets of Tehran.

Endnote: the "Chinese Solution" refers to the Chinese government's brutal suppression of demonstrators at Peking's Tiananmen Square in April 1989.

The Vanderbilt Chaplain Controversy

2010-02-04T19:29:00.004-06:00

A very large minority of elders and deacons of the Tennessee Conference obtained their theological degree from Vanderbilt Divinity School. I am one of them. Although the school has no denominational affiliation, it was originally founded as a Methodist seminary. Vanderbilt University was founded as a Methodist-affiliated college. Those bonds were severed in 1915 (if I recall correctly), but the Methodist influence on the Div School remains strong, and vice-versa. The Div School has an endowed chair of Methodist studies, for example, presently held by Dr. Doug Meeks, a scholar of the first rank. About a third of the students of the Div School are Methodist and UM hymnals are used in worship services held there. So there remains a very strong tie between the school and Methodism, especially Tennessee Methodism.

As an alumnus of Vanderbilt Divinity School, I know that the university generally and its religion departments specifically fully embrace conceptually and practically gay rights. This is a very strong institutional value of the university.

So what are we alums to make of Awadh Binhazim, a Vanderbilt Muslim chaplain, who stated at a public forum late last month what those of us who study Islamic law, sharia, already: that Islam calls for the execution of homosexuals. This is explicit in the hadith, the oral traditions of the words and deeds of Muhammed that were finally set to text. Binhazim's confirmation of this fact is not objectionable since any reader can read it plainly. The controversy at Vanderbilt springs from the fact that Binhazim went on to say, when asked, that as a Muslim he agreed: "I don’t have a choice as a Muslim to accept or reject teachings."

The video:

Here is Vanderbilt's official position on the controversy:

A recent forum at Vanderbilt University has generated questions about the university's stances on discrimination and free speech.

The "Common Ground: Being Muslim in the Military" event on Jan. 25 was part of Project Dialogue, a series at Vanderbilt dedicated to bringing diverse viewpoints to campus. It featured Awadh A. Binhazim, Muslim chaplain at Vanderbilt, and Army Reserve officer Capt. Darryl A Cox discussing issues military leaders face as they encounter and lead soldiers with Islamic beliefs.

During the question-and-answer session that followed the presentation, a student asked Binhazim about Islamic law and homosexuality. Binhazim answered the question with his interpretation of an Islamic law.

For clarification, Vanderbilt strives to bring many points of view on the issues of the day to campus for examination and discussion. This is the purpose of Project Dialogue.

No view expressed at a Project Dialogue or similar campus forum should be construed as being endorsed by Vanderbilt. The university is dedicated to the free exchange of ideas. It is the belief of the university community that free discussion of ideas can lead to resolution and reconciliation.

Vanderbilt is committed to free speech. It is equally committed to a policy of non-discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, national origin or sexuality.

There has been some confusion as to Binhazim's role at Vanderbilt. He is the Muslim chaplain at Vanderbilt, a volunteer position. He is not a professor of Islam and is not associated with Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He has adjunct associate professor status at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in pathology. This position, which carries no teaching or research responsibilities, is also unpaid.

I cannot even imagine a Christian (or Jewish) chaplain saying gays should be executed. According to ReligiousTolerance.org, the only reference in the Jewish-Christian Bible prescribing death for homosexual acts is Leviticus 20:13. However,

Over the last few centuries, most Christians and Jews have rejected Leviticus 20:13. They no longer call on the death penalty for homosexuals. Only Christian Reconstructionists and a few Christian hate groups wish to revert to mass executions of gays and lesbians today.

Which is true. But I absolutely guarantee that the university would fire a Christian chaplain who denounced homosexuality as merely abominable. However, execution of homosexuals is a fact in Islamist countries, especially Iran. The photo at right is from the hanging of two teen-aged boys in the Islamic Republic in 2006. The Washington Post reported it was one of a series of photos.

The pictures show a dismally sad drama: Two young men, identified by the Associated Press as aged 16 and 18, are seen shackled in a prison van, sobbing; one of them is then seen being led to a scaffold; other shots show the boys together with dark-hooded men placing nooses around the boys' necks; and two final images show their bodies hanging from ropes, in a large public square, as a crowd watches from a distance.

What Chaplain Binhazim said was that this hanging, and countless others in Iran and other Islamic countries, was dictated by the basic tenets of Islam and that he agrees with those tenets. Hence, these executions are right and proper and unobjectionable.

You may recall that when Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University in 2007, he said there are no homosexuals in Iran. Now we know why. He has them killed.

Let me be clear of my own position here. Asked a straightforward question, Mr. Binhazim gave an equally straightforward answer: This is what Islam says and I am bound by the tenets of Islam to accept it. I personally do not think he should be disciplined or fired for answering the question, even as bluntly as he did.

But there is not the slightest doubt in my Vanderbilt-alumnus mind that a Christian chaplain would indeed be disciplined by the university. So what Vanderbilt will do now is something of a defining question for the school. It prides itself on being tolerant and inclusive. Well, let's see just how tolerant and for what it shall be.

The whole forum lasted about 80 minutes. The co-speaker, Army Reserve Capt. Cox, is a Muslim convert. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, testified to Congress this week that the Defense Dept.'s "don't ask, don't tell" policy should be revoked and that gays should be allowed to serve openly. A good question for Capt. Cox would be, "As a Muslim officer, do you accept Islam's doctrine that homosexuality is an abomination?" There is no possible answer for him but yes, since textual literalism is a basic tenet of Islam. Then, "If you were directed by your superior commanders to participate in and publicly support a gay rights event, similar to such events already held by the military for ethnic minorities, would you comply?"

The entire forum may be viewed in eight parts starting here. Related coverage from Vanderbilt's campus newspaper:

Sparks fly at presentation on Muslims in the military

Vanderbilt 'Muslims in the Military' event goes viral

Finally, speaking of things Vanderbilti, Gen. David Petraeus will "engage in an open dialogue at Vanderbilt University about his actions as commander of the surge in Iraq and the role of U.S. forces overseas" at the university on March 1 (link). The event will be streamed live.

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So many of us have been there

2009-12-30T10:00:00.001-06:00

No commentary needed.