NPM: Detroit

Despite a short stint up in the Wolverine backwoods, I've spent over 75% of my life living one block from the city of Detroit. I grew up in a house across the street from my grandparents and I now live in my grandparents old home. Funny how life can work out sometimes.

Anyone paying attention to the News is well aware of the problems with Detroit. I love the city. I love how dirty, grimey, and unpolished it appears to outsiders. I love the view you get driving north on I-75 coming over the Rouge River Bridge and the city skyline appears with the RenCen glistening and the Ambassador bridge in the foreground and the smoke and haze of manufacturing surrounding the beauty. I'm pretty unapologetic of my love for all things Detroit (even Kid Rock and Eminem, but not so much Lions and City Council)

They say New York is the city that never sleeps, well Detroit is the city that never stops working.

That was until they starting bailing out Wall St.

I won't aplogize for this video, and it's as in your face as it needs to be.

“Pardon me if I don’t shed a tear...‘Cause they’re selling make-believe and we don’t buy that here.” - John Rich

Unfortunately, no one's listening.

NPM: Black and White

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn't agree with you. A camera in the right person's hand can be as powerful as any great work of art or composition. For quite sometime now a niche market has developed within photography focusing on black-and-white and the artistic ability it provides. According to Wikipedia,

"Today black-and-white media often has a "nostalgic", historic, or anachronistic
feel to it."

Who doesn't love black and white pictures? They usually capture a moment that communicates pure beauty. The magic is in there simplicity. Just one snapshot, catching a slice of life, that can sweep through our emotions. Stripped down to bare essentials, everything covered in shades of gray.

It evokes a simpler, much more easier time.

How long before my grand-children look at pictures of my life and "see the story of my life right there in black and white."

What I mean is, many of us nowadays hear the phrase "back in the day" to explain a time when things were easier and a Norman Rockwell moments was more commonplace than a car in the driveway. Dad worked, mom stayed home, and Eddie Haskell was your biggest problem.

But were those times easier?

Did my grandfather find times were great and things were easier as he walked to his factory job every day? Did my grandmother find her life charming and quintessential washing laundry by hand and walking to the grocery store with her kids everyday? Did they view their experiences as Norman Rockwell moments.

So, when will my grandkids pull out some old pictures and see my life in Black and White?

Really, is any time in life ever really simple and completely pure? Black and white? I don’t think so.

”A picture’s worth a thousand words but you can’t see what those shades of
gray keep covered …You should’ve seen it in color.” - Jamey Johnson

I'm on Board

Unless we are anywhere near Somalia or Rush shows up.

Crapping the Bed

Being thoroughly confused to just what in the hell is going on with all this financial meltdown crisis and watching the Stock Market drop 1,000 points in just a couple I've been trying to read a whole hell of a lot and try and figure out to what extent my family will be affected.

By all accounts, with the exception of the 401K, HSA's, and IRA's we have, we should be ok going through this. We only are in debt the cost of our mortgage (which is only 30% of the orignal mortgage cost, so even if our house has lost value, our loss what be percentage points), and in addition to the 10% of pre-tax money we put into 401K's, HSA's, and IRA's we always aim to save an additional 10% of take home pay. No Credit Card debt, School Bills, or Car Payments. So, we are not overborrowed or in heavy debt but we'll need to still do some buckling down if we want to keep on saving. I am pretty convinced, as of now, this is great chance to Buy-Low, extremely Low.

ANYWAY, here are a slew of articles, commentary, and blogs on the situation for you to read if you want. They have helped me to really understand what in the hell is going on.

• Maybe the best and clearest explanation from the WSJ "No end in Sight"
• Doctor Doom from Forbes
• Time Magazine weighing in (with a very lengthy piece) to let you know how massive this perfect storm is.
• From the BBC, which is basically saying see you later to the Clinton Democrats (don't let the door hit you on the way out) and this modern anti-fiscal conservative Republican Party (good riddance!!!)
• And, from the Atlantic it's not all George W's fault.......
• it's ours as Deneen (some good Perotesque charts and graphs) and Larison say (this is succint, to the point, and brilliant)

Please make sure your seatbelts are buckled, your trays are in their upright and locked position and you have a snickers bar (or two) - we're going to be here awhile.

Extermination and War

Chilling piece from Joe Carter in Culture11 about how China and India, among other countries, are exterminating shocking numbers of baby girls in the womb. Hey, if abortion is legal and accepted, what right do any of us have to tell Indian and Chinese mothers they may not kill their baby daughters -- sorry, female fetuses -- because they'd prefer to have boys? Right, feminists?

Beyond the confluence of feticide and sexism, Carter foresees violence in the womb leading to violence elsewhere:

Even if we set aside the moral horror of a world that is killing its daughters, this oft-ignored trend of female feticide could pose a greater threat than many of the high-profile concerns that are touted by the media. For instance, the Chinese government says that by the year 2020 the men in that country will outnumber women by 300 million--roughly the entire population of the United States.

Imagine hordes of men, numbering in the hundreds of millions, who will never be able to have sexual contact with a woman, never be able to marry, and never leave a descendant to carry on their lineage. Think about the level of anger and frustration that will be generated. Now consider the fact that the number of males fit for military service (ages 18-49) in the U.S. is currently and remains steady at 54 million.

Pious Hand Wringing

Further proof that the Catholics are getting it more right all the time and why the Evangelicals flounder and spin their wheels under the banner of "conversation."

Truth hurts, truth divides, and truth is love. Truth is not judging. Truth is compassion and not tolerance. Hurt and divide are the ugly results of truth, the difference is that the glory in truth is to far outshine the ugly. Too many times, we focus on the ugly and not the glory.

The Roman Catholic arhcbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput, is someone I'd be a dummy for when it comes to the issue he writes about in this magnificent teaching document. He sets the Speaker of the House - Nancy Pelosi, a self-described "ardent practicing Catholic" straight about what her Church actually teaches and expects its communicants to believe on abortion. Rarely do religious leaders of any church speak so clearly and forcefully about faith and morality in public life. Here's a characteristic passage:

Ardent, practicing Catholics will quickly learn from the historical record that from apostolic times, the Christian tradition overwhelmingly held that abortion was grievously evil. In the absence of modern medical knowledge, some of the Early Fathers held that abortion was homicide; others that it was tantamount to homicide; and various scholars theorized about when and how the unborn child might be animated or "ensouled." But none diminished the unique evil of abortion as an attack on life itself, and the early Church closely associated abortion with infanticide. In short, from the beginning, the believing Christian community held that abortion was always, gravely wrong.

Of course, we now know with biological certainty exactly when human life begins. Thus, today's religious alibis for abortion and a so-called "right to choose" are nothing more than that - alibis that break radically with historic Christian and Catholic belief.

Abortion kills an unborn, developing human life. It is always gravely evil, and so are the evasions employed to justify it. Catholics who make excuses for it - whether they're famous or not - fool only themselves and abuse the fidelity of those Catholics who do sincerely seek to follow the Gospel and live their Catholic faith.

Magnificent. Of course many Catholic Democrats and Christian Democrats will continue to vote and serve the Democratic Party. Earlier he wrote:

But [Catholics who support pro-choice candidates] also need a compelling proportionate reason to justify it. What is a "proportionate" reason when it comes to the abortion issue? It's the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life--which we most certainly will. If we're confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.

And further

Carter lost his bid for re-election, but even with an avowedly prolife Ronald Reagan as president, the belligerence, dishonesty, and inflexibility of the pro-choice lobby has stymied almost every effort to protect unborn human life since.

In the years after the Carter loss, I began to notice that very few of the people, including Catholics, who claimed to be "personally opposed" to abortion really did anything about it. Nor did they intend to. For most, their personal opposition was little more than pious hand-wringing and a convenient excuse--exactly as it is today. In fact, I can't name any pro-choice Catholic politician who has been active, in a sustained public way, in trying to discourage abortion and to protect unborn human life--not one. Some talk about it, and some may mean well, but there's very little action.

"Pious hand-wringing." Exactly so.

Where's the humanity in a "Pro-Choice" stance?

This happens alot to me....

Maybe all the time actually.

I can't figure out why some things become such a huge deal before legitmacy is proved.

Maybe I am missing something. And I know my bias comes out in these types of things, but nothing has appeared with these types of news stories to make me regret showing bias. Actually, there's been nothing, ever, at all to make me re-think my bias in these situations. That, as the media purports will happen, has my faith been shaken and rocked to its core. Everytime these things prove to be fakes, frauds, or were completely misinterpretted.

James Ossuary (Or "Loss Tomb of Jesus)? - Fake
Gospel of Judas? - Grossly embrassing for National Geographic
Tomb of Jesus? - That was the same thing as the James Ossuary, and yet, it made it's way back to the forefront under a different name and had the backing of "famous" people like James Tabor and James Cameron. Books, TV shows, etc., etc., etc. Big oops on that one

So why keep going?

So, why is Dan Brown-esque hysteria allowed to happen?

So, what am I missing with the newest discovery that, get this, goes from having no evidence at all to almost no evidence at all that Messianic resurection was an option.

There are elements in the Jesus story -- and in other stories in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) -- that have analogues in other traditions. If this new discovery proves to be exactly what some think it is, so what? How does that falsify the resurrection of Jesus? It certainly makes it easier to believe that the Jesus cultists, so to speak, made it all up. But couldn't you say the same thing about the messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Bible -- that Jesus's followers, knowing about the prophecies as part of the Jewish tradition, adapted the story of their Lord's life and death and resurrection to fit those prophecies? I mean, if you're determined to disbelieve, there are plenty of reasons to disbelieve. And if,like me, you're determined to believe, material evidence doesn't much matter, does it? Especially when that material evidence continues to fall short time and time again.

My reaction to this latest news is, "Ho hum." But maybe I fail to grasp its true significance. What say you?

Darwinmania!!!!!

I found this New York Times column zooming around some other blogs and found it to be an interesting look at Charles Darwin and the likely festivities that will surround two important anniversaries soon to be celebrated. And what better group of people to discuss this than all 2 of you:

The party is about to begin.

In a week or so, the trumpets will sound, heralding the start of 18 months of non-stop festivities in honor of Charles Darwin. July 1, 2008, is the 150th anniversary of the first announcement of his discovery of natural selection, the main driving force of evolution. Since 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth (Feb. 12), as well as being the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece, "On the Origin of Species" (Nov. 24), the extravaganza is set to continue until the end of next year. Get ready for Darwin hats, t-shirts, action figures, naturally selected fireworks and evolving chocolates. Oh, and lots of books and speeches.

But hold on. Does he deserve all this? He wasn't, after all, the first person to suggest that evolution happens. For example, his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, speculated about it towards the end of the 18th century; at the beginning of the 19th, the great French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck made a strong case for it. Lamarck, however, failed to be generally persuasive because he didn't have a plausible mechanism -- he could see that evolution takes place, but he didn't know how. That had to wait until the discovery of natural selection.

The author goes on to explain just why Darwin, who wasn't the first to think of natural selection either, deserves the parties that will be held in his honor; and I'd tend to agree, for the most part.

As a Creationist, you'd think I'd have problems with Darwin's theories. Kinda, sort of. Call it riding the fence if you will. But here is the best way I can explain it:

I believe that God made the world and everything in it (I wasn't around during this time, so I really can't speak to the timeline or how long it took God to do all of this); I believe that He directly created the souls not only of the first two fully human creatures on Earth, but that He continues this act of direct creation of the souls of every human being in existence. In other words, the human body may have been formed by evolution (but not from monkeys or even "neanderthal" as in the stereotypical thought that enters everyone's mind when I said neanderthal), but the immortal soul of every human being is not something which developed naturally, or exists as a naturally occurring characteristic of the material existence of humans.

The real conflict between religion and science often comes about when science claims that the ability to demonstrate certain empirical truths automatically disproves the existence of the non-material. This is no less true for the various debates that have arisen about ideas based on Darwin's observations than it has been for other similar conflicts. Those followers of Darwin who say that evolution and natural selection prove that there is no God, as man no longer requires a Creator, or that there is no immortal soul, as such a thing could hardly have evolved and can't be empirically observed anyway, are stepping outside the bounds of science and into metaphysics, where by definition they have no business; the tools of empiricism are useless in the realm of the transcendent realities.

But the strict empiricist doesn't believe that there are transcendent realities. All is physical, all is observable, all is the result of brain chemistry or hormones or the twirl and dance of deoxyribonucleic acid. Love isn't a many-splendored thing, but the predictable and combined result of proximity, the observable qualities of the other that strike the observer's eye as desirable, and the activity of certain physical and chemical processes; beauty may not be in the eye of the beholder, but what does it matter so long as the proper hormonal response is achieved?

And hate is in the gut--literally--and crime located somewhere in the glandular systems, and free will is an illusion that we've evolved to believe in because otherwise the sheer randomness and preprogrammed nature of our choices would drive us to despair--or, at least, to whatever physical/chemical combination "despair" really is.

So for the empiricist, any talk of God being involved in the creation of the world, even if religious believers are quite willing to entertain the notion that it pleased God to set evolution in motion (provided we retain our beliefs about the soul, which the strictest empiricists don't believe in anyway) still isn't acceptable. For certain people whose beliefs in non-creation and the non-Creator are inextricably tied to their beliefs about science and about all of reality, this is not a compromise they can live with--it seems as though they must convert believers to their non-belief, so ardently do they insist that evolution proves that God is not.

It does no such thing, of course. And I can't help but wonder just what sort of biochemical impulses the strict empiricist-evolutionist blames for his unhappiness with the whole notion.

Bureaucracy vs. Humanity

In Poland, traditional farmers are being driven out of business because of European Union regulations favoring factory farming. The ironic thing about it is that cultural and culinary trends are shifting in the direction of precisely the kind of traditional farming that they do. But they are going to be wiped out by Brussels' cookie-cutter regulations.

Kirk said that true conservatives have an "affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems." Conservatives ought to be on the side of the Polish farmers. I've no doubt that many who call themselves conservative will sneer at this thought, and say that the Poles should give way to market efficiency. Well: the price of something doesn't always reflect its full cost.

So, is God still judging America?

Thanks to the 4 people who voted and the 3 who left comments (I'm sure those 3 also voted) on whether or not you think God is still judging the nations. I know I have more readers than that so maybe I should have included a "I do not know" option so you could have added to the conversation.

Even with the small response here at MP, the conversation has continued offline on this whole God still judging the nations discussion. As a result, this interesting question has raised it's ugly head.

In Romans, we are commanded to obey our government. As such, were our forefathers very, very wrong to engage in the Revolution? Afterall, it was an uprising against the government resulting in war? Which resulted in a complete over turn of said government.

So, was the Revolution wrong in God's eyes?

Is God still judging America for those actions?

Leave some comments, vote in the poll and let's see what we all think about this.

Politics and Culture

"The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Culture and politics are intimately related. And the current economic crash we appear to be on is proof of this. The financial recklessness that engulfed Wall Street and Main Street both didn't come from nowhere, and it wasn't imposed on us from on high. No, the politicians that allowed this to happen came out of a culture that enabled it. Politicians aren't created in some lab or basement or factory and come out minted 100% whole; they are human beings who are produced by the culture they serve, and as such reflect the strengths and weaknesses of that culture.

How many politicians of either party could have hoped to have been elected to national office over the past quarter century by preaching thrift, self-discipline and self-sacrifice?

Already we can see our tendency is to blame other people for this confrontation with limits. It's the Chinese and Indians. It's the oil companies. It's Bush/Cheney. It's the Islamofascists. It’s like heavy traffic. Heavy traffic is always other people. When you say 'traffic was terrible' you’re never talking about yourself. Well, folks, the traffic is terrible. But the last thing we should be doing is building more roads.

Here's what I don't get about conservatives (i.e. me). We are able to recognize the danger in Big Government; our understanding of the fallenness of human nature makes us rightly suspicious of the concentration of power in the hands of the state. But what makes us so willing to disbelieve that concentrating so much unchecked power in the hands of financiers will lead us to paradise? Is the financier any less human and more angelic than the government bureaucrat? Is he less susceptible to greed, to envy, and to all the ordinary vices that deform human character and cause us to behave in foolish and reckless ways? Law and culture are two gifts of civilization to help us order our liberty, and put constraints on individual action. Too much constraint, and you stifle life, growth and creativity; too little, and you have shipwreck.

God's Judgement on the Nation cont....

Wouldn't you know it........

Following a reference from one of my buddies in response to reading "God's Judgement on the Nation" he lead me to a couple resources he knew of that would perhaps answer some of the questions I proposed in that post.

The issue came up not long ago in an Mars Hill Audio Journal interview with Prof. Steven Keillor, author of a book called "God's Judgment." Unfortunately, if you click on the link you have to pay for the podcast or other form of media you'd like to use to hear it. I didn't get to hear the podcast but was given the highlights and the following link with an excerpt from a critical but largely favorable review of the Keillor book, which appeared in Books & Culture and was written by Prof. Brad Gregory of Notre Dame:

Those of us skeptical of Keillor's aim [to show that it's possible to argue seriously that God intervenes in history -- my note.] need not accept his premises in order to see the force of his arguments. His claim that the Bible offers a divinely revealed understanding of history can be tested (albeit never proved) by its analytical power in interpreting major historical events. Keillor seeks "to correlate known causes of the event with known categories of divine holiness and judgment" as disclosed in Scripture, well aware that such interpretations can be perilous and are often abused:

We must beware of presumption in claiming to know the mind of God. But the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, where the inability to know for sure morphs into a refusal to ask questions that cannot be known with certainty and then into a dismissal of the category of divine judgment.

In short: if God's purposes are such and such, then certain events are plausibly understood as his judgments in the flow of human history.

I won't get into the details of Keillor's theory of how we can discern God's purposes in historical events -- the B&C review does this nicely. Bible Girl's column, though, was a good reminder as to how rarely many of us serious Christians ever think about God's judgment with regard to national events -- and how unbiblical that is. In the Mars Hill interview, Keillor explicitly discusses the temptation to read divine purposes into the events after the fact, or perhaps to justify wars and other events. But just because it's common for people to do such a thing doesn't mean that we should dismiss entirely the idea that God uses dramatic events to chastise nations and to teach them something about their behavior.

We all remember Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson's pronouncement right after the 9/11 attacks that the event was God's judgment on America brought about because of the actions of the abortionists and gays. When I heard that, I was enraged and furious. Some time later, though, I had to confront the possibility that they were right, that the events of that day were, in some sense, permitted by God as a judgment upon America. I think that given the symbolic power of the attacks, a far stronger case can be made that if -- if -- the God of the Bible intended those attacks as a judgment, the symbolic meaning of the targets would lead us to conclude that He was trying to teach us a lesson about the corrupting power of wealth and materialism (the Twin Towers), and about American militarism (the Pentagon). That interpretation wouldn't suit the political purposes of the Revs. Falwell and Robertson, but it makes a lot more sense to me. See the difference?

It seems to me no bad thing for American Christians to think more rigorously about how our nation measures up to the Biblical standard, and how God might be speaking to us collectively through historical events to call us back to obedience and fidelity. We so often assume that our national aspirations and intentions are consonant with the Almighty's, and that's a profoundly hubristic assumption. So many US Christians support the idea that spreading liberal democracy is a fulfillment of the Great Commission, a sort of divine "mission civilisatrice " for the world, that we don't even stop to consider how God might see what we do. Even the Chosen People fell away from the divine will, and suffered for it. Why shouldn't we?

In the Mars Hill interview, Keillor said that one reason we modern Americans are uncomfortable thinking about interpreting history in this way is that we are opposed to the idea of collective guilt. We judge individuals, not groups, in our legal system. We expect God's judgment to conform to that model. But insofar as the Bible is a reliable testimony of God's literal historical dealings with humanity, we are imposing our own model on Him, and it's baseless. He does judge nations. Neither the United States nor righteous Americans are immune.

So: laugh at Bible Girl if you want to, but whether or not you agree with her conclusion, she's standing on firm Biblical ground in asking the right questions.

God's Judgement on the Nation

This is some interesting stuff I came across and has me really thinking just what it is I believe.

Bible Girl, aka Julie Lyons, is a white Pentecostal who keeps a blog at the Dallas Observer (Dallas' weekly Alt-mag). From what I can gather she worshipes at a black church. And as you will see, she apparently has a history of being fearlessly honest in her writing.

She's got a column about why, even though she remembers a Nigerian pastor prophesying in 2001 that after the Bush years, God would give America a black president, and even though she's a pro-life D will not consider voting Republican until the GOP gets serious about what she regards as racial justice, she will not vote for Barack Obama. The reason? Abortion. Excerpt:

It is interesting how Scripture virtually ignores a king’s political or military accomplishments. Jeroboam II, for example, presided over a time of great prosperity and influence for Israel. Yet the Bible dismisses these things in a few brusque sentences. Jeroboam II ultimately failed in keeping God’s commands, and he was judged to be evil. Because he called evil good, he caused the people to do evil as well. End of story; over and out.

Which brings me to abortion again. I’m one of those people who was never passionate about this issue until I had a child of my own -- kind of like the folks who don’t care about famine in faraway places until they see the pictures of starving children. God touched my conscience one day concerning abortion; today I passionately oppose it and call myself a pro-life Democrat.

I see it as an elemental thing: the value of life. You couldn’t identify an issue that cuts to the core more than that.

I won’t say I’m the deepest thinker on this subject. It’s just simple to me. I will put no other god before me, neither will I play God and make decisions reserved solely for him. Every time man has been given the power to decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die, hideous things have resulted.

The Middle Passage. The Holocaust. The Nazis’ extermination of the mentally retarded and gypsies. Genocide in Armenia, Rwanda, Darfur. The executions of innocents in Texas and other states. Abortion.

More

Yet I can’t escape the words of Kings. God will judge a leader by one thing: his faithfulness to God’s Word on matters for which the Christian position is clear.
No, that’s not a fashionable concept these days. It won’t win me many friends in the circles I travel. I do understand that we don’t live in a theocracy; our nation is governed by a constitution. As voters, we deal in a continuum of hope and reality. We don’t get everything we want.

Well, whoever said the world would understand or approve of followers of Jesus Christ?

I believe that Barack Obama will be our next president; the hand of God is upon him. If you read Kings, though, that can cut many ways.

But I will not give him my vote.

So, does God still judge nations?

I mean her explanation is unusual. She based her conclusion in large part on her reading of the Bible, and its clear testimony that God intervenes in history to judge nations that fall away from His will. She is withholding her vote from Obama because of her very real conviction that God's judgment will fall on this nation if it fully embraces the legalized extermination of unborn lives (nearly 50 million of whom have died at the hands of abortionists since Roe v. Wade was legalized in 1973).

For non-believers, it is obviously foolishness to make a political decision based on fear of God's judgment. But do believers really have the option not to consider it? Abraham Lincoln didn't think so. His Second Inaugural Address framed the Civil War as God's judgment on America for the sin of slavery. Excerpt (again):

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

I don't think Lincoln was speaking figuratively. He really believed the Civil War was an act of divine judgment. Anyone who takes the Bible seriously as a record of God's dealing with His people in history cannot escape the testimony in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) of God withdrawing his protection from Israel in response to its stiff-necked behavior. God sent the Prophets to call Israel back to holiness. And when that didn't work, He allowed chastisement to humble his Chosen Nation.

If we believe that God dealt with Israel that way, why wouldn't he deal with us, and with any other nation, that way?

Airplaneseatreclineology

It took me awhile to find this comic, but I finally did so.

Corey's post is what got me thinking about it. I read this comic quite awhile ago but it is very appropos to the conversation.

Read Corey's post, view the comic and have a good laugh. But I would encourage everyone to think about the fact that a comic strip is mocking the jist of the problem with humanity.

If you have more to say on the subject, do so at Corey's blog, he started the conversation, let's keep it going over there.

If you like the comic then I encourage you to check out Pearls Before Swine....it is hilarious stuff. Basically the mouse is an arrogant "know-it-all" who feels the need to tell his "pearls" of wisdom to the pig (who is the only one that will listen to the mouse). Hence "Pearls Before Swine"

And yes it is a direct result of Jesus words in the gospel. But I have found nothing that tells me the author is an Evangelical or Born-Again.

There's more to it, but give it a chance. Good stuff. A lot of pop culture and a look at humanity in the whole....as the above comic.

Here's the website (via comics.com)

Here's some Wikipedia info on the comic strip. Maybe a good place to start to figure things out.

To pass on the faith, live it...with discernment

I was emailed this link by a buddy of mine who, even though it has a Catholic slant, thought I would greatly appreciate it....I did.

It is an interview with Amy Welborn, who appears to be a pretty big deal in the Catholic blogosphere.

ANYWAY, back to the interview, here is a snippet worth repeating...

The problem is that when you look at Catholic history, the faith has never been passed on predominantly in classroom situations. The faith has been passed on in families and in parishes and in communities. You can have really nice catechetical materials in which you have kids learn about a saint each week and you introduce them to various devotions, but if all of that is absent from parish life, and if all of that is absent from the life of Catholics, which it is for the most part…It's something that any teacher of, particularly, the humanities can sympathize with. Think about the poor teacher trying to teach Shakespeare or Chaucer to kids who go home and are on the Internet for four hours and then are playing video games and doing all kinds of other things. It's not just a religious ed problem; it's a cultural problem. [Emphasis mine]What we are trying to transmit in a classroom setting isn't reinforced culturally.

In the Catholic setting, that means it's not reinforced in most parishes. There's no Catholic life that continually reinforces the Catholic faith. Our churches are bare. Kids don't have the opportunity to study murals and pictures of stained glass and they get bored.

Catholic education is getting better in the classrooms but we haven't grappled with the bigger cultural issue of a community's responsibility to transmit the faith outside the classroom setting.

What's the broader message for people of faith? That passing on the faith to our children is not something we can or should rely entirely on the institutional church (sermons, Sunday school, Christian schools) to do. We have to do it in our homes and in our cultural lives -- and not in the sense of, "Tonight, children, we are going to discuss the doctrine of the Incarnation." The Christian faith has to be woven into the fabric of everyday life, has to be experienced not as an interesting add-on to normal life, but as normal life itself. This is particularly challenging in a culture like ours, where increasingly the only normative belief is that there is no normative belief. But what choice do serious religious believers have?

This is why I'm attracted to the idea of living in some sort of community with other families who share our faith. My kids need to see that it's not just our family that believes and lives by these things -- and they need to see that every day of the week, not just on Sunday.

But there can be problems to that and it was why I am VERY selective on who I include in that community in terms of leadership and influence in my life and that of my family. I'll talk to anyone and let anyone "in" but when it comes to who I am going to listen to and take direction from, who I want to be a role model and someone to follow, sorry but I am judicious and selective.

And ironically, while purusing more of the Catholic website where Amy's interview came from I came across this "essay." It furthered cured the cement work I have laid down for my foundation on life, faith, and community. The author's summation with a number of statistical facts is fascinating and all too revealing, most of them showing that despite the Catholic Church's growing numbers on paper, the content of the Catholic faith in the hearts and minds of its adherents is rapidly changing to something that's Catholic in name only:

A survey in 2005 found that 76 percent of the Catholics of the United States thought someone could be a good Catholic without going to church every Sunday. Other elements of Catholic belief and practice also fared poorly. Three out of four said good Catholics needn't observe the teaching on contraception; two-thirds said the same of having their marriages blessed by the Church and accepting the teaching on divorce and remarriage; 58 percent took the same view of giving time or money to the parish and also of following Church teaching on abortion. These numbers have gone up dramatically since Davidson and his colleagues began collecting them in 1987. And, by 2005, nearly one in four held that a good Catholic needn't believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead.

In 2003, the researchers tested American Catholics' views on the Catholic Church and other religions. Some results: 86 percent agreed with the statement "If you believe in God, it doesn't really matter which religion you belong to"; 74 percent said yes to "The major world religions are equally good ways of finding ultimate truth"; and 52 percent accepted the proposition, "The Catholic religion has no more spiritual truth than other major religions."

Apparently not all of those highly educated and loyal Catholic Americans measure up too well by the standards of Catholic orthodoxy. I am reminded of the 25-year-old chap, a baptized Catholic with six years of religious education who claimed he went to Mass twice a month. Upon leaving a showing of the movie The Da Vinci Code, he told The New York Times: "The Catholic Church has hidden a lot of things—proof about the actual life of Jesus, about who wrote the Bible. All these people—the famous Luke, Mark, and John—how did they know so much about Jesus' life? If there was a Bible, who created it and how many times has it been changed?"

People who talk as the happy-talkers do about the glories of contemporary American Catholicism aren't crazy. They know what’s going on. But they pass it over lightly because that suits the project of replacing a form of Catholicism they consider moribund with an endlessly evolving religion without norms. In their estimate, a Church like that would better suit the exigencies of post-modern times. Call it Anglicanism with a figurehead pope. (In general, I think, bishops who take the same line don't share that objective—they simply think blarney is good for morale.)

The author concludes by saying that anybody who believes there's a simple solution to this very deep and broad problem is either a liar or a lunatic. But he says any attempt to turn it around must begin with telling the truth:

Jesus tells us, "The truth will make you free" (John 8:32), but today illusion—the illusion that we aren't doing so bad—is choking the life out of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Shaw's critique concerns the US Catholic Church, but it's not hard to read it as a broad indictment of the American way of being Christian. What he's talking about is the evolution of the Christian faith to fit American cultural norms: whether we realize it or not, most contemporary Christians are Moralistic Therapeutic Deists now.

See, this is why I'm not impressed when I read news reports saying that America, unlike godless secular humanist Europe, is still a land of vibrant faith. I suppose it is, in a way, but what is the content of that faith, anyway? What does it mean to tell a pollster that you are a Catholic, or an Evangelical, but in practice do not mean by those terms what they historically mean? What does it mean to report that Christianity is doing well in terms of the numbers of people who call themselves Christians, but to ignore or downplay the qualitative aspect of their belief?

I'm not trying to read anybody out of Christianity, but what I am saying is that as a theological matter, to claim you are a Christian -- a Catholic Christian or a Protestant Christian -- means and has always meant that there are a certain number of irreducable foundational doctrines that one must believe -- doctrines that teach who Jesus is, what He did on the Cross, what Scripture is, what the Church is, what man is, and so forth. See, even a trampoline has a sturdy frame that everything else is attached to. To reject them is to reject the faith itself, in any meaningful sense. Over the course of the past 2,000 years, the churches argued over aspects of those foundational beliefs, which is why the church, sadly, is no longer united. Christians have argued over what it means to be a true Christian, but have not argued over the idea that there was an objective standard by which to define Christianity. What you wouldn't have seen, until the present day, is the widely accepted belief that it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe you're Christian. That Christianity has no objective definition, and is primarily defined by subjective emotion.

Why does this matter? For one thing, some of us have this quaint idea, as did every Christian until practically yesterday, that the point of religion is to save souls, and Jesus taught us how to do that. To be crude, humankind was lost, but God intervened in history to send us a guide. Scripture (and, for most Christians throughout history, the Church) is our map out of the wilderness. If we lose the map, we could lose our souls, and the souls of our descendants, whose salvation depends on our passing the map to them in good condition. So much American Christianity has become a matter of forgetting, or denying, that there is any such thing as a map.




Why does it seem the Catholics are getting "it" more and more often?

Conservative Christian - A Prologue

UPDATE: This is a prologue to the series of posts I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I have been composing on Christianity and the Conservative movement. I have really been thinking about this whole "Conservative Christian" moniker people like to throw around. And the more I wrote this prologue and wrote the next 3 posts in the series, the more I am finding it harder and harder to see the connection. Why is the prologue and why do the next 3 posts seem so different? Maybe you the reader will see something, but as I wrote the prologue and the subsequent follow-ups, I took a turn somewhere. None the less, know that I am going to publish the whole series (on Mondays) just as I have written them.



There are many conservatives who would like to return to the era of frequent public executions, even hangings. In fact, conservatives are generally united in strong support for the death penalty, a fact the liberal media enjoys equating with the election of George W. Bush as President, since as Governor of Texas, Bush presided over record numbers of executions. It is anecdotally said that Bush faced opposition to the death penalty from his mother, wife and daughters, but never flinched, even in the case of Karla Faye Tucker, an obviously rehabilitated evangelical Christian.

I support the death penalty. People like Ted Bundy and Timothy McVeigh deserved nothing less. As a Christian, I believe it is taught in scripture and I have no doubt that Jesus would have supported it. If I served on a jury, I would express my support for the death penalty without embarrassment.

Having said all that, I am uneasy with the current conservative posture on the death penalty. Not with the position, but with the posture; with our approach to the application of the issue. But it isn’t just the death penalty, it’s a lot of things that our “posture” is a problem within the “Conservative Christian” movement. The death penalty premise is an easier subject to express posture versus position. I know we are talking about human life, but the death penalty isn’t a “sticky” subject. At least I think it isn’t in relative terms to Immigration, Iraq war, Abortion, Homosexual Rights, Healthcare, etc.

Let me be clear about one thing. I do not believe we should question the death penalty as a way of making conservatism or Christianity "kinder" or "compassionate." If someone thinks that conservatism is cruel, they don't understand liberalism, which is tyranny masquerading as compassion. The Biblical admonitions that support capital punishment are presented as a way of properly valuing and respecting the fact that human beings are made in the image of God. It's not presented as a way to torture the guilty, but to remind the rest of us that people aren't like anything else in creation. I don't expect liberals to appreciate that, since they reject the Judeo-Christian worldview and its emphasis on the sacredness of human life. Note how liberals can't see why we oppose abortion yet support capital punishment.

No, my reconsideration is based on two factors: my enthusiastic belief in limited government, and my commitment to the idea of genuine, objective truth. Sad to say, I believe conservative enthusiasm for particular issues is obscuring the importance of these two principles. And we must be a principled movement, or our positions mean nothing.

Let's start with my second objection (what I believe to be the lesser of my thought out arguments, meaning you’ll probably find a lot of holes in this point, oh well): the importance of genuine, objective truth. Conservatives may not entirely agree on the nature of truth or the means for discovering it, but generally, they have refused the postmodern spirit and insisted that judgments, policies and personal choices be evaluated on their coherence to an objective standard of truth. Whether Christians or not, conservatives have said "You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

What does this have to do with the death penalty? Plenty. In making a judgment about guilt and punishment, conservatives need to take into consideration all the truth in a given situation. Frankly, this seems to be quite the opposite of what many conservatives want to do. For example, the truth of mental status applies in the case of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her kids. Yes, it did result in dueling expert psychologists explaining her mental state, but we aren't acting on principle if we ignore that aspect of the case, even with the clear outrage of the death of five children. We should say that no punishment is appropriate until we know if this mother was rational, insane or some mixture of the two.

Every couple weeks or months, the news magazines like 20/20 or the big news channels CNN and Fox News run a special report where a convicted murderer was released because DNA evidence proved they could not have committed the crimes for which they were convicted. Conservatives say little about this, and I'd go so far as to say I suspect some are not happy at the development. The fact is, this is the triumph of truth, and conservatives should rejoice. It is liberals and postmodernists who want us to believe that truth is political and imaginary, shaped only by the agenda of the powerful (government and religious entities). As conservatives, we believe truth is a force that brings down tyrants and rights wrongs. We don't believe it is a commodity to be ignored or manipulated.

As the debate continues, it seems there is a fear, not entirely irrational, that we should be swift and quick in the use of capital punishment to insure that the culture of excuses, with all its various prophets of irresponsibility, doesn't turn the entire justice system into the O.J. Simpson trial. I sympathize and largely support that notion, but we will not achieve that end by reducing the "truth factors" considered in a particular case. The Houston mom was eventually ruled to be insane by a reasonable definition, as such she must be dealt with differently than McVeigh, and conservatives should be quick to say it. We should strongly support the distinction between children and adults, and be against the kind of sentencing that sees them as the same, because it is the truth that they are not the same. We should welcome the evidence of science in any form that gets us closer to what really happened. Truth is always our friend and ally.

When we love the truth, we are all more free. And freedom is a core conservative principle. Quick justice and swift punishment are not the legacies of our system of government, but the legacies of lynchings and tyranny. Conservatives may not like judicial activism, the ACLU, the trial lawyers lobby and the like, but let's not forget that the truthful use of the justice system is a precious benefit of our continuing American revolution. On any given day, it may be the only protection any one of us has, and perhaps our only hope of publishing the truth.

So, we go to my other consideration (the one I hold to dearly and is the crux of a lot of my belief), the principle of limited government. And here, I am bitterly disappointed with many of my conservative counterparts. We will applaud the limitation of government on taxes and regulations. We applaud the limitation of government in taking over the private sector. We applaud the limitation of government in forcing the liberal agenda on our families. But can't we see that limited government is important when it comes to the issues of our agenda as well?

Conservatives are attempting to preserve the ideas of the American revolution, particularly the idea that unlimited central government inevitably leads to abuse. It’s actually something I was taught relentlessly while sitting under the tutelage of school administrators. Any study of history will quickly reveal that one of the primary abuses of government in history has been the application of capital punishment. Christian scripture clearly says that government has the power to bear the sword, but that same scripture shows the execution of Jesus by the state as an evil act. The founding fathers of this nation were good candidates for swift execution by the British government. All dictatorial empires have used capital punishment to eliminate opposition and intimidate the public. To listen to some conservatives talk, you'd think that captial punishment, like Christmas, can only do us good. Read Foxe's Book of Martyrs. All those burning Protestants were fried up.........legally.

When we allow the government to execute McVeigh, we should be reluctantly yielding such power. When we see the incarceration of thousands of Americans for crimes like personal drug use or tax evasion, we should be uneasy. It is quite possible that capital punishment is abused by state governments and it is quite appropriate that conservatives be the loudest voices urging caution in the use of the ultimate punishment. Not because it is wrong, but because government is sinful and awkward, usually acting in the interests of the powerful, and not to be trusted completely in any situation. Even when implementing our agenda.

As I see it, conservatives are somewhat seduced by their desire for justice and order. While these values are important, even crucial, they cannot be purchased at the price of making government more powerful. Freedom, not order, is our primary value. Justice must include the possibility that government can be unjust, and frequently finds ways to punish those who are innocent of anything other than deviation from the norm.

So I would prefer that our attitude towards capital punishment be seasoned with a bit less enthusiasm, since we are, after all, giving to government the right to kill us all for whatever reasons it deems acceptable. That makes patriots nervous. So where are the patriots?

I don't expect many conservatives to join me in these reconsiderations, but I think they are important. Conservatives are showing a dangerous tendency to be willing to give up their freedoms to purchase more order in society. If we are reduced to such a choice, all of us will have difficulty choosing, but consider one option. If we empower tyrants with more power and less truth, how will freedom loving people rise up to oppose such a government and restore true justice?

Next I tackle myself.