The Believer's heaven

You have to see this, but the scabby people who put it up prevented it from being embedded, so you have to follow this link.

Thanks for the tip, Todd!

JAS

Virginia Tech Massacre - Lesson One

It's difficult to imagine the personal reality of those who were there watching Cho walk around and kill their classmates. It's also difficult to imagine that worse horrors than this occur every single day outside of our relatively safe borders. If we are at all sympathetic to the victims (dead and living) of Virginia Tech, let’s also be mindful of those people who suffer this kind of tragedy every day.

Last year the first scientific analysis of the Iraqi death toll announced that as many as 655,000 people died as a result of the invasion, which is an average of an extra 2519 people per week attributed to our presence in Iraq (33 people died in Virginia). Even if the figures are not universally accepted, we're still speaking about ridiculously large numbers of people.

In the last two years, somewhere around 300,000 people have been killed or died specifically due to the violence in Darfur. Currently, two million Sudanese people from Darfur are displaced and living in aid-dependent camps in Chad, many dying from abject neglect.

So sure, Virginia Tech is a tragedy, no doubt about it . . . I want that kind of thing to stay as far away from me and my family as is possible. But our reaction to it, in the media in particular, demonstrates the inequity of our concerns for human life. Christianity is supposed to be a global concern for the entire human race. At one Christian university I know about, they’re having a prayer vigil for the people at Virginia Tech.

I only mention this because it seems to be a fairly standard response by churches and Christian organizations and it is indeed a good and proper response. But, I’m yet to see popular prayer vigils for the literally millions of people who have suffered because of our presence in Iraq, or for the two million displaced from Darfur, almost all of whom have lost loved ones due to the violence there. I’m yet to see popular prayer vigils for the millions of people world wide adversely affected by our economic and environmental practices.

What I walk away with here is that Virginia Tech and other tragedies like it evidence that popular Christianity here in the US has a deeply seated materialism (big surprise!): it’s only worth praying about if it could happen to us. If it’s happening elsewhere and there’s no danger of it hurting us, then we can comfortably ignore it. No prayer vigil necessary.

Pot Calls Kettle White - an interesting article

Nick the Eloquent included this link in a comment in the last blog. It's to an article written by a Black journalist and it lends credence to the claims of the blog entry.

Pot Calls Kettle White: Race Relations, Don Imus, Jesse Jackson and Mr. S. Dog

I understand from some of my enlightened friends who are more sensitive to American culture and history that my own perception of the race-relations in the US is wanting. Note that I don't think it's wanting; otherwise I'd change my mind.

I'm really surprised, to be honest, that there's been so much backlash against the Imus comments. Not that I think they were okay, but really, they were par for the course in his work: he makes horrible comments about everybody, Hillary Clinton in particular, which personally offend me . . . as a human being.

However, why is it that when he says something about African Americans, suddenly, the gloves are off and he needs to resign? Moreover, why are people not calling for the resignation of the CEOs of record companies who produce the most atrocious and vile descriptions of black women and others?

Witness the following outrageous comment by the guy with the ridiculous name: "Snoop Dog" or whatever on earth it is. Apparently Mr. Dog was asked about the comparison between his own voluminous toxic vitriol and the cranky comments made by Imus. MTV then transmitted his response:

"It's a completely different scenario . . . [Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We're talking about ho's that's in the 'hood that ain't doing shit, that's trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain't no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them mutha-----as say we in the same league as him." (This quote comes from here.)

From my perspective, people like Jesse Jackson legitimate this kind of cancerous attitude by ignoring it on the one hand and on the other hand by going after every (specifically) white person who steps across the perceived line. I simply don’t buy as a socially acceptable reality that it’s okay for Mr. Dog to abuse women because he’s a black man. The irony is, Mr. Dog is a hero to many (obviously unfortunate) young people and his lack of apology for being so misogynistic actually validates his perspective among his followers and fans, whereas at least Imus has publicly apologized.

It doesn’t matter whether we “think” Imus means it or not, it’s a social gesture to apologize publicly and it reinforces, publicly (!), that we as a society do not approve of such behavior. Yet by contrast we publicly accept Mr. Dog’s anti-social behavior. I think the bigger part of the guilt here should be laid at the feet of the self-appointed media-hungry leaders of the African Americans, people like Jesse Jackson. The reason: because they’re in the best position to do something about it, but they don’t. In fact, when a real Black leader, Bill Cosby, attempted to address this very problem, he was criticized as some kind of Uncle Tom by Jesse Jackson, et al. WORSE, Jackson is a self-proclaimed Christian!

So what is Imus really guilty of? He’s guilty of saying a lot of bad things about a lot of people. But up until now, no one really cared what he said or about whom. So why now? Because he said it about some black women. But then so does Mr. Dog. So what’s the difference? Imus is white.

Sounds like a real red-neck cliché, “guilty for being white,” I know. But tell me, if a black man can make a filthy rich living by uttering the most profane things about black women and not be censured, and a white man calls some black women “nappy headed ’ho’s” and is publicly humiliated and protested against, I have to assume it’s because he is white. And tell me, when the Black man’s rationale is “well, the women I call ‘hos’ are ‘hos’” clearly we are a LONG way from anything approaching a reasonable treatment of Imus.

If Jackson weren’t so racist himself (that’s what it’s called when you attack another person because of his race, as did Imus), and protested against ALL such unjust and anti-social behavior (specifically including that committed by such intensely ego-centric black heroes as Mr. Dog, and P something and Phat someone, et al.), then I’d be right behind him, supporting him all the way.

For now, though, it seems to me that this is a situation in which a few people who smelled weakness and saw a chance to promote themselves went after it with all the ferocity they could mount in order to prop themselves up in the estimation of those whose adulation they crave. This in itself is anti-social behavior (just ask Hitler how it worked for him).

If I’m wrong here, help me understand.

Hyper Milers

Brad commented in the previous post about these Hyper Milers (people who squeeze over a 100 miles per gallon from a Prius and outrageously high miles out of other standard cars). Here's the article, if you didn't follow his link; its really worth the read.

I think the reason this is worth reading, btw, is that most American males think people interested in saving fuel are long haired hippies who are probably gay and French. But what we have here seems to be just an all-American bloke with a big screen TV, three cars (two are SUVs), ride-on lawn mower, and all that. And yet, he sees the value of saving on fuel. He sees it from a practical perspective that would make Hank Hill offer a warm smile of camaraderie: in short, it's just a big fat waste not to save fuel. He was admittedly driven to this via fear about national reliance on foreign oil, but I appreciate his American pragmatism kicking in here.

Making this guy's story even more pragmatic is that you can e-mail this to your macho friends as a starting point for a discussion without threatening their sexuality.

Hey, what about having a manly competition in your group of friends or church to see who can exceed the manufacturer's reported mileage by whatever percentage (so V8s could compete with 4-Cylinders). As a prize to attract the competition, you could offer raw meat right off the bone of a freshly killed deer or something.

The Earth God Made: The Politics of Christian Responsibility

Just a quick note before I make my point about this. I was talking to my friend Brad or Brad during lunch this week (see favorite lunch in the side column) and he put a nice term on a lot of what I’ve been trying to do here (as he and others are doing elsewhere): "reclaiming Christianity." I’m wearied, as is he, of the way in which the term “Christian” is employed to legitimate greed, the pursuit of power and the destruction of other people’s lives. We have to be restless in our efforts to reclaim the identity of Christianity. Worse, this abuse comes from Christians themselves who ignorantly confuse their (secular) cultural ideals with Christianity.

To the point:

Christians readily confess to “not being perfect, just forgiven.” Of course, there’s a big difference between reluctantly accepting our weaknesses as humans and happily ignoring our responsibilities. These days, most Christians are unaware of the theology which undergirds our behavior as a culture when it comes to our resources.

The theological condition of our cultural behavior is called the “cultural mandate.” It’s based on Genesis 1.28 “. . . subdue [the earth] . . . ” Here’s how the argument goes: since God told us to subdue the earth and since environmental concerns apparently have no similar theological basis, concerns about the environment are not Christian concerns.

So the cultural mandate has been used to legitimize how we assume we can go about using the resources of the earth. But is it really the case that there is a biblical mandate to do whatever we feel like with the earth God made? That is, is it the case that while, according to the Bible, humans are given authority over the earth, we can therefore abuse it? Think of it like this: parents have authority over their children (also a biblical principle), but does that mean that the parent can do whatever he or she feels like doing to the child? Of course not, the Apostle Paul even warns against it.

Surely it’s reasonable for us to assume that just because we believe we have “authority” over the earth, does not at the same time mean that we have no regard for the well-being of the earth.

Here’s another way to think about it: why not?! Why not bother to care for the earth? There’s only one single reason: selfishness. And let’s note that selfishness is the behavior most disdained by the teachings of Jesus and the behavior most opposed to dominant biblical ethic: love.

This selfishness manifests itself in our personal laziness, insofar as we simply do not want to be inconvenienced. We have a standard of living we are just not willing to give up, so we deliberately choose to ignore all the Christian ethics that question the legitimacy of that standard. The worst, though, is the way our selfishness manifests itself in the alluring green hue of the mighty dollar. This is where it gets insidious.

Currently, it’s the “Christian” (mainly evangelical) position to support political candidates who don’t support environmental concerns. Why? Because such political candidates tend to be politically conservative (whatever that means), and Christians equate conservative politics with Christian values. The same candidates, to the degree to which they reject environmental concerns, support the very corporations doing the most damage. Furthermore, these politicians (the ones assumed to be supportive of Christian values), use their political muscle to protect these corporations from having to either change their practices (which costs money) or invest in environmentally safe processes (which costs money).

Note these two things: (A) just this last week, the Supreme Court decided that the Federal Government had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, (B) last week, the most dire report on the environment came out from a prominent panel of scientists from around the world. The big point of this report was not so much that the earth is warming and that much damage has already been done, and that there are countless tangible and measurable results (that much we already knew). The big point was that the effects of all this are going to hit with the greatest severity the poorest people on the planet. That is, the wealthiest are creating conditions which destroy the conditions of the poorest people. Surely we really don’t have to point out how profoundly un-Christian and unbiblical this is?

The United States is five percent of the world’s population (300m out of 6B). However, we produce twenty-five percent of the world’s green house emissions. Now, we also produce things for other parts of the world, but even so, the figure represents a certain poverty of global stewardship. If American Christians claim that we should be a Christian nation and influence the world thusly, then are we not all the more responsible to take care of that over which we were given stewardship? And let us note: we’re talking about the “whole earth” not just the USA.

You’d think so, but after the Supreme Court ruled this week, what was George Bush’s response? It was that (A) we’ve already done enough and (B) we’re not doing anything until polluters like China do. What kind of global leadership does this exhibit? More importantly, is it the Christian norm to say “I’m not going to stop sinning until that sinner over there does”?

Why would someone have this deeply selfish attitude? Let’s note it clearly: this is not at all a Christian perspective. This is about money and the power to make more money. It is not about right and wrong. This is not a moral or ethical issue for George Bush. It is simply and only about money. Admittedly, Bush and his advocates might attempt the feeble claim that this is about national security, which, in the end, only means they equate money with national security, because for Bush, security and peace come from power. These are not the politics of Jesus.

We’ve been given the earth (however we may understand that), and what an infinitely wonderful gift it is. But what kind of depraved people would we have to be to take that gift and destroy it before the one who gave it to us?

Is it really that difficult to accept that the gift of the earth comes with the responsibility to care for it? If we don’t accept that as a biblical mandate, can’t we at least accept that it’s not a bad idea to take care of a gift so deeply precious. And even if we still cannot even accept that, then surely we have to accept that to deliberately and knowingly hurt another human being is contrary to countless biblical mandates, since this is what we know our disregard for the environment has been and is doing at this very moment.

My Rights / Your Rights - A Christian perspective on American individualism

All "isms" are fraught with uncritical assumptions. Individualism in the US is no different. When I first arrived in the US , the notion of individualism as it related to individual rights was immediately marked off in my mind as problematic. I'd never really given it any further thought until just a couple of years ago.

My first encounter with this issue was listening to a (rabidly blue-collar, right wing AM) radio show where callers would call in and complain about this and that. One woman, however, made the mistake of calling in to complain about hunters hunting in the woods (legally) adjoined to her own premises. Apparently they would start shooting in the wee hours of the morning and wake her up. The response of the radio host surprised me: “it’s their right to hunt in those woods and you can’t infringe on their rights.” To which she immediately responded with, “what about my right to sleep?”

I’m not sure either of these “rights” are actually included in the Bill of Rights, but I know that at least in most parts of the US there are legal statements to the effect that no one is allowed to disturb the “normal” lives of those around them (whatever that may mean). For me, I tended to side with the woman, but noted no one was breaking the law. Although, if they were hippies having a party in the woods and playing music loudly, rather than exercising their “right to bear arms” by killing animals for fun, I’m sure the radio host would have had a different view.

On the surface this looks like an impasse: each person grabbing for his or her respective rights, but to do so requires the other one to surrender his or her rights. This is where the notion of rights gets caught in the sticky “ism” part of individualism. Neither of these are actually rights, but the “ism” allows us to cook up all sorts of ways to define individual rights which in the end amount to one person insisting that another person does or does not do what another person wants or doesn’t want that person to do.

Basically, the “ism” factor allows us here in the US to act childishly but to coat that childish demanding behavior with a veneer of legitimacy. But it’s only apparently legitimate, it’s not actually legitimate. Playing the “you’re infringing on my rights” card is actually just a way to make it sound like you’re not just in an argument with another individual, you’re actually challenging the history and cherished values of the entire United States of America. But really, you’re likely not going to be in that situation unless you try to stop someone doing something expressly stated in the US constitution and its amendments.

The pursuit of happiness is an idea stated in the US Declaration of Independence. Some people think therefore that anything they do, so long as it makes them happy, is in harmony with the founding ideas of the USA. But clearly, we already infringe upon that popular notion the moment we condemn a pedophile for raping a child. One person’s pursuit of happiness may cause harm to another. I think we should be thinking of this pursuit of happiness in broader terms: i.e., the national/social pursuit of happiness.

Along with that, I think it’s time for us to rethink our approach to the “ism” part of individualism. Not to get rid of it (can’t be done) but to rework it and produce what I personally believe (after reading through some early American lit) is something closer to what the early Americans were aiming for.

In a nutshell, we want to shift the idea of individual rights away from something we grab and make sure we get, to something we ensure other people get. That is, individual rights can only work as a popular system (an “ism”), if it’s about our making sure another person’s rights are respected and not about our making sure our own rights are respected. This is the Christian path to social peace and a well articulated New Testament ethic (Philippians 2:1-4 clearly says to consider other people as more important than yourself.)

The problem is that we tend to forget that an individual is always networked into a society. Promoting the well-being and interests of a society therefore promotes the well-being of the individual. To assume that we should pursue individual interests over and against society’s interests is to deny your own interests as a human being. America is what it is today because the early Americans thought in terms of the individual’s responsibility to society. The pursuit of individualism over and against that ideal is a recipe for social and thus national decline (why China is heading for a meltdown).

The sooner we make life about making it better for others, the sooner it will be better for us. If we then revisit the radio call above, the conversation should have been: “I respect your ‘right’ to shoot at defenseless animals for fun early in the morning and rouse me from my sleep,” or “I respect your ‘right’ to sleep without being woken up by my seeking personal enjoyment through killing defenseless woodsy creatures with my guns.”

Girls and Norms: Revisting Female Misshapenness

If anyone doubted my recent claims concerning female misshapenness, the most recent Sunday Times, has a front page discussion on this very thing.

No Religion Without Truth: Why Stanley Fish is not just plain wrong but insidiously wrong

In this copy of the article from Today's New York Times, uber-academic Stanley Fish
proposes that we can't teach religion while bracketing the truth claims therein.

The proposal is a reaction to an up-coming cover story (2 April, 2007) in Time Magazine that proposes we should teach religion in schools. The number one fear, of course, is indoctrination, etc., (not that there's any of that in our schools already!).

Fish seems to suggest that because you can't separate from religion its truth claims, you can't study a religion in any meaningful way without subscribing to its truth claims. I seriously doubt this.

For one thing, as a professor at a college where the major for every one of our college students is Biblical Studies (CCU), I do not believe that studying a religion or its teachings, even in the most tendentious of environments, means you'll end up subscribing to its truth claims!

For a second point: I grew up in one of the world's most secular nations, Australia, and yet throughout my years in Primary and Secondary school we all had to study a religion and attend "religious instruction" each week. Moreover, instead of being a benign presentation of, for me, the Christian religion, it was ONLY taught by priests or pastors of actual churches, and not the proposed but questionable sterile objectivity suggested by the Time Magazine piece. In other words, the instructors really wanted you to believe this stuff and made no pretenses to the contrary. But by the time I was in grade 12, I was one of three (3) seniors who would have made any claim to having a faith of some kind.

Quite in line with the above point, anyone who has lived in Britain will testify to the fact that the more educated a person is, the more likely he/she will have a well developed sense of the content of the Bible and at the same time the less likely to make any claims about belief in that content.

So for me, it is entirely possible and indeed common for people to study religion and bracket its truth claims. I'm a firm proponent of just such a study in US schools because, among other things, Christian discourse is the foundational discourse of Western society (with or without a faith). As a Westerner, I care less for the study of Eastern religions (Islam, Buddhism, etc.), but as someone who wants a better tomorrow for the West, I think it's vital.

But, not to let Fish off the hook that easily, we have to ask why on earth he would come up with such a claim?

Let's just note that the reason Fish wants to tie into an inseparable knot the study of religion and the acceptance of its truth claims is because he wants to mask his own preferences under the guise of an elevated view of religion.

That is, if he proposes a high view of religion (can't study it without the truth element), then he seemingly doesn't offend religions types, while seeming to objectively interact with the proposal of whether as a society we should study religion more seriously.

This offends me as a rational person and annoys me as a confessional Christian. It reminds me of when I first started teaching at CCU and I took a call from a newspaper about whether I thought a degree at such a school would be as legitimate as it would be at a secular institution. My response was that in many ways it was more legitimate because we're more honest. (I know that sounds crazy, but hang in there.)

I said that I believed we were more honest because we communicate to people our ideological assumptions and our world-view right up front. We wear it on our sleeves and we declare it publicly without shame. The standard secular institution makes claims to be objective and postures itself as rigorously attentive to truth, but everywhere tolerates a secret shame: the fact there is a whole slew of ideological interests on the part of the faculty.

That is, the realities of ideological leanings are openly confessed at a religious institution, but the SAME realities of ideological leanings are classically denied at secular institutions; thus making the secular institution, to invoke Nietzsche, a classically "insidious" one.

Of course, I'm not saying that one is academically better than the other, far from it, I'm simply pointing out how each relates it's understanding of truth to its discourse about truth. And I'm doing this because Fish's article is an instance of the insidious kind . . . what's worse is that I think he must know that.

Whew . . . I got all the way through and only made one horribly predictable pun on the word "Fish."

tongue speaking mystery and madness

There's a bizarre clip from the Borat movie at this link. It's a group of "tongues speakers" . . . um, slaying Borat in the Spirit, I guess. Sacha Baron Cohen is incredibly cheeky here; as he starts to be overwhelmed by the Spirit he sticks his tongue out and feigns a nascent gift of tongues.

I saw Borat last night. There are scenes in that movie which I never ever want to see again (eeewwwww!), but sadly they remain vividly impressed into my mind.

The Lotus foot and female misshapenness

I recently blogged about seeing a picture of a Japanese woman’s bound feet on my Yahoo! page. However, as I started to think on this image, it evoked for me the question about the degree to which it is a metaphor of women in our society and particularly within the Church. I realize that the point I’m making is not a new one, but I thought that perhaps the visual aid we have here might at least be an occasion to think about the matter further.

Take a close look at the image (right) and note just how bizarre it looks to see her toes wrapped around and under her feet like that. Even now when I look at it, I still think it’s her hand holding her foot. In other words, her foot is so horribly contorted into a fundamentally unnatural position that it’s hard to process the image accurately because it no longer looks like a normal foot.

The final product of binding, if done correctly, is called the “Lotus Foot” and women with lotus feet wear lotus shoes. A girl’s feet would be allowed to grow until she was about four or five and the feet were about four inches long (the ideal size). Then, in order to begin the deformation, the four lesser toes were broken and pulled down and stretched towards the heel and then set in place by constant binding that hindered growth and ensured the deformation and thus the creation of the lotus foot. (Though it's hard to process, the woman on the left reveals, from a different angle, her lotus feet without their bindings .)

It’s very easy for us to think that the bound foot thing is so “obviously” unnatural, and how we could never conceive of doing such a thing. Yet there are people for whom it is normal. And there was a time in Japanese history when the practice was considered as an achievement of the culture’s ideals.

What the bound foot should expose to us is that it is often normal to assume the unnatural is normal. Just because we assume a degree of normalcy with the way women currently operate in our contemporary environments, even if it appears to be healthy and with little complaint, doesn’t make it automatically in harmony with the divine order of things. Take a look at the foot again and note that some people think this is okay and normal because that’s just traditionally the case.

So isn’t it not only possible but likely that even expectations of women in our society, traditional expectations, require a woman to contort herself and subject herself to social or emotional misshapenness, in order to fit the traditional ideals and norms. I think so. I also think that within the Church in particular, there is a gross and deliberate distortion of women brought on by early social and emotional binding practices.

I was talking to one woman friend recently who was taking one of my classes. She remarked that she didn’t feel like she had that much to say in class. I happened to know that this was completely erroneous and that she did in fact have a lot to contribute (seriously and in a technical way). But what was happening was that she noted that the male students appeared to speak with such confidence and assumed that they must have more to say, since she wasn’t going to speak with such confidence. My argument to her was that as a female growing up in the non-urban Midwestern USA she had been conditioned to assume that she really didn’t have that much to contribute but that men did. By contrast, I noted that within the class the male students really did assume that they had a freedom to assume confidence in what they had to say. Both I thought were the products of social conditioning, since it wasn’t the case that everything the men said should have been said with confidence, and vice versa.

So now, having seen this woman’s bound foot, I rethink this experience in terms of social and emotional or psychological misshapenness. The image is for me a tangible metaphor of the sad reality of women in our society . . . still. It’s all the worse that much of this misshapenness is brought on as an attempt to seek the divine ideal within the Church.

Disciples Together, Constantly

I have a seminar class in which we’ve just finished reading the pictured book (order it from Amazon), by A.K.M. Adam (aka AKMA, see his website/blog). The final chapter was a bit of a deviation from the central theme of the book, but not altogether “other” than the rest of the book.

The chapter “Disciples Together, Constantly” caught us a little off guard at first, since the chapter was essentially a case for gay marriage and the title didn’t sound anything like that. But in retrospect the title made a lot of sense (you’d have to read the chapter to appreciate exactly what I mean . . . available in the CCU library soon).

One student remarked that it was the best case for gay marriage he’d read (not sure why he’s been running around reading these cases so as to be so discerning, but whatever...). The argument goes like this: God cares about our relationships with each other because God cares about our relationships with God. What makes our relationship with God one that he approves is our fidelity and constancy to God. Thus a human relationship achieves its ideal when we reflect those values of fidelity and constancy (note the word “constant” in the title).

Interesting angle, something with which we can all agree I’m sure. The big rainbow colored elephant in the description thus far is what to do with all those God-given genitalia. AKMA’s take on the natural law argument is not as well attended to as is his theology of human relationships in general. The central concern for AKMA is to focus on what constitutes a relationship’s falling short of the divine ideal. He states: “There are countless ways in which human relationships can fall short of God’s ideal, and these do not depend on the matter of who does what with whose genitals.”

Consider that what AKMA does is to expose the fact that Christianity tends to be so focused on the genital aspect of marriage as a big problem (the republican party rolls out this issue every time it needs to energize its voter base . . . engineering fear) that it breezily ignores what it is about a relationship that matters most to God. (I’m not even going to mention the divorce rates among this very same demographic . . . !)

I say “most” because it’s that part of our relationships which most represents human relationships to God: fidelity and constancy. That is, if a man or a woman is abusive or complacent in marriage, or not vigorously and daily, hourly even, attending to the maintenance and health of the marriage, daily sacrificing one self for the other, then it falls short of what is central in what God expects of our relationships in general, let alone of our marriages. And thus also such a failure compromises our relationship with God.

So read AKMA’s chapter and consider his presentation on the matter of human relationships, even if in the context of gay marriage. And ask yourself, how is it that people get bent out of shape about the genital aspect of marriage while all along accepting without question the failure to attend to the central elements of human relationships. Ask how it is that we so easily handle divorce (something the Bible refers to as a thing God “hates”) and how we tolerate impoverished relationships in which the partners fail to attend to each other’s needs and the needs of the marriage.

Apart from the fact that it is imperative for society that we get our relationships in order, it is imperative for Christian people to seek to reflect our relationship to God in every relationship we have through vigorous fidelity and constancy (neither of which are easy, but both of which are fundamentally necessary components in our relationships with God).

A Joke: from dinosaurs to Heidegger, but not seriously

I always wonder where Jokes come from (surely we all do). I assume they arise out of the evolution of a conversation. When I hear a joke or tricky saying, I often spend a lot of my subsequent thought time wondering how this came to be, what conversation was necessary, what subject matter and what development of ideas, etc. Anyway, this morning I was mucking around with my kids and we ended up with the joke (not that they got it):

What do you call an existentialist? A Daseinosaur! HAHAHAHA!

. . . get it, because it's a kind of old and outdated way of thinking . . . daseinosaurs! . . . hilarious!

Oh dear . . . whew! Anyway, it started out when my kids and I were imagining a story about a family of "designosaurs" who were architects and very upstanding and proper members of a middle class, suburban neighborhood. Even though they're actually dinosaurs, none of the neighbors noticed that little fact because the designosaurs wore spectacles and normal clothes to mask their reptilian identity. Oh the crazy things those designosaurs would get up to in the effort to mask their true identities and behaviors (eating goats chained to trees, being very very big, having rows of six inch long teeth, the usual stuff dinosaurs have to hide when they live amongst us).

So it evolved from that to other words that sound like dino, and thus "Dasein" which interestingly, for those who don't know, is itself a morphed word from Da Sein (which means "being there" or "there being" but in its morphed form became one of Heidegger's buzz words).

A Rosa by any other name would smell just as bad

My wife recently sent a letter to the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer in which she is pointing out the problem of the current Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) director's position on "haves and have-nots." The director, Rosa Blackwell, recently claimed that CPS was made up of haves and have-nots. Stick with me here, this is not about CPS or school budgets.

The thing about CPS is that it's so dog poor and terribly governed that to claim that someone is one of the "haves" is like trying to decide which homeless person in Cincinnati has it too easy. So as per the published letter, referenced above, my wife wrote the following statement:

"Her [Rosa Blackwell] division of CPS schools into "have" and "have-not" schools is small-minded; and judging by how she's managing things, her response to slavery would have been to make everyone equal by making everyone slaves."

Now I thought that was a delightfully crafted point. However, it appears that it has bothered some people (White people) for reasons we can only assume are race based or based on the pain of slavery. It so happens that Rosa Blackwell is a black woman . . . not that I see color, a la Colbert . . . and God. But I thought that the statement was not racist at all; indeed, for me it uses the pain of the reality of slavery to illustrate a current political failure. For those who know us, we are not Americans, so maybe we're missing something. But is it now the case that we may not even employ an historical event in the context of our conversation and debate? Is it that we fear that we might suddenly start enslaving people again? Or are we just so ashamed of slavery in US history that we dare not mention it's name? A Rosa by any other name would smell just as bad.

Are we psychologically capable of surviving Internet?

I saw this picture today on my Yahoo! page (yep those are her toes broken in her infancy and folded and bound under her feet). After the initial grossed-out shock, I was struck by the fact that the Internet brings every weird, gross, disgusting and horrifying thing that happens in the world front and center into my normal daily experience. Now this particular image is not that bad . . . relatively speaking. Unless you have a foot fetish in which case you're likely already on the floor quivering in horror . . . or delight—who can tell what you freaks are thinking.

After seeing this, I started to wonder whether we were psychologically capable of handling the ceaseless flow of disconcerting imagery the Internet facilitates. I've seen some amazingly horrible things on the Internet: beheadings in the Arab world, people's bodies being maimed, the close-up bodily remains of gruesome murder victims, diseased body parts, the ugliest dog in the world and of course the countless vile skanks that seem to find their way into the news or the Google search pages.

The first response I had was "well, hey, that's real life, mate!" But I wonder whether this is an appropriate response. For example, most people who have to witness a beheading first-hand likely have beheadings as a part of their discourse. So I propose that there's an element of cultural conditioning there. People who see gruesome murders first-hand are in general either people who do them or people who investigate them (not saying cops are conditioned, but they're "prepared" even if the preparation is poor and they are counseled to assist their getting over it).

But further to that, someone who sees a beheading in Iran may not also be exposed to the myriad other forms of horror the Internet avails. That is, just because it's real life, does not mean that we're capable of dealing with every horror known to humanity. Yet on the perch from which I view the Internet I can flick from a beheading to an exploded cat to the world's fattest woman in the time it takes to click a button. Are we capable of dealing with the entire world. After we've been sullied by this experience we may find ourselves in the dilemma of Nietzsche's madman asking "who will wash away the world?"

emergent church and emergent terrorism: coincidence or conspiracy???

“Terrorist cells just aren’t what they used to be.” That’s what you’ll hear from some of the older, traditional and conservative terrorist. Back in the good ol' days, when the whole Libyan army was essentially a terrorist organization it was efficient enough to bring about the famous Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am 747. This large government sanctioned organization lumbered its way to a single famous bombing: moderate success at best.

Along comes our more familiar foe, Al Qaeda. In comparison to the Libyan army, it was lithe and flexible, but still an easily identifiable organization struggling to maintain its complex internal coherence and its fidelity to a theologically charged ethos. Nonetheless it ultimately failed to flex and conform to the rigors of the emerging political paradigm (think lots of bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq), and thus the form Al Qaeda assumed at the beginning of the “war” largely fell apart in favor of something more dynamic: younger, emerging terrorists say that the failure was due to the lumbering and oversized nature of Al Qaeda’s corporate structure: too much focus on learning certain creedal statements, too much focus on too many programs all trying to make people identify with Al Qaeda as an organization over and above their identification with the Islamic jihad. In short, the militants weren't being sufficiently missional, it was all about bossy boots bin Laden and his ability to stamp his imprimatur on the organized resistance, Al Qaeda. So defending Al Qaeda lost sight of the mission to defend Islam against the Western devils.

So the natural response to Al Qaeda’s structural downfall and focus on organization over mission (think old fashioned and out-of-touch), the emerging terrorism is based on small missional groups enthused by ostensibly in-touch, hip new leaders. Leaders who can speak the language of, and identify with today's young terrorist: meet therefore Fatah al Islam: lean, mean young and vibrant. Fatah al Islam casts off the shackles of the over-stuffed structure of Al Qaeda. Gone are the old fashioned ways of screaming Allah Akhbar (God is great) and shaking a fist, stone or AK47 at the TV cameras. Welcome the new contemporary style chant complete with dance routines: “In unison, they lunged in one direction, turned and lunged in another. ‘Allah-u akbar,’ the men shouted in praise to God as they fired their machine guns into a wall” (though it appears the anonymous, pointless shooting of guns, like a small dog scraping its hind legs, remains de rigeur).

Today’s emergent terrorists, unlike the Al Qaeda purists, are all about the new urban reality, rising out of the hard knock life of Lebanese and Palestinian slums, and spurning the silver spoon suburbanites of the bin Laden brigade. They spit on the lumbering bulk of mega-cells . . . it’s not terrorism with small groups, it’s terrorism of small groups; they shake their fists and guns and vehemently repudiate their soft and self-involved ways . . . it’s not a terrorism of programs and pretence, but of missional fervor and “reality.” They sing and chant about their new found missional agenda with lots of first person structures like: I do this for you, you do that for me. I love/die for/kill for/serve you and you give me what I want alone here in my room with no one else but you and me and it’s all about you and it’s all about me and it’s all about me and you and you and me and when the music fades and it’s just about me, Allah, it’s just about you and me Allah, Allah Akhbar, Allah, Allah Akbar Akbar Akbar, Allah Akbar and here I am coming back to the heart of terrorism and it’s just about me and I’ll do it all for you.

So, emergent church or emergent terrorism: you decide!

thanks for all the new enemies George Bush

Yet another formation of a terrorist group cohering around its desire to inflict pain upon Americans. The new group, Fatah al Islam, is a governed by the ideals of Al Qaeda and ignited by anger at the US for conducting it's illegal war in Iraq.

Thanks George, we need more enemies.

scene from a story

Liberal Drew and the President

“ . . . and to tell you the truth,” the President leaned closer to Drew and lowered his voice to a whiskey soaked, hoarse whisper, “to tell you the truth, I really have no idea what I’m doing here, hehehehe! But don’t tell anyone, now, you got that?!”

“More M&M sprinkled profiteroles, Mr. President?” The alarmingly solid block of secret service agent leaned over and offered the tray of presidential pastries and pressed it against the president’s cheek and then wiggled it a bit.

The president jerked back, “what do you think you’re doing, boy!”.

The solid block of secrete service agent leapt back in horror. “Oh, I’m so sorry sir, Mr President, sir; it’s these uniform sunglasses, I can’t actually see very well with them on when I’m inside the House.”

“Well, dumb ass, take them off” he stated sternly, while winking at Drew with a quick smile and a repressed belch.

“But I get in trouble if I take them off sir . . . HR are all over us if we don’t keep uniform.” The agent began to choke up, “it’s really very, very stressful, and I don’t mean to complain, but” BLAM! The agent fell to the ground in a limp pile of muscle and black suit.

Drew gasped. The president put his gun back into one of his holsters, and then dived to the ground and raced along on all fours to catch an M&M which had rolled off his profiterole. He looked at Drew and Drew looked at him. “I guess you want some kind of explanation” said the president.

“Oh, huh?, no!, not at all . . . pfft, about what? No, no, no . . . um, tell you what, though . . . wow . . . wow . . . it’s been great . . . really, really great, but ah, I probably need to mosey on out of here” Drew said with his voice trailing off distractedly while pointing at his rainbow colored watch but staring at the president.

“It’s an orange one,” the president noted with only slight glimpses of the profiterole being mashed about.

“Huh” Drew startled.

“It’s an orange one.”

“Oh . . is that why you, um . . . an orange what?

“An orange M&M. I don’t go crawling on the floor for any old M&M, but the oranges ones are the best ones. Maybe I’d go after a green one. If it was brown, I could see myself stretching around the floor with my hand, but I wouldn’t get out of my chair for a brown one, or a yellow one. I have all the red ones burned, like we should do with all the liberal commie pinkos trying to destroy America.

“Oh, I see. That’s, that’s really interesting.” Then Drew noticed that where a second ago there had been a pile of crumpled black suit and floppy secret service agent, there was just the floor. “Um, gee, I ah wonder what happened to that secret service agent?”

“Which secret service agent?”

“The one whom you, ah, received the profiteroles from.”

“Well, I don’t recall any agent pressing a tray of M&M coated profiteroles into my cheek and wiggling it a bit.”

“Oh, sure, yeah. What! what am I even talking about, man I’m just, just, well . . . yeah, probably.”

The President turned his head slowly to the other agents but kept his eyes fixed on Drew and asked, “do you boys recall any other secret service agents round here?”

Right then, the secret service agent who’d been shot, jumped out from behind a curtain: “Gotchya!”

Booyah! Yelled the president laughing so hard his face went a deep mauve.
Drew noted that it was quite a lovely color, but then also decided that it didn’t really suit the president’s face. He then recalled how he had a t-shirt that color, and that he hadn’t seen it for a while and that perhaps it had slipped out of the back of the drawer and found its way into that little space behind all the draws but not actually in any of the draws. And then he remembered that he was sitting in the Oval Office with the President who had just shot a secret service agent for complaining about his uniform, but really for bumping him in the cheek with a tray of M&M coated profiteroles, but was nonetheless pretending nothing had happened except for a rescue attempt on an orange M&M. And then he thought how this all sounded just a little odd, and he then noticed he’d been staring for a while and that all the secret service agents were laughing and pointing at him and then recalled that the dead agent had jumped out from behind a curtain and that he wasn’t dead at all.

“Now get the hell of out my office ya liberal bastard!” The President’s yelled, startling Drew. “And stop destroying America or I’ll come and kill you dead myself.” Then the secret service agents came after Drew, so he ran as fast he could to flee his humiliation.

Drew’s legs were going as fast as they could, but when he got to the door, there was no handle to turn, so he jumped out of the window and tried running across the White House lawn when a giant profiterole covered in M&Ms asked him if he wanted to know a secret about the president. Drew kept running but the giant profiterole had grabbed the scruff of his neck and was dangling him in the air while his legs spun around pointlessly and all the M&Ms were laughing at him because he had no clothes on, so he tried running pointlessly faster and the faster he ran the louder the music got and the more vigorously the profiterole shook him about. Drew started screaming Noooooooo! Noooooooo! and the profiterole was yelling back at him, Duuuuude! Duuuuude!

“Wha?!” Drew looked up and gave a girly yelp at the sight of his roommate standing over him way too close in unbecoming boxer shorts.

“Was it the profiterole and the president dream again?” he asked.

“No! . . . and put some pants on.”

“I’ve got pants on.”

“In only the most strained sense of the term . . . yelch!”

did you know

Watch this video. I don’t know about all the facts, but they sound true enough. It was originally put together by Carl Fisch and then modified by Scott McLeod both are education and technology guys. I’m tapping you into a YouTube video:

I know what Bible you got last summer

As I’ve listened over the years to why students show up to class with NIV study Bibles, I’ve been able to compile this accurate representation of the story in its universal form. You’ll find it eerily similar to your own story, you’ll wonder how I knew such things. If you’re actually interested in which Bible, you go to an added section in spitrie's Student Basics which helps you understand the differences between the versions.

✠

“. . . there you go son-or-daughter, I’m proud of your choice to attend College and study for ministry-or-corresponding-vocation. So we’ve decided to buy you a nice, shiny, new Bible.”
“Wow, it’s neato! Thanks parent(s)-or-guardian(s). You guys are ‘groovy.’”
“Ha-yuk, ha-yuk, ha-yuk, . . . now now, you’re not at college yet, young man-or-woman.”
“I’m sorry significant-people-or-person-in-my-life, I’m just so gosh darn excited.”
“Well, you’ll need to curb that youthful excitement of yours while you’re at college. It’s not all corn hole tossing and ice-cream socials there you know. It’s serious business; that’s why we purchased this New International Version Study Bible for you.”
“Wow, ‘international’ . . . wow!
“There you go again with your youthful excitement . . . what did we tell you about that!”
“I’m sorry disciplinary-figure-in-my-life, I’ll try harder, I really will.”
“Well, I’ll let it go this time. Anyway, about that Bible, Dr. Dobson seems to think it’s just about the best one produced in the history of the six thousand year old universe. Come over here and we’ll look at it together.” So the young man-or woman slid out a chair at the dinner table and sat looking at the shiny new NIV Study Bible.
“Wow, it sure is shiny, parent-or-guardian!”
“That it is, my son-or-daughter-or-ward, that it is.”
“Look at all the study notes, what are they for?”
“Well, they’re there so you don’t have to worry about what the verses mean; the study notes provide that information for you.
“Wow, I really am going to do well at College.” “That’s why we purchased this item for you.”
“Neato . . . oops, sorry, wonderful! But, parent-or-guardian, what does ‘New International Version’ mean?”
“Oh, it refers to the translation.” “Translation!? . . . from what?”
“From the King James Version. You see, the Lord gave us the King James Version about two thousand years ago. He threw it down from heaven and hit a man named Saul right in the head and knocked him to the ground. The holiness of the KJV immediately caused this wicked pharisee to repent and convert to Christianity and change his name to Paul. But because that kind of English is a little difficult for us to understand, the good people at Zondervan were asked by God to create a new translation that would faithfully represent the truth of the King James Version. And so here it is . . . with study notes to boot, so you don’t have to ever again worry about what the Lord wrote. It’s all right here in convenient packaging.
“Well, why should I go to College if I already have everything I need right here?”
“Ha-yuk Ha-yuk Ha-yuk, oh son-or-daughter-or ward, you make me chuckle. We already know everything we need to know about the Bible, so you’re not going to College to learn what it ‘means’ you’re going there to stomp out the fiery flames of liberal ideas; ideas like the KJV wasn’t actually thrown down by the Lord and hit Saul the wicked Pharisee on the head, or that God didn’t appear to the people at Zondervan in the form of an angel with silver plates etched upon with the very words of the NIV, you know, all that kind of crazy liberalism.”
“I will, parent-or-guardian, I will stomp out those vile lies, I’ll stomp them out with all of my might.”
“Good for you, my son-or-daughter-or ward. And if that doesn’t work, just shoot them.”