Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
Time to vote third-party!
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
I’ve always bought into the idea that a vote for a third-party candidate was a wasted vote. No more. I’ve become convinced that a vote for a Republican or Democrat – at least at the national level – is a wasted vote. Why? Because neither party can be trusted to do what is right for America.
Consider this: Based on their relative solvency, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG should be bailing out the U. S. government, not the other way around. Uncle Sam is so broke and so in debt to China that it’s folly to pretend he has the assets to save even the neighbor kid’s lemonade stand from financial ruin. And there’s no point in partisan finger-pointing. The Elephants and Jackasses have all sold us out with equal fervor.
Yesterday I briefly watched Sen. Chris Dodd blather about how, amid the feds’ .7 trillion dollar give-away, the “taxpayers will be covered”. Covered with what, he didn’t say, but he didn’t need to. When it hits the fan, the politicians and their rich buddies who created the problems in the first place will be well under cover. (See Ron Paul’s email about this vast giveaway.)
The argument from hysteria (the politicians’ favorite way of clouding any issue) is that there will be terrible economic consequences if a handful of private financial instutions are allowed to collapse. What the politicians never tell us, however, is how much more terrible the consequences will be when our government collapses from the weight of its own spiraling debt. I – along with most of Congress – may be long gone by then, but my children or grandchildren are going to live in a debt-ridden country with a third-world economy because we took the easy way out and voted for Republicans and Democrats.
I’m voting for Libertian candidate Bob Barr and I’d encourage you to do the same. But if you want to vote for the Green candidate or the PETA candidate or dust off Ross Perot or write in dear old dead Pat Paulsen, it doesn’t matter to me. Just do it! My guy won’t win and neither will yours. No matter what happens, we’ll be saddled with McBama or OCain and it won’t matter much which one it is.
But if enough of us vote for someone who is neither Democrat nor Republican, we might put a little fear into the self-serving fat cats inside the beltway who have had their way at our expense for way too long.
Posted in Culture, Politics | No Comments »
Obama/Biden: Sounds familiar….
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
Obama picked Joe Biden, launching a day-long media love-fest. Joe’s first assignment will be to travel to England in search of speeches he and Barry can use. Maybe Al Gore will teach Joe to use the Internet he invented so Joe can do his reasearch with a small carbon footprint.
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PCUSA: Business as usual
Monday, September 10th, 2007
Amid the announced departures of Washington Office Director Elenora Giddings Ivory, and Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick, the renewal crowd have turned absolutely giddy. They seem to think these are signs of positive change in the PCUSA. To me, it looks like Christianity Lite continues to captivate the enterprise.
From a recent Presbyterian News Service (PNS) story, Shaking comfort zones and a few hands, on the PCUSA website:
The story from the 4th chapter of John’s Gospel about the Samaritan woman, who was a Gentile, and Jesus, a Jewish man, “gives us a signal about how we are to position ourselves if we are to do evangelism,” especially when sharing faith across cultural boundaries, Sadongei said.
Christ’s evangelism began when he put aside his own cultural understandings and assumptions, acknowledged the stranger’s presence and initiated a conversation, she said. Then an “unbelievable dialogue” flourished that eventually brought home the gospel to the Samaritan.
“Jesus and the woman were willing to risk trying something different, willing to be open to a person who was much different than them, and possibly learn something from them,” said Sadongei, a member of the Kiowa and Tohono O’odham tribes and full-time stated supply pastor at Central Presbyterian Church in Phoenix.
Is Pastor Sadongei telling this story from the Samaritan woman’s point of view? Or is Sadongei herself unaware that Jesus is much more than just “a Jewish man” who was “willing to risk trying something different”. Is she seriously suggesting that before he could evangelize, Jesus had to “put aside his own cultural understandings and assumptions”, that he had to change somehow? According the story, Pastor Sadongei went on to make some very good points about how to be welcoming and loving toward strangers. But did she have to fictionalize the account of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman to make her point? Could she have found no factual basis in the Bible?
Or consider the progressives’ recent discovery that evangelism is a Good Thing (Spiritual revival is key to social transformation, Wallis says). But evangelism for what purpose? It’s not what you might think, according to “progressive evangelical” Jim Wallis. [As an oxymoron, “progressive evangelical” is first rate, a shining example of the left’s use of Godspeak to cloak a decidedly humanist objective. ]
“The social transformation of the world – alleviating poverty and disease, restoring human rights and religious freedom, bringing peace overcoming prejudice – can only come through spiritual revival.” For this reason, “there are very few things as important as evangelism in the churches today”, Wallis told the National Presbyterian Evangelism Conference. Apparently evangelism is not a means of carrying out the Great Commission, but a new-fangled way of bringing about social transformation:
“Everyone knows politics is broken, is failing to address the moral issues of our time,” he said. “And history shows that when that happens, social movements rise up to change politics, and the best social movements have spiritual foundations.”
And what is the power of the current social movement that Wallis perceives? “Spiritual power is being harnessed to address the great social challenges of our time.” This statement is right out of the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Why were the Nazis seeking the Ark of the Covenant? Because they (and George Lucas) saw it as a vast power source that could be harnessed for their own earthly purposes.
Do the departures of Giddings Ivory and Kirkpatrick suggest a cultural change for the PCUSA? Of course not. Neither of them created the worldly culture that has overtaken the PCUSA, they both merely reflect it. Their departures will be barely noticed as the denomination spirals downward into irrelevancy and apostasy.
Posted in Culture, PCUSA | 5 Comments »
Culture: Imus and Jackson
Friday, April 13th, 2007
Among Don Imus’ critics was a relatively subdued Jesse Jackson. I was surprised he had the nerve to speak up at all. In their feeding frenzy, the news outlets I’ve seen and heard have been strangely silent about Jackson’s anti-Semitic remarks in 1984.
I was taught that character is what you do when you think no one is looking. When Jackson referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York as “Hymietown“, he was having what he apparently thought was a private conversation with a journalist. He thought no one was looking.
It can hardly be said that Imus thought he was speaking privately. Insulting people and being hip were part of his broadcast schtick. On the few occasions when I watched his show on MSNBC, I briefly wondered where the offensive humor ended and the man with a heart for kids* began. It seems unlikely that he actually bore the women – black or white – of Rutgers’ basketball team any ill will. I suppose he was just a foolish old white man trying tart up his trademark insults in gangsta chic.
But Jackson was in what he thought was a safe environment. He spoke freely, apparently never considering that his bigotry would be made public. According the Washington Post story cited above, Jackson first denied the remarks then tried to blame his victims. I don’t recall Imus blaming the basketball players for his remarks. So who’s the greater bigot?
Come to think of it, what about all the racial invective directed at three innocent Duke lacrosse players? Who’s going to get fired for that?
I don’t consider the end of Imus’ show much of a loss. Like Howard Stern and the gangsta rappers he seemed to want to emulate, Imus made a substantial contribution to the coarsening of American culture. It’s the shrill hypocrisy of those who brought him down that seems to be getting lost in the coverage.
* [The Imus ranch’s] sole purpose is to provide the experience of the great American cowboy to children suffering from cancer or serious blood disorders, and children who’ve lost brothers and sisters to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)…. All expenses are provided including airfare and transportation to and from the airport in New Mexico. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3359675/
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Culture: A cornucopia of crackpot conspiracies
Sunday, August 6th, 2006
My thanks to Talleyrand, who observed that “Life Is Too Short to Read Dumb Books”, for much of the information here.
David Ray Griffin has kindly summarized his goofy conspiracy theory (blaming 9/11 on President Bush) on a free website. This is a good thing because it deprives the author of royalties and the publisher, the dear old clueless PCUSA, of profits that might be gained by people actually buying the book.
The most hopeful part of Griffin’s article was the first clause of the first sentence: “In the spring of 2003, near the end of my 31-year teaching career at the Claremont School of Theology….” That’s a relief, at least he’s out of the classroom. So what was he teaching? Although he seems to have made his silly conspiracy his new life’s work, he was probably teaching them something called process theology – a materialistic postmodern philosophy that proposes a god who is part of the universe and constrained by it, an obvious contradiction of God’s self-revelation in the Bible.
The website that hosts Griffin’s fantasy offers a truly amazing collection of equally hare-brained conspiracies. For example, “using human beings [especially children] as guinea pigs to test the toxic strength of commercial poisons has become a central regulatory strategy under the Bush administration.” Or soon, maybe tomorrow we will all begin, “a slow, somnambulant walk as in a gray dream right out of the Talmud into the Neo-Con extermination camps now currently under construction by the fine folks at, you guessed it! – – Halliburton.”
Did you know that the U.S. deliberately kept all warnings of the 2004 tsunami a secret? How about DuPont’s plot to eliminate the growing of hemp and deprive Dead-heads and other American stoners of their favorite recreational drug? And you probably didn’t know that Rupert Murdoch is at the center of a conspiracy to turn the Internet into “a mass surveillance database and marketing tool.”.
This is the sort of company the esteemed David Ray Griffin keeps. I expect the PCUSA’s Westminster/John Knox publishing house to announce new author signings from among this crowd any day now.
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ECUSA – the future of the PCUSA?
Thursday, August 3rd, 2006
As noted in the “about me” box on the right side of the home page, I am an elder in a mainline denomination seemingly bent on self-immolation. So I observed with some interest the selection of Katharine Jefferts Schori as Presiding Bishop-elect of another imploding denomination, the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. I am not personally acquainted with “Bishop Katharine” as she seems to be known. I’m sure she’s a nice lady and I wish her no ill will. But a recent Time magazine interview provided a chilling glimpse into the likely future of the PCUSA.
Asked what her focus would be as head of the ECUSA, she replied
Our focus needs to be on feeding people who go to bed hungry, on providing primary education to girls and boys, on healing people with AIDS, on addressing tuberculosis and malaria, on sustainable development. That ought to be the primary focus.
These are all laudable activities, the sort of things Christians are called to do (although my denomination seems to think that we are merely called to lobby the government to do those things on our behalf). But the “primary focus”?
The list sounds like the primary focus of the Department of Health and Human Services, not of a church that once believed it received its primary focus directly from Christ – “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20) I would have thought she might mention preaching the gospel as part of her primary focus, maybe down the list between malaria and sustainable development, but surely somewhere.
Asked if “belief in Jesus” was the only way to get to heaven, I hoped the leader of a church that once accepted the truth of Jesus’ words would mention his own reply to that question – “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6) But no. She answered
We who practice the Christian tradition understand him as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.
These are honest and frightening words. They seem to say that the ECUSA is reduced to a group of people “who practice the Christian tradition” while utterly disregarding the person and work of the one whose name they have borrowed. This notion of doing good works without a clear understanding of their source echoes the blindness of the PCUSA’s previous Moderator, Rick Ufford-Chase. On the page entitled What I Believe, Ufford-Chase confesses to believe only one thing about Jesus:
Jesus is God’s radical answer to the unbelievable suffering that exists all over the world.
But Jesus could be that answer only by first addressing sin – the real source of the world’s “unbelievable suffering”. Jesus could be that answer only by being who he was – untamable, unpredictable, dangerous, and holy, only by enraging puffed-up religious leaders and driving away casual followers with hard truths, only by laying down his life in a messy, bloody death, tortured and nailed alive to a tree because we humans had no other path to reconciliation with his holy Father, and only by taking his life up again three days later. Jesus could be that answer only by being God. So Bishop Katharine was right about one thing. Those “who practice the Christian tradition” of lip service and works judged good by human standards do indeed “put God in an awfully small box.”
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PCUSA: Word games, part 1
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006
The PCUSA has a long history of playing word games with the Bible. Word games are played by social activists, peddlers of strange theologies, bureaucrats, tenure-seeking academics who have to come up with something novel to get published, and humanists (including atheists). They are the tool of choice for people who find the plain meaning of Scripture to be in conflict with their own philosophies, political aspirations, cultural objectives, or simple carnal desires. The appeal of a word game is that it leaves the words themselves intact while altering their meaning and intent. Word games have this in common with the old carnival shell game: Both use misdirection and a torrent of misleading words to convince the mark that what appears to be certain is not certain at all.
Biblical word games range from sophisticated plays on ancient linguistics to simple proof-texting gimmicks that distort the meaning of a passage by plucking it from its inspired context. In its most brazen form, the game consists of nothing more than the player lying about the meaning of the words. Skilled players (especially seminary-educated ones) can reverse the meaning of a passage entirely or show that it is silent about the very topic it is addressing. In all cases, the player’s first step is to convince the mark that the passage is ambiguous. If the victim can first be persuaded that the plain meaning of the text is not plain at all, everything else is just “interpretation”.
Ok, I get that. The Bible was written by someone else. Despite such recent foolishness as “justice-love” and a Trinity composed of “mother, child, womb”, even the PCUSA’s most committed players seem to understand that they can’t actually rewrite the Bible. But the 217th General Assembly decided to play word games with our own Book of Order. Since there is a process for amending the Book of Order, why would the G.A. simply issue an “Authoritative Interpretation” of a key provision and assert that it means something other than what it says? The answer – in part 2 (upcoming) – reads like an Oliver Stone plot line.
Click here for Part 2, here for Part 3.
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