There were a couple of diaries at Street Prophets reflecting on some of the political and social aspects of two strategy/war games -- Chess and Go: "Metaphor and The Game of Go . . ."
[Point ten of Jared Wilson's criticism of the "culture wars": (Index)]
Jared Wilson: "The 'culture war' is going to hell because . . ."
10. The culture war is carried out for our name’s sake, not Jesus’. I am not a fan of gay marriage or Roe v. Wade, and even though I would vote to outlaw the former and repeal the latter, neither of those actions in themselves will make a single unbeliever say “How wonderful Christ is!”Read more!
The bitter truth is that the Christian culture war is not carried out for Jesus’ glory and renown, but for ours. It makes “Judeo-Christian values” the end-game, the treasure of our mission. And that is idolatry. Nobody was ever legally or argumentatively or even culturally convinced to believe in Jesus. But millions have been loved and served and submitted to into believing.
Dying for somebody says a whole lot more than debating them.
Uganda may pass a law that could lead to the death penalty for homosexual behavior.Read more!
The proposed law is odious.
Due to the legacy of colonialism, Western people should be sensitive about interfering in sub-Saharan African politics and modest in making moral pronouncements regarding Africa, but this law deserves universal condemnation. Uganda experienced many evils under colonialism, including the loss of basic liberties.
Experiencing evil does not give a free pass to do evil and this bill is wicked.
It is not a close call.
At the moment I am writing this line 178,536 people have signed "The Manhattan Declaration" - A Call to Christian Conscience. It is probably clear from my series on the culture wars that I will not be a signer of the Declaration - but some comments are in order.
Their website front page reads:
[Point five of Jared Wilson's criticism of the "culture wars": (Index)]
Jared Wilson: "The 'culture war' is going to hell because . . ."
5. It battles against flesh and blood. We’re not supposed to do that.Read more!
[Point four of Jared Wilson's criticism of the "culture wars": (Index)]
Jered Wilson: "The 'culture war' is going to hell because . . ."
4. It is often hypocritical. It is the height of weirdness to expect people who don’t know Jesus to act like they do especially when we can’t get our own house in order. So long as large numbers of Christians continue contributing to the divorce statistics, the porn industry, and more acceptable sins like gluttony and gossip and greed, we have zero business telling the world how to act. Judgment begins at the house of God.Read more!
1 Peter 4:17 For it is time for judgment to begin, starting with the house of God. And if it starts with us, what will be the fate of those who are disobedient to the gospel of God?
[Crossposted from Street Prophets]
In the discussions that is going on about the Roman Catholic Church, and its change, I made a comment (I will get there in a minute). Starwoman responded with:
Thanks for this very clear and helpful comment about what the strategy is wrt Evangelicals, theology, and civil marriage laws.I can try to do that - but it may not work out.
I'd be interested in a diary from you on the theology behind Evangelical (and other Reformed, maybe) attitudes towards the relationship between church and state.
[Point three of Jared Wilson's criticism of the "culture wars": (Index)]
Jared Wilson: "The 'culture war' are going to hell because . . ."
3. It is theologically naive. It is the height of weirdness to expect people who don’t know Jesus to act like they do.Read more!
[Point two of Jared Wilson's criticism of the "culture wars": (Index)]
"
Jared Wilson: "The 'culture war' is going to Hell because . . ."
2. Its medium is moralism, not gospel. It makes kingdom militancy about religion, not gospel. It seeks a Christian coercion of others toward better behavior, not an incarnational sharing with others of the better Way.Read more!
[Point one of Jared Wilson's criticism of the "culture wars": (Index)]
Jared Wilson: "The 'culture war' is going to Hell because . . ."
1. Its expectation is foolish. Whether you believe America was ever a Christian nation or not, it is theologically naive and demonstrably false to think laws or policies make anyone a Christian. You cannot create or recapture a people for Christ by illegalizing sin. (Which, by the way, is not to say that certain sins shouldn’t be illegal. It is only to say that, for instance, outlawing gay marriage or repealing Roe v. Wade won’t make anybody a Christian, much less make America “a Christian nation.”)Read more!
I mentioned how much I liked Jared Wilson's "Funny, I don't Feel Neoconnish" posted at Evangel. His ten points about why the "culture wars" are going to hell --
[Attention: This posts is not about all atheists, or what all atheists believe, or even (necessarily) all utopianism - please read carefully]
I will begin with a comment I made in a discussion of Bill Maher's "enabling" of the "Religious Right" (all the scare quotes there are because I do not think any of that terminology is very good).
Suffice it to say, that the view of Marx on the philosophical side was the same as Dawkins: progress will only occur in solving the world's problems if the metaphysical, non-naturalist ideologies and theologies standing in the way of that progress (and they always stand in the way of that progress) are isolated from the culture so they can no longer stand in the way of that progress.There is no doubt that the modern history of totalitarianism is primarily anchored with expressly atheist ideology (Communism) or non-Christian ideology (Hitler). The slaughter has been enormous - far, far outweighing the closest of Christian kings or rulers since the beginning of Christendom around 400 AD. Religious, but non-Christian, kings have not been as bloodthirsty either by several orders of magnitude. Why is this?
In either case, both Marxism and Dawkins stated, or seriously implied, that religion must be removed as an influence in society in order for humanity to solve its real problems and evolve to a higher order of human social relationship. In the case of Marxism in power, that led in every case to atrocities against the religious and holders of other "bourgeois philosophies" in order to move that evolution on.
President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize
“The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” [full text of announcement]Obviously, lots of folks are talking about this; and I am sure someone will be able to explain why President Obama was deserving [here it is] - despite the nominations closing on February 1, just 11 days after President Obama took office.
Wherein I look around the web - hopefully once a week - and draw some attention to things I see there that interest me.
If you want to know where I go, look at the links on the left of my blog under "Places I Frequent". From there, I will go places those places may point me. Typically, I will also list up to three of my favorite posts from the current Christian Carnival - and may go somewhere those blogs take me.
Sometimes they will be topically organized, and sometimes just in order of the links I visited. Enjoy:
"Speaking truth to power" is not a phrase that one hears very often either from political or theological conservatives. I always assumed that it just had to do with someone who was a theological or political liberal having used it; and that it was picked up in one of those cultures. It has always felt presumptuous to me.
However, I have never seen a critique of the phrase. Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed pointed me to a "an old blog that deserves a wide readership" - and if this post is any indication then I agree.
The name of the site, and the author, is Allan R. Bevere; and he speaks "On Why The Church in America Cannot Speak Truth to Power"
". . . perhaps the most useless political phrase of all is the high-sounding but irrelevant phraseology of "speaking truth to power." -- Allan Bevere
Bevere gives two reasons: "And therein is the heart of the problem. That most Christians in America believe that the church's primary role is to affect policy in Washington DC betrays the mistaken belief that the primary political action in this world is to be found in the White House and on Capitol Hill, when the New Testament clearly indicates that the primary agency of politics is located in nothing less than the community of faith known as the church. In order for the church to speak truth to power it must recover its unique polity apart from the earthly polity known as the nation state; for it is God and not the nations who rules the world.
One of the examples Allan uses is feeding the poor:
My great concern is that when Christians in America want to play the role of prophet in Pharaoh's court, they end up looking, not like the wise sage, but the court jester that gets used by the king for his or her own comical and unsavory purposes.
The people of God have been co-opted; it is time for the church to recover the politics of witness." -- Allan BevereFor Christians to be concerned for the poor, the outcasts, and those on the fringes of society is a given. The problem is that it is not always clear how Christians should care for such persons.
Another writer who tried to lift Kingdom priorities over politcal priorities was J. Budziszewski in his two essays on political liberalism: The second moral error of political liberalism is expropriationism. According to this notion I may take from others to help the needy, giving nothing of my own; according to Christianity I should give of my own to help the needy, taking from no one. We might call expropriationism the Robin Hood fallacy. Today, the expropriationist is usually a propitiationist too, confusing the needy with some subset of the merely wanty. So we are speaking of a style of politics in which the groups in power decide for us which of their causes our wealth is to support, taking that wealth by force
and political conservatism: The eighth moral error of political conservatism is meritism. According to this notion I should do unto others as they deserve. With the addition of mammonism, matters become even simpler, for then those who need help are by definition undeserving, while those in a position to help are by definition deserving. That meritism is not a Christian doctrine comes as a surprise to many people. Large numbers think the meritist motto “God helps those who help themselves” is a quotation from the Bible. What the New Testament actually teaches is that in what we need most, we are helpless; the grace of God is an undeserved gift. According to Christianity I should do unto others not as they deserve, but as they need.
Read the rest of Allan Bevere's thought-provoking post; and I would suggest you put his blog on your reading schedule - I am going to.
I even like his quote of the week from G.K. Chesterson: "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."
I recently discovered a blog called Fundamentally Changed which has fundamentally changed my view of the word "fundamentalist", and being called a "Fundamentalist". I am not sure the word (like "Evangelical") can be resurrected from what secular society has done to it, but at least I do not need to feel insulted anymore when someone calls me one.
Jason, one of the bloggers at Fundamentally Changed, noticed that I was beginning to link them in some of my stuff and put them on my reading list on my sideboard. He did something that really hasn't happened to me up to now (and is, in my opinion, really cool) - he sent me an email:
I have talked alot about subsidiarity:
"As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations. Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them." (Pope Pius XI, "On Reconstruction of the Social Order", 1931)On of the reasons for this is diminishing spontaneity:
as a hierarchy of associations and relationships rise from the individuals and families at the base of the social structure (up to and including government), the higher the rung the less spontaneous it is and the more contrived; or, the higher you go the less help the structure gets from nature and the more help it needs from culture.So, as this article points out:
[Subsidiarity] holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracyThat is because the closer, and more organic, organization is the more natural organization and easiest for the folks affected to control.
suggested that where power, in the sense of effective action within a community is missing, violence takes its place. Moreover, once the institutions of government have outgrown the individual and the neighborhood, so that the very scale of governance no longer permits effective action for most people, then those people are more likely to take to the streets and address their grievances in destructive ways.If you are not just going to take things like the Tea Party movement and the outcry at the health care town halls as astroturfing, then you can see this feeling of ineffectiveness and lack of control beginning to explode into anger and violence.
The Wall Street Journal has an interview with retired 4-star general Jack Keene - the architect of "The Surge" in Iraq. It is an interesting read.
Keene is asked about why the surge worked, and what the current threats in Iraq still are. These are critical things to understand as whoever wins in November takes control of Iraq policy in January. In late 2006, after the midterm election debacle for Republicans, pressure rose for a quick if dishonorable exit from Iraq. Gen. Keane met Frederick Kagan, who was putting together a report on an alternative strategy for Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute. On Dec. 11, both men found themselves at the White House to push the plan. Congress, the Joint Chiefs, Iraq commander Gen. George Casey and the Iraq Study Group all wanted a fast drawdown. President Bush ignored their advice. Gen. Petraeus was sent out in February to oversee the new, risky and politically unpopular surge.
For the future, he noted some items:
Even Gen. Keane didn't expect the new strategy to work so fast. "It's a stunning turnaround, and I think people will study it for years because it's unparalleled in counterinsurgency practice," he says. "All the gains we've achieved against al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency, the Iranians in the south are sustainable" -- a slight pause here -- "if we're smart about it and not let them regroup and get back into it."
Gen. Keane wants to make sure people understand why the surge worked. "I have a theory" about the unexpectedly fast turnaround, he says. "Whether they be Sunni, Shia or Kurd, anyone who was being touched by that war after four years was fed up with it. And I think once a solution was being provided, once they saw the Americans were truly willing to take risks and die to protect their women and children and their way of life, they decided one, to protect the Americans, and two, to turn in the enemies that were around them who were intimidating and terrorizing them; that gave them the courage to do it."
This is a discussion (outside of tanning beds in the Alaska Governor's mansion) that folks need to have. The vision for how American policy will evolve in Iraq is critical to the Presidential race - since Commander in Chief is one of, if not the, the President's most important jobs. Indeed, as Keene points out: "It is a myth for people to assert that by pulling away from the Iraqis, by pulling away from the Iraqi political process, that somehow that becomes a catalyst to do things that they would not do because of our presence. That is fundamentally wrong. It is our presence that is helping Iraqis move forward."
"It appears that Maliki is using the guise of security to enhance his political base and to diminish his political opponents," says Gen. Keane, citing the Baquba incident. "That is a danger and that is something we should not tolerate."
Iran wants a weak Iraqi central government unaligned with America. "We know that they intend to come back on the kinetic side, attack U.S. forces exclusively with less attacks, but more spectacular. I don't believe for a minute they're going to be able to resurge and be successful as long as we stay on top of it, keep our head in the game, maintain our force presence in the south."
"Despite the fact that President Bush did preside over a strategy that was failing for three plus years, and he has been criticized for that," says Gen. Keane, "he also deserves a significant amount of credit because all around him people were advocating a failed strategy, particularly key leaders around him, and he had the wherewithal to make a tough decision that flew certainly in the face of political opposition even in his own party."
I have spent a lot of time the last week dealing with some of the outrageous stuff thrown at Sarah Palin in the first week of her addition to McCain's ticket. The reason for that is both simple and complex:
Kirsten Powers says something in her New York Post article I agree with - because obviously I have been saying about the same thing.
In her article - "ABC'S Bungles: Botches mar Palin Interview" her intro says:
At times, Palin seemed to know less than she should. On the other hand, Gibson sometimes seemed to "know" things that just aren't so.She continues:
Her responses to Gibson's cross-examining seemed canned and rehearsed, a little like the answers you might give in a tough college interview. But that may be a result of the ham-fisted editing - which seemed to cut her off mid-thought on many answers. ABC should release the entire, unedited interview, so that Americans can judge her more fairly.
The biggest concern is that she appeared to not know what the Bush Doctrine is. There are, in fact, different definitions of it - but all have had an impact on this nation. One hopes Palin is more up to speed than she seemed.
Of course, she needs to be questioned on many issues - but this interview left us with little new information about her.
her answers last night are already being misrepresented. She said - quite correctly - that, if Georgia and Ukraine are admitted to NATO, the United States may be obliged to defend them. This has been morphed into an assertion that we might invade Russia. And ABC News bears much of the blame: It actually sent out a pre-broadcast alert to that effect.Exactly my point in my recent series of posts. The issue here is what US policy should be toward the admission of Georgia and Ukraine to NATO - since we may be obliged to defend them if they are admitted. Now we will get to discuss Sarah Palin's and/or McCain's bloodlust to invade another country.
So now we can play this stupid game, pretending she wants to invade Russia instead of debating real issues.
ABC's errors didn't end there. The interview seemed to show a lack of good faith, with the blatant misrepresentation of comments she's made about the Iraq war.Exactly! I even agree with the issues I think Palin should explain - although the "troopergate" issue is not on her list and it is on mine. There is more on the rape kit issue though. The statement the Wasilla police chief, Fannon, made that has been reported as:
Gibson - probably relying on a sloppy Associated Press report - told Palin she has said that, "Our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God."
In a part of the interview that was edited out (but is available on ABC's Web site), Palin says, "You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote."
Gibson snaps: "Exact words."
Sorry, Charlie - let's go to the tape.
In the video of her remarks, Palin says "Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [US soldiers] out on a task that is from God." She is clearly praying for wisdom for our national leaders - praying that they are following God's will.
This is Christianity 101, not some fundamentalist plot to wage a holy war. Presumably, Obama, as a Christian, utters similar prayers for our country as well.
There's more: Gibson also accused her of saying of Iraq, "There is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."
Here's what she really said: "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."
Despite Gibson's insistance that she'd said things that she clearly hadn't, Palin was polite and seemed unrattled.
We need to get beyond the stereotypes. Palin has been cast as a right-wing nut job in the media, yet her actual record suggests something more complex. She is a Republican who made herself the enemy of oil companies in Alaska. She raised funding for pregnant teens and learning-disabled children. She has expressed concern that we don't have a clear strategy in Iraq.
But she also was mayor of Wasilla at a time when women were charged for rape kits - we need an explanation why. And what of her opposition to abortion even in the case of rape or incest? Is that a personal position, or does she seek to impose it on all Americans? And, even if no books were banned in the Wasilla library, why did she inquire as to how the librarian would react if they were?
There are real questions that Americans need to hear Palin answer. But they're ill-served by the game the media has played so far. Rather than real insights into this woman, we get exchanges that will lead to arguments about whether she's a religious fanatic - arguments based on a comment she never made.
This is completely destructive to the public debate.
Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon does not agree with the new legislation, saying the law will require the city and communities to come up with more funds to cover the costs of the forensic exams.continued [HT: Amanda Carpenter]:
In the past we've charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible. I just don't want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer, Fannon said.
According to Fannon, the new law will cost the Wasilla Police Department approximately $5,000 to $14,000 a year to collect evidence for sexual assault cases.
Ultimately it is the criminal who should bear the burden of the added costs, Fannon said.He did not say the victim should pay - he said the cost should be passed on to the rapist as part of the restitution in the case. Incidentally, Fannon's axe:
The forensic exam is just one part of the equation. Id like to see the courts make these people pay restitution for these things, Fannon said.
Fannon said he intends to include the cost of exams required to collect evidence in a restitution request as a part of a criminals sentencing.
Palin appointed Fannon as police chief in 1997. His predecessor was fired by Palin over his willingness to limit the town’s bar operating hours. Fannon was one of three candidates considered for the job and the City Council confirmed him in a 5-0 vote.Read more!
Palin later tangled with Fannon when he ran for Wasilla’s mayoral office during her gubernatorial race. Fannon created campaign ads containing a false endorsement from Palin. Palin did not support Fannon for mayor. She supported his rival, Curt Menard.
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