09.30.07
Please help us identify the individuals within this universally-recognized-as-evil organization who have had a genuine change of heart
An update to the post below on Karzai’s reaching out to the Taliban.
Walled in
Try as I might, I’m never able to get the whole nature-of-God thing far from the forefront of my thoughts. As I wrote in my journal this morning, it seems as if I’m walled in between the two models I most frequently come in contact with (as in daily), and I find them both to be deeply flawed.
BN readers may recall that my last Republic column was on what it will take for our society to recover its ability to recognize evil. In the course of constructing my argument, I outlined the way I regard the Bible. I said it is the main scripture to which I go to deepen my understanding of the nature of God and my relationship to Him. I mentioned that fact that I also glean solid insights from the Bhagavad Gita and the sermons of the Buddha. I followed that one-sentence assertion with a reiteration of my main reliance on the Bible. I said that if one looks at the broad outline of the story it’s telling, of a particular people that the Creator has selected for a special relationship, and how that people disappoint him, break his heart, even incur his wrath over and over again, we can indeed glean important insights into His nature. Each time, he sighs deeply and says, “Okay, let’s try this again,” so there’s this idea of a renewed covenant. It’s like God says, “I can’t resist giving you people all the chances you need to need to get our relationship right.” Now, that’s some deep love. We see the culmination of this in the events of that first Easter weekend.
I did spend about a paragraph saying that I could never be a fundamentalist, that certain Biblical images and accountings – six-day creation, every organism on Earth represented in the life forms gathered on a boat that floated high above an apocalyptic flood, the rod turning into a serpent, all those seals and lamps that the Hebrew prophets saw, a literal, physical throne of judgement before which we’ll all stand at the end of time – are just too far beyond what any human being I know of has ever experienced for me to take literally. (By the way, C.S. Lewis doesn’t appear to have been a fundamentalist, either. From today’s reading in The Business of Heaven: ” . . . the story told in Genesis – as St. Jerome said long ago – is told in the manner of a ‘popular poet,’ or as we should say, in the form of a folk tale. But if you compare it with the creation legends of other peoples . . . the depth and originality of this Hebrew folk tale will soon be apparent. The idea of creation in the rigorous sense of the word is there fully grasped.”)
All the foregoing was actually just a preface to the main point of my column, which was another theme frequenters of BN know I visit regularly: the need of a mature cosmology to address evil.
Anyway, I got a letter from a total stranger about three days later – this guy didn’t waste any time – that started off acknowledging our common ground. “I’m glad to see that the Bible is your main source of spiritual guidance,” he began, “and that you see the need to resist evil in this world.” He then launched right into this: “If you haven’t accepted Christ as your personal savior, I encourage you to do so now. I found a lot of things about the Bible perplexing before I did so, but now it makes perfect sense and I read it frequently throughout each day.” Invited me to check out his church or call him if I had any questions.
Frankly, I was offended. It’s their way or the highway with his type. Did he not discern the tone of my column? I was basically saying that I was really not too far from where a guy like him was coming from. I said I believed in an inevitable accounting before God for what one has done with this gift called human life, and that we’d all come up short, and that I saw a profound cosmic significance in what Christ went through on that Firday centuries ago, that it had much to tell us about grace. But, no, with a guy like this letter-writer, you either buy the whole fundamentalist package, or you ain’t got squat in the way of a spiritual life.
Now, back to this morning’s journal entry and my feeling walled in. The other wall is the whole New-Age, “transformational,” you-can-have-it-all, crystals-and-channeled-entities bag. What level to begin with? There’s the utterly juvenile embrace of supernatural phenomena made up out of whole cloth. It’s like little-kid-pretend stuff, like the secret decoder ring on the back of the cereal box. Then there’s the girly-girl therapy-speak, focus on feelings and emotions that characterizes such programs and approaches. Then there’s the crass commercialism of it – tapes, videos, Alaskan cruises. It takes, to use a certain hard-left Senator’s phrase, a “willing suspension of disbelief” to plunk down a bunch of money to sit in a hotel ballroom and watch an ostensibly normal human being approach the podium and summon on cue some “being” or “group of beings” that will tell you how to have it all, get everything you want. That’s another thing. Why is it what it’s presumed the audience wants is the stuff of women’s magazine covers – nice home, a “relationship,” weight loss, career fulfillment?
Mainstream, World-Council-of-Churches-style Protestantism (and its weird stepsister, Unitarianism) offers no alternative. That area of postmodern American religious life had devolved into a bunch of self-congratulatory field trips to the Palestinian territories or to Gaia-worshipping global-warming conferences.
So where do I turn?
What I do is stick with the Scripture I mentioned in the column. Keep the relationship as direct as possible. Prayerfully cast my eyes heavenward and pose my questions to the only One who can answer them anyway.
09.29.07
Where did he get his Kool-Aid?
What is Afghan president Karzai thinking? I can’t begin to enumerate all the levels on which this is a disastrous move.
09.27.07
This phrase should be associated with her name every time it’s uttered
The H-word creature may represent New York in the Senate, but, with her “We haven’t even tried” humdinger last night, she placed herself in the camp Dr. Kirkpatrick rightly characterized as San Francisco Democrats.
On a related note, Bill Kristol watched the debate last night so we could get through our evenings without digestive upheaval. He comes away concluding that the White House will probably remain in GOP hands. The H-word creature has to get to the nomination without a major misstep. Should she commit one, it goes to one of the second-tier candidates, either He Who Walks on Water (Teri O’Brien’s title) or Silky Pony (Laura Ingraham’s). They are such obvious jokes that such a development would take the odds of the next prez being a Pub from 2 to 1 to 4 to 1.
So, be careful out there, Senator We-haven’t-even-tried.
09.26.07
An opportunity for show content I’ll have to take a pass on
I run into situations like this from time to time at the nexus of my professional life and my life as a human being with deeply held convictions.
Seven area restaurants are contributing special dishes – a lot of them pumpkin-related, given the season we’re entering into – to an event early next month called Sustainable Table. It’s a fundraiser for the Bloomington chapter of the Sierra Club. Because these are indeed cool, creative dishes, and because I know a lot of the chefs and proporietors involved, it ought to be the kind of thing I’d talk up on Stirring Something Up, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to help the Sierra Club further its agenda.
So I’ll just find other stuff to talk about.
You’d think they’d want to join them formally
Read this ‘08 election strategy report and see if you can see any points of difference between what it outlines and the policy orientation of the Democrat party. I couldn’t find any.
What you need to talk sense to the eco-hysterics
The National Center for Policy Analysis Global Warming Primer. You can read the pdf on line and / or order it (as in, in bulk, all you teachers out there).
Will someone please send copies to Ban Ki-Moon and Arnold Schwarzenegger?
09.25.07
Laser-focus thinking of the day
At Hot Air, Michelle Malkin interviews Diana West about her new book The Death of the Grown Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bring Down Western Civilization. I really liked the part about what Lionel Trilling had to say about the shaping of a life.
Part Two is tomorow.
My birthday is coming up. I think I’ll plant the idea of this timely tome in Mrs. BN’s mind as a gift idea.
09.24.07
The terrorist-in-chief speaks
Watching the live streaming of Ahmadinejad at Columbia. Started out letting everyone know he found Bollinger’s introduction rather insulting. Then went into a discussion about scientific inquiry as a gift from God, and how it can be misued, as when the major powers make WMDs. Lots of nods to Jacob, Moses, David and Jesus. The Palestinians were just minding their own business and then got displaced sixty years ago and have been subjected to helicopter gunship attacks ever since. Iran has the right to develop peaceful nuclear power.
I must say, the guy has learned how to talk to a Western audience.
And can he ever prevaricate during Q&A time.
30-24
A productive afternoon in Houston. The Texans were still impressive, even without Andre Johnson and Ahmad Green, but the Colts’ Joseph Addai was more so.
Not an urban myth after all
The NYT did indeed give MoveOn.org a half-off discount for its full-page act of treason.
09.22.07
Thirteen hours to go
The autumnal equinox occurs at 5:50 tomorrow morning.
Right now, as I drink this beer on my porch, it’s definitely deep summer. The fact that we’ve had near-drought conditions since July reinforces that limp - in places outright brittle - way that life force expresses itself after the peak of chlorophyll-fuelled ebullience has passed. Our garden and the porch plants and the flower beds are still putting on a display of cellular abandon, but that’s only because we’ve decided we’ll live with a high water bill as long as these conditions persist.
The breeze is languid and hot. The sky is white. Not overcast, white. If you spray, say, a basil plant with the hose, you unleash a furious swarm of gnats and mosquitoes.
Cultural change-of-season indicators have been in place for weeks now. Obviously, the kids are back in school. The football season is into its fourth week. The supermarkets have Halloween candy and plastic jack-o-lanterns on special display.
Still it’s very possible to savor the summer vibe – the one Nat King Cole celebrated in song with his baritone nod to soda, pretzels and beer – today.
And I’m inclined to. Perhaps the biggest charm of living in south-central Indiana is the likely regularity, in any given year, of four distinct seasons. I have seen years when we got our first taste of clammy, blustery weather on Labor Day weekend. In 1989, on October 19, we got four inches of snow. Sometimes you get 80-degree temps in mid-March. Still, on average, things change in accordance with the calendar.
I like that, because it gives me a proper opportunity to process the significance of transistion. At the risk of sounding overly English-majory, a year’s milestones and points of transistion – season changes, holidays, birthdays – remind us of the nature of time and impending death.
Nothing to get super-shook about, but there nonetheless. That’s why this afternoon is marvelous. Quiet, lazy, a lingering sheet of oven-like white over everything, drooping vine leaves. Great for smiling, humming some old tune from a summer past, and cultivationg the art of appreciation.
What’s the point in talking when nobody but you wants you to exist?
Condi Rice is having difficulty getting Arab nations to sign on definitively to the peace conference she envisions holding in November, but the main reason she should reconsider the whole thing is that it’s just plain a bad idea.
09.21.07
Connecting the probable dots
Charles Krauthammer’s column today lays a number of things on the table sequentially and concludes that there’s very little time left to do what’s essential: put the maximum hurt on the theocratic regime in Iran with sanctions. We all know what our options dwindle to if we don’t get cracking. The French foreign minister recently spelled it out for us.
Let’s lay the developments out in even more simplified form:
In July, several dozen Iranian and Syrian technicians in Syria died when their attempt to fit a missile with a chemical warhead resulted in a disastrous accident.
At a Syrian port, cargo from North Korea marked as cement was offloaded.
On Sept. 6, Israeli warplanes did something over Syrian airspace about which Israel is being extemely tight-lipped.
Shortly thereafter, the latest round of six-way talks over North Korea’s nuclear program was abruptly postponed.
A prominent anti-Syrian member of the Lebanese parliament was killed by a car bomb in Beirut, the eighth such Lebanese politican to be so assassinated in two years.
Now, these are all facts. There may be more facts, facts that would lead us to some conclusion other than the one to which these facts point. they would have to be some humdinger facts, that’s for sure.
And could any such facts taper the steely-eyed resolve with which we ought to be proceeding with regard to those states and entities we know to be our enemies?
Update: he will speak at Columbia
It appears that the university did not cancel Ahmadinejad’s speech.
You have to wonder how this nation – and the broader Western civilization of which it is a part – is going to survive. Our educational establishment seems to want its destruction. Same goes for our major news-dispensing institutions. Also most of the arts-and-entertainment industry. Also one of our two major political parties. Other industries are mainly preoccupied with what they primarily do: make and distribute things.
I hope there’s a huge crowd on hand to raise hell when this vile creature steps on campus.
