08.24.10
Posted in Appeasement of rogues, Culture, Dhimmitude at the highest levels, Diciness of Western civilization's survival prospects, Islam, Religion & Spirituality at 1:09 pm by Administrator
You just knew it was only a matter of time until this came out.
I think of those America-haters lined along the streets of lower Manhattan Sunday, with their placards about “racist fear.” I think of columnists like Eugene Robinson trying to make 70 percent of America look like a frenzied mob on the fringe. I think about MSM bigwigs like Katie Couric prattling about the danger to “American values.”
Well, so it turns out this Faisal is an America-hating, Hamas-loving, Sharia zealot after all.
I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about the concept of disconnect. Wee see disconnect in every aspect, on every level, of American life these days. What makes for the proper attachment of the modifier “chillingly” before the adjective “surreal” in describing it is the fact that so many people with such ostensibly respectable credentials are throwing their disingenuousness – let’s be completely accurate here – their willingness to lie – in our faces. The above-mentioned arbiters of societal mood know damn well and have since this guy showed up on the radar screen that he was a radical Islamist.
And their “W’s State Department sent him on trips, too” meme doesn’t wash, either. As we’ve said many times here at BN, W and his administration were not consistent in their adherence to American principles. That’s why North Korea is still a threat. It’s why the fraud of climate change hasn’t died yet. And, of course, it’s a precipitating factor in the debt and deficit levels staring us in the face.
It’s some small comfort, I suppose, to know that when one’s hunches about some development on the national or world stage grow strong, one can be assured that facts will soon surface to back them up. The downside, though, is that countervailing lies still carry a lot of weight in these very strange times.
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06.06.10
Posted in Human nature, Religion & Spirituality, human sexuality at 10:39 pm by Administrator
Hoo, boy. Longtime BN readers, or anybody who takes a scroll through the posts in the Religion and Spirituality category, knows that, while I lean toward Christianity, the final sticking points that stand between me and full embrace are knotty indeed. I’ve been working through several of them. The whole Hell thing is something I’m considering in ways I never have, for instance. It’s not easy to look squarely at what committed Christians profess about the subject, but I have had several discussions with myself, the upshot of which have been that dismissiveness will get me nowhere. I’m not saying I buy the whole package, but I’m looking at it with a seriousness I would not have been capable of twenty or thirty years ago.
Then along comes this, and I’m all blasted out of my seat again. Basing a marriage on one verse from Paul’s letters in which he admonishes wives to submit to husbands. I know, I know, as the linked post and several comments and links to be found there point out, one must put that teaching within the context of an entire marriage based on submission to God. Still, this one just comes across like a chain saw starting up in the middle of a Bach concerto.
It’s not the first time I’ve thought about this submission thing as an aspect of what Christians with a capital C are saying. C.S. Lewis refers to it. There’s the “love, honor and obey” snippet in marriage vows one rarely hears anymore.
I’ve even thought about it from an overall anthropological and biological perspective. Religion generally gives primacy to the role of a man. Islam is obviously the handiest example of this to cite, but even the leadership chains in the various strains of Buddhism are exclusively male. We know how gorillas, lions and elephants organize themselves societally. Men have the aggressiveness and upper body strength. They are wired to put fear aside when confronted with a threat. They get horny faster. They’re more analytical.
Still, a female human being is every bit as smart as a man. I’m no fan of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, but there was a point to the effort to get society to see that a great swath of human contribution was going to waste by not having women step up and give their say-so and excel in the various fields of human endeavor and fully participate in fashioning a fine and durable, workable society. To have a woman who enters into an intimate, lifetime commitment with a man base it on a “Here’s-how-I’ve-decided-we-will-do-things”/”Yes-dear-you-know-best” motif seems to me to be a recipe for snuffing out the very core of her humanity.
I guess the largest issue I still have that stands in my way of taking the plunge is this recurring meme I encounter along the lines of “I know these core precepts fly in the face of one’s basic sense of justice and even rationality, but we must submit to them because they constitute the way God decreed reality to be.”
Then again, as I say, I’m only leaning toward Christianity. Maybe once you make the full declaration, you see this all differently, and see a depth to Paul’s directive that’s not available to those peering through the crack in the door.
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04.18.10
Posted in Ideology, Religion & Spirituality at 6:35 pm by Administrator
Robin of Berkeley is one of the most intriguing contributors to The American Thinker. She’s a Bay Area psychotherapist. It’s pretty clear she used to swallow the Kool-Aid, but she’s solidly conservative now. Her articles have evolved in tone over the time I’ve been reading them. She has become less scrappy. She now probes into her own motives for her thought processes in a more methodical way. What I didn’t know is that she’s been exploring Christian faith, attending churches of various kinds. In her latest piece, she discusses how talking to one minister of the “social justice” variety shook her up and got her thinking about why a significant portion of American Christianity is so keen on remaking Jesus in the image of a left-wing activist. It’s good reading, and I sense that she’s going to have more insights to share on the matter.
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Posted in Religion & Spirituality at 2:10 pm by Administrator
My Facebook profile lists my religion as “leaning toward Christianity.” I had one church-going buddy chuckle with bemusement as he took note of that. An old school chum who now lives in Texas wrote in response to it, “Don’t lean toward it! Become one!”
Here’s where I stand: I am most definitely not atheist or even agnostic. I take religion per se seriously, and the older I get the more I can see that Christianity addresses cerain aspects of the human condition more thoroughly than any other mode of inquiring into the nature of God. I have moved past the phase of dismissing out-of-hand any doctrinal features that, at first glance, fly in the face of what my own experience and observation of reality have shown me. I’m willing to concede that I may need my perspective widened to see how such features make sense.
My sticking point remains this notion that all human beings are sullied by sin from the get-go. I respect great minds who hold this as a conviction, yet it just doesn’t make real sense to me at this point. Yes, the yay-hoos who hand you little tracts and pamphlets do have a heavy-handed way of expressing it. (”We can see from Book, Chapter and Verse such-and-such that we deserve hell and death, but there is good news! Book, chapter and verse such-and-such tell us that if we will just . . . “) But it is a doctrine with a long pedigree. Calvin’s TULIP formula proceeds from the premise that humankind is totally depraved. Highly erudite modern theological minds such as R.C. Sproul make this doctrine central to their work. So it’s not something that goofballs pulled out of thin air. For that matter, such scriptural chapters as John 8 and Romans 7 can’t really be interpreted with much leeway.
Still, I don’t get it yet. Unless a person has totally given himself or herself over to evil – and there are such human beings among us – why are we to see them as hopelessly sullied by sin? I’m a pretty good guy. I actually do a fairly decent job of following the Ten Commandments. I don’t steal, lie or murder. I practice constant vigilance against envy and blasphemy.
Maybe there’s something prideful in that outlook, though. Maybe what’s required is to so totally humble oneself as to say, “Lord, there are still gaps in my obedience to you.” But then, he knows that. What’s up with this wrath business? (I saw a church marquee a while back that bore a real downer message: “Divne mercy without wrath is meaningless.”) It makes it sound as if it’s the ultimate conditional love. God will cherish you like you’re infinitely precious if you will confess that the shed blood of Jesus has this very particular significance, but otherwise he’s mightily pissed at you, enraged, in fact.
But then it’s important to remember that God is the One who stuck His neck out, who went to the wall for us. He let his only begotten son go through the hellish experience of Good Friday. So maybe it’s a case where if you can’t muster up the humility and gratitude to say, “Yes, I know what he did up there, and it makes me drop to my knees when I fully let it in,” you aren’t spiritually prepared for real grace.
I just wish I could find some Christian who would hear me out, one on one, regarding these questions, and answer them as clearly and sincerely as possible, and not try to stick me in a Bible study group. I read the Bible. That’s where these questions came from.
That’s where I am.
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01.05.10
Posted in Human nature, Religion & Spirituality, human sexuality at 9:04 pm by Administrator
The Anchoress on Brit Hume on Tiger Woods and by inference Buddhism. She also offers a roundup of other perspectives, ranging from Buddhist to Christian to secular.
What is the relationship between forgiveness and peace of mind?
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12.23.09
Posted in Human freedom, Religion & Spirituality, health care at 3:16 pm by Administrator
What a depressing irony it is that, during Christmas week, the United States of America finds itself in the grip of unprecedented evil, a domestic enemy that has used the excuse of being duly elected to turn the last, best hope of humankind into a totalitarian dictatorship.
There are so many levels to this evil.
Jacob Sullum examines the “radical assault on the traditional understanding of rights” that Americans have had throughout their history. Is there anything more foul than convincing people that a right is a “legally enforceable claim on other people’s resources?” That’s what we’re witnessing.
Michael Gerson unpacks the full moral rot of Harry Reid’s offer of thirty pieces of silver to Ben Nelson. A money line: “Many assumed that [Nelson's] objections to abortion coverage were serious.” Alas, they were anything but. And now, taxpayers in all other 49 states will be subsidizing any new Nebraskans coming on board to Medicaid.
It’s the eleventh hour – in fact, well into the eleventh hour. It’s dark indeed. What kinds of resources are called for in a situation like this? Wits, IT savvy, an understanding of the Constitution, but most of all faith.
This is one of those scenarios, much like being outmanned and outgunned in a battle for a peice of ground, in which one realizes that a spiritual level to one’s existence is a binary choice. You may or may not call yourself a Christian, Jew, Buddhist or Hindu. You may or may not sign on to premillenial dispensationalsim, sola scriptura, or even such modern inventions as Rauschenberg’s social gospel, but at a juncture this grim, you will be forced to reach into your core and ask yourself whether all that is true, lovely, noble and worthwhile will in the end be preserved.
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11.30.09
Posted in Religion & Spirituality at 3:00 am by Administrator
I don’t know what it is about this time of year – the obvious, I guess – but no matter how I think I’ve got the ontological cauldron safely enough under a lid that I can focus on work, food-making, card-writing, the wind-up of the Colts season (they’re now 11 and 0 after another grand come-from-behind victory in Houston this afternoon; more on that soon), getting holiday gigs, and social events, I find myself scratching and clawing again about the nature of Jesus and that whole bag of theological snakes.
This year it was in large part jump-started by my having started to hang out with a young Indian man, an engineer at a local manufacturing firm. He’s been in the US a little over a year. He’s immensely curious about American culture, and to that end I included him in Thanksgiving, which he found fascinating and delightful. But he is also endlessly curious about the intersection of the world’s religions. He was raised a Hindu in Hyderabad and still celebrates those holidays, but wants to know about Christianity. He has begun attending Bible study at a local Lutheran church. He wanted to meet me for lunch last Saturday to share how that’s going.
It turns out, and I guess this is no surprise, that he’s asking the pastor, who leads the class, some really uncomfortable questions. He’s also asking them of his personal fitness trainer, a young woman of the Pentecostal faith. In both cases it boils down to their insistence on ascribing a divinity to Jesus that can’t be ascribed to the yogis and advanced beings he was taught about as a youth in India.
Another sticking point for him is the proliferation of denominations within Christianity, and their attendant doctrinal exclusion. He finds it so unlike the panoply of schools within Hinduism, each devoted to a particular form of the ultimate God, but welcoming of all who enter into their various temples.
And while that’s another subject I’d hoped to give a rest for a while, what do I stumble on this evening during a Net-surfing session but this Parchment and Pen post on the recent annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Tales of theological libs looking down their noses as dispensationalists who in turn go to great lengths to show how far their school of thought has advanced.
Then there are those like The Anchoress, who make the Advent and opening one’s heart to it look so clear-cut.
Then there’s the whole question of why one can go days, weeks, a lifetime in this realm and not bump up against any points at which one must face any such questions.
It may be a long Christmas season.
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08.18.09
Posted in Culture, Educational dhimmitude, Pakistan, Religion & Spirituality, Spiritual implications of our life choices at 12:18 pm by Administrator
Dennis Prager on the moral cowardice of Yale University – the University Press and the administration – for not printing the Danish Mohammed cartoons – in a book about the Danish Mohammed cartoons.
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07.07.09
Posted in Multiculturalism and diversity, Religion & Spirituality at 11:46 pm by Administrator
Pope Benedict, whose writings when he was a cardinal I found impressive, has imbibed some kind of Kool-Aid, I guess. At any rate, he’s clearly an economic illiterate, if this report is accurate.
UPDATE: Then again, that was the Reuters take on it. The Acton Institute seems to think his new encyclical is actually a call for a morally informed free market.
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06.25.09
Posted in Culture, Politics, Radicalism in high places, Religion & Spirituality, human sexuality at 2:28 pm by Administrator
The guy can put on a heart-wrenching presser, can’t he? It was brimming with the requisite deep respect for the initial good intentions of his mistress to repair her own marriage, oozing with remorse for the spouse, sons, staff and state he let down, drenched in on-the-knees humble yearning to find a way back to spiritual health.
My favorite kind of movie is the noir-era morality play. Double Indemnity, A Place in the Sun, High Noon, Casablanca. They hinge on a moment in which a moral choice is set before someone with unmistakable clarity.
A lot of life is boring or exciting or stressful or interesting or funny or gratifying or whatever, but once in a while, it is uncompromisingly demanding. There are points along the vector at which we are called to make choices that tell God everything He needs to know about the quality of our souls. It’s not a matter of the “deep,” “complicated,” “untamed” nature we express as humans. The heart having its reasons and all that. that’s using the poetic stuff as a smokescreen for unvarnished spiritual failure.
What should Sanford do? He ought to resign as governor, completely remove himself from the public arena, and focus on the supremely uncomfortable work of repairing his role in his family.
At this point, a certain kind of BN reader will no doubt be interested in seeing if I have anything to say about Newt Gingrich, for whom I have expressed admiration on many levels. For the record, I think his failings in this regard disqualify him from seeking the presidency or other high public office ever again. I am curious as to how he and his daughter Jackie Cushman, with whom he recently wrote a book on the basic principles for a happy life, have forged a close relationship, given Newt’s tawdry treatment of her mother. Anybody out there know the inside scoop on this one?
I am also willing to believe that Newt’s conversion to Catholicism is his sincere desire to learn how to face his Lord squarely in all his shame and sinfulness and seek real forgiveness.
It’s also important to state that the behavior of a Sanford or a Gingrich in no way has anything to do with the principles they assert and defend in the realm of public-policy and cultural polemics. Free-market economics, a foreign policy that accounts for enemies, and, yes, the championing of Judeo-Christian values, are good and immutable whether espoused by saints or scoundrels.
When it comes to putting those principles into law or executive policy, though, we must insist on that being done by people who hold themselves to a higher standard than adulters with good minds and intentions.
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06.11.09
Posted in Culture, North Korea, Religion & Spirituality at 6:23 pm by Administrator
Last night I was really proud of Mrs. BN for something she observed and remarked on.
The Presbyterian Church in which I grew up – and, in fact, in which Mrs. BN and I got married – is just a few blocks from where I live. It’s been years since I darkened the door there. I tried it a few times a few years back, but quickly detected that same odor of leftism that made me leave the Unitarian church a few years earlier.
The congregation’s lurch to the left had begun when I was a kid. The minister at the time got it very involved in the National Coundil of Churches. Shortly after I was confirmed at age fourteen my parents quit going and quit supporting it financially. My dad took the pastor out to lunch, because he thought a respectful explanation of where he was coming from was in order. he told him the final straw was the sending of local money to Angela Davis’s defense fund during the time she was on trial for that courtroom shooting.
I knew that things had gone downhill over the years. We’ve al seen the stats on declining membership in mainline Protestant denominations. I wrote my master’s thesis on the subject. I’ve had ways of keeping up with developments at the local church. The local “Peace Fellowship” meets there once a month. A few months back, I became aware that it had declared itself a “progressive Christian community.”
Recently, the church has taken to prominently hanging a banner on its fence by the sidewalk that says, “Torture is a moral issue.” Every time I pass it, I give it the finger and mutter to myself, “Fine. Tell it to countries that torture.”
Back to Mrs. BN. Last night she asked if I’d seen it. She said she was well aware what it was implying. She said she found the moral preening involved in its display supremely off-putting. She wondered if anybody in the congregation had ever watched any jihadist beheading videos.
Many times a day, I look at her and realize I’ve got a real keeper, but there are exceptional moments when it becomes resoundingly clear.
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06.03.09
Posted in Ideology, Pakistan, Religion & Spirituality at 11:18 pm by Administrator
He says we’re one of the world’s largest Muslim nations.
As BN has pointed out, from a statistical standpoint, we’re a significantly larger Buddhist nation.
And, why doesn’t TCM, The Aquarian Totalitarian, the ultimate danger to humankind’s survival, state forthrightly the truth that we are the second-largest Jewish nation on earth?
More to the point, why doesn’t he have the balls to retract his statement that the United States of America isn’t a Christian nation?
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