Where do they find these idiots?

I am not just talking about Republicans, but this time it is one: this idiot. I'll put his original comments aside. They are not a question of stupidity but of his apparently sincere religious beliefs. The issue of stupidity is when he insults everyone who is a Hindu and THEN DOES NOT UNDERSTAND WHY THEY COULD BE OFFENDED.

The director of the Hindu American Foundation talked to him and sent him this reply:

“It is difficult to understand how an individual of your education, experience and position would think that calling ‘gods’ of another religion ‘false’ and its practices ‘idolatry, and stating that your hope was that ‘Hindus open their eyes and receive Jesus as their Savior’ would not be taken as offensive…. While you say that you did not intend to offend Hindus, it is apparent that you did. Still, I appreciate the time you personally took to clarify your perspective.”

After reading about this impenetrably smug doofus I can only imagine someone like, say, Christ, walking out of the thoroughly disrupted money changers' section of the Temple and wondering "Was it something I said?"

When you think your religious views are so mainstream that calling anyone else on their religion is simple common sense you have wondered far from the Gospels. What sacrifice, what burden, what cross have you picked up if you are that smug and self-satisfied.

Is there something we have been feeding politicians lately? Is it the water?

money changers. that would be ancient bankers. another remarkably smug lot.

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The King James Bible, once again

Having heard something read from the King James Bible in at least one or another of its versions almost every week of my childhood, I often have posted something about it here.

Here is another one, complete with a neat little video I can use in class. It is the 400th anniversary of the work.

Enjoy.

So. How do you spend your day?

Fascinating. Here are some charts loaded with data about how Americans spend their day. Not much to my surprise, time spent on 'correspondence' and 'sports and recreation' don't even show up on the charts. More to my surprise, neither does 'religious activity.'

well, maybe if you blow the chart up by about 500% you could see something.

First, grace.

from Andrew Sullivan

Words from long ago

Sometime in the first decades of the fifth century the Bishop of Hippo, a town in North Africa, wrote the following:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something, about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world ... and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics . . . If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason.

Somewhere else he wrote:

"Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all.

This particular bishop became a saint, and if that weren't enough, his mother was a saint too. (He apparently didn't care too much for his dad).

he wrote a bunch of other stuff. I should read some of it sometime.

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More on Rand v Christ

Andrew Sullivan has a piece by Joe Carter:

"

[T]o be a follower of both Rand and Christ is not possible. The original Objectivist was a type of self-professed anti-Christ who hated Christianity and the self-sacrificial love of its founder. She recognized that those Christians who claimed to share her views didn’t seem to understand what she was saying.

Many conservatives admire Rand because she was anti-collectivist. But that is like admiring Stalin because he opposed Nazism. Stalin was against the Nazis because he wanted to make the world safe for Communism. Likewise, Rand stands against collectivism because she wants the freedom to abolish Judeo-Christian morality. Conservative Christians who embrace her as the “enemy-of-my-enemy” seem to forget that she considered us the enemy," - Joe Carter.

The Rapture: So far so good

Is everyone still out there?

I am here, in the house. No sign of The Rapture, yet. But then I can't see anyone from where I am. I last saw Carmen with a pot of picadillo leaving for ...

... her church. .... and now she's nowhere to be seen.

you don't suppose ...

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Religious tolerance at the academy

I am having great fun reading Alexandre Dumas' La Reine Margot about the St Bartholomew Day's massacre. But that was far away and long ago and we are more tolerant these days.

Here, by chance, is a quote from one of my 'Migration in World History' students essay on their family:

The family "converted from Catholicism to Christianity."

And I am sure they are better Christians for it.

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I'm still puzzled

Well, by a lot of things, but especially this (at least this morning). Why is it that the Pope's ruling on condoms is being brayed about the universe and parsed within an inch of its life, while his much more significant position on healthcare is virtually ignored?

it's almost as if ... as if... the media and the bloggers were not serious or something.

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Opinions on health care

Glenn Beck's take:

"We have a right to health care, really? God doesn't give health care. Man provides health care. So how can it be a right. If you are endowed by your Creator with certain unalienable rights, how can a God-given right be health care, unless Jesus comes down and starts to open up a clinic and heal us himself? There cannot be a right to health care, because the rights come to God."

And Pope Benedict's:

Access to adequate medical attention, the pope said in a written message Nov. 18, was one of the "inalienable rights" of man. [...]

The pope lamented the great inequalities in health care around the globe.... Because an individual's health is a "precious asset" to society as well as to himself, governments and other agencies should seek to protect it by "dedicating the equipment, resources and energy so that the greatest number of people can have access."

Don't know the effects of this last opinion.

though I hear some hold his opinion about God to be more authoritative than Beck's.

Advice for Christian students... or anyone

Via Andrew Sullivan comes this page of good advice from Stanley Hauerwas in First Things. It is good advice. Even if you aren't a Christian. You should read the WHOLE thing (as I tell my students), especially if you happen to teach at a college or university.

First, the inescapably Christian part:

“The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.”

I like that last part about history.

Here is the part Sullivan likes (me too).

But there is much more. Here is a part I like, partly because it has some relevance to my particular institution:

It’s not easy for anyone who is serious about the intellectual life, Christian or not. The curricula of many colleges and universities may seem, and in fact may be, chaotic. Many schools have no particular expectations. You check a few general-education boxes—a writing course, perhaps, and some general distributional requirements—and then do as you please. Moreover, there is no guarantee that you will be encouraged to read. Some classes, even in the humanities, are based on textbooks that chop up classic texts into little snippets. You cannot become friends with an author by reading half a dozen pages. Finally, and perhaps worse because insidious, there is a strange anti-intellectualism abroad in academia.

And if you were going to boil it down to a few sound bites:

But you are a Christian. This means you cannot go to college just to get a better job.

And, of course, you cannot read enough Trollope. Think of books as the fine threads of a spider’s web. They link and connect.

You cannot and should not try to avoid being identified as an intellectual.

Also, go to the bookstore at the beginning of the term to see which professors assign books—and I mean real books, not textbooks.

Although many professors are not Christians (at some schools, most aren’t), many professors have a piety especially relevant to the academic life.

So read the whole thing. Even if you aren't a Christian, or aren't a very good one, the advice is good and provokes thought.

T E Lawrence has an encounter.

Lawrence, he of Arabia, was on campaign and climbed up an escarpment to bathe in a fresh pool of water flowing from between the rocks.

Upon the water-cleansed and fragrant ledge I undressed my soiled body, and stepped into the little basin, to taste at last a freshness of moving air and water against my tired skin. It was deliciously cool. I lay there quietly, letting the clear, dark red water run over me in a ribbly stream, and rub the travel-dirt away. While I was so happy, a grey-bearded, ragged man, with a hewn face of great power and weariness, came slowly along the path till opposite the spring; and there he let himself down with a sigh upon my clothes spread out over a rock beside the path, for the sun-heat to chase out their thronging vermin.

He heard me and leaned forward, peering with rheumy eyes at this white thing splashing in the hollow beyond the veil of sun-mist. After a long stare he seemed content, and closed his eyes, groaning, 'The love is from God; and of God; and towards God'.

His low-spoken words were caught by some trick distinctly in my water pool. They stopped me suddenly. I had believed Semites unable to use love as a link between themselves and God, indeed, unable to conceive such a relation except with the intellectuality of Spinoza, who loved so rationally and sexlessly, and transcendently that he did not seek, or rather had not permitted, a return. Christianity had seemed to me the first creed to proclaim love in this upper world, from which the desert and the Semite (from Moses to Zeno) had shut it out: and Christianity was a hybrid, except in its first root not essentially Semitic.

This observation leads him into a dream like incantation of the progress of Christianity.

A most peculiar man.

taken from Seven Pillars of Wisdom

More oldies

Here is a capsule review of a book that now seems prescient, though I remember reviewers thinking the author was throwing too much stuff that wasn't really related to the decline of the American republic. Here's what I said about it a few years ago:

17. American Theocracy by Kevin Philips (audio). I am not in a mood to write much about this right now. It’s a good book examining three major trends in American political life that Philips thinks are terminal for the Republic: dependence on foreign oil, the rise of a religious party (the Republicans) for the first time in American politics, and the rise of high finance as America’s principle industry. Over drawn and overly pessimistic, but an important read if you are a politically aware citizen.

I am not so sure after three years of crazy politics and imploding banks that his view was as over drawn as I thought!

The Power of Prayer

A wavering Christian (actually, I waver occasionally on most of my convictions) I am always depressed when I see certain types of Christian behavior. Not many weeks ago a good Christian stood in my living room and told how much he approved of "enhanced interrogation."

This is another example: apparently some conservative Christians are sporting bumper stickers that say Psalm 109, verse 8, which goes like this, according to Rabbi Herschfeld on BeliefNet:

For those of you who may not know that particular verse, it reads "May his days be few, may another take over his position." And before anyone excuses this toxic use of scripture as nothing more than the wish that President Obama not be re-elected to a second term of office, the next verse in the psalm reads, "May his children be orphans and his wife a widow".

In fact the whole chapter is about awful things happening to an evil person.

Couldn't we just stick to claiming he was born in Kenya?

Yes, I know. Probably very few people are doing this and it is being blown out of proportion by blogs. Like this one, maybe.

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Christian missionaries at work.

According to Wikipedia, there is a new concept out there called "the 10/40 Window". Better let the article speak for itself (though the emphasis is mine).

The 10/40 Window is a term coined by Christian missionary strategist Luis Bush in 1990^{[1] [2]} to refer those regions of the eastern hemisphere located between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator, a general area that in 1990 was purported to have the highest level of socioeconomic challenges ^{[3] [4]} and least access to the Christian message and Christian resources ^{[5] [6] [7]} on the planet.

This quite explicitly includes Portugal and Greece.

As one of my fellow Mediev-L commentators said, "I hear that the NT hasn't been translated into Greek!" I'm sure they are working on it even as I type.

Well, at least they let Italy off the hook Jack. Spain too, apparently, so Carmen's ancestral home is safe.

Without Comment [parady alert]

UPDATE:
Well, I am afraid I have to end my fun and add a comment. The above coloring book sample is a parody. Dang. I should have known. As Maire pointed out, all the true dinosaurs died in the great flood because they were too dumb to get on the ark.

but I knda liked the macho Jesus image

Russian Icon

No, this is not a joke apparently.

"An icon depicting Soviet leader Joseph Stalin has appeared in a church of Leningrad district's city of Strelnya, Novaya Gazeta reported Wednesday."

could lead to a revival of iconoclasm. One can hope.

Christ and the GOP

Mulan's dad is a colleague in the history dept. One of his students, a devout evangelical Christian who helps teach Sunday school at her church, told him that an assistant Sunday school teacher told her that:

Since John McCain was God's Candidate ... and he lost ... and everything happens according to God's will ... the only reason the Evil Obama one won was because we had sinned against God ... and therefore the next four years of Pure Evil were our punishment.

Don't quite know what to say about people like that. Though I would have thought that the Pancreator, maker of billions of galaxies each with billions of stars and billions of planets that might bear creatures of soul, and who loves and is concerned about every single one of the 6 billion plus homo sapiens alive at this very moment, not to mention the billions that have already passed to their reward and the billions to come ...

... might have other things to worry about than the political fortunes of one man of one political party of one nation state (which, as a creation of sinful human beings, might be unworthy of such attention in any case).

But, I could be wrong. God hasn't been cluing me in on such matters (though I am reading Marcus Borg's Jesus with a bunch of Episcopalians).

but just so you Catholics don't feel left out, a uniformed member of a priestly hierarchy under the direct supervision of a foreign potentate has refused communion to anyone voting for Obama.

Carmen wants to know how he knows.

A temple of beer bottles

This temple was built by monks in Thailand out of a million green Heineken and brown local beer bottles according to Andrew Sullivan.




But what did they do with the beer?

I've always liked H. L. Mencken

At least in small doses. Too much of him is like a bit too much vinegar in your salad dressing. But here is a quote of his posted at Andrew Sullivan's site by Patrick Appel.

Despite the common delusion to the contrary the philosophy of doubt is far more comforting than that of hope. The doubter escapes the worst penalty of the man of faith and hope; he is never disappointed, and hence never indignant. The inexplicable and irremediable may interest him, but they do not enrage him, or, I, may add, fool him. This immunity is worth all the dubious assurances ever foisted upon man. It is pragmatically impregnable. Moreover, it makes for tolerance and sympathy. The doubter does not hate his opponents; he sympathizes with them. In the end he may even come to sympathize with God. The old idea of fatherhood submerges in a new idea of brotherhood. God, too, is beset by limitations, difficulties, broken hopes. Is it disconcerting to think of Him thus? Well, is it any less disconcerting to think of Him as able to ease and answer, and yet failing?"- H.L. Mencken. From "Damn, a Book of Calumny" (now out of print, but available in "A Mencken Chrestomathy"; p.96)

I think this is supposed to illustrate the 'Conservatism of Doubt' meme.


Or is that the 'Doubt of Conservatism' that I am afflicted with?