God Probably Doesn’t Exist.

The British Humanist Association, supported by Richard Dawkins and others like Ellis have tried a new method to make their opinion heard that religion is worthless: plaster it on buses in Britain.

At first glance, this may seem horrible. But does Dawkins have a point? What he’s reacting to are the religious posters that say things like, “Repent! Or go to hell!”

The full slogan says: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Who knows what the affect would be. People are getting so cynical of advertising in general…. Why not post something like that? Will it really matter either way?

Pacifism… Not sticking one’s head in the sand

One of my friends was in a debate tonight regarding war, specifically the current war. The opening question was whether or not America should pull out of Iraq and into Afganistan. There were a number of good points raised by the five students, some more than others, and I have to say that my friend did a remarkable job as an informed individual that answered the question comprehensively.

There was one student who, in his opening statement, made extremely clear that he is a pacifist. I am a pacifist too, as one would know from my previous entries, so at first I was interested in how he might relate that to the current situation. But that was the problem… he didn’t. He “answered” the question, saying that America should not move out of Iraq, and should not go into Afganistan. Then he went into what might have been a good argument for pacifism in another context… however, it had no bearing whatsoever on the actual topic being discussed. He was the only one of the five to bring his Bible up to the debate table (although he didn’t open it; maybe it was just there as moral support), and he argued that murder and killing and violence are unnatural. Very true. But what does that look like for this situation?

A lot of the other students had obviously been well informed about specific cultural and political tensions between not just the three countries mentioned, but Iran as well. They addressed each others’ concerns well, and then the need for clarification about the pacifist’s position arose. When the moderator asked for clarification of what it looked like to stay in Iraq but not be at war, the pacifist opened a whole other can of worms: he said that our government is a Christian nation, and as such we should be “pushing” Christianity, although not in a military sense.

I’m sure that shocked a lot of us. He went on to say other things that are clearly fallible, or at least need a lot more clarification, like the Roman empire fell because of the pacifism of early Christians, and that the Christian force he’s promoting will not disrupt any current cultural tendencies, essentially taking out the “Christian” aspect of Christianity, since a “secular” group could promote justice and peace just as much as Christians.

All that to say…. I really wish he hadn’t given pacifism such a bad rap. Pacifism isn’t a denial of all reality. It is ascribing to a higher reality. There are governmental issues that need to be discussed pragmatically as well, and if as a pacifist who thinks that those ultimately will fail, and want to abstain from that, like me, that’s fine. But if you go as far to say we are a Christian nation, and ignore the specific issues that are making this a complicated topic, just trying to promote pacifism in the process, I wish you wouldn’t. Really. Be a closet pacifist or something.

All this political talk!

I keep posting all these blogs that have to do with politics, and I realize it is somewhat onesided, but that’s the culture I’m breathing right now. How can one not?

Here’s another item about politics. I read an essay by Emma Goldman, and I was struck by how much she focused on the economic aspect of her times. Her explanation for crime was that it was “misguided energy”: people were being forced to make ugly things, and they found no joy or pride in producing something beautiful. They were trapped inside a prison that made them go crazy.

I brought the topic up in my political science class, and I did a poor job of trying to phrase it into a question; it wasn’t really a question, I just wanted to talk about it more. What resulted from the discussion however was the notion that economic power feeds into state power. I had known that corporations and nation-state governments were extremely similar. But what if this was taken to its extreme?

The Pixar movie Wall-E indirectly addresses this. I watched it again last night, so it was fresh in my head, and this time I noticed that the person in charge is the CEO of Big N Large. He has a podium that looks very much like it came out of the White House… but there is no governmental presence in the movie– just a corporation.

Is that an accurate depiction of what this would look like at its extreme? Would we be any worse off if a corporation was running our country instead of a government? Sometimes its hard to tell the difference between the two anyway.

Church and Politics Quiz

Here is an interesting quiz I came across on the blogosphere… I’m not a huge fan of statistical data, and admit the lack of comprehensiveness a chart can give… but it might be an act of interest for those of you.

http://www.buildingchurchleaders.com/quiz/?id=FVDKP

If you’re curious about my results, we can compare, of course as a furthering of conversation, but I’m not going to post it publicly. If you want to post your results as comments, or further comments about the accuracy of this “quiz,” I’d be interested in hearing your opinion.

America: A Christian Nation?

85% of Americans identify themselves as Christian (although only 33% admit they go to church regularly).

77% of people in Israel identify themselves as Jewish.

Are you surprised? I was.

What does the term “Christian Nation” even mean? I wish it would disappear entirely.

*Source: http://harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080695*

Voting: A game of chance?

“All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers, or backgammon, a playing with right and wrong; its obligation never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.”

~David Thoreau, quoted by Emma Goldman in her book Anarchism and Other Essays.

Always Swim with a Buddy: What Can the Imago Dei Learn from Transgenders?

“Our bodies are like dust covers.”

So said prodigal son Ryan Stevenson, son of a murder victim who had been found in the ocean, severed in two.

Oh, but perhaps I should mention, this isn’t exactly a real story, but the plot from the most recent episode of the TV show Bones. The show features an anthropologist who sees religion as a “mass illusion” and completely illogical. Her partner is a non-academic Roman Catholic (in the sense that he is a normal guy who’s faith means a lot to him, yet he doesn’t spend his time academically trying to support it). The two of them throughout the four seasons have had disagreements about science and religion, and often offer at the least an interesting dialogue, even if it seems a little biased.

In this episode, the skeleton of a woman named Patricia, who was a pastor in a church called “Inclusion” (welcoming recovering drug addicts and alcoholics) washes ashore. Through a good amount of investigation and ingenuity, they discover that the pastor is actually the same pastor that had been a televangelist in a materialistic fire and brimstone type church, a church that openly spoke against homosexuality…. but the interesting facet is that former pastor was named Patrick… and had been male.

The quote I started with, from Patrick/Patricia’s son, is central to the whole religious tension in the show. Patrick’s son had taken over the pulpit after his father had disappeared some five years earlier, presumably dead. He gets fed up with the church, perhaps as his father had, and engages in types of social work as an act of redemption. Upon finding out his father had died, but had lived a life as a woman, Patrick’s son was not offended by his father’s sex change. Instead, he was saddened he had not known her as that person.

Booth, as a Catholic, shares some of the concerns that were raised by Patrick’s former wife. She was convinced that Patrick would never do that, at first, because they believed that people are made in the image of God, and God does not make “biological mistakes,” as the psychologist Sweets phrased it in the show. Bones countered that this woman had obviously had plastic surgery and colored her hair. Booth somewhat heatedly responds quickly that in the case of this woman, she was just augmenting the image God had given her, not totally dismantling it.

And while it is a complex topic to wonder whether or not people really are attached to their genders, or perhaps more accurately, if our gender stereotypes are all-encompassingly correct, what I would like to end with is the final moments of the episode. The son takes on his father Patricia’s role as pastor of the Inclusion church. And in his sermon he starts off by saying, on the outside we are gay and straight, black and white, fat and thin, man and woman, saint and sinner… but that we are all children of God. He says he is sorry he didn’t get to know his father Patricia but he wants to get to know her, that redeemed human being both in her old Bible, but most importantly through the church community. The people that she loved, and people that loved her back. The true Imago Dei.

Booth comments, “I get it. Redemption through transformation.” And poignantly asks, “What is it you believe, Bones? ” Despite all of Bones’ genius and scientific expertise, there is still something lacking, something that is often complemented by Booth’s presence, but is still something missing in her as an individual. And yet, Bones response illustrates this exact point! She says, “I believe in swimming with a buddy.” Booth is confused, but I think her point is extremely profound, and somewhat uncharacteristic for her, since she is quite proud of her individualality.

But even Bones understands that it is through relationships, through community, and through learning from others, or “gathering wisdom” as she phrases it, that we find meaning through our relationship with others, and for the church, by manifesting the imago dei.

Nation for good… Language of violence.

A few quotes from the second presidential debate.

John McCain: “We have gone to the four corners of the earth and shed American blood, often in the defense of someone else’s freedom… because we are a nation for good…”

Obama: “Senator McCain and I do agree, this is the greatest nation in the world, we are a nation for good.”

Humanitarian crises that does not affect our national security; use of force?

Obama: “We have moral issues at stake. Surely if we have the ability, that would have to be something we’d strongly consider, and act. I do believe we have to consider that as part of our national security. But we can’t be everywhere at once…”

McCain: “Greatest force of good, must do whatever we can, but tempered with our ability to beneficially affect the situation; I know those situations. I’ve been in them all my life.”

Obama: “We will kill Bin Laden, we will crush Al Queida; that is our biggest issue of national security.”

Obama: “We will never take military options off the table.”

McCain: “I know what it’s like for your comrades to pick you up and put you back in the fight. That’s what America’s all about.”

Donald Miller– Barack Obama’s Spokesman

I found out that Don Miller was coming to Calvin the day he arrived, and it said he was speaking about politics, but I kind of figured it would be a safe sort of conversation like Jim Wallis did a few weeks ago. He would say a lot about how being a Christian really affects how he votes, etc. But when I arrived and saw tons of Barack Obama propaganda, I realized I had mis-illusioned myself. The Calvin Democrats (an organization that has recently been resurrected for this year’s election) hosted him, and as such the room was mostly democrat, of about 50 to 75 people.

It was really convincing, actually. If I still believed in American bureaucracy I would probably vote for Obama. He does seem to do a good job of being democrat and being Christian, and the way Donald Miller made it sound, any Christian who is Republican is stupid and has been misled by shallow simplifications of issues. McCain apparently has put the pro-life label on himself just to get the evangelical vote, but that Roe v. Wade probably can’t be overturn. Obama on the other hand, “has a plan,” and according to Miller, we should vote not for an ideology but for a plan– for action.

But at the end of the day, no matter how convincing Obama’s narrative of Christian faith is (Miller says McCain does not have a convincing narrative; the reason he’s not having issues with his pastor is because he doesn’t have one– to vote for him would be to vote in the first secular president), he is still going to pledge allegiance to the religion of Americanism before he plegdes allegiance to Christ. If Christian morals correlate with American morals that keep this country from chaos, then he is going to support that. But the moment that our security is threatened to an extent that he must go to war to preserve our country… he’s going to do that. It might be portrayed as a difficult decision… but no president can be a pacifist. Just like a corporation is bound by law to make money above all else, so the president of the United States is bound by law to preserve our interests. To be president is to put priority of a specific geographic location with imagined borders over other geographic locations with their imagined borders as well. It necessarily creates an us-them distinction.

However, if I were to vote, I would vote for Obama. It’s hard not to be cynical and to actually believe someone when they say something… but Obama is pretty convincingly going to do what he can do to help resolve some of the issues that plague our country. But at the same time I am not going to fall prey to the illusion that the only way my voice can be heard is to vote. That’s a really common American myth, and one think is false. Maybe it’s not very pragmatic of me, but I am going to imagine different ways to let my voice be heard and not imagine that my civic duty can be done by electing a president to fix the world for me.

Notes on Journalism… and unrelatedly, the Emerging Church

My brief experience with journalism last year taught me something. I don’t like fast-paced deadlines. I think it would be fine if an article or two was the only thing I was working on, that way I could devote my whole attention through organizing interviews and actually writing the thing. But when I do it as an added on thing, on top of my schoolwork, I always end up feeling frustrated. That happened again this week. Part of it was that I had no idea what I was writing about. All I heard was there was some sort of meeting with all these different student groups that have acronyms that I hadn’t quite figured out yet. So I went in to my first couple interviews having one idea of what the article would be, and then it ended up being something quite different.

It was an exciting topic I realized afterwards… but another frustration was that I’m supposed to pretend to be objective. I don’t think there is any such thing as being objective, and pretending to be so is useless. The words I choose to use, the lines I quote, the organization… all these things are very subjective, and would have been different if someone else wrote them. I would much rather be more open with my own role in the process of writing, not in an overbearing way, but in a natural, here’s what I think, sort of way.

Another thing, to switch topics real quick… I don’t really know what to say about the emerging church-bashing that’s going on. I’ve always been a bit skeptical, thinking that they are appealing too much to how people are now instead of expecting them to change, but that can be said of many movements. I haven’t had any real intimate aquaintance with anyone in this movement, so in that respect I don’t know how they would feel about this… but I do think the movement has gotten so broad that you can label just about anything “emerging” and you’d be fine. It also goes hand in hand with the term “postmodern” church.

Maybe, for the sake of having precise language, it would be good to change the name. but I don’t know if that is going to cause the individual churches to change at all. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.