OK, this post discussing daily [tag]lectionary[/tag] readings and particularly the story of Peter being released from prison (Acts 12), is just too good not to link.
This retelling just gets the feel of the story, I think, and the humor of the situation, and like Jenn says, the “lectionary dudes” had fun putting it all together.
. . . oh, and pardon me for stopping by to read and enjoying the blog! (HT: 42)
For a break from white male Christianity, try Renita Weems’ blog Something Within, subtitled “For Thinking Women of Faith about matters of church, race, gender, sex, values, culture, justice, spirituality, and, oh yeah, God.”
I particularly enjoyed her recent post on the church’s view of sex, which challenges a good deal of common thinking in the church pews these days, if any thinking goes on at all.
Go, enjoy, and be challenged!
I don’t know if the claims made by this CEO according to the Washington Post are true or not, but I suggest we would do well to give them due consideration.
First, do you regard this kind of activity as impossible? Is it unlikely that the executive branch of the government would do such things?
Second, what is there to prevent them from doing it? They declare the material secret, take action against a citizen, and then they try to block the defense by claiming all the evidence is secret.
Some government secrecy is necessary, but we must limit it, and we must make those who hold those secrets as accountable as possible. This man may simply be making a self-serving claim, but his story is way too possible, even easy, for my comfort.
There’s still a good bit of discussion of Richard Dawkins around the blogosphere, focusing on <a href=”The God Delusion, though not exclusively. This morning I encountered a post by The Christian Cynic that gives an interesting response to one point, and also lets me know that the Christian Cynic is posting again.
The point to which the Christian Cynic is responding is simple and annoying: What’s to keep Christian moderates from taking the next step and blowing things up? There are so many things wrong with the question. You can read Cynic’s good answer. I would answer with a counter-question: What’s to keep Dawkins from taking the next step after despising religious moderates, and start rounding them up and killing them (or advocating it)? If you’re an atheist and find that question offensive, then consider the offensiveness of Dawkins’ approach to religious moderates of all stripes.
Cynic also linked to two other posts, these by macht of Prosthesis who is an occasional commenter here on Threads as well. The first is Self-Deception and Faith and the second is More on the reasonableness of belief systems and on comment on Sam Harris. Both are good. I personally have less concern with talking about leaps of faith, though I do not find theism unreasonable. I simply don’t believe there is sufficient evidence to force all reasonable people to agree–here is a leap at the end, because the evidence doesn’t carry one all the way.
But this whole issue leads back to a sort of binary thinking. In discourse on theism vs [tag]atheism[/tag] much of the discourse is done in black and white, proven or not proven, rather than looking at shades and probabilities, even if they involve some guesswork. Science is suited to study the natural world and nothing more. But it is an assumption, and a leap whether of faith or not, to go beyond that and say that nothing exists other than the natural world as we perceive it.
As a side note with commercial overtones, this binary approach is constantly applied to scripture. Either the Bible is inerrant or it is useless. I take a different approach, one which I discuss in my book When People Speak for God. I’m unlikely to convince anyone that the Bible is inspired with that book, but I do present an alternative to the all or nothing approach that pervades the discourse. I related this to Dawkins in The God Delusion and the Bible. For a full list of my posts responding to The God Delusion, see my category Dawkins.
I was going to do a bit of a wrap up on my comments on the [tag]Jena 6[/tag] even though I haven’t yet had the time to read all of the documents that were provided by Laura Curtis. She has, however, and has written a wrap-up. She’s already said what I wanted to say, and it sounds like she’s come to a pretty balanced conclusion. I still hope to read more in the future, but it’s not at the top of my list.
I want to congratulate Laura for bringing this to many people’s attention, including mine, and for managing to remain quite balanced and rational in spite of frustration. Considering that we come from substantially different points on the political spectrum, I think it’s significant that I have found her writing on this issue on target and balanced at all times.
Hopefully this situation will be concluded justly. The fact that Mychal Bell is being tried as a juvenile is a positive indication.
. . . has been posted at Lingamish. Good job, pretty pictures, interesting stuff, nuff said!
. . . through which one could easily drive a complete tyranny.
MSNBC.com reports:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday terminated a lawsuit from a man who claims he was abducted and tortured by the CIA, effectively endorsing Bush administration arguments that state secrets would be revealed if the case were allowed to proceed.
Read the entire article. The evidence is there that this option has been misused, and how could one possibly expect that it would not be misused? It’s too nice of a loophole, and it sounds so good. “Your security would be compromised if we were accountable on this issue, so we get to do what we want.” Somehow this makes some people feel safer for completely unknown reasons.
This is one of those things that makes me want to hold my nose and vote Democratic, rather than holding my nose and voting Republican (not holding my nose doesn’t appear to be an option), simply because the Democrats are more likely to put judges on the bench who are willing to hold the executive branch accountable for their actions.
There are secrets that need to be kept, but somehow the courts need to find a way to keep accountability, whilst protecting them. Perhaps we need a law that would provide a special judicial panel that could review claims of “state secrets” in secret, and then rule on such a claim.
It’s getting within a quarter or so of the first votes, so I thought I’d put in a few posts on what I, as a self-proclaimed moderate independent want for election day. I have to note that it doesn’t look thus far like I’m going to get it, but one can always wish, no?
The great weakness of our candidates, I believe, is that they lack any evidence of strategic thinking on dealing with terror. From one side we are hearing the “we’re in a war” beat, and we are told that we will go hunt terrorists for however long it takes and wherever they are hidden. What we are not told is how this strategy is ever to come to a close, or how the resources for such a strategy are to be provided.
On the other hand we have those who would pull out of [tag]Iraq[/tag]–an option devoutly to be desired in my view. At the same time, they haven’t laid out any long term plan that would substantially reduce or eliminate terrorism as a threat in the world. Iraq was a bad idea. Whether you are just plain anti-war, or simply prefer your wars to accomplish something, you can get on board with that. Incidentally, I would also like to see the withdrawal accompanied by an assessment of just what a foreign army can actually accomplish in Iraq, no matter how good that army is, and a measurement against that realistic standard. “Unified and democratic” isn’t likely to be on that list of potential objectives.
On the domestic front, it seems to me that we are in the business of kind of patching this or that element up haphazardly. What does a nation that is alert to [tag]terrorism[/tag], has the law enforcement and intelligence capabilities to detect such attacks, and can deal with the legal aftermath look like?
On the Republican side, it seems to me to look more and more like a terrorist state, where we just “trust” the executive branch of the government to do the right thing without any sort of accountability. More law enforcement is no good unless it is also smarter law enforcement. What will it be like to live in this country at the end of the process? I suspect that most of these candidates haven’t really thought about that. On the Democratic side, many candidates are interested in protecting our rights, but what precisely are they going to do instead?
I could suggest many things such as a large increase in the number of linguists and specialists in Middle Eastern culture in our government and intelligence agencies. Our current strategy and intelligence shows a great lack in that area. I’m not talking about a minor change–I’m talking about a massive increase. That is just one thing that I think is not being given the attention that it deserves. There are many others.
Do I personally have a strategy to propose? Not in detail, but then I’m not running for president. I can certainly tell you the key priorities of such a strategy.
I don’t want much, do I?
I’ll continue over the next few weeks with occasional posts on what I’d like to see in presidential and congressional candidates. Right now, I expect to be wearing a figurative clothespin on my nose when I go to the polls.
A number of folks around the internet have gotten pretty worked up about [tag]George Bush[/tag]’s comment to an Al Arabiya reporter in an interview that he believes Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Here’s an extract (source: www.whitehouse.gov):
Well, first of all, I believe in an almighty God, and I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God. That’s what I believe. I believe that Islam is a great religion that preaches peace. And I believe people who murder the innocent to achieve political objectives aren’t religious people, whether they be a Christian who does that — we had a person blow up our — blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City who professed to be a Christian, but that’s not a Christian act to kill innocent people.
Amongst those who have responded negatively to this is Joe Carter who applies considerable logic to refuting this idea that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Carter is pretty thoroughly convinced that it just can’t be so.
As a note to any liberals who are crowing about Christian conservatives turning on Bush, I must note that in my part of the world, Bush is often regarded as a liberal himself. Conservative Christians haven’t been all that much on board with him from the time of the primaries. He was certainly better than Kerry from their point of view, but he is not one of theirs. It shouldn’t be surprising that when he talks about religion, it’s not pure conservative evangelicalism.
Further, let me note for the record that I am a trinitarian Christian who accepts the incarnation as the central doctrine of Christianity. In other words, I believe that Christ was divine, and more specifically uniquely divine, i.e. not just having a divine spark, and in a way that I and other people are definitely not divine. Thus I differ from the Jewish and Muslim concepts of God.
But there are two major issues that I think run through this debate. First, one’s concept of God is, hopefully, something different from one’s God. In fact, worship of the concept is something I discussed in an earlier post Conceptual Idolatry. Second, just how “right” does one have to be about God in order to worship him? I’m going to very briefly look at these.
All of us have some sort of concept in mind when we refer to God. It may be a concept that we reject as impossible, or it may be one in which we put our trust. The quality and value of our concepts vary substantially, I would guess. God is not limited by, defined by, or fully described by our concepts. It almost goes without saying that as a trinitarian Christian my concept of God differs from the Jewish or Muslim concepts, amongst many others. It differs in smaller ways from the concepts of God held by my fellow Christians, including those who are worked up over George Bush’s concepts.
I would like to think that my concept of God is more accurate than mine. I come to the Father through Jesus Christ (John 14:6) and I believe Jesus gave the clearest picture of God for us. I don’t regard this as exclusive, since I believe one can follow a road without necessarily comprehending all the roadsigns. (If anything generates a comment, that one should, but I’m not going to explain further in this post, so there!) I am, however, fallible, and I’m quite certain that my concept of God is not perfect.
So we could replace the question first with this: Are our concepts of God the same? No. Are the similar? In many ways, they are not.
But if we are truly monotheistic, we believe there is only one God. So I think there is a second question: Can you worship God (the only one there is) when your concept is flawed, even seriously flawed? Well, Paul suggested that the Athenians did, in worshiping their unknown God:
?23? For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, To an unknown god. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” — Acts 17:23 (NRSV)
Paul, as reported by Luke, starts from the point of view that they are, in fact, worshiping this unknown God, even though they don’t know him, his attributes, his name, or anything whatsoever about him. Is Paul asserting a theological point here that one can worship a God one does not know? He could be simply starting from his opponent’s viewpoint in order to lead them to his, but it seems to me that he does allow that they are actually worshiping God in some way, however partially. Romans 1 and 2 I think expands on this idea quite a bit. People who do not know God explicitly nonetheless can serve him.
So I think the arguments fail on both points. That two people’s concepts of God differ does not mean they are worshiping two different gods, any more than the fact that my concept of my wife and someone else’s differ means we’re talking about different people. Further, one can worship something one does not know.
Does this mean that I accept the doctrines and concepts of Islam on the same basis as I do my Christian doctrines? Not at all. If I did, I would be a Muslim. I simply believe they are worshiping the same God, not because of how right or wrong they are (or I am), but rather because I believe there is only one God available to worship.
Ah, that’s a provocative title, isn’t it?
[tag]Richard Dawkins[/tag] is setting up an organization to help lobby for atheists. Despite my many serious disagreements with him, I don’t think that’s a bad idea, because atheists are viewed very negatively, and I think unfairly so. In fact, in many ways Dawkins himself is unfairly viewed in a negative light.
But in this Guardian unlimited story, the following paragraph is not going to help, especially here in the United States:
In an interview with the Guardian, he said: “When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told – religious Jews anyway – than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.”
Now I would put this in perspective simply because Israel is viewed very differently here in the United States than it is in Europe, and the conversation is very different. But to a whole bunch of people I know personally, and a whole bunch more I know of, them’s fightin’ words!
As soon as you talk about “the Jewish lobby” and claim that they are monopolizing some aspect of American society you’ll be seeing the anti-Semitism charge come up pretty soon after. I’m moderately pro-Israel myself, and I think it’s extremely easy to overstate the influence of Jewish groups on the government. It’s also very easy to see “Jewish groups” where there are only groups with Jewish members.
All of this combines with a very real anti-semitic movement, and a prejudice that lies just under the surface in many places. I’m assuming that Dawkins is merely taking a more European view and is not himself anti-Semitic. I know many people don’t believe that’s possible, but I have encountered that position and respect it while disagreeing. But such language is going to provide ammunition for his opponents.
You think I’m overstating it? Joe Carter has already put it in his 33 things post today as “shades of anti-Semitism”. Oh well, I guess it’s fun harvesting questionable quotes from atheist speakers.
