Good Job

There's a guy I'd love to hate in the upcoming college football "national championship" (dare we call it that?)-- Florida quarterback Tim Tebow.

For starters, he plays for Florida. That should be enough reason right there. Florida wins everything, every year, all the time. It's getting old, guys. Can't you throw a game or something?

Then, he's an amazing athlete, and the press gushes about him. That's another point against him in my book, as I'm usually anti-anybody-the-press-is-for.

Despite all of this, I just can't dislike the guy. Among numerous other things, the following quote I found is one of the reasons why:

Pressure is not having to win a football game; pressure is having to find your next meal," Tebow says. "From being in a lot of places that I've been with my dad and on mission trips, you kind of find out what true pressure is and what just is a game. Even though we love it so much, football is still just a game.

"A lot of people bleed over it and love it, and I'm one of those people. But at the end of the day, I know what's more important, and football is not more important than life and pressure is definitely not football. So I think when you can put that in perspective, I think it really gives you a much better outlook.

So, that's why I give Tim Tebow a "Good Job."



But... I'd still like to see the Sooners humiliate the Gators.

Humanity

I'm going to chime in on the hackneyed question "What does it mean to be human?"

But i don't mean to (and i know i can't) chime definitively. I'd rather chime adjectively, or, in other words, to slap a label on us humans-- Are we good or bad? Malevolent or beneficent? Nice or mean? Selfish or altruistic? Dark or light? Team Sauron or Team Gandalf?

National Public Radio has time each week that they devote to listener-generated essays titled "This I believe." Now, I don't think they would allow my essay on the air (NPR is given to a rather narrow worldview), but in spite of that, this i believe: both history and the Bible are crystal-clear in their testimony of humanity's evil.



Do I need to catalog the countless horrors humanity has wrought against man, and woman, and child? I suppose the objection could be made that these horrors were the result not of an inherent problem in humanity, but rather a learned evil. Bad conditions make good people bad. But whence came the bad conditions? From other people who were under other bad conditions?

I have also heard it said that evidence for people's basic goodness is in their doing heroic deeds in the face of the worst conditions. I would offer, as counter-evidence, tales of people doing the worst possible deeds in the best possible conditions, such as Enron's upper echelon stealing millions when they already had millions.



The Bible is even more clear than history in this regard. Let me sum up what I consider a major theme of the entire Bible in the verse from Isaiah:

"All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away."

Also, in the Bible we are faced with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. If humanity were intrinsically good, why would God murder His own Son? Why would Jesus be such a big deal in the Bible at all? I feel as though it is necessary to fully embrace an evil humanity if we are to fully embrace Christ. Otherwise, our Lord and Savior becomes something of a megalomaniacal fool, greatly deserving our pity, not our reverence and worship. I think C.S. Lewis makes this point somewhere, much better than I.

I know the above is quite incomplete and inadequately argued; but hey, this is a blog. No one would would publish a book I wrote! Others have written far more eloquently and completely on this very issue.

My point in all this (besides making a general case for a biblical doctrine) is basically the way we use the words "human," "inhumane," and "humanity." It is not uncommon to hear "the act was inhuman" or "the inhumane treatment of people" or "what happened to his/her humanity?"

That's backwards. We should be using those words the other way around. It is very human of a person to treat another person with malice. Genocides are humane. They are committed by humans, no? When warlords in the DRC commit horrendous atrocities; when politicians allow the deaths of unborn children into laws, and when people kill other people, they are doing this because they are human. They are acting completely within, not without, their humanity.

in quotation...

Once when a Buddhist teacher said that he could not believe that Christ suffered the death of the cross because no king allows his son such indignity, "Judson responded, 'Therefore you are not a disciple of Christ. A true disciple inquires not whether a fact is agreeable to his own reason, but whether it is in the book. His pride has yielded to the divine testimony. Teacher, your pride is still unbroken. Break down your pride, and yield to the word of God.'"

- Adoniram Judson, a Christian who lived 38 years in Burma. Source.

Hell

Tim Keller, pastor of a large church in New York City has a great article on The Importance of Hell.

You can read the article for yourself, but here are some of my favorite parts:

Why is [Hell] so extremely important to stress in our preaching and teaching today? The idea of hell is implausible to people because they see it as unfair that infinite punishment would be meted out for comparably minor, finite false steps (like not embracing Christianity.) Also, almost no one knows anyone (including themselves) that seem to be bad enough to merit hell. But the Biblical teaching on hell answers both of these objections. First, it tells us that people only get in the afterlife what they have most wanted-either to have God as Savior and Master or to be their own Saviors and Masters. Secondly, it tells us that hell is a natural consequence. Even in this world it is clear that self-centeredness rather than God-centeredness makes you miserable and blind. The more self-centered, self-absorbed, self-pitying, and self-justifying people are, the more breakdowns occur, relationally, psychologically, and even physically. They also go deeper into denial about the source of their problems.

And, from the great Clive Staples:

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others . . . but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God 'sending us' to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.

From the conclusion:

We must come to grips with the fact that Jesus said more about hell than Daniel, Isaiah, Paul, John, Peter put together. Before we dismiss this, we have to realize we are saying to Jesus, the pre-eminent teacher of love and grace in history, "I am less barbaric than you, Jesus--I am more compassionate and wiser than you." Surely that should give us pause! Indeed, upon reflection, it is because of the doctrine of judgment and hell that Jesus' proclamations of grace and love are so astounding.

I hope these entice you to read further.

Campbell... Routs?

Any time you see Campbell "routing" anyone in anything other than driving directions, you've got to shout that to the world (or at least to those people who read your blog).

Campbell Routs

I love it...

Beautiful.


Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Language and Death continued

Well, I thought we were done. But then I saw a couple of things on other blogs that I thought were incredibly relevant (even down to using some of the same words we were using) to what we were just talking about, that I want to throw up a couple of links. But don't forget to send me your "lemons/lemonade" updates (see post below). Here are two relevant blogs:

Justin Taylor

Robert P. George

Please note that I am not trying to come down on Barack Obama per se... though of course by effect that is what is taking place. I feel that this is because of his choices (which I think, by the evidence in the two articles, are indeed aggressively pro-abortion), not my words.

Also, I agree with the notion that there are lots of other issues to be concerned about in elections. But let me take some categories from statistics to explain why I keep harping on abortion.

Statisticians speak of "sufficient" and "necessary" variables. Sufficient is far more powerful than necessary. For example, in making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it is necessary to have bread, but bread alone is not sufficient. You need the other necessary variables of peanut butter and jelly.

Similarly, when we speak of presidential platforms and abortion, I think a "pro-life" stance (see discussion of Piper's argument in post titled "Human Rights") is a necessary, but far from sufficient variable.

Thus, to belabor a point made in "Human Rights," a pro-abortion candidate must be disqualified.

Comedic Relief

I've been thinking about the old saying "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade." I like it, but it's just not far reaching enough. I've managed to squeeze out a few more:

- When life gives you brown bananas, make banana bread.

- When life gives you old newspapers, make post-consumer recycled content.

- When life gives you Venezuela, make nationalized industries (this one only for Hugo Chavez).

That's all I've got. What can you come up with?

Language and Death

Just for teaser's sake, I think my next post will be on the Economy, so you can all pop your popcorn and microwave your edamame beans for that. Perhaps I've got another rant against the Media in store too.

But I digress.

Language is crucial; it is a backbone; it is an infrastructure; it is a box. It not only communicates ideas from person to person, it forces those persons to think about ideas in certain ways. This was the lesson we learned from Master Orwell in that novel of novels, 1984.

So it is important not only that we use language precisely and delicately to communicate our own ideas, but also that we understand the control that language has over us when other people are telling us things.

And thus, my point: the language of abortion has long been dictated by those who are "pro-abortion."



I intentionally refuse "pro-choice." This changes the nature of the debate. When we talk about "pro-choice" we no longer talk about life and death, but we talk about choice, marginalized groups (women), and freedom. An attack on "pro-choice" is an attack on choice and on freedom.

Again, I refuse this. I refuse the "pro-choice" designation, because we ARE talking about life and death. We are talking, more specifically, about the life and death of people. We are talking, as per my last post, about human rights.

To take it a step further, I think "abortion," "pro-abortion," and "anti-abortion" may be too euphemistic, too sugar-coated. Abortion is a technical word for an act of murder. Passion and emotion are lost in this technicality. Our sense of life and death are lost in this technicality. Most tragically, millions of humans are lost in this technicality.



Our ability to feel horror at the massive tragedies happening in Sudan, Cambodia, Uganda, etc., comes from the descriptions we hear of them: "genocide," "mass-rape," "mass-murder." Our inability to feel rage at the senseless murder of tens of millions of human beings comes from the descriptions we hear of it: "abortion," "an act of choice."

This is why I refuse these words. I refuse to couch my argument in the terms of my opponent. Maybe a more appropriate label for abortion would be "pre-birth infanticide," as I have heard it described before. Certainly it is murder. Certainly it is genocide. Certainly, it is a crime. Certainly, a marginalized group, with no voice, is being oppressed by a dominant group that holds all power in the situation.

I feel I can go even further. Those who perpetrate these crimes are thus criminals. We can place them in the same category as Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin. This was something of the point of my last post, so I'll go no further.

Basically, I'm just trying to say that using "pro-choice" language is like trying to paint a sunset with a pencil someone else handed you. It fails to capture the utter magnitude of the situation.

"Human Rights"

I'm going to make a very serious accusation.

It's not a joke. I do not make it lightly. I'm not trying to be snide or funny or petty or even clever. I do not mean to be partisan (as far as politics go), but I guess it could possibly look like that. It is indeed a serious accusation.

I think Barack Obama has one of the worst human rights records on the record.

My equation is simple. Abortion is a crime against humans. It is stealing human life from those who cannot defend themselves-- the ultimate crime of the haves against the have-nots. The quintessential victory of a powerful elite over a marginalized, underprivileged class. The greatest oppression of the greatest right we have: life itself.

So when I say that Obama has one of the "worst human rights records," that's pretty serious. Because, I mean, I'm throwing him up there with some BAD guys, like Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin. I'm really not pulling any punches here.

But I feel justified in this. All we need is a direct comparison between our likely next president and the aforementioned terrorists. Pol Pot took great pains to end the lives of millions of human beings. Joseph Stalin took great pains to end the lives of millions of human beings. Barack Obama, his voting record proves, has taken great pain to end the lives of millions of human beings.

I really don't even feel a need to provide any kind of reference to what he actually voted on. It's no secret. He's made no secret of it himself. How has he "taken great pain?" you ask? There are numerous bills which even his fellow Democrats have felt were too barbaric to vote for that he supported. He has one of the most consistent pro-abortion voting records that exist, and consistency like that in a system like ours takes pain.

There are, of course, those who will snivel at my lack of sophistication, and tell me that Christians need more rounded voting criteria. That Christians need to get off the two-issue platform and stick up for the rights of the poor. Aside from the fact that this is exactly what I feel like I'm doing, and the fact that the Bible doesn't support socialism just as much as it doesn't support capitalism, I turn also to John Piper.

This article that my lovely wife sent me says it better than I ever can, but I'll summarize anyway (because I realize I've gone on a little too long myself). Basically, his argument is that while a pro-life stance does not qualify someone for public office, a pro-abortion stance disqualifies them from public office.

Ergo, Obama is disqualified from office. Has he community-organized on behalf of the poor of Chicago? Wonderful. Has he developed a deep sense of the inequity of our current market system? Beautiful. Has he wrought on the anvil of civil society a magnificent socialist government that will rise from the ashes of a W administration? Marvelous. But has he also thoughtlessly bereft millions of their lives with a stroke of his pen?

Disqualified.

It's Coming...

That's right. WBMC back in action. We were shut down for a while following a raid on our offices after our criticism of Kim Jong Il.

But soon, you'll see a brand spankin' new post, set up for your reading pleasure. What will we unearth? Who will be exposed? How can you possibly sleep at night?

The NCAA, weddings, and B.O.

We're in the midst of the Madness-- upsets are mounting, threes are dropping, hearts are pounding: it has come.

But i've found that i don't like it so much this year. i can't pick teams that win. Who seriously has time to sit around and watch all these teams play so that they can predict a 13 beating a 4? Not me, that's who. The whole thing is really starting to make me mad-- sort of like last year, when Julie beat me by ten points. I think i swore then never to play again.

Speaking of Julie, we're getting married on April 5th. If you're reading this, you're probably invited. If you didn't an invitation, feel free to come. We're going to have cake. And punch. And everyone likes those things.

Julie brings a good balance to my life. She injects my cold, objective analysis of the world with an eloquent compassion-- and i'm very thankful. Where would i be without God's compassion on me? Thanks Julie.

To turn a corner, I've been itching to write about the latest political fiasco.

Barack Obama's pastor is exposed for extremely racist, hate-filled, ethno-centrist, anti-American (i could keep going with the adjectives) comments. What follows?

Republicans jump all over it. Hillary sits back and smirks. Most of the major news networks fall all over themselves to defend him and point fingers at other people. Democrats look kind of sheepish.

To be honest with you, i wasn't going to vote for Obama to begin with. i wouldn't know what i was voting for. Change? Hope? Unity? Buzzwords? Come on. Here's some buzzwords for you: substance. policy. reality.

As for the current situation, i don't think i'm being too simplistic to say that Jeremiah Wright is a racist. Not only that, but he lacks a lot of credibility when he lambastes America and "the white man" from a cushy Chicago pulpit. i might listen more closely if he were speaking from an African village.

As for Obama, of course he knew what his pastor has been saying all this time. Let's not be absurd. But assume for a second that he doesn't know what's going on at church, and you have a 20 year lapse of judgment and failure to read the writing on the wall. Not such a great defense.

The biggest issue of all, for me, is not the race or the anti-American sentiment. It's the fact that this guy has "Rev." in front of his name and has been called "pastor" and ran a "church" for so long. It's the fact that he is spewing hatred from the pulpit. i don't care if i've only heard selected sound bites. There shouldn't be a single sound bite like what i've heard. Not one. His vitriol has nothing to do with God's kingdom.

The real villain here has not been Barack Obama. It's not even Jeremiah Wright. It's the media. Their unthinking, banal analysis and willingness to fawn over celebrity politicians, combined with their maddening double-standard when it comes to racial issues would cause anyone else to lose their jobs. But this is exactly what keeps their jobs safe.

Shame on you, media. Shame.

The good Clive Staples

"The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself.
We are told to deny ourselves and to take
up our crosses in order that we may follow
Christ; and nearly every description of
what we shall ultimately find if we do so
contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks
in most modern minds the notion that to
desire our own good and earnestly to hope
for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I
submit that this notion has crept in from
Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the
Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the
unblushing promises of reward and the
staggering nature of the rewards promised
in the Gospels, it would seem that Our
Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but
too weak. We are half-hearted creatures,
fooling about with drink and sex and
ambition when infinite joy is offered us,
like an ignorant child who wants to go on
making mud pies in a slum because he
cannot imagine what is meant by the offer
of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily
pleased. "

taken from The Weight of Glory, a sermon C.S. Lewis preached at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford,on June 8, 1942: published in THEOLOGY, November, 1941.

Jong Il: A History of Corruption

Michael Lee is WBMC's Asian affiliate based in Shanghai.

Pyongyang- Today a Pyongyang insider, at the obvious risk of his life, made a bold accusation: North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Il has been stealing donated money all of his life.

It seems that when Jong Il was just seven years old his mother gave him some money to walk down to the market for some rice. Along the way, Jong Il was lured into a back alley where he saw a sight that would mark his course for the rest of his life-- a jagged, dull Swiss Army knife.

Jong Il's eyes bulged, his palms sweated, his fingers trembled; he gave up his rice money and his soul.

From that day forward his pockets have been getting deeper and his lies bigger. In the 7th grade Jong Il actually convinced the rest of his class that he was raising money to take to "Mothers of Pyongyang," an NPO that distributes funds to mothers who had lost husbands and sons in the war with South Korea. Jong Il took the funds and bought a handgun.

And now we see the culmination of a corrupted life; Jong Il uses UN funds to feed his starving population to supply his military with guns, tanks, and uniforms.

What can stop this madman? Who will stand between him and the starvation, exploitation, and utter abuse of his people?

They are no Patriots

The Patriots haven't accomplished a thing-- except for proving that the NFL cares far more about the money they can pull in from a team going "16-0" than it cares about following the rules and maintaining integrity.

So here's a big BOO for the Patriots and a bigger BOO for an NFL who won't call cheaters out. Both of you have showed poor form and no class in a disgusting show of commercialism and shame. Both of you have brought sports and our nation to a new low. Both of you have showed all of us that it's ok to break the rules when there's enough money involved.

Inconclusive

i should have explained myself a little better.

My argument is not necessarily with the study itself, nor even those particular scientists. i do have a problem with the conclusion those particular scientists drew from the study itself.

From the evidence of "people who have sex 'too early' or 'too late' in life experience sexual dysfunction," their response is "ergo, abstinence-only education is harmful." This is precisely where i think the bias lies. They have stepped over the boundary of scientific investigation into a political, social, and moral arena. Non-sequitur, my friends.

It does not follow from the evidence presented that we can make such an over-generalization.

But in a much larger sense, what really does not follow is why we've given scientists the voice in society that we have.

And that's really what i was getting at in my first post on this.

I fully agree that to extrapolate from this one incident to generalize bias over all scientists would be wrong. In the same way, we cannot extrapolate from one suicide bomb attack that all Muslims are extremists. But we can use each attack as an indication of how some Muslims act. As my favorite professor always said, "stereotypes exist because there are 50,000 examples." So i didn't mean to use this for extrapolation, but rather indication. It's one example among countless others that scientists are not computers.

They have motives. They have biases. They have wallets that need filling. They are not unlike the priests of the middle ages who kept scriptural knowledge, and thus knowledge of God, to themselves. It was a mechanism of power. Today, science is being used as a mechanism of power (by some, not by all, of course) in the same way priests used the "mysteries of God" to wield power. Sound dark and pessimistic? So is human history.

What i was really after here was the ethos of epistemological superiority assumed by (some, maybe most) scientists, and willingly given them by an all too uncritical public.

When the argument moves from "the evidence suggests" to "scientists say," i get wary and suspicious. It does not follow that someone is right just because they are a scientist. They are as suspect as anyone else because they are a human with motives and biases.

i think that's all i wanted to say. i'm not anti-science, by any means. Science is great. Scientists are great. But they do not have exclusive claim on the truth.

Science?

i know i've not posted in quite a long time, but this was so unbelievable that i couldn't help but put it up.

Well, maybe "unbelievable" is completely the wrong word.

I think it's actually quite believable, and proof-positive that scientists are as subjective as the rest of us. This is such a shoddy example of the scientific method that it brings the whole community into suspicion (as though they were somewhere else).

Thoughts? Am i wrong?

China in all her glory

My ire with China groweth.

Palestine: The Divided House Falls

It's hard to sift through all the layers of silt here. As though the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts weren't bad enough, now Hamas and Fatah have finally decided they've really had enough of each other this time. Then there's the more global issue of Islamic militancy; Hamas sticking its proverbial finger in the proverbial eye of the somewhat proverbial West.

But the silt has somewhat settled, and the murkiness is a little less murky, and some interesting things have come to light:

• The somewhat proverbial West has resumed payments to the Fatah government under Abbas in the West Bank. For once, i think an Islamic takeover has done the world some kind of good, indirectly of course. Hamas won't be able to function economically without international aid, whilst the Fatah government should at least be able to pay their civil workers salaries they've been denied for a while, which should result in some kind of stability and economic progress. This is probably going to be a banal oversimplification, but i see this as a black eye for Islamic militant ideology.
• Israel has surprised me. Maybe they are just acting as pawns of the US and the rest of the proverbial West, but this article describes doctors from Israel helping Palestinians trapped when trying to flee from Hamas fighters. i only have a surface knowledge of the situation here, but it looks to me like Muslims, fleeing death at the hands of Muslims, are being helped by Jews. Interesting.
  
• The larger picture here looks to me like a dead end for the kind of "angry Muslim" worldview. Palestinians are dependent on foreign aid, most of this aid coming from the US and the EU, both of which are more or less the named enemies of radical Islam. If Al-Qaeda or other groups do succeed in toppling "The Great Satan" and her allies, a rampage of poverty would shock the non-Muslim and Muslim world alike. i realize this is farcical and somewhat slippery slopish, but i exaggerate to make a point.

Well. Those are my bulleted thoughts. Take 'em or leave 'em. Just don't box me into one of those "Americans only talk about their own country" boxes. It's crowded in there.

Blogs and the Bible-- Literally

i sat one day clicking links faster than i could keep up with, and i came across Slate.com's "Blogging the Bible."

And i thinks to myself "this should be an interesting read" and i sits me down and reads for a while.

Author David Plotz goes through every chapter of every book (i think he's made it up to Job now) and kind of... writes things... about them. At times he's irreverent. At times he's blasphemous. At times he's insightful. At times he approaches worshipful.

i guess i can only give it a mixed review. Plotz seems more given over to banterous entertainment than delving the mysteries of the written Word. But really, could more be expected? Who would go to Slate.com to read something that wasn't entertaining? And i think he admits as much in the following Q and A:

Potomac, Md.: In your reading, are you looking at any secondary sources for guidance, such as the commentary in the footnotes in Etz Hayim?

David Plotz: I try to avoid commentary as much as possible. One of my translations has no commentary at all in it; the other has a few footnotes that I try to ignore. Avoiding commentary is a conscious effort. I want to encounter the book as rawly as possible. Most people encounter the Bible through someone else—as their rabbi or pastor or professor or priest interprets it for them. My goal for Blogging the Bible is to read it with as clear a mind as possible.

This means, of course, that I massively misinterpret certain passages, because I don't have sufficient education and context to understand them, and it means that I skip important verses or stories, and miss connections. But that's okay. The value of the experience for me as a reader (and as a writer) is to make sense of my holy book for myself—not to succumb to the interpretation that someone else imposes on it.

Something's got to be said for his trying, i suppose. But not much. i feel i have to protest his literary theory. Understanding what the text says or means doesn't matter to him, he claims: "i massively misinterpret certain passages... But that's okay." It's only important that he "experience" the text.

My protest is this: why is it "okay" to treat the Bible this way, but no other literature? How about a letter from your insurance company? A letter from your wife? A speeding ticket? A court summons? Your bank statement?

Is it "okay" to "experience" these pieces of literature instead of accurately pulling meaning from them? To feel the weight of social responsibility and civic duty but never actually go to court? To experience some vague feeling of familial love from your wife but never to actually meet her?

i don't think so.