Recently in Culture Category

It occurred to me while teaching Nietzsche yesterday that the use of Nietzsche to motivate antisemitism by the Nazi regime is pretty much the opposite of contemporary antisemitism, at least in one key respect. Hitler's use of Nietzsche capitalized on the idea of Jewish inferiority. If it's perfectly fine for the strong to trample the weak, then all it takes is finding a group that can be taken to be weak, and then you can trample away.

The problem Nietzsche would have is that you can't really demonstrate that Jews are the weak. In fact, the history of Jews in the United States seems to demonstrate otherwise. Before Hitler's time, Jews in the United States tended to do worse on IQ tests than the majority population. After WWII, they tended to do noticeably higher than average. The best explanation for that seems to be that Jews were sidelined more often and had become mainstreamed in a way that allowed them to develop the cognitive skills that they already had potential for but hadn't been developing as strongly. Even with the problems in using IQ tests to identify intelligence plain-and-simple, it's certainly true that there are skills that IQ tests measure, and the Nazis would have been happy to accept IQ scores anyway. So it seems as if the facts are just against their claim.

Contemporary antisemitism has to take a different stance. Not only is it ludicrous to take Jews to be inferior in terms of any important skill set for success in life, but Jews have in fact been much more successful in most of the ways people who make such judgments would actually care about than the average for the non-Jewish population. So the narrative is no longer that Jews are inferior and thus need to be trampled because of some Nietzschean mission to lift oneself up by taking advantage of the weak. Now it's almost a reversal. Jews have assumed control of society in some massive conspiracy, and the rest of us are the victims who need to resist the collective strength of the Jewish conspiracy.

Now I guess the two views are compatible. Someone could think that Jewish success is merely due to conspiratorial measures implemented by idiots who succeed only because a few of the relatively smart ones have gotten enough Jews into influential positions to prevent anyone from overcoming their collective strength. But I don't think the idea of Jewish inferiority among such conspiracy theorists is really about intellectual inferiority anymore. It's not clear to me exactly what kind of inferiority it's supposed to be, though. It clearly has some normative element, but I'm not sure it's even thought-out enough for there to be a real answer to that question.

As I was responding to this comment from Neil, I realized that I was getting into a bunch of issues that I don't think I've ever discussed comprehensively on this blog before, and I thought it might as well be its own post. Neil raises some questions about Christians reading (and presumably watching) science fiction and fantasy, questions that are more general (and more legitimate) than the common complaint about magic in fantasy. He wonders whether certain writers or stories (he has in mind a series by Stephen Donaldson that I'm not familiar with) can be dangerous in leaving behind what he calls an amoral residue. There's also the worry that spending time in fictional worlds is escaping from reality and might even be an addiction. It also might be a waste of time when there are more important things to do. He suggests that God might speak through such literature, but hasn't God spoken much more clearly in other ways already, so why should we need this kind of thing?

I think there can be a number of different healthy motivations for a Christian to read or watch science fiction or fantasy, many of them no different from the motivations for any other kind of fiction. One is simply entertainment. The idea that entertainment is just escape from reality seems wrong to me. I know people who think of it that way, but I don't think that's what they're actually doing when they see themselves as escaping. They might be distracting themselves from things they don't want to think about, but the things they're thinking about, while fictional, are based on reality in some way, or they couldn't think about them. It's just a rearrangement of real things, and those are good things that God created. It's also an engagement with the process of creation, an ability that I think God has given to us as part of being made in his image. The use of the imagination develops abilities God wants us to develop. Thinking about fictional worlds is one way to develop intellectual virtue. It's also simply good to enjoy good storytelling and to appreciate people using their God-given abilities to produce something enjoyable.

There are also moral themes in literature, and fiction of any kind helps us evaluate our lives in many ways. If the story in question only motivates moral evaluation of fictional cases, and those cases could never come up in real life, then at least it allows us to practice our ethical thinking in hard and strange cases, which is still a good skill to develop, because we will confront new situations that require such skills, especially as technology develops and social relations become further changed from what we see as the norm. But many ethical issues in fiction, even in fantasy and science fiction, are also going to come up in real life. Sometimes the author wants to make certain moral points, and sometimes we need to develop the ability to think for ourselves about those questions and not just accept what the author wants us to take away from it. But that's not a reason not to read or watch it except in cases where someone has a problem doing that. Maybe in Neil's case the Donaldson series was like that, and for all I know it might have that effect on me too (I know little about the series in question, so I have no idea). It's certainly worth being vigilant about how things affect you, but that's true of any fiction, and it's true of a lot of things besides fiction. It's true of observing how your friends live, and Paul tells us not to isolate ourselves from those who aren't Christians, even if he also says that Christians ought to live differently from the world.

I like fantasy and science fiction in particular because they help illustrate philosophical questions in ways that real life sometimes can't. One way to show that a sophisticated hedonism is wrong is to point out that with Harry Potter's invisibility cloak or Sauron's ring you could get away with almost anything you want, and it would still be wrong to do so. A sophisticated hedonism says it's only wrong to do certain things because it's against your self-interest (given that people will be mad at you for doing it and want to stop you and punish you). But these cases show that the real reason it's wrong isn't because it's against your self-interest, because you can achieve the self-interested goal in such cases, and it's still wrong. Scenarios like the Matrix or science fiction or fantasy worlds with very different social relations raise interesting questions about the moral principles that we assume as fundamental, because they lead us to wonder if they would apply in a very different situation. If I spent ten minutes coming up with a list, I could probably name off at least a dozen examples from science fiction and fantasy that I use regularly in my philosophy classes to illustrate points that are a lot harder to make clear or vivid without the aid of such examples.

So you don't need to think of fiction as revelation in any important sense to think that it provides an occasion for something that can be productive. It's bad if it distracts from more important things, as is true of any kind of enjoyable activity. At the same time, a little rest and relaxation, especially if it engages aspects of our thinking that we don't otherwise use, is part of being productive in the long run. So there has to be a balance, but I think this kind of imaginative fiction can contribute a lot of good toward our moral development and to our lives as well-rounded human beings, even if there are also risks and dangers, as there are with most pursuits in life.

Peter Kirk takes Obama's conversion experience as evangelical (but see his comment below resisting the seemingly-uncontroversial inference from having an evangelical conversion experience to being an evangelical). The interview Peter links to in support actually leads me to conclude that he's definitely not an evangelical, and a case can even be made that there's nothing distinctively Christian in his personal faith. Let me first outline what I think the boundaries of evangelicalism can include, and then I'll look at some of the things Obama says that make me think he's outside the realm of evangelicalism and perhaps even not very specifically Christian. Much of the content here is adapted from comments in my conversation with Peter in the comments.

Theologically liberal views (at least compared to the status quo in evangelicalism) would include people who reject the substitutionary element of the atonement but retain a penal element (e.g. my co-blogger Wink), who support open theism but insist that God has a plan and will win in the end (e.g. philosophers Dean Zimmerman and Dale Tuggy), who are universalists of the sort that they're convinced everyone who goes to hell will eventually repent and follow Christ once they see the consequences of not doing so, and thus evangelism is still urgent, and hell is still real but just not eternally populated (e.g. Keith DeRose), who are inclusivists of the sort where Christ's sacrifice in fact atones for some in other religions because general revelation teaches them that God must provide a solution to the sin problem and trust him to do so (e.g. the C.S. Lewis view), that a homosexual lifestyle is morally ok but who feel the need to reinterpret scripture to defend such a view (e.g. I have a friend who holds such a view and is clearly an evangelical) rather than saying the Bible includes an immoral prohibition.

There are some who deny inerrancy (but really affirm it and just deny a straw man that they think inerrancy is), but I think actual denial of inerrancy is harder to maintain while being an evangelical. The Fuller Theological Seminary model makes an effort by still insisting that scripture is infallible on any moral teaching or theology within its pages. (Some at Fuller don't actually follow this. I know of one who thinks Paul was a complementarian but insists that we shouldn't be, and I think that moves out of the range of evangelicalism.) But I think you can say that there are errors in dates and place names in the Bible and still count as being within evangelicalism, just on the fringes. Once you start explicitly questioning the plain moral and theological teaching of scripture without trying to reinterpret it so that you at least believe scripture teaches your view, it's hard for me to see that as even on the fringes of evangelicalism. That's just theological liberalism in its most plain form.

So I'm certainly open to finding liberalizing tendencies within evangelicalism, even if one is on the fringes for holding certain views. Some of these are closer to the fringes than others (e.g. Wink's view of the atonement doesn't seem very extreme to me, just extreme-sounding to those unwilling to think very hard about what they've been taught). Those who combine several of these are more on the fringes than others. But one can be an evangelical and hold such views. It's a separate matter whether someone is a Christian but not an evangelical. I'm not saying here that one must be an evangelical to be a Christian. I know plenty of people whom I would not consider evangelicals but who do lay claim to being more broadly Christian. Very few Catholics are evangelicals, in my view, although I personally know a handful who I think are evangelical Catholics. I do think pious Catholics are Christian in a perfectly normal English usage of that term. I know a number of people who I think are Christians in mainline denominations who aren't evangelicals by the criteria I've outlined above. Some evangelicals want to restrict the term 'Christian' so that it only applies to evangelicals, but it's linguistically inappropriate to do that given what the term has come to mean.

But suppose someone denies the reality of hell and then expresses skepticism even about the existence of an afterlife in heaven. What if you say you pray, but then when you go on to explain what you do when praying it becomes clear that you're just maintaining an internal dialogue evaluating your life? What if you talk about a power that goes out of you when you speak the truth (rather than inflating your ego or playing rhetorical games), and then when your interviewer asks you if that's the Holy Spirit, you prefer to speak instead of just seeing a common recognition of truth outside of you? What if you're willing to talk of Jesus as your personal means of bridging the human-God gap but think of that in terms of reaching something higher rather than as the solution to a problem of sin? Speaking of sin, what if you admit to believing that there is such a thing but then define it entirely in terms of going against your own convictions, as if hypocrisy is the only sin? In the above-linked interview, Barack Obama did all these things.

There are some interesting moral issues related to the use of expressions that are perfectly ordinary and inoffensive in most situations but are used offensively within a small subset of the population, particularly when there are some among those on the receiving end of such expressions who don't know of the ordinary, inoffensive use of the term in question. It's usually good to show moral deference to the ignorant, if we haven't been in their position of ignorance, giving them the benefit of the doubt. But the ignorant in these cases include both (a) those who use the expression without knowing or the offensive connotation that it has in certain contexts and (b) those offended but its ordinary usage because they don't know about anything other than its offensive use. At the same time, there's always the questions of (c) whether those in (a) ought to have been more aware of what offends people and (d) whether those in (b) ought to have be willing to throw out such serious moral charges based on an ignorance that many might not easily excuse.

I've defended the use of such expressions in many contexts, emphasizing (a) and (d) above while perhaps too easily dismissing (b) and (c), or at least not explicitly laying out the reasoning for why I tend to favor (a) and (d) as more decisive in these kinds of cases. One example that came up in my post was the old expression "call a spade a spade". This one actually goes back to Plutarch in the second century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, although he used a different metaphor that was later mistranslated by Erasmus in 1542. (It's not generally accessible online except with a password to get through a university firewall, or I'd link to it.)

When I was talking about these cases with my friend and colleague Chuck, who occasionally comments here, he decided to go check the OED to get the history of the expression. He noticed a particularly funny quote that the OED used to exemplify "call a spade a spade".

1647 TRAPP Marrow Gd. Authors in Comm. Ep. 641 Gods people shall not spare to call a spade a spade, a niggard a niggard.

Those who have followed the recent history of offense over normally-inoffensive terms will remember that the black mayor of the District of Columbia fired one of his white aides for using the term 'niggardly', a word that only sounds like a racial epithet if you aren't listening very carefully. Even the NAACP chair, Julian Bond, thought it was crazy to criticize someone for using that word. But I suppose we've now got solid proof that 'niggard' does refer to black people, since Trapp in 1647 used it in parallel with "call a spade a spade". Or does this show that "call a spade a spade" is tied to offensive language because its connection with niggards goes back at least to 1647?

This is the second post in my Right Reason guest series from last year at the now-defunct Right Reason blog.

I want to begin this series looking at Augustine's views on the topic I'll be discussing, but before I get into his views on the direct issue I'd like to present a few of his background views that will be relevant to the more direct discussion of religious motivations in public life and civil government.

Augustine doesn't ever (to my knowledge) discuss the best form of government. He's not really interested in political questions for their own sake. He is interested in God's role in history, in individuals and among nations and rulers, including both good and bad rulers. He does think there are ethical questions about how to govern, and he's interested in how Christians as part of a political entity should live and participate, but his ultimate concern is the relation between what he calls the City of God and what he calls the early city. This does include those in government, and thus he does have some things to say that affect political matters.

The City of God is an important enough concept that he named what's considered by many to be his most important work after it. The City of God is not actually a city or political entity but rather a spiritual reality, manifested by people who follow Jesus Christ. Christians compose the City of God, and their primary identity is in that relationship, not in any political, cultural, social, ethnic, or whatever other identity-forming relations they may have. The stark contrast between the City of God and the earthly city is crucial for understanding Augustine's views on Christians and civil government.

Each group has its own mindset and what we would now call its own value system or worldview. Augustine sees the City of God as valuing what God would value (or at least valuing to move toward valuing those things more). The earthly city, on the other hand, is largely self-interested. It's not that all ethical theories developed by those in the earthly city are hedonistic. Augustine is well aware that that's not the case. He discusses Plato and the Stoics at great length in City of God, and he acknowledges the difference between their views and those of the Epicureans, who were genuinely hedonistic in their explicit normative theory.

But even the views of Plato and the Stoics are self-interested, even if they aren't selfish. All the ancient philosophers were concerned with the good life, i.e. a life of flourishing, a life of well-being. But this mindset takes the good life to be merely what's a good life for me to have. For Plato and the Stoics, the good life is an internal matter. It's what sort of inner state is good for me to have. For Epicurus, it's also internal to me. It's about avoiding pain. The ancient skeptics sought to avoid having beliefs. Even Aristotle, who recognized external goods, was primarily concerned with how such goods help the individual to flourish, to lead a fulfilling life.

In contrast, Christianity places primary value outside oneself, in God, and in the concerns of a God who is directed by the concerns of his creation. He does say that such a life is the most fulfilling, the life with the most value for me. But what gives it that value is not merely that it's the best life for me to have. This is why he thinks those outside the City of God are in a sense merely self-directed. Without a divine purpose, he sees nothing but what kind of life you want for yourself, even if the life you want for yourself involves doing altruistic deeds.

It's also worth being aware of Augustine's views on human motivation. He sees all human beings since the fall as having disordered desires. We don't want what's best, at least not in a way that reflects how good different things are. We want things that are less good more than we want things that are more good. He sees virtue or excellence as having rightly-ordered desires, having your desires organized in a way that your highest priorities are the things most worth desiring, with other things occupying a lower priority level. Disordered desire is a consequence of the fall, and only those whose priorities are reordered by God in conversion to following Christ can begin the process of moving in a direction of excellence. This is ultimately his explanation of why the earthly city doesn't have the most important good (i.e. God) as its highest-motivating factor, and the City of God does (at least when its members are not sinning). That allows him to form such a stark contrast between these two mindsets. There's a metaphysical difference between the two groups.

Posted by Jeremy Pierce on July 14, 2007 8:48 AM

I wrote before that my proposal for a chapter on mutants and the nature of race was accepted to The X-Men and Philosophy volume and that I'd submitted three other proposals for two other volumes. I haven't heard anything one way or the other about my submission about The Hobbit, but I found out today that one of the two proposals I wrote for Harry Potter and Philosophy was accepted. They liked what I submitted about the limits of authorial intent, but they had a number of good submissions on that topic, and they decided they'd rather go with my proposal on destiny in Rowling's series, so they accepted that one. You can see the blog version of my initial thoughts on the matter here.

Before I even started graduate school, I hoped to be able to write popular-level philosophical discussions about questions that I thought needed serious philosophical reflection that science fiction and fantasy often raise, and I guess now I get to write about two topics I care a lot about in two fictional worlds that I've spent a lot of time in. These will be my first publications besides a book review (although it was a book review that made several substantive points, some of which I thought were genuine contributions to how to think about the issues). That means I need to work hard to submit some parts of my dissertation to journals pretty quickly to avoid giving the impression that I'm a lightweight when it comes to publication. Still, I'm glad to have the chance to contribute to these volumes.

One of the most irksome things about the fascination in cable news with certain missing persons cases is that virtually all of the cases they pay any attention to are of blond, white girls or young women, and they pay absolutely no attention to the vast majority of missing persons cases, and yet the few they can find with an attractive blond girl will get hours a day for months. It's such a clear example of a kind of white racism that isn't what most white people think of when they hear the word 'racism'. White people think of negative, overt, conscious attitudes against non-whites when they hear that word. This is clearly not that, and yet there's no way it's not a kind of racism.

In light of that, see this interesting poster campaign. [hat tip: Racialicious]

A janitor at the University of Indiana at Purdue is in their continuing education program, trying to improve his lot in life on the side. He reads during his break time. One book he reads is called Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. It's not exactly favorable to the KKK, but it does include their name in the title.

Somehow the university thought it was ok to ban him from reading this book during his breaks [hat tip: David Bernstein], because there were black people around him, and they were offended that the book mentions the KKK. Here is the statement from the affirmative action office on why this counts as racial harassment:

"You demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your coworkers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence...you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black coworkers."

First of all, how could someone possibly think that it's immoral to read a book that's highly critical of the KKK while in the presence of a black person? Second, it's not as if he was reading it aloud. All they had any access to was the fact that he was reading it. Third, even if it's immoral to read something in the presence of someone else, how does that give the university a good reason to ban it. It's not as if he was waving the book around and saying anything to anyone else about it. He merely had the book and was reading it. Fourth, why would they want to give the appearance that they're hindering a janitor, who does some of the dirtiest jobs at the university, from getting his education? It doesn't reflect all that well on them. Fifth, they accuse him of being insensitive and expressing disdain for his co-workers, when he's the one who tried to explain the book's content to several people who refused to listen to him and insisted that anything even remotely discussing the KKK is offensive. How backwards is that?

Well, they recanted while pretending to clarify their position. Some higher-up must have realized how silly the whole thing was.

I don't spend a lot of time harping on this point, but this is a pretty good instance of something I've tried to motivate a few times before. There is certainly plenty of room for improvement in how sensitive white people are to black people's experiences, and a lot of offense can occur that isn't intended. Nevertheless, it only hurts that cause to insist on offense over stupid things like this. The guy was reading a book whose very title shows that it's not in support of the KKK. It's not a good idea to try to get your employer to ban someone from becoming educated about the realities of race relations, something white people certainly need more of.

John McWhorter's stuff on victimology is often dismissed among those on the left who recognize real racial problems (not that McWhorter ever denies those, of course). But he's surely right that there's a culture of complaint about relatively trivial offenses and in many cases immoral complaints about non-offenses like this one. This kind of reaction only fosters the attitude among many on the right that racial problems are caused by black (or in general non-white) people who won't learn to get over it, because it confirms that at least in some cases there's some truth to that.

What if the show 24 had been made seven years earlier with the technology of that time?

It's pretty funny and brings back a lot of memories of what things were like. I just realized that my students in 1994 were the ages my kids are now and would therefore have almost no memories of the technology of that time.

It's election day, and since it's just local elections the turnout is really poor. I was just voter #74 in my district, and the election workers are (I believe?) joking about knocking on people's doors to remind them that there's an election on.

It's strange that we never care as much about local elections, even though they impact us far more directly than national ones. How can people with kids not care about who is running their schools. How can someone be motivated to vote for a presidential candidate who has little chance of winning their state because of party dominance and yet not be able to get over to vote on the people who will determine which construction projects happen in their neighborhood? There are plenty of irrational elements of voting behavior, but this one has to be up near those who voted for John Kerry because they thought he was pro-life or George Bush because they thought he was pro-choice.

Is this just an artifact of the nationalized media? Is it because no one pays attention to local media? I doubt it, because I'm pretty sure this pattern is older than nationalized media's dominance. Is it that the issues in national elections seem more important because they have more effect? This might explain why we get more worked up about national issues than we do about anything at the local level. The local authorities can't do as much about those concerns. What's ironic, if that's the case, is that we have far smaller influence over such issues, and so we're getting more worked up about things we have much less ability to affect.

It's especially odd that this apathy about local elections is present among libertarians, federalists, and small-government conservatives, who constantly go on about how certain issues ought to be left to the local level. Do such people regularly vote on the local level about those issues? Some of them surely do, but I would guess that the percentage of people voting in local elections is similar across parties.

I don't normally like to link to things if I have nothing to add or critique, but Joe Carter's post on Generation X conservatives and how they differ from conservatives of the previous generation has a lot of interesting analysis on an issue I've never seen anyone write much about before.

I've never been much of a fan of Ayn Rand. Her egoism gets the motivations for moral living completely wrong. I'm not much sympathetic to her atheism. Her libertarianism on free will is contrary to my own compatibilism. Her political libertarianism is motivated in her egoism and ends up with results that I think are contrary to my own political conservatism, even on the economic and structural matters where conservatives and libertarians often agree. But it's nice to find one redeeming quality in her work. David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy notes one way she influenced him that I can't help but agree with.

First, she indirectly persuaded me that caring about the success of strangers on sports teams that happen to carry the name of my city or school is a waste of time. This freed up thousands of hours for other endeavors more directly related to my own life.

I never needed convincing on this, but it's nice to see that Ayn Rand at least got one thing right. There are so many conceptual confusions, misrepresentations of views she's arguing against, and just complete howlers of arguments in what I've read of her writing, and I'm sure I'd disagree with her reasoning even on this one point. (I'm actually not sure how she can consistently argue against people choosing to do this out of enjoyment.) But until now about the only thing I've been able to credit her with is sheer force of will in maintaining her commitment to a ridiculous thesis (that morality consists only and completely in being selfish). Now I can at least acknowledge her recognition of one of the biggest wastes of time in American culture for what it is.

(Note: I'm not saying that it's not an enjoyable waste of time for those who enjoy it. That would be obviously false. I just can't see how that particular enjoyable activity should be better than other ones that are much more productive, self-improving, other-improving, and so on, and I can't see how it can be worth all the money that gets thrown into it, the permanent injuries that arise among those involved with certain sports, or the level of importance given to watching it that trumps all other endeavors. I certainly have my own obsessions, but I think mine all have at least some deeper importance, even if I might take them too far.)

I've often begun ethics classes by having my students write about something that they've done that they believe to have been wrong, explaining why they think it was wrong. It gets them into the mode of having to give reasons for their moral views. This semester I decided to supplement that assignment by having them write a week later about someone they admire and respect or some action they respect, explaining why they find that person, trait, or action admirable. It captures a kind of ethical thinking that I think a lot of ethics classes will downplay because of their focus on what factors make an action wrong. There isn't as much emphasis on good-making features of actions, character traits, and so on in contemporary ethical theorizing.

I was very surprised by the results, and I'd be interested to see if this happens with a different kind of group. I'm teaching a junior-level class, and all these students have had at least two philosophy classes that are supposed to be heavy on the history of philosophy. I wonder if newly-arrived freshmen would answer the same way. Still, it was a little unexpected to find that 19 out of 43 students who did the assignment had chosen a parent (or both parents in one case). These were about evenly split between mothers and fathers. Another 10 were other family members (a sister, two brothers, a grandmother, three grandfathers, an uncle, and a cousin). Five chose friends and one an unrelated, older role model. Two were about complete strangers they'd interacted with or observed. One was amorphous, just listing character traits. Five were famous people (Max Roach, Oprah Winfrey, Jessica Lynch, Abraham Lincoln, and professional baseball players as a whole).

For some reason it didn't surprise me that a lot had chosen family members, but this was overwhelmingly family-heavy, and the bulk of the family members chosen were parents or grandparents, with parents occupying the most (almost half of the responses). I expected a lot more than three contemporary celebrities, but I guess it's not so surprising that most people don't see celebrities as heroes to respect or admire. Most celebrities aren't all that worthy of respect and admiration.

But my question is this. Is this a reflection of a cultural change? Are college students now all of a sudden more respectful of parents than we've been led to believe? Common wisdom among those I spend a lot of time with think there's very little respect for parents among young people. Or is it something that wasn't ever really true to begin with? Or is this something due to a change as students move out from their families and live on their own, now seeing their parents in a more accurate way? Or is it something particular about this group of students because they're at a Jesuit institute of higher learning?

When I first saw this video, I was wondering what Andrew Sullivan was getting at by calling it The Christianity of War. He obviously finds it problematic but says nothing about what is so problematic. But then I followed the link to the original location and read some of the comments, and I think I know what's wrong with it. The problem is that the makers of the video produced something for the evangelical community that anyone remotely biblically literate would understand as a call to spiritual action, cognizant of the reality of Satan and the necessity of bearing up the weapons of Christian warfare as listed in Ephesians 6:10-20 and referred to in II Corinthians 6:7; 10:4; Hebrews 4:12 (among other places). These weapons are things like faith, righteousness, the good news message about Jesus Christ, the word of God in general, and salvation. Most of them are defenses against spiritual attacks from Satan and his minions.

But it seems to me that in a biblically-illiterate culture, it's setting yourself up for misunderstanding to post something on the internet if many will not understand the biblical context of the metaphor you're using. This is especially true given those vocal anti-evangelicals who adamantly misinterpret everything evangelicals do in order to further the completely ridiculous thesis that evangelicals are all about political agendas and that evangelical missions groups have nothing to do with spreading the gospel but seek to fight human enemies (not the spiritual enemies discussed in the verses I just referred to that the video was actually about) with human weapons (not the spiritual enemies in the verses I just referred to that the video was actually about).

I am not going to absolve the pretty ridiculous commenters on the video from doing their homework. Anyone who thinks that video was about political fighting against the political opponents of the religious right is morally at fault. There's plenty of publicly-available information that should easily make it plain that that's not the case, and it is indeed immoral to make base charges, that are so obviously false, against such a large movement when it's so utterly obvious that you know so little about that movement.

But I think evangelicals have a calling to make the message of the good news plain and clear in a way that videos like this are not going to get in the way of that. This was obviously not intended to do anything but motivate Christians to pray, study the Bible, hold each other up in times of spiritual trial, and seek to live a godly life. Its creators therefore didn't expect this to be viewed by those who know very little about evangelicals besides the popular misconception based on how evangelicals are treated in the media. But they put it on the internet, and they failed to take into account the small but vocal miscreants who find anything they can about evangelicals in order to take it out of context and put evangelicals in as bad a political light as possible, and that's what's happened here. Those who would produce such videos ought to take that into account and not just leave metaphors like this hanging unexplained to be taken to be about whatever the viewer happens to want it to be about.

Update: I write this post, and then I check up on what's been going on at the Volokh Conspiracy in the last couple days while I haven't had the chance to check in there, and I find this post, which has statistics showing that the demographic group that is most disproportionately Christian fundamentalist in the U.S. is African-American women, and more fundamentalists are Democrats than Republicans. Neither of these is all that surprising to me once I think about it a bit, but it certainly goes against the sort of thing I was trying to confront in this post.

What an interesting argument! Laurence Thomas argues that there is a black American imperialism. [Note: Laurence's site doesn't like the server this blog resides on. You usually have to click on the link, wait until you get a rejection message, click in the URL box, and hit enter. I've never seen it fail to work that way.]

Blacks in the U.S. tend to see blackness as something they have a monopoly on, such that Barack Obama isn't really black due to his father being from Africa and his mother being white. You might hear things like, "Immigrant blacks don't have our heritage, so they must not really be black." At the same time, hip-hop is one of the biggest cultural exports from the U.S., and blacks in the U.S. are having a huge impact on blacks elsewhere, while ignoring that Africa is a continent and not a country, smoothing over the huge differences throughout Africa to act as if all blacks are just from Africa (appropriating half-customs with no meaning in the process). A number of elements in this process resemble the cultural imperialism that larger American culture regularly engages in, so it's interesting to see him identifying some ways that the black subculture in the U.S. does similar things.

Mark Goodacre points to the attention Deirdre Good's new book Jesus' Family Values is getting. Her argument is basically that Jesus had no family values, on the following ground:

1. Jesus challenged some of the societal expectations people in his cultural context had about families.
2. Jesus doesn't spend a lot of time on some of the moral perspectives assumed by all first-century Jews because of the background of the Hebrew scriptures, i.e. he focuses on where the people of his time were misinterpreting or violating the spirit of the Hebrew scriptures.
3. Jesus predicts that families will divide over him, without ever saying that those who reject his followers in this way and put them to death are right to cause such division.
4. We see no sign of Jesus calling his foster father Joseph by the name he reserved for his heavenly Father.

She also says (falsely) that the word 'family' never appears in the New Testament. Now the English word never appears in the Greek, but a simple online search would have shown her that many English translations use the word regularly (see the ESV, NIV, HCSB, TNIV, NLT). Maybe she got some not quite true information about the KJV not having the word in the NT (it does have it once), but that has nothing to do with the content of the Greek NT itself but more to do with the English language at the time the KJV was translated (or rather the English language of a couple centuries earlier, which is what the KJV translators were translating the Bible into). [Update: see the comments for a more careful presentation of her view, why it's a little better than this, and why I still disagree with it.]

Now maybe the bulk of her argumentation is good, and maybe her conclusions aren't as radical as this presentation makes it look, but the impression of what I'm getting is that she's trying to send a message that pretty much everything those who speak of "family values" consider to fall under that would have been foreign to Jesus, and he'd in fact take the opposite views on many of those issues. The implicature is that those who say they derive their moral and political views from the Bible on these issues are in fact making them up whole cloth.

As I said in the comments on Mark's post, this is a very strange argument. For one thing, Jesus did speak about family values. He lambasted the Pharisees for taking the money they should have been using to care for their parents and dedicating it to God with a vow so they could use it now and not have to support their parents. He gives his mother to John to take care of her. He treats the love of the father for the prodigal son as an image of perfect, divine love, which affirms such love for wayward children.

It's sometimes said that the word 'jihad' in Arabic derives from a word for striving and thus doesn't mean war or holy war. Mark Liberman points out that the English word 'war' is also derived from a root that has nothing to do with war, although in this case it is confusion rather than striving. It's easy to see how either might eventually end up meaning war. (It's a little more difficult to see how the etymological root of 'war' eventually became the German word for sausage.) But both words do actually mean war.

Now, as Mark acknowledges, this doesn't stop people from using either word metaphorically to refer to something else. Muslims do use the word 'jihad' to refer to an inner, spiritual quest that involves struggling to be a good Muslim, but in fact the English word 'war' can also be used in such a metaphorical way, as can several other words that literally mean violent conflict. Some words have even more commonly come to mean nonviolent moral missions (e.g. 'crusade') and hardly ever mean war.

I have no problem if a Muslim wants to use the word 'jihad' in this way. I'd be much happier if all Muslims did no more than go through inner struggles in their personal jihad. I do have a problem if someone wants to pretend that the word never means "holy war" or especially the historically revisionist line that Muslims never meant it as war. I do have a problem if someone tries to act as if this nonviolent use of the word is standard in a way that nonviolent uses of the word 'war' are not. But even aside from the parallels between the two words, I think it's worth resisting the etymological fallacy that takes a word to mean something simply because it was derived from an archaic root that means that. The classic counterexample of 'butterfly' in English comes to mind. It doesn't have much to do with butter or flies.

I've read a number of criticisms of Justice Kennedy's decision in Carhart v. Stenberg, which upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban. One theme I've seen several times is the claim that Kennedy's use of the term 'abortion doctors' is somehow pejorative and inappropriate. In fact, this meme seems to have initiated with Justice Ginsburg's dissent. See here for Justice Ginsburg's words in making this criticism.

When I first read about this, it seemed an unfair and illegitimate complaint, but I didn't really spend much time thinking about it or looking at the use of the term 'abortion doctor'. I decided to look around a little when I saw this post by Stuart Buck, which points out that one person now making this complaint had only two years earlier used the same expression in an entirely positive context. I did a Google search for "abortion doctor" OR "abortion doctors". Here are some of the results.

1. a directory of abortion providers
2. someone's explanation "Why I Am An Abortion Doctor"
3. a 1998 CNN news story about the murder of an abortion doctor
4. a 2003 AP news story about the execution of someone who killed an abortion doctor
5. the amazon.com entry for the book associated with #2
6. a 1997 pro-choice website seeking to organize the pro-choice movement against a murder charge an abortion doctor was facing
7. a 2003 Fox News story about the same events of #4 above
8. a 2007 Los Angeles Times piece on an aspiring abortion doctor still in medical school, which I have to note is (a) very positive about her and (b) significantly after the Kennedy opinion
9. another article about the 2003 case, this time hosted at a site about dangeous cults that places this killer in a larger category of anti-abortion extremists
10. an abortion provider directory at abortion.com, which as far as I can tell has removed whatever reference it had that placed it in the listings for this Google search

What would you describe as the typical Disney family model? Jae Ran Kim points out how frequently the main character of Disney movies has either an absent or dead parent (or two absent or dead parents), among other unusual anomalies that should be surprising for a line of children's entertainment. I think the only one in her pretty long list to have both parents raise her ends up a cross-dresser.

This isn't necessarily a criticism. This particular story device often simply makes for a good story. But doesn't it seem excessive for Disney to be so overwhelmingly like this? Or is this more common in children's stories in general than we notice? Since we generally don't notice it with Disney, maybe that's so. But why don't we notice it, if we don't?

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy has some interesting observations about interracial dating. It turns out that there's more resistance to interracial dating even when it comes to online dating, which means it doesn't just have to do with who you associate with in daily life within your local community (although that's got to be a factor, because groups who tend to live in areas where they are the majority are less likely to take part in interracial dating than groups that typically find themselves in the majority wherever they live).

One factor that he includes that I hadn't connected with this is that people with higher or more specific standards in non-racial ways might be more open to interracial dating simply because their pool is already much smaller than other people's. He includes religious standards such as refusal to date someone of another religion. This may well be one explanation why, in my own observation, evangelical Christians (at least in the circles I run in) are far more open to interracial dating than most any other group I can think of. It may well be partly because evangelicals have a smaller pool to pick from because many evangelicals will date only other evangelicals, and being open to interracial dating helps widen the pool from what it would be if they looked only at people within their own racial group.

Nonetheless, I don't think such an explanation undermines what I've long thought to be the explanation for evangelicals' greater openness to interracial dating. I've generally taken it to be because evangelicals have a heightened sense of the oneness of all genuine followers of Jesus, who evangelicals typically see as including mainly those who have put their allegiance to Christ above all other allegiances. Identity in Christ is primary, and other sources of identity are at best secondary. Thus when I think about who I'm most closely aligned with, I'm going to think of black evangelicals as much closer to the heart of my identity than I will white non-believers.

This isn't just not in conflict with Somin's point, as if they are two compatible explanations. It's actually the same fact under two different descriptions. On the one hand, evangelicals who have this restriction do indeed have a smaller pool to pick from, and they are thus more likely to be willing to include others in the pool than just those of their own race. But the philosophical justification for restricting the pool to like-minded believers is the same justification for expanding it to include like-minded believers regardless of race. After all, it's the sense of closer identity with fellow believers that leads both to the restriction to only believers and to openness to believers of other races.

One more voice enters the fray to support the minority report that Don Imus' primary offense is against women, with his offense against blacks only secondary. Roland Martin (who it is worth recognizing is black) argues that, while the nappy-haired qualifier restricted Imus' comment to black women, it's very clear that calling them hos made it an attack on women.

I wouldn't say some of what he says, and I'd word some more of it very differently than he does. I think you could be critical of Hillary Clinton as an opportunist without basing it on her violation of gender stereotypes that we'd prefer her to conform to. But I do think enough of the criticism she receives comes from what he's getting at. The same is true of Condi Rice. People can criticize her views or even slander her character without necessarily being sexist. After all, they do the same to other members of the Bush Administration, most of whom are not women. But sometimes it takes on a particular flavor with her in ways that you couldn't see if the attack were against a man. The same is true of Janet Reno. Just consider the SNL parodies of all three of these women, especially Will Ferrell's Reno.

Compare someone who refers to some black people (sex unspecified) as nappy-headed and someone who refers to some women (race unspecified) as hos. The former makes fun of someone's physical characteristics, deriding a distinctive characteristic of the appearance of black people. The latter invokes a double standard (men who are promiscuous have no similar negative term) and usually involves a moral judgment about sexual behavior based on evidence that often isn't closely (or isn't at all) tied to sexual behavior. It is a particular insult against women to take part in that game, regardless of whether the insult in a particular case is restricted to a particular sub-group of women, even if the context also insults that sub-group.

Both are immoral, but the second seems much worse to me. So when both are done together, why is it that people focus just on the former? Is it that we're just incapable of seeing an insult against black women as being an insult against women? Or is it that we've got a heightened sensibility toward seeing slights against black people that we don't have toward seeing slights against women? Or is it some combination of the two?

Don Imus' recent racist and misgynist comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team have gotten him suspended from his MSNBC morning show and the CBS radio network for two weeks. Two weeks? Forget the nappy-haired bit. How many people do you think could call some college students hos on a major cable news network and not be fired permanently on the spot? Not very many. All Imus gets is two weeks of presumably unpaid vacation. ABC and CBS are basically collaborating to let him get away with this with minimal impact on his career.

Isn't it interesting that the people who have been bearing the burden of responding to this are black people who have been offended by the racist connotations of his "nappy-haired hos" comment (and the more explicit epithet of his conversation partner)? Why aren't we hearing as much of a response from feminists about the misogyny of calling college women hos, even aside from the race issue? I wonder if it's got something to do with the fact that most feminist don't consider themselves-as-women insulted when it's only black women who have been spoken of this way. The lack of feminist response itself is an interesting example of hidden racism.

A friend of mine overheard some university students yesterday morning talking about this in Starbucks. They were actually defending Imus on the grounds that the people he was talking about really do have nappy hair. Even aside from the racial issues some might raise about such a statement (which I'm guessing people will disagree about), isn't it kind of silly to defend someone who called some people "nappy-haired hos" by saying they do have nappy hair? It's kind of like defending someone calling a Jewish person a "Jew-nosed liar" by saying that since the person really is Jewish then it sort of follows that they have a Jewish nose and then not even mentioning that they accused the person of lying too.

Update: I didn't hear about this today, but some are comparing this incident with a similar one in 2003 when Michael Savage called someone a Sodomite and wished he'd get AIDS and die. MSNBC fired him on the spot. Now wishing someone's death on the air is much worse than what Imus said, but does one justify immediate firing and the other just a two-week vacation'? I have no idea if this piece is trustworthy, but it suggests that Imus is just too connected to influential people for this to affect him long-term.

Update 2: Apparently MSNBC has fired him now. See the comments. I'm curious how they're going to spin their change of mind. They very clearly had not wanted to do that and were hoping a slap on the wrist would pacify any outrage.

Scot McKnight presents some survey results from a new book about conservative Christians. Since most people have an extremely fuzzy sense of what it might mean to be a conservative Christian (even leaving aside the politically conservative issue, which isn't what this is about), I was curious what it meant to be a conservative Christian according to this book. Here is the definition:

[Conservative Christianity] is a biblical religion in the tradition of the Reformation not only at the leadership level but also within the ranks of the faithful.

That's a pretty broad category. I would say it's much broader than evangelicalism. The biggest problem is that "in the tradition of" is extremely vague, in more ways than one. But I didn't have to read much further to know that I shouldn't bother to pay any further attention to anything this book might have to say. Consider the following completely absurd caveat (the introductory words are McKnight's:

But, and this needs to be observed: "only a minority of CCs embrace all of Cons Christianity’s essential elements"

I was sure I must be misreading something. Since I don't have the book, I can't check to see if he's misreporting things. But this just seems completely ridiculous. If someone doesn't meet essential characteristics for being in some category, then they simply aren't in the category. There's no borderline or fringe character to it. It's easy to find lots of categories with unclear boundaries, and it might be unclear whether certain potential members belong in those categories. But that's only true when it comes to non-essential or possibly non-essential characteristics. If we're talking essential characteristics, then not having it means you're not in the category. It's like throwing some triangles in the mix to see if all squares have four sides.

If they're doing this kind of thing, why should they think their results are useful for anything? What's worse is that it isn't just accepting some people to count as Conservative Christians who most definitely are not Conservative Christians. They've stated that a full majority of the people they're counting as Conservative Christians aren't Conservative Christians according to their own definition of Conservative Christians. It's really like taking triangles as most of your samples that you're calling squares and then doing a survey that leads to the conclusion that most squares only have three sides.

I've been reading Tommie Shelby's We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. After an excellent Ralph Ellison quote about how much mainstream American culture is influenced and produced by black people, Shelby raises an interesting question about a common enough attitude among many black Americans. Enough people think that anyone who is black, merely from being black, has a positive duty to embrace black culture as one's own culture. Part of Shelby's critique lies in questioning whether someone, by being black, automatically ought to embrace black culture. But along the way, in the context of Ellison's point, he raises a difficulty about what even counts as black culture:

Moreover, there are aspects of black culture that whites have played a constructive role in maintaining and developing -- such as musical forms and literary traditions. Do their efforts make the culture any less black? Or are we operating, absurdly, with a reverse "one-drop rule" of culture -- with a criterion that holds that a cultural trait is black if and only if blacks alone had a hand in its creation?

This point is very close some of what John McWhorter simply calls separatism, although Shelby probably disagrees with McWhorter on some of that larger phenomenon. But Shelby and McWhorter are coming from very different places politically. McWhorter, while no Republican (he donated $3000 to John Kerry's campaign for the presidency), tends to have more conservative views on race than most blacks in the public light (although I myself consider him fairly moderate compared to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas or libertarian economist Thomas Sowell). Shelby, on the other hand, is a Marxist, and his views on political policies that will help black people are very left-wing in the American political scene. His aim in this book is to appeal more to a much broader political base, so it's unsurprising to find some arguments that moderates and even some conservatives might go for, but this isn't some pragmatic argument on the basis of premises he doesn't accept. He thinks the position he's critiquing is truly absurd, and his reasons aren't that far from McWhorter's.

What struck me most about his statement, however, was not its appeal to more moderate and conservative views but its rhetorical move comparing this tendency among some blacks to the racist one-drop rule that classifies people as black merely for having one black ancestor several generations back. Blackness is like an infection of impurity, according to the one-drop rule, and it can't be removed no matter how you dilute it. According to the reverse one-drop rule for culture, it's (cultural) whiteness that's an impurity infecting black culture. Even aside from the issues of mainstream culture vs. black culture (see my separatism post linked to above), there's something disturbing about seeing white cultural elements as impurities, even if whiteness as a concept stems from evil ideology. That doesn't mean cultural traits white people happen to have should always be bad and can never be adopted by black people willingly and as good things.

People (almost certainly college students with too much time on their hands) have come up with a version of Quidditch that you can play without magic, with some pretty creative ways to try to capture some things in the original that require magic to do. They've got leagues and everything.

I just found this old Freakonomics post, but it raises an interesting enough question that I thought it worth posting. It used to be that blacks and whites had very different TV viewing habits. According to recent data, these different viewing habits have begun to converge. I can't think of any good reasons why that might be. Any thoughts? Is it because the particular shows that are on now have something that appeals to both audiences when nothing before did? If so, what would that be? Or is it because something has changed in one or the other audience? If so, what would that be? The explanations offered in the comments don't seem very convincing to me.

One way to be inconsistent is to hold two views that are inconsistent with each other. Another is to do something that, whether you realize it or not, is inconsistent with your official view. I'm regularly complaining that people confuse these two things. Only the latter can ever accurately be called hypocrisy, and only then if it's done regularly with the full knowledge of the person doing it. A slip here or there is not hypocrisy. It's just humanity.

But pragmatic inconsistencies are still worth pointing out, because people who engage in them ought to change their view or seek to change their behavior. Arnold Zwicky at Language Log has an example that seems to me to be exactly the kind of inadvertent pragmatic inconsistency that I wouldn't call hypocrisy but do think ought to lead to some revision of belief or practice. Jennifer Gilmore reports on the behavior of her Jewish parents:

My father, who is 100 percent Jewish, has always been obsessed with Christmas. He grew up in Minneapolis, in an unobservant household, and he considers it part of his childhood. "I remember the lights, the trees," he used to say to my little sister and me. "It was magical." He decorates the mantel with Christmas cards and tapes mistletoe to the doorways, and one year he even tried to get my mother, also Jewish, with a much more observant upbringing, to allow an evergreen wreath on our front door. ''I can't live with that,'' she said. "I just can't. Nothing on the outside of this house. We're Jews, for Christ's sake."

Now there's a separate issue of the inconsistency of allowing it on the inside but not the outside. That seems to me to be a deliberate allowance of the behavior in private but not in public, which is outright hypocrisy of a very crude sort. It's ok for us to do this, as long as no one knows about it. If it's ok for you to do, then you should be able to do it without embarrassment, and if it's not then you shouldn't be doing it anywhere.

But even aside from that, I think there's a much more interesting kind of inconsistency going on here. There seems to be a tremendous resistance to being seen as doing anything related to Christmas. The reason is because they're Jewish. This is a line that I've heard often enough from Jewish friends, despite the fact that Christmas trees are a non-religious symbol of a secularized holiday. Some Christians might choose to endow Christmas trees with some religious meaning, but as most Americans practice Christmas there is no symbol to the tree that has anything particular to do with Christianity.

Phil Vischer, creator of Veggie Tales, gives an account of why he thinks The Nativity Story bombed. Key quote:

No intrigue about the artistic vision, combined with no intrigue about the subject matter, leaves a movie with very little to stand on except, "Hey Christians! Please come see our movie about your savior! We made it just for you!" And that pitch, as Hollywood is about to learn, will only get you so far.

In some ways, this is another example of what we regularly see in politics. The leadership of the GOP is much better at coming up with policy proposals that evangelicals will accept. There's also such a clear sense of a lack of genuineness coming from many on the left who try to come off as religiously sensitive but just end up appearing religiously ignorant. Howard Dean and John Kerry don't come across as a genuine Christian to most evangelicals, but neither should Newt Gingrich or Rudy Giuliani. Most importantly, there's always the worry that evangelicals' concerns aren't at the heart of any candidate's views, and attempts to satisfy evangelicals will then just amount to vote-grabbing with no real concern for those issues.

Brian Weatherson links to the Unsuggestor, which uses Amazon personal profiles to match up books people have with books they're not likely to have. It's sort of the inverse of Amazon's engine for recommending books based on what other people who bought what you bought have bought. I tried a few books I've got, and I discovered some disturbing things. Consider the following sets of unrecommendations:

They have the second Harry Potter book opposed to The Gospel According to John, by Leon Morris, a fairly respected evangelical commentary on the fourth gospel. I have both books and like them both very much. Most of the Harry Potter books have several John Piper books turning up in the top five, mostly some of his newer books (which I don't have), but his earlier Desiring God turned up with some of novels by Terry Brooks, one of my favorite fantasy authors. This would again be a case of two books I pretty much like (even if I criticize Piper on a few issues here and there). Some books in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series are put up against John Piper, Josh Harris, Wayne Grudem, A.W. Tozer, J.I. Packer, and other books by evangelicals, including several books I've got or have at least spent time looking through. Pratchett's Reaper Man isn't my favorite of the Discworld series, but a lot of it is funny. Its opposite is Doug Stuart and Gordon Fee's How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, one of the best popular introductions to biblical interpretation ever written. Pratchett's much better Lords and Ladies is opposed to Knowing God by J.I. Packer, one of the most important popular introductions to theology in print. While I don't think Grudem's Systematic Theology is well-argued on the level of detailed exegesis (as in the classic tradition of Reformed systematic theologies like Hodge's), it's an excellent reference work, and I think his positions are largely correct on most issues. It's opposed to Pratchett's Pyramids, a Discworld book I very much loved. D.A. Carson's guide to New Testament commentaries, something I use all the time, lists Harry Potter book 6 as its opposite, a book that is next on my list to read. Carson's How Long, O Lord?, the best book I've seen on the problem of evil, also lists Potter book 6 as its first unsuggestion.

Ross Douthat has an excellent essay on the theocracy paranoia that's becoming fairly common in certain segments of the left. [Hat tip: Blogwatch] I've always thought any such claims were so far out of touch with political realities and cultural dynamics within evangelicalism and Christianity in the U.S. in general as to be not worth much time, but the frequency and urgency of these claims continues to increase as the plausibility of them continues to decrease. I'm glad someone is bothering to tackle this nonsense, because I don't have the kind of patience with this particular conspiracy theory to put together as comprehensive a treatment. See also the much shorter Rich Lowry piece on the same phenomenon, which contains a couple of the best points from the Douthat article.

Bruce Meyer left the following comment on a post that wasn't about this subject, so I thought it might better occupy its own post:

Recently Jeremy and I have been talking about reaching out to neognostics and pagans. After we talked, I realized that the guy with expertise in this area is in my own town (where I teach) of Salem, Massachusetts, Pastor Phil Wyman. So on Halloween I stopped by his church to catch up, and found their outreach at work. Also found that they were on the front page of the Salem News and The Wall Street Journal. The problem is that they were reaching out to pagans. Oops. Waddya know. Here are some links. BTW, I'm quite proud of my friend Pastor Phil.

Befriending witches is a problem in Salem, Mass
Let's Not Get Too Cozy with Pagans? Foursquare Church and The Gathering
The Missional Journey of Phil Wyman
Church severs tie with Salem branch:The Gathering chastised for getting too close to witches

I have to say I like the following quote from the first article:

"Sure, he wants to convert people," he says about Mr. Wyman. "But he does it in a way that respects you."

It's also worth noting how much some of his critics sound like Jesus' critics:

Mr. Wyman appeared "too familiar, too cozy, too amicable with that community," said the Rev. Kenneth Steigler, a United Methodist Church pastor.

This is excellent. I don't know if I can vouch for everything the Campaign for Real Beauty is doing, but the video is itself real beauty.

[hat tip: Tyler Williams]

Jason Sperber has some thoughts worth considering about when Halloween costumes are offensive and worth avoiding. Jason and I weren't close friends ourselves, but we had several friends in common during college, and we often sat at the same table in the dining hall. I don't think either one of us expected to have much if any contact with each other after we graduated, but I recently discovered that he's blogging in several locations, mostly in the context of race, and I found enough of it intriguing to add his blogs to my RSS reader. I've put up links some of the places he blogs in the sidebar, but I've been waiting for a post by him that I wanted to say something about so I could mention him in a post.

I think a lot of people who claim certain kinds of costumes to be offensive do an absolutely awful job of explaining why, and those who don't understand the reasons usually just write them off as being too over-sensitive. Sometimes maybe people can be over-sensitive and get offended at something they shouldn't. Other times maybe there is cause for offense, but it's not a grave enough concern to justify the kind of outrage you sometimes see, and besides there might be more productive ways to address such issues than complaining about one's rights being violated simply because one has been offended. Still, there are good reasons to avoid certain kinds of Halloween costumes, and Jason provides some good explanations (taken from tolerance.org) for why it might be bad to use a variety of different kinds of costumes. The reasons vary in kind and in degree of importance. I want to try to make the moral reasoning more explicit, since some of them go a little too quickly for my philosophically-trained ethical thought processes.

Richard Dawkins has announced that teaching children Christianity is worse than sexually molesting them. [hat tip: Blogwatch]

Update: Nick, commenting at the Evangelical Outpost mention of this, has the most pointed remark I've seen:

To me, the obvious answer is that molestation is a traumatic ordeal which cannot be compared to being raised Christian or to being raised atheist. After all, a child raised by atheist parents can still become Christian, and a child raised by Christian parents, even the strictest hellfire and brimstone fundamentalists, is free to embrace atheism as an adult.

I think that's the most important issue. Molestation cannot be undone, and its effects are as long-lasting as any that might come from being taught to fear hell (at least assuming there is no hell, as Dawkins is doing). On the other hand, all sorts of people are raised to believe in hell and yet reject it, and all sorts of people are raised not to believe in hell who yet become very committed Christians. You can change your views, and teaching views someone might consider harmful has not stopped people from abandoning those views later in life. No one is molested and then later becomes such that they have never been molested.

Devon Carbado at blackprof.com raises some interesting questions about race on the Grey's Anatomy show. [hat tip: Racialicious] I've never watched the show, but these issues come up with quite a number of shows that I have seen. Some people have called the show colorblind because it has non-white characters playing a prominent role without ever making an issue of their race. Many who say this are thinking of colorblindness as a good thing. Racial ways of thinking involve thinking of the less privileged races as lesser or as not part of the mainstream. This kind of colorblindness is often thought of as good. It mainstreams the marginalized. On the other hand, it does mask genuine racial issues when they might be lurking beneath the surface, unnoticed by those who aren't tuned into them, ignored due to no one's willingness to talk about them for fear of being seen as cooperating with the unfortunate implications of a good deal of the negative racialized thinking that colorblindness wants to avoid.

Carbado steps into this with a claim that I think shows some great insight.

I don't think the show is colorblind at all. It is color conscious in a particular way -- namely, it presents non-white actors in roles that do not explicitly invoke race. That is neither colorblind nor race neutral.

It didn't occur to me to call this approach color-conscious at all, but I think this is right. The producers of this show are surely aware of what they are doing. The writers may not be addressing race issues, but what is color-conscious is the placing of non-white actors into these parts, and I suspect they are consciously not referencing the characters' races very much.

It's clear that it's color-conscious in at least that way, then. The question is whether this is a good or bad thing to do. Carbado worries about one aspect of it:

I haven't commented on the recent brouhaha involving the pope and Islam, largely because I've been too busy to put my thoughts together. In the meantime, lots of posts I've read make some worthwhile points, and there isn't really a whole lot I have to say after all of it, but I thought I'd put them all together in the same place.

My first thought was that nothing could even be taken as offensive once you had everything in context, but Jonathan Wilson at the Elfin Ethicist thinks it's a little more complicated than that, mostly because his representation of Islam is inaccurate. Mark Goodacre also thinks it's a little unfair to Islam to say that Islam doesn't embrace reason. My problem with this complaint is that the pope never asserts anything about Islam, as far as I can see. He does quote some people who say that Muslims place God above reason and thus are not limited by it. Nowhere do the people he quotes say that Muslims see reason as bad. The reason issue is his topic, however, not Islam.

Mark puts the quote in context fairly well, and despite my disagreement of his characterization of what the pope was doing, I do very much like his concluding comment: "those who are overreacting to the speech might well wish to demonstrate the importance of reason in their thinking by engaging it rather than caricaturing it." Indeed. It has struck me as especially ironic that those who took issue with his portrayal of Islam as violent (which I don't think he really did, but that's what's being assumed) decided to confirm that very judgment by being violent in response. Does that make any sense?

Was Steve Irwin a Christian
steve irwin christian
I've been getting searches like this up to several times an hour (but usually less) since Steve Irwin died, but nothing I said was relevant to this. Maybe those searches will get diverted to this post. I know nothing for sure about Steve Irwin's views on religion. He did, of course, accept current scientific understanding on the process of human origins, which will automatically disqualify him in the eyes of some people who think views on the means and time frame of creation count as the gospel (or, even worse, think evangelism consists of sending creationist tracts to celebrities). But of course plenty of people accept common descent who are genuine Christians.

He did believe in God, or at least he sometimes talked that way, saying, "But I have a gift. God put me on this planet with a mission. My mission is to educate people about conservation." But lots of people believe in God without being Christians, and lots of people speak of God's purpose metaphorically, mostly to suggest that they feel a purpose for their life. Someone in this thread remembers him saying he believed his mom was in heaven and looked forward to joining her, which suggests some sort of Christianlike view of heaven. I can't find any substantiation for him saying this, however. It says it's in the Larry King interview, but I didn't see anything even close to that there.

One piece of evidence against his being a Christian is that they had Buddhist nuns (his term; I don't know the proper term) bless their child in a sort of public baptismal ceremony. I doubt they would have done that in addition to a private Christian service, but it's possible. More likely is that this was all they did in that area, and it's probably not something serious Christians who accept and follow biblical teaching would have done, since this looks strikingly like the kind of pagan temple worship that the early Christians would have considered idolatry.

Update: Snopes.com finally tackles this issue (or at least the issue of the hoax discussed in the comments).

This is part three of what I was expecting to be a four-part review of Mary Kassian's The Feminist Mistake. I have decided to post what I've written of part three and then not continue, primarily because I have not been reading any more of this book for quite some time, and I need to limit my reading list down to something much more manageable given that I would like to finish my dissertation by the end of next summer. So I've decided not to finish this book in the foreseeable future. Here, then, is the last part of my series of reviews on this book, covering a few chapters into the third section.

I was sitting in the law school library one night a couple years ago, and a law student asked me if I could remind her the names of the Supreme Court justices. Bear in mind that this was before Roberts and Alito. The Supreme Court at the time had been the same people since something like 1993. This particular law student had probably been in junior high when President Clinton had appointed Justice Breyer. When she found out that I wasn't a law student, a law professor, or a lawyer but merely a philosopher, and yet I could name them off in like three seconds, she was feeling a little Bashful.

Speaking of which, have you heard about the latest poll purportedly showing that the seven dwarfs are more famous than the Supreme Court justices? I've seen it several times now, but most people aren't noticing what Mark Liberman at Language Log has picked up on (see the links within that post, since it doesn't say much itself). It's good reading in general to see how misleading polls can be, indeed how misleading they can be designed to be. Suffice it to say that there's little to be trusted about this poll. It has all the hallmarks of manipulative poll-spinning.

For some reflections on culture, in particular art and science in relation to faith, check out Bruce Meyer's blog Being Human, in Faith Art Science. Bruce and I have a lot of common friends, but we've never met. He was once part of the congregation I'm now a member of, but he left town long before I arrived. He's been blogging for a few weeks now and has enough posts to give you some sense of what his blog will be like. I recommend checking it out and seeing if it's the sort of thing you'd like to add to your blog-reading menu.

Update: I particularly recommend Industrialized Sex and True Intimacy, Part I and Industrialized Sex and True Intimacy, Part II. He also provides and reflects a little on an excerpt from Aristotle on friendship, whose insight into human nature and psychological matters was in some ways (but certainly not all) extremely insightful and way ahead of his time.

Laurence Thomas defends Dr. Laura on marital sex, particularly her encouragement to married women to be more willing to be coaxed into sex by their husbands. Laurence argues that seeking to satisfy their husbands' desires is not merely giving in to selfishness. It's actually acting in a way that serves the interests of him while also being in her own self-interest at the same time. He suggests that the gift of sex is a power that women have that men do not, a theme consistent with a number of his recent posts. The good life involves the best use of that power, and fostering gratitude is one good use of any moral power. In the process, he argues that Dr. Laura's view comes from feminist motivations that her critics have simply failed to see, out of their assumption that seeking a man's happiness must always mean ignoring a woman's own concerns. It does not, and it particularly might not even when a woman thinks it means ignoring her own concerns.

I think the key issue in the whole post is the difference between choosing to see someone else's desire as an imposition on oneself vs. choosing to see it as an opportunity for kindness, one that will in the end reap the rewards of the other's gratitude. This point generalizes to many other circumstances, of course, but it does seem apt here. I think the problem Dr. Laura's critics have had is that they see her as arguing that women should consent to sex as a conjugal duty, when that is not at all what she's saying. She's saying that the kind of character trait that builds a good marriage includes seeking to please one's spouse, especially if the means of pleasing involves pleasure to oneself. I guess some of her critics can't see the difference between that and a mere fulfillment of a duty that one hates, but it's a fundamental distinction in terms of both motive and result. It's telling that in the one place this comes up in the writings of the apostle Paul in I Corinthians ch. 7, he tells married couples not to deprive each other (except by mutual consent for a limited time and only then for the sake of more focused prayer). The motive is concern for each other. The result is a good for each other that otherwise would count as deprivation. This is mutual. If abstaining is depriving each other, then sex is a good (a good for both parties) to be encouraged and engaged in, in part for the sake of the other. As far as I can tell, that's all Dr. Laura is saying to women. (What men might need to hear is a very different thing, but that's an issue for another time.)

Someone sent me a link to a piece by RJ Escrow called The Evangelighouls -- How The Christian Right Exploits War's Youngest Victims. He's crossposted it also at his personal blog Night Light. It's basically a hack smear of Campus Crusade for Christ, the second largest Christian missions organization in the world (after the Southern Baptist Convention's missions wing).

There are plenty of errors in Escrow's post. Some of these are purely factual. He consistently misspells the name of Steve Sellers (as Sellars). He says Sellers is president of Campus Crusade, a position currently held by Steve Douglass (and only ever held by one other person, founder Bill Bright). Sellers is a vice-president overseeing the ministries in North and South America, not president of the whole organization. In the earlier draft picked up by Yahoo, he uses a definite article before the name 'Campus Crusade for Christ', a common feature of those who speak derisively about the organization who don't really know anything about it. He seems to have removed all but three of those at this point. What disturbs me more are Escrow's false attributions, misrepresentations, and assumptions of motives well beyond the evidence.

Marc Driscoll has a post, Death by Ministry, which purports to point out some of the problems with burnout on the part of pastors. He gives some interesting and alarming statistics:

The following statistics were presented by Pastor Darrin Patrick from research he has gathered from such organizations as Barna and Focus on the Family.

Pastors

Fifteen hundred pastors leave the ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout, or contention in their churches.
Fifty percent of pastors' marriages will end in divorce.
Eighty percent of pastors and eighty-four percent of their spouses feel unqualified and discouraged in their role as pastors.
Fifty percent of pastors are so discouraged that they would leave the ministry if they could, but have no other way of making a living.
Eighty percent of seminary and Bible school graduates who enter the ministry will leave the ministry within the first five years.
Seventy percent of pastors constantly fight depression.
Almost forty percent polled said they have had an extra-marital affair since beginning their ministry.
Seventy percent said the only time they spend studying the Word is when they are preparing their sermons.

Pastors' Wives

Eighty percent of pastors' spouses feel their spouse is overworked.
Eighty percent of pastors' spouses wish their spouse would choose another profession.
The majority of pastor's wives surveyed said that the most destructive event that has occurred in their marriage and family was the day they entered the ministry.

His post has three parts, the first of which is these statistics, the second of which is "Some signs", and the third is "Some solutions". While I think most of his solutions are good, I am not sure I entirely agree with attributing all of these statistics and signs to burnout (or even with saying that they are sometimes due to burnout). But before I write any more on it, I wanted to solicit your comments. What do you think?

Adrian Warnock points out an interesting "pop quiz" on marriage. I have to admit, some of the answers are pretty surprising, if true. That is, if it's right, things aren't anywhere near as bad as I thought they were (although still pretty bad). Too bad it doesn't have links to all of the relevant evidence. I'm sure it would if it were a blog.

So, I just got an e-mail a few minutes ago that Skype is now allowing free "SkypeOut" calls anywhere in the U.S. and Canada, which means you can now use Skype to call any regular telephone in that region (or mobile phone) for free. I've used Skype before, but I was curious how well it worked (and never wanted to pay for the service in the past), so I just gave it a shot, and it works pretty well. The person on the other end heard a bit of an echo, and the quality wasn't quite as good as a telephone call for me, but it was better than I expected. I'll probably use it again in the future for long distance calls sometimes.

On a related note, though, I have both a Mac and a PC, and I've had occasion to compare the video capabilities of Skype (which aren't available on Mac yet) with that of iChat (on the Mac). The quality with iChat seems a lot better. Does anyone know what's going on behind the scenes? My guess is that Skype isn't using the full bandwidth it could, while iChat seems to be using a lot more bandwidth, but I'm not sure. Regardless, I am delighted with iChat and keep using it to have video meetings with folks at work and elsewhere, while Skype's video is a bit more of a pain to watch. While it's still better than no video, I'd hesitate to use it for a meeting.

I find it remarkable that after decades of predictions that video telephony was just around the corner, now it has finally arrived -- but it's over the Internet, and with relatively little hoopla. We had some relatives on the other coast get Skype so we could call and show them live video of us with our new baby, and they had no idea that such a thing was even possible until they saw it.

One common but bad argument against interracial marriage stems from the fear that it destroys cultures. Mixed Media Watch has a good response to this argument. I would add that racial interaction of any sort, especially intermarriage, should create culture as much as destroying it. Once you stop assuming that culture is the same thing as race, it becomes pretty clear that kids of mixed race can have a culture, and this is so even if both parents avoid continuing cultural traditions of their families. We all have a culture, and every culture is changing. In the U.S., there used to be a black culture and a white culture. Now there's still something to black culture, but there really isn't much of a white culture anymore, just a mainstream culture that includes many historically white elements but has many elements from non-white ethnic groups. If black people were to give up the remaining distinctives (which isn't what I'm recommending; I would recommend giving up only bad elements of any culture), it still wouldn't mean black culture is lost. It would mean some (but only some) of those distinctives would be lost. Many of them would remain on in the continuing culture that contains those and some of the original mainstream features.

But what's really silly about this argument is the idea that mixed race children are being robbed of their own culture if they are not raised in ways that the culture of one side of their ancestry had. Whatever you're going to say about what they're being denied, they're not being denied their culture. It's not their culture unless they once had it. Those who were taken from Africa and made slaves were robbed of their culture. If Sam and I adopt a Korean girl, we're not robbing her of her culture just because her parents would be of two very different ethnic groups that are not her own. That Korean culture was never hers, so no one could claim that she would be robbed of her culture. At best she would be robbed of a culture that might otherwise have been hers, but that's not the same thing. We might say there's some kind of ancestral heritage that she has, but it's not her culture. Her culture is what she's raised with.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine dealt with this issue nicely in the second season episode "Cardassians". A Cardassian child was raised by Bajorans. I've used that episode with good results in my classes when I've talked about race. A Cardassian child was raised by Bajoran parents. The Cardassians had been the oppressors of the Bajorans, until the Bajorans freed themselves. Some Cardassian children were left behind, and this kid was one of them. The Bajorans took them in. His culture was clearly Bajoran, but his father wanted him raised as a proper Cardassian to appreciate Cardassian things. Sometimes thinking about these things with a no-stakes context like science fiction really helps put things into perspective when you return to the real-life cases.

Sheila Jackson Lee's attempt to get hurricanes named things like Jamal or Chamiqua isn't new to me, but it was surprising to see it turn up on snopes.com. I'm not surprised that someone might be offended at the particular email that they're confirming the basic facts behind, given the nature of the speech used in the email's last paragraph. (I'm not going to quote it here. Go read it for yourself.) I'm a little surprised that what's offensive is supposed to be that it's racist. It seems to be quoting a general tendency within a certain subset of African-Americans (and not exclusively among African-Americans either). Can it be racist to put words together that accurately reflect how the mainstream of the hip-hop community actually speaks? How is accurate representation of real people supposed to be racism? Unless it insinuates that all black people are like this, which it doesn't, I can't see how it's racist. It's certainly an offensive way of speaking, but the offensiveness is not something the email author came up with. It's something the email author is simply representing accurately. The most famous hip-hop artists speak in such an offensive way, and they are represented as major moral leaders by many African-Americans.

This is uncharacteristically uncareful for Barbara Mikkelson, who usually does an excellent job with the snopes.com site in sorting through what is accurate and what is not. She just seems to have a strange sense of what counts as racist.

In Emergent Church: Apostate or Nothing New Under the Sun?, I addressed the Emergent Church Movement primarily in terms of what's going on with its key philosophical claims, especially its epistemological claims. For non-philosophers, epistemology is the theory of knowledge, justification for belief, and other questions related to our understanding of the world, how we get it, and what makes it a good or bad state of mind regarding a particular belief or set of beliefs. Epistemological issues in the context of Christian belief thus deal with whether we can be certain that Christianity is true, what gives us good reasons to believe it, the status of the Bible as revelation from God, and the nature of truth itself. I ignored many crucial elements of this movement, and I'd like to remedy that now.

Ed Stetzer discusses three strains with the so-called Emergent Church: Relevants, Reconstructionists, and Revisionists [hat tip: Mickey McLean]. My previous post left us with a choice in how evangelical Christians should evaluate this movement, and I suggest that either there's very little new at all about this movement, and it's classic evangelicalism, or it's heresy and/or heteropraxy. There's probably some of both in the movement. What we need to do is isolate strains with it and then consider each separately. Stetzer's three categories provide one categorizing system to begin this work.

From last week's Christian Carnival, Bruce Alderman has one of the funniest posts I've seen in a long time.

Ira Steven Behr was responsible for some of the best Star Trek episodes ever produced, particularly in Deep Space Nine, which he eventually became the head writer for. I have tremendous respect for him as a writer. I have to wonder, though, about one statement he made in this interview. When asked what super power he would want, he responded, "In addition to the ones I already have? I've been blessed with so many that I would feel like a Republican to ask for more."

I've been trying to figure out what he could possibly mean by this. Even if he's working with some nasty and uncharitable stereotype of Republicans, what could it be that Republicans are supposed to be like that even remotely resembles having super powers and asking for more super powers? If anyone has any ideas, I'm really curious, because this just makes no sense to me.

I'm not sure I've ever blogged about the so-called Emergent Church, mostly because I think the whole movement is so radically confused that I never wanted to bother to figure out where to start in pointing out all the philosophical and historical errors that serve as its foundation. But Gnu at Wildebeest's Wardrobe has done that work now in a way that I'm in complete agreement with. His post on this, to my mind, is the defininitive analysis of the Emergent Church. What I'm going to say here doesn't add anything to Gnu's post, but I think I can say the main points more succinctly and without as much technical jargon.

For those unfamiliar with this movement, the Emergent Church (a term some of them have used, but sometimes they prefer the Emergent Conversation) is a movement that had its origins within evangelicalism and has rejected key features of what it sees as modernism within evangelicalism, seeing itself as an emerging generation of those who have accepted that we're now in a postmodern generation and have to conceive of the mission and methods of the church differently in order to capture the good of this overwhelming change in cultural perspective. If you take some of their language seriously, it sounds as if they've left the church and formed something else, something thoroughly postmodernist, rejecting truth or at least any possibility of knowing the truth. If you pay more attention to those who moderate their rhetoric, it sounds as if their claims aren't nearly as strong. So there are these two ways of reading them, and the question is open (as far as I'm concerned) which of them is correct. What I think Gnu has valuably accomplished is figuring out how to categorize these two possibilities and being able to distinguish what follows if each is true.

Christian Carnival XCIX is up at Attention Span. The 99 theme is kind of fun. One more to the big 100, which will be returning to the Carnival's founder. I didn't get Agent 99, but at least I ended up with the second best of the categories, Interstate 99, which I'd never known about before. Current plans include extending into my own state. (They violated interstate naming conventions, though, by putting 99 west of 81. I'm not sure what they were thinking. It's immoral to break that sort of convention, particularly when people put such great work into organizing it in a way that you can usually predict what an interstate's number means.)

At the Banty Rooster, Global Warming is Really Global Cooling. [HT: Blogwatch]

Eugene Volokh has an op-ed in the L.A. Times about how easy it is to get a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Previous nominees include Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Castro. Now what I'm wondering is who counts as a professor, because there are some low-lifes that I might be able to nominate if all it takes is to teach at the college level.

Jollyblogger points out a beautiful Yale prank against Harvard.

Sam's put some more pictures online. Ethan and Isaiah were wrestling this week. For some reason Ethan was really frustrated that Isaiah kept not being where Ethan wanted him, so he kept pushing him and lying on top of him to prevent him from moving. Eventually Isaiah started enjoying it, thinking it was playful wrestling. Ethan continued in his frustration the whole time. It was really weird. It was as if the world would end if Isaiah got up. There's also one of Sophia watching the boys go off to school.

The Syracuse University Daily Orange has an interesting article about the LGBT group making a list of bathrooms that would be more favorable for transgendered people [registration probably required], particularly so that they know which bathrooms are single-occupant and which have offensive graffiti. I don't want to get into the general issue of why this is or isn't a good idea or what we should think about the transgender phenomenon as a whole. I've commented on some aspects of those things previously. (It's not clear in the article, but I don't think anyone here is advocating making all bathrooms co-ed, since that would surely make many more people uncomfortable going to the bathroom than the current situation.)

What struck me as very strange, though, was a quote from a student:

The directory is a good idea because people should not feel nervous about going to the bathroom," said Sarabeth Schoeneck, an undeclared sophomore in the College of Human Services and Health Professions. "SU claims to be "no place for hate, and people being discriminated against in the restrooms is a form of hate," she said.

This seems to me to be a huge mistake. I think I have a pretty clear idea of what hate is, and I think I could give plenty of examples of when discrimination stems from hate, but the mere fact of discrimination is simply not hate. Sometimes discrimination occurs unintentionally. Sometimes it's from something like residual racism, where someone might have an immediate response of fear or discomfort because of someone else's race even if they rationally cannot stand the fact that they have such a response and really try to overcome it. Yet it might unconsciously affect some of their decisions and actions. Anyone who thinks that sort of discrimination is hate is morally insensitive.

What's even worse is confusing institutional discrimination with hate. Many authority positions are occupied disproportionally by white males, and white males tend to have disproportionally white male friends, both for largely innocent reasons with respect to their own choices. Given these realities, the practice of favoring people you know in hiring has a disproportionate effect on racial and gender lines. Those who aren't white males will tend to be less likely to be hired. That's a simple statistical fact, and this one practice will offer resistance to overcoming discrimination. So an institution or an overwhelming tendency in society can promote discrimination without any intentional discrimination. That seems to me to be exactly the sort of discrimination you might call this. How, then, is it hate? I think we're just so unaccustomed to seeing real hate in these matters that we have to invent it to have something to talk about. What's ironic is that most people making claims like this wouldn't know real hate if it bit them on the leg, and yet it's pretty common in academia. But hatred of those whom it's politically correct to hate doesn't count as hatred, while mindless processes and attitudes people are desperately trying to overcome do.

Those who opposed invading Iraq in 2003 have often been accused of not being patriotic. I think it's a slimy complaint. Some of them surely are not patriotic. Some have demonstrated by their actions and statements that they prefer al Qaeda to succeed if that's what it takes for Bush to fail. I'm convinced that such a view is much more mainstream than some people think. But many people opposed the war because they considered it immoral and didn't want their country doing immoral things. That's patriotism. This is all old news, though. Why am I talking about it now?

Well, it occurred to me recently that this is the same general phenomenon that I've also talked about a number of times on this blog with respect to accusations of anti-semitism in the gospels (and in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ). I've elsewhere argued that the gospels are Jewish works engaging in self-criticism of their own culture, much as the Hebrew prophets were. Jesus was particularly hard on his own people, but that didn't make him anti-semitic, and it doesn't make the recordings of his life and sayings in the gospels anti-semitic. They do indeed record harsh statements against the Jewish leaders, and John even directs these statements to what he calls the Jews (which careful scholars realize amounts to exactly the same thing). What was funny to me was realizing that those who are so inflamed at those who claim anti-war demonstrators to be undemocratic might well be exactly the same people accusing the gospels or Mel Gibson's use of them (which amounted pretty much to direct quotes of them) as being anti-semitic. It's the same error in reasoning in both cases. (Incidentally, it occurred to me after writing this post that this probably also applies to those who say someone is self-hating for criticizing the behavior of a contingent of their own ethnic or racial group, e.g. Bill Cosby.)

If you can be patriotic while engaging in self-criticism of your own culture, then it isn't anti-semitic to engage in self-criticism of your own culture if you're Jewish. But that's exactly what the gospels do when making the sorts of claims about the Jews of the time that the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and a few more liberal contemporary gospel scholars declare to be anti-semitic. People on the left make this sort of blunder as easily as people on the right do.

Christian Carnival XCVI is at Jordan's View.

Have you heard about the 18-year-old elected mayor as a write-in candidate? [Hat tip: Mark Olson]

Ben Witherington reviews Anne Rice's new novel about Jesus' childhood. I can't help but mention that he also gives Firefly and Serenity a thumbs up.

Here's Ethan a few years ago looking like his ducky (that's old ducky, which his mean aunties lost at the store 723 days ago; the new one has a much bigger bill, which I hope his mouth never looks like).

Christian Carnival XCIV is at Wittenberg Gate. Dory is in need of future hosts, so if you're interested follow her link at the top of the post. The Bible Archive is doing a series on Genesis. I especially want to direct your attention to his nice post on what Genesis 1 does say. All the debates about how to interpret the days and whether it's consistent with evolution easily distract from what the passage is about to begin with, and Rey brings our attention back to that. If you want to see his summary on those other issues, it's here, but why is our focus so often not what the focus of the text is? Walter Snyder has a good explanation of how it is that Bible publishers can justify charging royalties for the use of what is God's word (and thus should be free). [Hat tip: ESV Bible Blog] Belgium declares names and titles to be no longer capitalized. Well, I guess it's just politically incorrect names and titles. Actually, they've just singled out 'christ' and 'jew'* just to show how arbitrary they can be. Or is this arbitrary? [Hat tip: Sam] *Well, for 'Jew' it's only when the reference is religious rather than ethnic; if ethnic, it's still capitalized.

At Real Clear Theology, you can find excerpts of D.A. Carson and Douglas Moo's section on the New Perspective on Paul in their new edition of An Introduction to the New Testament, a book I would wholeheartedly recommend. [Hat tip: Rebecca]

Tyler Williams looks at witches in the Bible and traces out the origin of our modern conception of a witch. The first comment (the only one so far) is priceless.

Ed Feser at Right Reason takes apart Simon Blackburn's critique of Elizabeth Anscombe's natural law theory. [Hat tip: Philosophers' Carnival XXI] Standout quote:

Blackburn appears to be the sort of philosopher who, as an undergraduate, read a few excerpts from Anselm and Aquinas in some textbook, along with the standard potted “refutations� deriving from Hume and Kant, and never looked back – assuming ever since that no one could seriously believe that the existence of God could be demonstrated philosophically. He shows no awareness of the extent to which many of these standard objections are based on caricatures or oversimplifications of the traditional theistic arguments, nor any appreciation of the work done in defense of them by contemporary philosophers of religion like Plantinga and Swinburne, much less by analytical Thomists like John Haldane, whose work is most relevant to the matters presently at issue.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. It doesn't seem good for those who have insisted that Bush really wanted a war no matter what.

Senators Lindsey Graham (SC) and Mike DeWine (OH) were among the seven Republicans in the Gang of 14 who conspired to prevent Democrats from filibustering President Bush's judicial nominees and Republicans from using what's been called the nuclear option to remove the ability to filibuster judicial nominees. Since there are 55 Republicans, and 50 (+ Vice President Cheney's tie-breaking vote) would be needed to change the filibuster rule, only 6 Republicans were needed for the Gang of 14. They had 7. They now have at most 5, at least with respect to Samuel Alito's nomination for the Supreme Court. Graham and DeWine have indicated that they would not allow a filibuster on this nomination. It remains to be seen if the 44 Democrats (plus independent Senator Jim Jeffords of VT) would have enough votes to filibuster to begin with. The Gang of 14 again needs 6 votes to oppose the filibuster. As far as I know, not one of them has indicated anything on how they will approach Alito's nomination.

I found myself driving for quite a while yesterday so I ended up listing to NPR a bit, and caught this commentary on Katrina by Daniel Schorr. I don't have time to transcribe it [Update: Transcript in the comments], but you can listen to it if you like. The synopsis is actually a fairly good summary:

NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr asks where the scourges of hurricanes, drought, and famine fit into the debate over "intelligent design."

Schorr began by saying that Intelligent Design is a new form of creationism, and went on to ask, essentially, what kind of a designer would design natural disasters like these? He concluded by quoting someone who referred to hurricanes as natural events, and then asked, (paraphrasing loosely), "If nature is designed, can we really call them natural? Or are they designed? And that brings us back to the debate about nature versus intelligence."

Now, this whole argument about "bad design" is a relatively common argument against intelligent design. People point to various organisms (i.e. parasites) which appear only to exist to harm other organisms, or particularly nasty diseases, or (in this case) natural disasters, and essentially argue, "No good designer would do such a thing!"

I really have a problem with this sort of argument -- and even more so with Schorr's form. Intelligent Design doesn't claim anything particular about the designer, other than that the evidence indicates that the designer is intelligent. So to even argue such a thing, you're assuming that you know what the designer would do. And that's rather silly, since you're arguing that the designer must not exist (or must not have designed life) because you know what he would have done if he did exist. So at the same time you're arguing (if this is your view) that (a) it's impossible to see from nature that such a designer exists, yet (b) it's possible to determine somehow what the attributes of such a designer would be if he did exist. It doesn't seem like you can have it both ways -- if it's impossible to determine from nature that a designer exists (or possible to prove he doesn't) then you also shouldn't be able to determine anything about said designer. On the other hand, if you can determine the designer exists, then you can start asking what you can tell about his/her/its attributes.

I found Schorr's argument particularly bugged me because he begins by equating Intelligent Design with (Christian) creationism. Now, if that's his view, then the Bible does offer some reason why there is great suffering in the world, including things like natural disasters. The Bible explains that the world is not in its ideal (designed) state any longer, as a result of the sin of Man and the subsequent fall. That is, things are not all as they should be, so people die, diseases happen, and people have to toil greatly to accomplish much of anything on earth. This wasn't how God originally designed things, according to the Bible, but man sinned, and so bad things happened. [We could go into this a lot more, but the purpose of this post isn't to address the whole problem of evil and pain.]

I took this Newsweek poll online a few days ago, and now overall results are tabulated. There was an earlier, phone version of the poll, done by Beliefnet and Newsweek, which reached far fewer people. Both show some interesting results. You can read about the earlier version here. Unfortunately, results of the earlier poll are tabulated in a more effective way so it's possible to get a little more information about who responded how -- but the statistics aren't as good.

Here are some interesting points:
When asked, "Can a good person who isn't of your religious faith go to heaven or attain salvation, or not?" 79% of people said yes, including 68% of professing evangelical protestants, 83% of professing non-evangelical protestants, 91% of Roman Catholics, and 79% of non-Christians (earlier poll). The later, online poll had significantly fewer people saying yes, and results aren't broken down by religious identification.

The polls found 85% (telephone) and 71% (online) of people identifying themselves as Christian. Yet 55% (telephone) and 51% (online) of people attend worship services once or twice a month or less. And 55% (telephone) and 52% (online) of people read "the Bible, Koran, or some other sacred text" less than once or twice a month. (On the flip side, I guess it's reassuring that 40-some percent of people do these things more than once or twice a month).

[UPDATE: It's worth also noting this comment in this Newsweek article:

Of 1,004 respondents to the NEWSWEEK/Beliefnet Poll, 45 percent said they attend worship services weekly, virtually identical to the figure (44 percent) in a Gallup poll cited by Time in 1966. Then as now, however, there is probably a fair amount of wishful thinking in those figures; researchers who have done actual head counts in churches think the figure is probably more like 20 percent.

]

Most people (70-80%) also believe (according to these polls) that God created the universe.

Eugene Volokh has some interesting numbers on Americans' attitudes toward homosexuality over time and in different age groups. A few of his observations are noteworthy. Over half of Americans are still opposed to any homosexual sex as immoral. I wouldn't have guessed that it was over half, but then again I've lived in blue states my entire life. The most interesting element is that there doesn't seem to be much of a shift in attitudes within each generation over time. In some age groups there's no statistical shift. That means that exposure to gay people and portrayals of gay people in the media doesn't change people's attitudes to whether homosexual sex is wrong, even if it will lead to people's being more accepting of gay people, as it almost surely does. This also shows that a large enough percentage of the population must be able to consider gay sex wrong and yet accept gay people. I wonder if these distinctions are easier for people to make if they happen to think gay sex is wrong than they are by those who don't. In my experience, it's the latter group that seems unable to consider the possibility that anyone could take both of those stances, even though a large percentage of Americans do exactly that.

One of Eugene's conclusions is less sure but very interesting. There seems to be a bigger change in these attitudes in the generation that grew up before 1973. That means this isn't at all a result of the gay rights movement but is more likely a direct result of the sexual revolution. Those who were young during that movement are the first generation to approve more of homosexual sex. It's true that later factors explain why the next generation is more approving than the previous one, but the big change was simply the sexual revolution, and then those raised in that period communicated their values to those in the next generation effectively enough that the next generation had more permissive attitudes.

What becomes clear in the comments is that the 55% figure for who thinks gay sex is wrong is a marked contrast to the 80% of Americans who associate themselves with the major theistic religions. Now it's true that some of those people are involved with liberal religious groups that don't take their scriptures seriously enough to accept what they say on this issuue, but I don't think those people are over 25% of the population (some of the 55% are surely non-religious to begin with, though I suspect not many, but that would mean more than 25% would associate with the main religions while approving of gay sex). I don't know the numbers on all those. Does this make more sense if you do know them, or is there an alarmingly high percentage of Americans who say they follow a religion but don't really believe what that religiohn teaches?

From Gadfly's Muse:

If we preach the sanctity of marriage then let every man live with the wife of his youth (Mal. 2) and let our witness to the world be one of honoring that institution as holy. If we are indistinguishable from the world in our divorce rates, our adultery, our fornications, then how can we proclaim that political recognition of homosexual marriage threatens "family values"?

The overall post is an excellent argument for Christians to watch the way they describe their views and to serve as a model for reasoned discourse. The reason most people think evangelical Christians are stupid and have idiotic views is because enough of the people who claim to speak for evangelicals on political issues make themselves look stupid and make their views look idiotic, even if they're not. But what's just as important as learning how to speak into the mindset of a culture that shares very little of your underlying convictions, that finds very little of your assumptions plausible, is whether you live what you say.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had a radio commentary yesterday which made some rather alarming suggestions. You can get the transcript here.

Here are some excerpts from the introduction:

Men and women within the Roman Catholic faith are still hoping that the church can change to more accurately reflect the World in which we live. This week-end, for example, an international conference will be held in Ottawa to support women's equality in religions. WOW, or Women's Ordination Worldwide, is fighting for the ordination of women in all Christian Churches. It says it wants to open a global debate on the issue. ... Bob Ferguson is a retired professor from the Royal Military College. He believes that Catholics are unlikely ever to see changes in policy on birth control or on the question of married or female priests. In fact, he says change won't come until the churches are forced to comply with the same human rights legislation that affects the rest of society.

The rest of the commentary is from Ferguson, who goes on to argue that churches should be forced to comply. Here are some further excerpts:

This one really shocked me. This is from Doug Wilson, of all people. Gay marriage is a judgment on our culture, and as God's people Christians should allow that judgment to play out. Now this shouldn't be too shocking from someone who thinks we need to make a strong distinction between the heavenly reality of the church (what Augustine called the City of God) and earthly governments. Wink and I disagree on how much the government has a moral responsibility to represent moral truth as taught by Christianity, which we both believe to get moral teaching correct, but we agree on the strong distinction between the two cities of Augustine. For those who don't know who Wilson is, he's a theonomist, maybe the most influential one in the world. That means he sees no such distinction. For him to say something like this sounds really strange, at least if you think of theonomy the way pundits complaining about conservative evangelicals' politics think of it. However, those complainers don't understand what the more sane versions of theonomy really amount to, and Wilson's stance on this issue demonstrates that. [Hat tip: World, whose weird code for links I can never get to work either in Internet Explorer or Firefox, which is why I'm not giving any links to Wilson himself.]

On the more general point about Theocracy Paranoia, Gene Veith said something a few weeks back that I thought was incredibly insightful. The primary things people are worried about are the unsuccessful attempts by conservatives, many of whom are Christians, to limit abortion and to prevent marriage from being gender-neutral. Consider the failed attempt to limit what can best be described as the most barbaric abortion procedure ever invented That description of it is almost a direct quote from a Norwegian atheist philosopher friend of mine who is thoroughly opposed to the pro-life position. He says he doesn't know how American politicians like my senators can defend such an barbaric procedure. Even after Congress passed it and the president signed it, judges wouldn't allow the ban, claiming that it might sometimes be healthier for a woman to kill her child during birth than to go ahead and finish delivery. If the so-called theocrats can't even accomplish that small and relatively reasonable restriction on a dreadful procedure, I don't know why there's such paranoia about the looming theocracy that we all need to beware of. Anyway, in the light of that point, Veith asks the following question. "A few decades ago, when abortion was against the law and homosexuality was assumed by all sides to be immoral, was that a theocracy?"

Update: I hadn't thought to run my mouse over the World link and then type in the URL. I've done that. Apparently it's a piece by Doug Jones and Doug Wilson together. My thoughts on the actual piece follow below the fold.

At this time last year, I wrote What Should Christians Think of July 4? I've been told my several people whose opinion I greatly respect that this is one of my best posts, and I think it's among the best of this blog myself, so I might mention it to those who didn't read it the first time around.

Jonathan Ichikawa looks at a a study regarding private and public schools. Apparently the overwhelming support for the thesis that private schools are better disappears when you adjust for socioeconomic status. When you compare people of one class level, they do slightly better on standardized tests (well, really one standardized test) in public schools than in private. I don't think this shows that public schools are on the whole better, though.

This study doesn't seem to differentiate between two very different kinds of private school. There are the elite private schools like the one I went to for high school, and then there are the smaller, usually religious schools, which have a much lower tuition, often hire teachers with much less training, and don't attract students who are anywhere near as good. I suspect that many such schools are worse in most academic ways than the public schools in their area. Schools like the one I went to are just so clearly superior to the local public schools that I can't accept Jonathan's conclusion. That's not going to be representative of private schools on the whole, though. I'd like to see a study that compares students who went to a school like the one I went to with students in public schools alongside a separate category of those in smaller and less-funded private schools.

Well, most doctors in the U.S. believe in God, according to a survey reported here. [hat tip: World]

This is surprising according to the author, because supposedly scientists tend not to believe in God, but is that true? I remember seeing some survey that said most scientists do believe in God but accept the standard evolutionary picture other than its denial of God, including the common origins of all animals including humans (the one element of standard evolutionary theory that some but not all of the ID people deny).

One thing this attitude (that this result should be surprising) ignores is the difference between doctors and scientists. Notwithstanding the fact that the medical industry is in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies and is more often a for-profit business than a collection of organizations designed to help people, many doctors are in their profession not to make a buck (or at least not just to make a buck) but because they want to be in a profession that serves, a profession that heals. I don't want to suggest that atheists aren't interested in helping people, but it would surprise me greatly if you found a higher percentage of atheists in healing and helping professions than you do in society as a whole. Those who believe in religion-based morality tend to be much more highly represented in such professions. Why wouldn't this apply to those who go to school for eight years to be in that profession?

I'd been planning to post these links last week, but I have so much stuff in my file to blog that I must have missed these. Maybe I'd intended to say something about them, but I'm not going to do that.

First, he discussed scientific fundamentalism. Then he considers whether evolution is a threat to religious belief. Finally, he takes on the charge that evolution deniers are like Holocaust deniers. I agree with much of what he says in all three posts.

In going through last week's Christian Carnival (yes, I'm still working on that), I found Blake Kennedy's fascinating discussion of whether the Plymouth Brethren fit better within fundamentalism and evangelicalism. He wants to say the latter. I think his argument might lead to thinking of them as a borderline case, recognizing that the term 'fundamentalist' is somewhat loose and can include people who aren't at all like the paradigm cases. It's also possible that someone or some group might be a member of both categories.

What interested me most was his careful delineation of what's commonly associated with fundamentalism by those who want to distance themselves from that label by calling themselves evangelical. There is some overlap in some of these, but I think it's worth being explicit about some elements that are aspects of other, more general, traits. Many of these also admit of degrees, and thus someone or some group might be more fundamentalistic or less fundamentalistic than some other person or group. Fred Phelps and the GodHatesFags crowd will probably be among the most fundamentalistic, and I would say someone like Zane Hodges (most known for being KJV-only, hyper-dispensationalist, and antinomian) is more moderate in comparison with Phelps but still solidly a fundamentalist. John MacArthur is still a fundamentalist too, I would say, but he's much less so and is also an evangelical, albeit a more conservative one than most on these issues. I'm not sure someone who is KJV-only would be evangelical except if the person is really moderate with all the other features of fundamentalism (and there are such people).

What do John Paul II and Campus Crusade for Christ have in common? If you don't know the answer to that, you might be interested in reading about the very evangelical-like revival in Poland in the 1970s in the latest Christianity Today. [Hat tip: McRyanMac] As an undergraduate, I questioned the Crusade stance on Catholicism when I first encountered it, thinking they were smoothing over some truly important theological distinctives, but over the years I've gradually come to agree with them, though that agreement has come in stages. See my posts here, here, here, and here for some of my justification for this (no pun intended). I'm still working on a post dealing with issues besides justification, which I made some progress on yesterday after not touching for a week or two. I keep saying I'll be getting to it, and I have been working on it.

While I'm on the subject, one more little tidbit on the relation between Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) and the Joint Declaration with the Lutherans has been brought to my attention.

Nowheresville, USA has a nice post about some bad arguments for not sending your kids to public schools, followed up by an equally good second post.

There's also a third post, but his skill in responding to the arguments against public schooling doesn't manifest itself in his arguments against homeschooling, which seem to me about as bad as the arguments he's responding to against public school (note the false empirical claims about what homeschooled kids turn out to be like; see my comment). This is one of those issues where it's just overreaching to claim you have a conclusive argument for or against any of the major positions. I can think of about four or five major views you could take about schooling, and each one of them is false if taken as the only legitimate way or even as the best way for all parents and all kids.

Apparently The Dane is planning at least three or four more posts, so this will be a major series. [Hat tip: Jollyblogger]

I don't know how I missed this one. Well, I do know. I saw the title and thought it was the post I'd already read that had a similar title but was just the first in the two-part series. Anyway, Jollyblogger follows up his post on Sodom and homosexuality with a post on divorce. His original point is that Christians have pretended homosexuality is a sin all of its own caliber to the point of ignoring other sins, even when it comes to discussing the sin of Sodom, which Ezekiel points to as a whole list of things without even mentioning homosexuality. He focuses more on their arrogance and how the treated the poor. You don't hear about those as much from evangelicals in the news as you do from most evangelical preachers from the pulpit, but you don't hear about them enough even there. In this post Jollyblogger cautions against some of the statements made about God's judgment on America and Western culture for the sin of homosexuality because the same sort of argument would have meant God's judgment on the church long before homosexuality was even a major issue. Why? Divorce.

Scot McKnight, biblical scholar and theologian, extensively interacts with D.A. Carson's forthcoming book on the emergent church (or really about the epistemology of Brian McLaren, one of the key leaders in the emergent church). I really like Scot's attitude about this and think he's mostly right in his understandings of the issues. I hesitate at some of his conclusions, mostly out of ignorance and reluctance to go that far without further understanding, but much of what he's saying seems right to me given my limited understanding of the emergent types (even though my brother is one of them). I've left some lengthy comments where I have anything to say and don't really want to reproduce any of that here, mostly because it would be a lot of work to provide the context for each comment. The best way to find all the posts is to go to the April archives and read starting at the bottom.

In the past, I've indicated my preference for NPR over conservative talk radio. There's more real content, less of the shouting match that you find on both conservative radio and cable news station shows, and mostly real commentary informed by real research and careful thought processes, with people from many backgrounds and occupations and issues along a wide spectrum of interest. My one caveat showed up in spades yesterday on Terry Gross's "Fresh Air". Most of the people at NPR just seem to me to be out-of-touch with mainstream America in a few important ways (though not at all on others, and maybe they capture the others better than the other shows I was comparing them with). It wasn't just the sense that she was out-of-touch, although that came through. She seemed to me to have a clear political agenda driving her attempt to force a sound byte for her own view from a well-known and much liked conservative.

The Le Moyne incident I blogged about over two weeks ago has finally caught the attention of blogosphere heavy hitters. I guess that shows how little influence with the top bloggers comes from being in the top 100 (something I've known for a long time).

See Instapundit and Volokh for links. I have only two things to say beyond what I already said and what's in those two posts. First, some of the facts I'd been presented with originally seem not to be the case, though I'm not willing to spend the time right now investigating those in detail. Second, Volokh quotes from Le Moyne's faculty handbook to show how what they've done is at odds with what they state for themselves about faculty:

"A college or university is a marketplace of ideas, and it cannot fulfill its purposes of transmitting, evaluating, and extending knowledge if it requires conformity with any orthodoxy of content and method. In the words of the United States Supreme Court, "Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die."

Normally I'd read something like that and feel encouraged that the administration officials won't take issue with what I choose to teach, as it seems to me the philosophy department doesn't, but these events show that I could be fired simply for presenting an argument that, e.g., Plato might have been right about something that's currently illegal and against Le Moyne policy. Of course, in my case it would be more likely that they just don't hire me again for the next semester, given how easy that is to do with adjuncts. I'm glad the hiring decisions for teaching aren't in the hands of whatever administration officials were responsible for this.

My list of things to blog about has gotten too long and contains a number of things that are too old for me to want to bother with extended comments, so here are some of them that I'm giving up on, along with some more recent ones that I've decided not to comment on but thought were worth a link.

Ron Sider (not to be confused with metaphysician Ted Sider, for any philosophers reading this; Ron is Ted's father, but Ted is an atheist, and his dad is a religiously conservative but politically liberal evangelical Christian) has authored "The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience" in Christianity Today (Hat tip: Fringe). He argues that Christians who identify themselves in certain ways so as to be classified by pollster George Barna as evangelicals tend to have behavior that's indistinguishable from the rest of Americans (and if distinguishable then morally worse) in some key areas: divorce, racism, materialism (in the sense of overvaluing material possessions) and attitudes toward the poor, sexual morality, and other key behaviors that often lead to the charge of hypocrisy, or even worse that evangelicalism causes bad behavior. See this comment thread for someone who trollishly was making exactly that claim (though without actually giving any argument for it, which Sider does).

Here's another one I wanted to make an extended comment on, but it's been almost two weeks now, and I haven't had the opportunity, so I wanted to say something. Christian victiomologists are at it again. As I've explained before in more detail, victimology is focusing on victimhood when it's only barely present (if at all), not to seek solutions to any genuine problems but merely to contribute toward one's own sense of alienation and a group solidarity based on resentment toward the group that has, whether rightly or wrongly, been perceived to be victimizing one's own group. In my more detailed post (linked above), I gave a few examples of the phenomenon, some having to do with race or ethnicity, some having to do with religion or lack thereof. Christians, particularly the more extreme elements of the religious right, are no strangers to victimology, and that's what's going on in this case.

In commenting on this Pseudo-Polymath post, it occurred to me that, even though it's stupid to call this sort of thing persecution (as Mark does not) and probably false to conclude that it means Christians and those of Christian influence don't have much of a voice (as Mark does), it's pretty dumb to say that singing Christmas carols in a public school or putting a manger scene on government property is somehow an endorsement of religion. Why? Well, is an image of Santa Claus an endorsement of the Santa Claus myth? Is it an endorsement of the Holy Grail myth to show Raiders of the Lost Ark in school or an endorsement of the Robin Hood stories to have a play about Robin Hood? How, then, is it an endorsement of any Christian doctrine or practice to have a play about the story of Jesus' birth, to display a scene of that birth, or to sing Christmas songs about that birth, if the purpose is simply to relate the significance Christmas has to many people? That doesn't mean the people running the show agree with all that.

Not too long ago I witnessed five people enthusiastically singing classic Christmas hymns. As far as I know, not one of them believed a word of what they were saying. One of them was the chair of my department. I know nothing of his religious views, if he even has any. Another was a professor I once worked for and her husband. They're Unitarian Universalists. I didn't know the other two. They obviously weren't endorsing anything about the message of Jesus, the doctrines people might hold about him that these songs expressed, or the moral views such doctrines entail. A publicly-funded chorus singing Handel's The Messiah does not endorse the content of what they sing. They merely sing it. This is just something I don't understand about the secularists' complaints here.

Kevin Drum complains that Christians have so successfully spread the stupid claim that saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" is somehow offensive to some degree worthy of being called persecution. I think it's dumb that someone who isn't Christian would be offended by someone saying "Merry Christmas" given that Christmas is not a Christian holiday as generally practiced in the United States. It's a secular holiday, and anyone who considers is persecution to be told "Merry Christmas" needs to grow up. At the same time, those who consider it persecution to be told "Happy Holidays" is even more immature. In that I agree with Kevin. I think he goes too far in talking as if Christians are comparing this to the Holocaust. I've never seen anyone do that. They do call it persecution, though. Rush Limbaugh's brother David has a whole book claiming that, and it's just silly. This kind of victimology is just plain insulting to the Christians who are genuinely persecuted around the world today and to those who have been persecuted throughout the history of the church.

What's really funny, though, is the first comment on the post, who says: The moniker "Christian Taliban" is becoming more apt by the moment. Isn't it ironic that a post complaining about exactly this kind of absolutely ridiculous exaggeration and dysphemism receives as its first comment someone pretending to agree while doing exactly the same thing!

I've been ignoring the Scott Peterson trial as much as possible. How many hundreds of cases like this occur all the time? Why do they pick this one out and analyze it to death as if we should care about it more than any other? Of course they did it so much that many people turned out to care, but the entertainment circus over this thing has been really sad. Still, it was hard not to catch most of what was said. They repeated it so often, at least once an hour most days. What struck me as so obvious in this case was that they had absolutely nothing on the guy except some relatively suspicious circumstantial evidence and clear proof that he's just a total jerk. I don't know how any of that should be enough to alleviate a reasonable doubt that he killed them. I was never able to be convinced that he did it from what I've heard all along. I wouldn't put it past him. He's completely amoral. Still, that's no proof, not to the level of removing a reasonable doubt. Unless there's something that's been buried by the media, he should never have been convicted.

The fact that they're giving him the death penalty is now going to stand as evidence of how easy it is to get the death penalty, which will support those who want to remove it entirely. The use of such an argument is a baby-bathwater situation, of course, because one decent enough solution to trigger-happy juries is to raise the standards again for applying the death penalty, or rather enforcing them where they're supposed to be. That was supposed to have happened after the Supreme Court temporarily banned capital punishment in the 1970s because of its unequal standards in application, and those were supposed to have been greatly improved by the time they allowed its reinstitution. Compare the O.J. case, though, and it's easy to see that there's still great inequity, at least in the high-profile cases. He got off because he was a famous football player. Peterson didn't because his jury voted with their entrails and not their minds. We also know that the race of the victim affects juries' decisions on whether to institute a capital sentence. With white victims, the chance is much greater (regardless of the race of the convict, which turns out to have little effect either way overall, though some parts of the country lean one way and some lean the other, presumably because of residual racism in some places and P.C. restraint in others).

This is the biggest problem with the American system of peer juries. It's the same problem with Democracy in general. One impartial judge is always preferable to a whole bunch of jurors untrained in how to evaluate evidence or how to recognize bad arguments and appeals to emotion. Christians, of course, believe that there is that one impartial judge, and all will be set right in the end. Unfortunately for us at the moment, we'll have to wait until we die for that. Until then, we'll just have to observe the government wielding its God-ordained sword imperfectly.

I took a break from the internet from a few days (and should, in theory still be on said break), and when I surfed the liberal blogs this evening they were awash with invective regarding John Stott. Clearly I missed something because I have no idea what brought that on. What did I miss?

OCLC tracks library collections and was ripe for the picking to determine the popularity of books in libraries. There's now a top 1000 of books in member libraries (which has got to be most of the good ones, since the OCLC service is the best at the sort of thing it's designed for, and I can't imagine a modern library without it). Here's the top 10:

1. 2000 Census
2. The Bible
3. Mother Goose
4. Dante, The Divine Comedy
5. Homer, The Odyssey
6. Homer, The Iliad
7. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
8. William Shakespeare, Hamlet
9. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
10. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Joe Carter explains why NPR is objectively better than commercial talk radio. I agree with almost everything he says. Part of it is the commercial element and the fact that callers have nothing to say. Callers on NPR vary, but many of them have real questions of shows' guests or engage in a real discussion. Hannity, Limbaugh, et. al. are just looking for dittos from unthinking thralls or a punching bag at whom to rant. The people who fill these roles seem to fill them admirably. Those drawn to call such shows are exactly the type the hosts want calling. Anyone with anything intelligent to contribute just doesn't fit the format and won't likely be listening anyway.

I also agree that the biggest strength of NPR is that it isn't all about politics and the "us vs. them" mentality. They discuss issues that are interesting to me, and they discuss things I find utterly boring, and then there's everything in between. However interested I might be, it's pretty clear that the people talking about them consider the topics interesting in their own right. The interests of Hannity, Limbaugh, et. al. aren't exactly very broad.

The biggest downside of NPR is not the fact that virtually everyone working for them is politically liberal. The liberal viewpoint is worth discussing, and there's no way anyone will be able to criticize it if it doesn't come out, so conservatives should welcome the voice of liberalism for the sake of better dialogue and more fruitful discussion. Joe is exactly right that the biggest problem with NPR is that many of its key people are just so out of touch with many in mainstream America. As Joe says, "The hosts of All Things Considered, for example, would have no trouble relating to an obscure avant garde musician, while a popular gospel singer would be considered an anthropological curiosity". That sounds right. They bring Rick Warren on and are amazed that he points out the three biggest surprises of 2004: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, Warren's own The Purpose-Driven Life, and Bush's reelection, none of which make any sense to the cosmopolitan, left-of-center culture of blue-state secularism or liberal-secularized religion. Hannity and co. are just as out of touch with blue culture, and shame on them, so both parties in this comparison have that problem. NPR gets the advantage, though, because of what they talk about and because they do attempt to understand Rich Warren and seek his opinion for its own sake, with what at least is an attempt at a viewpoint-neutral perspective. You don't find that on commercial talk radio.

Some churches, ours for example, disapprove of Halloween. Presumably because of its pagan roots. So, they offer "Harvest Festivals" on Halloween as an alternative, where kids can come, have costumed fun, and leave with candy.

So let me get this straight. The church opposes Halloween. So it offers an alternative on the same night where the kids do the same things. They've just changed the name and that's enough? If everyone across the country agreed to call Oct 31st "Harvest Festival" instead "Halloween", would that be enough to keep the people in my church from telling me that it is an evil and pagan holiday?

'Cause if a name change is all it takes to take the pagan out of a pagan festival, then I'm all for it.

La Shawn posts the results of a new survey on whether Native Americans are offended by the name of the Washington Redskins. I'd like to know the numbers on how many are offended by the term 'Native Americans', since almost every single Native American I have known prefers to be called Indian. Maybe that offends people from India or of Indian descent, but that just shows the complicated waters politically correct sailor must navigate. (I suggest that it can't really be done.)

According to the poll, 90% of Native Americans said the team's name is acceptable, and 9% considered it offensive. What was interesting to me was that the percentage considering it offensive goes up at higher levels of education. Here are more details on the breakdown:

And the most humorous post of the week award goes to Joe Carter for drawing some amazing parallels between PETA's tactics of late and those of Jack Chick, the kind of evangelist you might think up to describe how not to spread the faith (except he really did all the things you'd advise people not to do).

This sounds like good fodder for The Holy Observer.

Saved is a soon-to-be-released film about a Christian school, someone coming out as gay, his girlfriend being told in a "vision" to have sex with him to keep him from being gay, and both of them being ostracized because of it. I'm always suspicious when Hollywood does anything about evangelical Christians, because I know full well that most people in Hollywood have never even met a serious and thoughtful evangelical. I don't know if anyone involved in this film is a Christian, but MC thinks the film is a good satire of Christian culture and not just an attempt by unbelieving Hollywood to make fun of Christians, though it does contain far too many examples of one-dimensional stereotypical Christian characters. Check out her review for more.

I still won't go see it without seeing other reviews and gauging more people's thoughts on whether it seems out to make fun of Christians, but we see hardly anything these days, so our not seeing it may just be a result of having too many other things that take priority. Spiderman 2 is still our top priority at the moment, and that's been out for weeks. The last movie we saw was The Prisoner of Azkaban, and I think the last before that was The Return of the King. I may be forgetting one, but we don't see movies in the theater that often, and if it's not sci-fi or at least an action movie it doesn't go on the top of the very small list we can afford to hope we'll go see.

In a Michelle Malkin post on Ann Richards (the Planned Parenthood board member or whatever she is who callously defended her convenience abortion of two of her three triplets), there's a little tidbit that I hadn't picked up on before. She's working under a surprising ethical principle, in addition to somehow thinking it's worse to be alive and have your mother shopping at Costco than it is to be dead:

Also, I personally believe that the long term physological impact on my child would be more negative if he knew that he had "siblings" out there whom he didn't know.

This is incredibly strange. Which would have a more negative impact (I'm not sure if she meant physiological or psychological) -- knowing that your mother decided to sacrifice for the sake of her children, knowing that they have biological siblings (that they shared the womb with!) out there, or knowing that your mother killed them? Besides the physiological results of sharing a womb and the psychological impact that might come with that (about which I know very little), the psychological impact of knowing your mother killed your siblings seems to me to be much more obviously harmful than the knowledge that she put them up for adoption just to make her life slightly easier and to make you feel richer than if you were lower middle class rather than solidly middle class, and knowing that she made the choice to sacrifice for them seems obviously less psychologically harmful than either of the above.

A new commentary series is starting, focusing on Pentecostal contributions to biblical studies. Judging by the writeup, one of the primary motivations for this series is to increase diversity among biblical commentators. The publisher is known for seeing diversity as a goal. Another series they're working on has to do with feminist perspectives in biblical studies. Pentecostal perspectives aren't frequent among biblical commentators. Gordon Fee is well known as one of the best commentators of the late 20th century. Wayne Grudem is well-known among evangelicals, though he's a Reformed Vineyard charismatic and has some differences with mainstream Pentecostalism (as does Fee). Also, the writeup mentions that 71% of Pentecostals are non-white, so if you assume that the biblical scholars among Pentecostalism are likely also to be non-white, then you get more diversity ethnically (though I suspect the assumption is quite false). There is something to seeing this as increasing the diversity of perspectives of biblical commentaries, anyway.

One thing about this just seems completely counterproductive. If the goal is diversity of perspectives, why have a series devoted to one perspective? It's a perspective not well represented in other series, so it increases the overall diversity of commentaries, but it places them all in one series. This could divert some of the better commentators who will write in this series from working with the main series out there, assuming there are any good enough to get such work (which I just don't know, since I haven't seen a list of the contributors to this series). Broadman and Holman did something similar with their New American Commentary series, some of the volumes of which are excellent, but it's mostly a Baptist series, and others don't give it the attention it deserves that they might give to some of the volumes if they'd been in other, more mainstream, series. In that case, though, part of the motivation had been simply to get some more recent conservative commentaries on some books that don't have recent conservative commentaries, and I'm glad for that. There's much less of a need for that, so I don't think this series has any such role to fill. Altogether, I'm not sure if this is a good idea, since it at least seems partially counterproductive to do this in the name of diversity.

To continue my ongoing effort to keep my favorite posts menu short, I'm collecting my posts that I probably wouldn't have had the motivation to write if it were not for Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ that I never got around to seeing.

Independence Day is tomorrow in the United States, and it's good timing for some thoughts I've been having lately. As my congregation has worked through the beginning of I Samuel and the founding of the Israelite monarchy in our sermons, I've had the occasion to reflect on the nature of government. I think there are two principles, which you might think of as being in tension (but not contradiction) with each other, that have a bearing on how we should think about our government today and how we should think about the 4th of July.

Posts at Jollyblogger and Beyond the Rim... also express in different ways the tension I'll develop here and how we need balanced between both principles without allowing either to remove the other.

GetReligion has a nice piece on a new Bible translation called Good as New: A Radical Retelling of the Scriptures. Here's an example of what it does to I Cor 7:1-2. First, the King James Versionfor comparison:

"Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband."

Now the Good as New:

"Some of you think the best way to cope with sex is for men and women to keep right away from each other. That is more likely to lead to sexual offences. My advice is for everyone to have a regular partner."

Then if you really want to give in to the culture around us, you can go with the GetReligion satire version, based on the NIV with alterations:

Hmm. Madonna's Esther's new fascination with Kabbalah has some striking similarities with certain segments of evangelicalism.

1. the form without the content (well, the mysticism is kept and exaggerated, but nothing else is)
2. "a superstitious attempt to manipulate the cosmos by a sort of divination with the sacred text"
3. violations of God's law despite some general approval of the things of God
4. money-making as a means to spread spirituality (or it is the other way around?)
5. merging a sense of piety with blasphemy

Incidentally, isn't it interesting that Madonna chose Esther out of all the biblical names she could have picked? One was a girl who was chosen out of obscurity to be queen, whose trust in God allowed her to have an impact on the Persian emperor for the good of God's people. The other is a self-glorifying celebrity who manifests a casual or hostile attitude toward anything really representing God but wanting all the spiritual benefits anyway, thus leading astray many in her influence.

I've got too many things to blog about again, so here we go.

Jonathan Ichikawa has a nice post at Fake Barn Country about obesity and determinism. I think I agree with everything he says. (It's also at his own blog, but there aren't any comments there yet. If you're interested in looking at all possible comments, it's worth checking both.)

Tiger! Tiger! has a great post on arguments for atheism. The author is an atheist but is acknowleding the insufficiency of the best arguments for atheism. I think I agree with every word up to a certain point. At the end, there's an appeal to a hermeneutic of suspicion as a final method of arguing for atheism, but I wonder if again this is at best at argument for agnosticism, since of course you can apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to the atheistic framework as well (and the atheistic explanations of evidence and experiences pointing to theism) by explaining the atheistic worldview in terms of Romans 1 and the fall of humanity.

Saddam's doctor gives some inside dirt. (via The Limitless)

Stuart Buck puts Brian Leiter in his place with a careful examination of a new poll that shows the overall increasing mistrust of the media from both political parties. Leiter was trying to use it to show that Republicans are stupid for not trusting C-SPAN and that Republicans are simply mad at the press for questioning Bush and no longer groveling to him (as if they ever did). Stuart points out that the poll shows that Democrats are growing distrustful of all the media sources, that the Wall Street Journal is the biggest drop in trustworthiness according to Republicans, that Democrats and Republicans trust both Fox News at nearly statistically equivalent rates to each other, and Democrats are distrusting enough of C-SPAN that they fall prey to his charge of stupidity if Republicans do (not that the charge applies anyway if you understand what they are distrusting, on which see his argument).

Eugene Volokh, as far as I can tell, is a standard pro-choice libertarian, but he's willing to acknowledge that, even though both sides of the abortion debate are guilty of euphemistic and dysphemistic language, the mainstream media really do show a bias toward the euphemisms and dysphemisms of the pro-choice side of the debate.

Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping notices how Bush's order in 'women and men' sends a strong signal to Muslim practices that marginalize women. It's little things like this that show that Bush really isn't like a lot of Republicans of the past (or at least of the era since the 60s when Republicans were the civil rights party). The Bush Administration consciously thinks about things like this.

Joanne Jacobs connects talking to kids (including to babies), grades/test scores, class, and the racial achievement gap. I don't think everything she says follows from the data, but it's fascinating stuff. My comment there is sufficient to show where I disagree.

Jollyblogger has an excellent post on metaphor and whether Harry Potter can be morally redeeming for a Christian who believes the occult is evil. It's one of the best defenses of popular fiction with elements hyper-fundamentalists would reject that I've seen in a long time, using the examples of Hosea's marriage to a practicing prostitute and Isaiah's walking around "naked" (both commands from God) for an interesting point. He didn't say what I thought was the most obvious thing to say, which is that magic in Harry Potter isn't what's condemned in the Bible, since it's a natural ability of the characters in that fictional world rather than a supernatural ability not of one's own but sought out through practices involving demonic beings.

My list of favorite posts is getting fairly long, and I've decided to remove some of the earlier ones. I still want to have a link to them, so I'm linking to them in this post, and then I'll put this post in the list of favorite posts. That way the list will be shorter, but I'll be able to find them fairly easily without having to search the whole site.

New low for racist left looks at a poster making fun of National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice that I believe to be racist. I explain why in the post, and somehow some slack-jawed yokels found the post, completely ignored my reasoning and everything about me that a quick look around my site would reveal, and proceeded to call me a racist. It was probably the most commented-on entry in the history of my blog, and the comments are quite characteristic of the average response to the kind of point I was making, which is simply to ignore it and change the subject, to charge me with things I never said and don't believe, and to take everything I said in the most uncharitable way possible.

Pacifism links to my fairly comprehensive teaching notes on arguments for and against pacifism, including both philosophical and biblical arguments.

Personhood and Abortion summarizes some of my views on abortion, in response to some statements by Senator Sam Brownback (R, KS). Careful-thinking people realize that personhood is the central issue in the debate (not life or humanity), but personhood by itself itself doesn't decide the issue one way or the other, giving pro-life and pro-choice reasons for thinking that. I offer two considerations that should also come into play, one having to do with violence and the other from the fact that we view very early miscarriages as unfortunate but not as bad as losing a child at a later developmental stage.

Update: I've removed some of the posts originally in this entry and put them into a topical one on apologetics, because they belong there. This one's a little haphazard themewise.

Update 2: I've moved more into Christian Ethics Posts. This post is getting smaller and smaller.

I am bewildered by the fairly common practice of American Evangelical parents of circumcising their sons. Given that most American Evangelicals are not Jewish, why is this practice so widespread? The book of Galatians makes it abundantly clear that this is not necessary for salvation. In theory, circumcision by Gentiles should only be done in an effort to convert to Judaism, but that hardly seems to be the motivation here.

If you are a Covenantal (i.e. you think that the Church has inherited the promises of Israel), then I might see how you might think that circumcision is a good thing except for the fact that Covenantals believe that the rite of baptism has replaced the rite of circumcision. And thus I remain bewildered by those who practice both infant baptism and circumcision.

Anyone care to enlighten me?

Here's some more stuff I've been catching up on from the weekend away:

The universe has been expanding faster than the speed of light (via Volokh).

Poliblogger links to a story about three washed-up action hero actors playing three washed-up action hero actors who open up a private investigtor firm. The actors? William Shatner, Robert Wagner, and Lee Majors. I'd watch that.

King of Fools points out that John Kerry is now advocating unilateral engagement with North Korea. He's also got a good post on lust and objectification that picks up on themes I blogged about recently.

Bill Hobbs gives a mini-roundup of connections between Saddam and al Qaeda (link from One Hand Clapping).

Rebecca Writes gives some helpful reflections on the moral implications of Philippians 2:1-8, including just what it is about Jesus' giving of himself that Paul is telling the Philippians to imitate. This post got a mention on Blogs4God.

According to this study (thanks to McConchie for the link), Americans commonly talk to their fetal children, while people in other countries tend not to do so. This really surprises me, given that Americans also tend to put in the strongest showing for killing their fetal children for reasons of convenience. (That's even illegal in Norway, for instance. Relaxed attitudes toward the permissibility of abortion are common in Europe, but the number of abortions for incredibly selfish reasons is much, much lower.) The researcher quoted in the article even sees this as evidence that people "start to think of their unborn children as persons who are part of their family". Are these two Americas, along the political lines evidences in the political maps and book-buying maps that I've linked before but won't bother to try to find again? Or are these products of the same communities and values? I have a hard time believing it's the second option, but I can't think this sort of thing runs along political lines either, which makes me hesitatnt to accept the first. So I'm baffled. Are we just contradictory in this?

PBS has relatively little going for it these days, but the last major good it was doing had to do with educational programming. Sesame Street has slid a bit in terms of some features, though it's improved in others. Our kids love it, and they've made the features that were most successful over the years more prominent. I think Playhouse Disney tends to be a little better. The Wiggles is probably the best kids' show on TV (though it pales compared to Veggie Tales).

Well, PBS has gone and ruined whatever they had left. They've added voiceovers to all their educational programming, apparently for the sake of vision-impaired children. I have no problem with adding features that people can turn on if they like and if they have the proper equipment. This is what's done with closed-captioning for the hearing impaired. Most people don't want those subtitles appearing on the screen. It's just incredibly annoying and hides some of the artistry of what's being done visually on the screen. Well, the same should be true of voiceovers to describe auditorily what's going on visually. What PBS has been doing this past week detracts so much from the audio of the work that it completely ruins it.

Since I'm going to be working on the questions for the Blogdom of God interview soon, I decided to go read the two interviews that I hadn't read yet. One of them was of Secret Agent Man's Dossier. This hasn't been true of any of the other interviews I've read so far, but I found a number of items worth drawing attention to.

Back of the Envelope continues the discussion about evangelicalism and its boundaries, raising questions about whether evaneglicals must hold to inerrancy. He's now interacted a good deal with some of my comments, and it's turned more into a conversation. I wasn't exactly wanting to recommend this post when I first read it, as my lengthy comments will show, but what it's turned into now is definitely worth digesting.

It's becoming increasingly clear that there had been some sort of investigation already going on, and they just didn't want anything public until they'd completed that investigation. This is as things should be and were before the media circus days that have destroyed the process of justice in many ways. Someone inappropriately released the information about this while this investigation hadn't been completed. I'm much more sympathetic to people who want to do things in an orderly and reasonable process, getting things right before saying anything about it than I am to those who want to emphasize parts of a story that we know something about while not investigating the rest. You can call me secretive if you want (which I'm sure you'll do of the Bush Administration), but I'll just call you rash and foolish right back. There are plenty of questions to ask, and they're asking them in the right place now. I'm not willing to say anything about how anyone has handled this until that's all in. Everything I've heard is as consistent with exemplary behavior by both Bush and Rumsfeld as it is with what their detractors are saying.

I do want to say that one thing Rumsfeld said impressed me greatly. I didn't get his exact words, but when he apologized for the actions of the U.S. military under his command, he said "we", referring to the United States. He's got a deeper understanding of communal responsibility than most Americans do. We did this. He understands that. Many people think so individualistically that they resist any notion of one person deserving shame for the actions of others who belong to the same group they proudly belong to after events like 9-11 lead to surges of patriotism. If we band together as Americans then, we band together as Americans when Americans do egregious things. Moral solidarity is a two-way street. Those who see an us-and-them between themselves and the Bush Administration while criticizing Bush for what individuals he's not immediately morally responsible for have done want to have it both ways. They want individualism when they separate themselves from the atrocities, but they want communitarianism to blame others. I think something of each general attitude is correct, but we can't go inconsistently adopting one or the other based on which people we want to criticize and which people we want to distance ourselves from.

Update: Sam has more on the pictures.

Update 2: Swamphopper at The Rough Woodsman has a bitingly sarcastic reductio ad absurdum of the Rumseld Resign argument.

Back of the Envelope has posted one of the best discussions of evangelicalism and fundamentalism I've ever read. It's good enough to get an InstaPundit link.
We've now seen the advent of this new term 'fundagelical'. Of course, I've never actually seen the term used, but I've seen it mentioned many times now. The rise of such a silly term makes this worth reading.

Update: Warren at View from the Pew comments: "I think Donald's definition of evangelical is probably a little bit wider than mine, and his definition of fundamentalist might be a little narrower, but he hits the nail firmly on the head. I guess it's the Southern Baptist thing -- we must think a little alike."

I've been wanting to host the Christian Carnival for about three months now, but I'd made a commitment not to do it during the semester while teaching an 8:30 am class, which gives no time for assembling the posts the night before due to prep work or the morning of due to teaching, so I've been putting if off. Well, the semester proper is over (though I've still got grading to do), and here we are.

Our party this week's Carnival has thirteen dwarves entries, including my own, and following the advice of Gandalf I've decided to pull rank as this week's heir to the title King Under the Mountain host. I've sought out a burglar Hobbit fourteenth entry to increase the size of our expedition the Carnival past such an unlucky unpopular number.

A member of my congregation started something like a Christian version of The Onion called The Holy Observer. I just discovered it yesterday.

Here's a bit from the disclaimer:

If you are offended by any of the content on The Holy Observer, there is probably some good reason why you shouldn't be. If you can't figure out what the reason is, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're not smart enough to understand why you shouldn't be offended, but it probably does.

One older piece that I found enjoyable: Christian Capitalization! Those who wrote the Greek manuscripts without any capitalization are in big trouble, though I guess the ones who wrote the ones that capitalizaed every letter are in pretty good shape.

I received this from the mailing list of the Society of Christian Philosophers.

"A Foreign Affair", written by Calvin Philosophy Major, Geert Heetebrij, is opening this weekend in LA, NY (I think), Phoenix and Grand Rapids. A Foreign Affair is a well-written, well-acted, well-filmed, well-just about everything you'd want in a movie. This is the clever story of two bumpkins traveling to St. Petersburg on a "romance tour" to find a Slavic beauty to be their wife (i.e., cook and housekeeper). David Arquette wonderfully plays a selfish oaf whose quest for a wife degenerates into a quest for romance blurred with lust. Tim Blake Nelson is business-like and rational in his search--romance, love and lust are far from his mind. Emily Mortimer is radiant as a reporter disgusted by these so-called romance tours. The film is both story and character driven. Each of the main characters discovers his or her true self. Without revealing the surprising ending(s), the movie is a deep and profound allegory of love. Although not explicitly Christian, it embraces Christian values. Geert has mortgaged his future on this movie. Go and see the movie and take all of your friends. Intelligent Christian filmmaking could use the support.

Fringe reviews the Punisher movie, the latest in a hopefully long line of successful Marvel Comics films, though in this case it's unfortunately not so faithful to some of the basic originality of the character or what's distinctive about the moral perspective on violence that we tend to find in comic books.

This may have been the earliest posting of the Christian Carnival in its history (at TheGodBlog.com), and I've been out all day and haven't had a chance to look at anything until now. Let's see what we've got.

My post on intermarriage is in there.

Some young guy in the UK names Andrew Guilder has a reference to Yes keyboardist extraordinaire Rick Wakeman's new special on the BBC about British attitudes about Easter. The title is "Jesus Who?" This story from before it aired says far more about it than the link Guilder gave. I'd be interested in seeing it, but I doubt I'll ever get the chance. There are two problems overdetermining his failing to get a link from me. First, he called Wakeman "this old rock star guy Rick Wakeman". Keep in mind that the guy he's calling "this old rock star guy" is probably second only to Keith Emerson among keyboard legends and a real musical hero of mine. That's a real insult to anyone who knows the history of rock music. Second, he uses Xanga, which has no permanent links, and the relevant entry isn't even on his front page anymore with no way to link directly to it. I had to search for it myself. So much for getting publicity from me. I'm not merely being petty. I wouldn't know how to link to it properly if I wanted to.

As usual, ireneQ has some funny and thoughtful comments, this time about prayer and the annoying things we do when we pray. She keeps saying all sorts of things I've long thought, but I always thought I shouldn't say them. It's nice to see them out there.

Mr. Standfast, a blog completely new to me, blogs about when to conceal knowlege. Hmm?

There's other stuff too, including some good reflections on Easter that for some reason struck me as old hat and of last week simply because Easter is past. Isn't that awful? Why should the resurrection of the Son of God get dated simply because the day we single out to emphasize it more than other days is done?

File this one under "Extremely Misleading Headlines" (via Volokh). The London Times ran a story about hate crimes, including data about how many people of different religious backgrounds were the victims. The headline ran "Muslims are main victims of hate crime". Once you read the story, you realize that 10 of 18 victims over three years were Muslim, but 6 of those 10 Muslim victims were attacked by fellow Muslims. The headline is literally true, but it gives the impression that other groups are targeting Muslims, when most of the Muslims were attacked by Muslims themselves. Did they intend casual reader to conclude something from the headline that the story itself doesn't support?

The Passion of the Christ, well on its way toward becoming the highest-grossing film in history, has evidence on its side to suggest that it will actually decrease anti-Semitism (or at least the ways people have been suggesting it might lead to an increase in it).

I don't think the people who put together the website I just linked intended anyone to connect the first two items, but look at the second one in the light of the first one. Might it not be that the real reason so many Jewish leaders were opposed to the film was because Christians would seek to use it to evangelize Jews? According to my new conspiracy theory, it's not anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism that they were worried about. They were worried about those who oppose a Judaism that rejects Jesus in favor of a Judaism that accepts him as Messiah, thus exemplifying the behavior of the very people they think Mel Gibson portrayed unfairly. [By 'oppose' I don't mean politically or in terms of how we get along but in terms of religious truth.] The ironies of the first-century interaction between Christians, who saw themselves as the true heirs to Judaism, and the Jewish leaders, who saw the Christian Jews and their Gentile converts as illegitimate Jews in some sense (for not following the Torah, as they saw it), continue into the first century of this millenium (though the issues are different now).

It continues to amaze me that Jewish people whom I respect very much, including a professor who has greatly influenced my ethical thought and my teaching, will insist that someone who is ethnically Jewish but an atheist or who converts to Islam or Buddhism is still a Jew, yet conversion to Christianity is incompatible with being Jewish. This double standard has the force of law in Israel (at least in terms of citizenship), but it's assumed by most Jewish people in the United States. Christianity has its very basis in Hebrew Torah, prophets, and other writings. It sees itself as the fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures. Yet a Jew who sees Jesus as Messiah is seen as an illegitimate Jew by contemporary Judaism, even if this Jew continues to worship at a synagogue of other Jews who see Jesus as Messiah, maintaining clear Jewish worship traditions and cultural observances. This is the real reason so many Jewish people were opposed to this film, I think. They hate Jesus and everything he stands for.

Thanks to Josh Claybourn for the links.

(The dead outvalue some of the living, anyway). Swamphopper at The Rough Woodsman has an interesting comparison between the outrage at selling body parts of already dead people and the business-as-usual attitude toward destroying live human beings for very large sums of money. The amount of money in these organ sales pales in comparison to the huge profit of the abortion industry that masquerades as health care. It's true that stealing and selling these body parts dishonors the dead who donated their bodies for particular uses. It's also true that we need to consider where our priorities lie and why we consider this to be more worthy of serious outrage than other things that have become accepted as normal and inevitable.

I'm afraid I've found myself once again with a bunch of stuff I feel like linking to but without the time to say much about them, so it's time for another roundup.

A politically-motivated policy (and I would argue one of ill will, since 'pro-choice' is at least as much of a euphemism as 'pro-life') has led a copy editor on the Los Angeles Times to replace 'pro-life' with 'anti-abortion' when the opera being described was, quite literally, pro-life and not about abortion at all.

La Shawn Barber has some nice balance to the Memogate charges. Her conclusion? They're all deceitful snoops on both sides, and this is just about one person who got caught. This was a dishonest crime that found out the culprits anyway, and why isn't that being investigated?

The new Spare Change (formerly Clarity Amidst Chaos) has a comparison of John Kerry before and after in a nice chart. Some of these are legitimate changes of mind on the issues, but I have a hard time believing this many serious differences could be from that. As I think I've said before, I think he's in the upper class of the Democratic party, voting according to the current political wind to retain the lower elements of the party and not caring as much about the issues. (See this post for more on the class structure of the parties.)

I never knew that John Kerry had once realized the negative consequences of affirmative action for the very underrepresented minorities it's supposed to be helping. I wonder how many liberal politicians know this but won't admit to believing it due to their desire to maintain control over black voters (also in the above-linked political party class structure post). For those who want arguments for my view on affirmative action, you'll have to wait until I come to it after I finish my posts on separatism and anti-intellectualism, which I will get around to soon but have been putting off.

On the topic of the Democratic enslavement of the black vote, Baldilocks has two posts, one on her frustrations of being assumed to be a Democrat by voting officials simply because she's black and another on the issue that may cost the Democrats their loyal slaves. (This is probably one reason John Kerry, who condescendingly wants to be considered the second black president, as if there has already been one, won't say anything on the issue.)

Instapundit has a large amount of information (unusual for him) on the people complaining about Bush's commercials. Lots of interesting stuff.

Biblical scholar Ben Witherington and John Dominic Crossan (who is something else but says he's a biblical scholar -- I think he's more of speculative fiction writer about historical matters -- he seems to think Jesus was just a political revolutionary whose death was later reinterpreted to have spiritual significance and whose followers concocted most of the teachings we have from him to fit this theory instead of continuing the revolution he started and would have wanted them to continue) have a discussion about The Passion of the Christ. I give Crossan credit for giving the most serious real criticism of the film I've seen yet (though he said it for all the wrong reasons) about how people would misunderstand the cross without the context of the rest of the gospels, though I don't think that's a problem in itself. One focal point of Witherington's response to Crossan is Crossan's repetition of concerns I've pointed out before raised by Andrew Sullivan that in fact reveal a prejudice against an orthodox Christian theology of the cross. They also consider whether Mel Gibson did enough to remove the anti-Semitism objections. At the end Witherington lists some unhistoricalities that bothered him. I should say that Crossan's final comment about how Mulsims respond is just stupid. Muslims won't use this movie to blame Jews for the death of a prophet that the Qu'ran says didn't die (because prophets can't die, according to Islam).

Adrian Warnock has challenged my claim in this post that, despite the fall, humanity still has anything at all good before being redeemed. I think it's quite obvious from the biblical picture that the image of God gets twisted in the fall but not removed, but one person in the comments section of his blog seems highly resistant to this idea. Adrian also has a whole bunch of posts from the last few days responding to objections against "the church" (although I somehow get the feeling they aren't using that term as the biblical writers used 'ekklesia' for the gathering of believers).

Disney is backing the first Narnia movie. So much for that one.

I've seen relatively little criticism of Mel Gibson's new film from Christian quarters. By far most Christians are excited about the film, even using it as an opportunity to initiate conversations about spiritual things with friends who don't believe. The ones who don't want to see it are just intimidated by the violence they keep hearing about. I have seen a few worries raised about this film, sometimes being put quite strongly. Two pieces that have been brought to my attention come from sources I very much respect. One is on the website of the Presbyterian Church in America. I'm not a Presbyterian (I disagree quite strongly with their views on sacraments and baptism), but I very much respect the PCA. They tend to be one of the strongest advocates for Reformed views, which I tend to share with them, in our time. The other is from the website of Alpha & Omega Ministries, the organization James White works with. I appreciate his work for the same reasons. I have chosen to interact with these arguments mainly because I very much appreciate that Christians are thinking critically about this film but also because I'm fundamentally in agreement on the basics of the Christian faith with these people. I don't think all their conclusions are warranted, as I will explain, but I do think these arguments deserve to be aired, and in some cases I think they should affect how someone views the film. I also feel obliged to link to a very positive review by a Christian who emphasizes things not covered in most of what I've read. I happen to be acquainted with the reviewer through our both being on a music discussion list, but I don't really know him. I highly recommend his thoughts.

The arguments I'm considering seem to involve some mix of the following conclusions: Christians shouldn't see it, no one should see it, it was wrong for Gibson to make it at all, and it was wrong for Gibson to make it the way he did. Different arguments seem aimed at different conclusions (and from different people who have given these arguments).

The piece from Alpha & Omega included the following arguments. Some of Gibson's Catholic theology has been missed by Protestants who have assumed these elements of the film were just artistic license. According to the argument, this is not just about minor disagreements but about doctrines Protestants should find horrific, a focus on suffering for its own sake rather than seeing ourselves as the ones for whom and because of whose sin he suffered, a focus on the passion with such small concern for the resurrection that it might as well not have been there, and that there are only a few hints of the gospel message itself in the film with no clear sense of why Jesus died, why he had to die, and what our response should be. The conclusion of this piece is that it's going to be of no value to someone who doesn't already know the background but that someone who has the grid to impose on it will be benefited greatly.

The piece on the PCA website is more strongly against the film. The primary reason is that it violates the second commandment (of the ten commandments given to Moses, not the second of Jesus' two greatest commandments). It makes a graven image to be worshiped. This is a much more serious charge (one the first author dismisses without argument), and if it's true it deserves a more serious response. I'm not exactly sure what the author concludes in the end, but I'm quite sure that I don't think the conclusion is justified.

Let's look at each argument in turn.

I've been a faithful reader of Andrew Sullivan since I started looking at blogs. I've very much enjoyed his analysis, and I even agree with much he's said lately about gay marriage (though certainly not all of it). When others have abandoned him, I've stuck with him. I'm not sure if I will continue to do so.

I'm not going to link to his post that offended me, but you can find it if you look. He linked to a site making fun of evangelical Christians who take seriously the authority of scripture on homosexuality with the slogan "God hates shrimp."

Amidst some decent (but ultimately minor) criticisms of The Passion of the Christ, he's been saying some things bordering on the offensive by belittling orthodox Christian views on the atonement, as if Christ's suffering and dying for our sins is a backward, dangerous, and hateful view and that Christians should switch to other ways of talking about Jesus. He's compared the orthodox view of the purpose of Christ's suffering to sado-masochism. (He makes all sorts of unsubstantiated claims that Mel Gibson invented the depths of violence in this film, where anyone who paid attention to the Diane Sawyer interview could tell how carefully he had researched this film in order to fill in the gaps that a modern reader wouldn't know about what would have been done to him, which a first-century reader would consider obvious background information. He didn't get all the details right, but he wasn't just making this all up.) He's taken a few Mel Gibson quotes out of context and has referred to older quotes that Gibson has later clarified or indicated he's changed his mind on, all to make the man look like he hates lots of people. He's joined the bandwagon of those who ignore Gibson's claim that the Holocaust was an atrocity by saying Gibson won't say there was ever such a thing as the Holocaust. In other words, Andrew Sullivan has left all reason behind when it comes to these issues.

I have to like this, even though their music isn't my cup of tea. A group calling themselves the Poppyfields released a song now at number 28 in the pop charts. The video shows a band made up of a bunch of teenagers. It turns out they weren't the people who played any of the instruments or sang. Milli Vanilli again? Not quite. The group was actually The Alarm, a U2-sounding group from the 80s. This was a deliberate stunt to show that a group who wouldn't have a chance running on their own name with a video of older men could do just fine if people thought it was a bunch of young punks. Apparently they were right. Now if only Kansas would find a group of young hoodlums to do their next video...

Thanks to Josh Claybourn for the link.

Someone I know emailed the following about Monday night's Mel Gibson interview:

I was especially -may I say blessed?- to see him treat his BC days
with fitting shame and humility. No reason to wallow in the filth
that was his life, and it was right of him to keep it totally
private. One thing that never fails to irritate me is hearing
someone give his testimony and proceed to brag about what he used to
do. I want to respond, "If Jesus really saved you from all that,
then why look back on it with nostalgia???" Mel had it right.

Good observation. I hadn't picked up on that aspect of his comments, but I agree.

Andrew Sullivan, continuing his in-depth coverage of liberal dominance of academia, dug out this letter from September 2002:

In seeking faculty, universities look for people who can analyze and discuss matters of some complexity, who are unafraid to challenge the wisdom of simple solutions, and who have a sense of social responsibility toward those who cannot buy influence. Such people tend to be put off by a political party dominated by those who believe dogmatically in the infallibility of the marketplace as a solution to all economic problems, or else in the infallibility of scripture as a guide to morality.

In short, universities want people of some depth, subtlety and intelligence. People like that usually vote for the Democrats. So what?

Lawrence Evans
Durham

The writer is professor emeritus of physics at Duke University.

Why do I get the feeling this guy hasn't met any sincere Christians or any Republicans who are Republicans on the issues rather than out of party loyalty?

ABC has posted bits of the interview with Mel Gibson that they're showing tonight about The Passion of the Christ. Some tidbits:

Gibson insists on Primetime he is no anti-Semite, and that anti-Semitism is "un-Christian" and a sin that "goes against the tenets of my faith." When asked who killed Jesus, Gibson says, "The big answer is, we all did. I'll be the first in the culpability stakes here."

"Critics who have a problem with me don't really have a problem with me in this film," Gibson says. "They have a problem with the four Gospels. That's where their problem is."

"Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenseless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do; absolutely," he says. "It was an atrocity of monumental proportion." Asked if the Holocaust represented a "particular kind of evil," he tells Sawyer it did, but adds, "Why do you need me to tell you? It's like, it's obvious. They're killed because of who and what they are. Is that not evil enough?"

Jesus Christ "was beaten for our iniquities," Gibson says. "He was wounded for our transgressions and by his wounds we are healed. That's the point of the film. It's not about pointing the fingers."

I'm finally getting around to saying something about this Duke fiasco about the much higher percentage of faculty who were politically liberal compared with the number who were conservative.

Kieran's post at Crooked Timber has a significant amount of discussion on this, only a small fraction of which is very balanced, though lots of good points come up scattered throughout the straw man reconstructions of conservative positions. Slightly more balance (with a much smaller volume to wade through) appears in the discussion of Donald Sensing's post at One Hand Clapping, but it might tilt in the other direction more than I'd like.

Volokh makes the obvious point that the Conservative Party Mill was talking about (read the first link -- I'm not going to explain everything!) was pretty far from conservatism today, which is probably more like the liberalism of Mill's day. It certainly wasn't about conservatism in general as a time-spanning tendency. All this ignores the point that even if stupid people tend to be conservative, that says nothing about whether smart people tend to be liberal, which is the implication Brandon seems to be drawing from Mill's quote. In fact, Instapundit lists some date from 1994-2002 voters that shows that Republican voters tend to have slightly more education than Democrats and tended to score better on vocabulary and analogy testing. He quotes Jim Lindgren:

"If one breaks down the data by party affiliation and political orientation, the most highly educated group is conservative Republicans, who also score highest on the vocabulary and analogical reasoning tests. Liberal Democrats score only insignificantly lower than conservative Republicans. The least educated subgroups are moderate and conservative Democrats, who also score at the bottom (or very near the bottom) on vocabulary and analogy tests."

Other worthwhile thoughts I've seen include that many people in this discussion confuse correlation with causation (the data may reflect more on what type of people would be interested in academic jobs vs. those that prefer other fields, regardless of how intelligent they are). There's also the possibility of liberal in-breeding in academia (one of the Duke professors interviewed thought the function of Duke University was to "rid conservative students of their hypocrisies".

I do have a couple things to say to Kieran's post at Crooked Timber. He says:

Mark Roberts has a very insightful post series: Cultural Impact or Cultural Irrelevance: A Christian Dilemma. I'm not sure he's said anything I haven't seen or thought before (except his particular focus on seeing some of what I've seen elsewhere in Philippians, the details of which I was unaware of in the passages he cites), but he seems to me to have a rare combination of maturity, balance, forthrightness, and understanding of the culture around us. It's nice to see it all encapsulated in a short place. Highlights:

"Most of the people who shape our culture, especially those who produce television shows, movies, Broadyway [sic] plays, rock music, and MTV videos, live in a moral universe that's far different from the moral universe of Christianity. Their perceptions of right and wrong differ vastly from the perceptions held by most Christians. This isn't a gripe. It's simply a fact."

"Those in the Christ against Culture camp recognize that culture opposes basic Christian values. Therefore they tend to withdraw from the world, either trying their best to ignore it (the Amish option) or taking pot shots at the world from a safe moral distance. Separation from the fallen world is, at any rate, central to Christian living."

"The Christ of Culture folk are much more accepting of culture. Opposing the theological conservatism of the Christ against Culture camp, they espouse a liberal theology that allows culture to determine the shape of Christian living. So, if the culture blesses sex outside of marriage, then Christians shouldn't attack this viewpoint, but rather reinterpret it in a Christian way. We should encourage fornicators to have mature, loving, just relationships, not to abandon their fornication."

"Ironically, both choices end up with a similar result: we give up our ability to impact the culture for good. Yet trying to live somewhere in the middle, to engage in a critical dialogue between Christ and culture, is tricky, not to mention messy."

Andrew Sullivan has a new Sunday Times column arguing that the latest Jackson family scandals have evidenced a deep fact about American culture -- it has two dysfunctional sides that need each other, the religious right and the liberal media. He mislabels this multiple personality disorder as schizophrenia, which really means "disruption of mental functions, not multiple personalities". In this case the effect is as we've seen:

"The religious right, fresh from outrage that gay couples might commit to one another in matrimony, made the usual loud noises. The Internet lit up; all the usual Hollywood gossip shows had clip after fuzzed up clip to reveal the horror of it all. And on and on. In the last resort, everyone wins. Ratings increase, careers blip upward, political groups have a new tool for fundraising, and hacks get something other than John Kerry's Botox to write about."

He says that American culture wars are in many ways a sham. "America worships freedom of expression but it also gets in high dudgeon about sexuality. It values and rewards celebrity above all things, and yet also condemns "misbehaving" celebrities as a curse on the nation's virtue. It favors miscreants with huge publicity, fame and therefore money. And yet it harbors genuine and lasting horror at the debasement of the culture all of this represents." He thinks the real America is the mix of all this. Each side would be nothing without the other. "Indeed, each side creates and sustains the other."

What should we make of all this?