D.C. Dreams

It's been interesting -- a whole month in the Baltimore-Washington area, staying near BWI and taking the train in from Dorsey every morning at about 6:35. 

Washington, D.C., is a fascinating place.  And it's nuts.  I hate the traffic.  The people are generally friendly, but getting eye contact is almost impossible.

My job has been to help with some software maintenance at the Washington Post.  I wanted to meet some of the writers but I got my job done too early.  So it's down to one more day to meet some of them.  These are the rock stars of the editorial world, like David Broder.  ;-)

Now, I don't always agree with all of them.  In fact, hardly ever.  But they are not my enemies.  Opponents on isues and world view, but not enemies.  I'd like to find the opportunity chat with some over lunch.  You know -- pick their brains.  Hear what they think about writing and communication.  Might be fun, if only on my last day at the Old Gray Lady.  Hey, a guy can always dream.

When Citizens Rebel

First, I do not and will not promote insurrection. But I will promote active dissent, even active disobedience when it comes to maintaining the practice of one's faith. The time is coming closer with the current situation in D.C. As reported in the Washington Post today, the D.C. council has taken upon itself the authority to decide when one can or cannot practice their religious beliefs.

Under the bill, headed for a council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings.

How dare they! They should be silent on the matter. They should speak neither positively nor negatively.

But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians. Church officials say Catholic Charities would have to suspend its social services work for the city, rather than provide employee benefits to same-sex married couples or allow them to adopt.But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians. Church officials say Catholic Charities would have to suspend its social services work for the city, rather than provide employee benefits to same-sex married couples or allow them to adopt.

What an arrogant bunch of thugs! If one participates at all in civic affairs then one has to hire homosexuals! That is wrong. The Romans should stand up against the city and stand in contempt of illegal laws. Call their bluff. Let Congress, which manages D.C., come out and make its position clear. Let's see how much statism the Left in D.C. is willing to enforce. Let's see them throw a few people in jail for the cause of religious liberty.

One More Liberty Lost

Well, not yet. But it looks pretty likely. Washington, D.C., the city that should be the protector of liberty is now bent on reducing liberty. Specifically, the city is bent on reducing religious liberty. And they are doing it in the same fashion as Massachusetts did a few years ago.



Tim Craig and Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post report today (Nov. 12, 2009, front page) that

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage la, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness, and ehalth care.


Under the bill, headed for a D. C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay mean and lesbians.


Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.

If you are unfamiliar with the happenings in Massachusetts a few years ago, the Catholic Church was forced to withdraw from participation in the foster care and adoption system of the state because of moral objections to having to place children into homosexual households. The state could have accommodated the church and modified their procedures, but they chose to do otherwise, thus removing the church from equal rights to participate in civic matters on account of religious beliefs.


The Post article goes further:

If the city requires this, we can’t do it,” Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. “The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that’s really a problem.”


Several D.C. Council members said the Catholic Church is trying to erode the city’s long-standing laws protecting gay men and lesbians from discrimination.

And of course there is the expected accusation from the homosexual community:

Peter Rosenstein of the Campaign for Alll D.C. Families accused the church of trying to “blackmail the city.” 

“The issue here is that they are using public funds, and to allow people to discriminate with public money is unacceptable,” Rosenstein said.

And

“If they find living under our laws so oppressive that they can no longer cake city resources, the city will have to find an alternative partner to step in to fill the shoes,” Catina said. He also said Catholic Charities was involved in only six of the 102 city-sponsored adoptions last year.

Terry Lynch, head of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, said he did not know of any other group in the city that was making such a threat.

“Are they really going to harm people because they have a philosophical disagreement with us on one issue?” Cheh asked. “I hope, in the silver light of day, when this passes, because it will pass, they will not really act on this threat.”

craigt@washpost.com
boorsteinm@washpost.com


Now, is anyone outraged? Well, the homosexual advocates are. But are we? Can we promote liberty while they, under their special-rights processes, seek to secularize society and turn the church into a servant of the secular state. This is statism at its worst.  Discrimination against religious beliefs and related liberty, under law.  But what has changed, really?  The homosexual thugs will not stop at restricting religious liberty to enforce their agenda.  They will go further if they are allowed to win more of these battles.  They want control of your belief system and find the church to be their greatest opponent. 


Your tax dollars at work.

Steps in American History

Step 1 was our identity crisis. From the beginning through the Civil War we sought to clarify our system of government, leaving the Articles of Confederation and moving onto the more centralized Constitution. We ended our bout with slavery and secured rights. We secured the hemisphere from European expansion and the threat it posed.

Step 2 was the First Corruption. From Grant to Hoover we gathered together into government a collection of the new corporate manipulaors.

Step 3 was the beginning of the American Empire. Whether it was our unique style of economic colonialism or (especially) the Wilsonian attempt to influence on other national identities, or today's neoconservative treatment of democracy as a commodity to be exported, our disintegration is now quite serious.

Empire is empire. The Caesar ignored the Senate. The Pelosi dismisses the Constitution. The Frank admittedly does not question jurisdiction. (We will only briefly mention his relationship with illegal substances and homosexual prostitution.) The Obama inserts admitted communists into government and promotes limitation on media that criticize him (specifically Fox News and by implication, Clear Channel Communications via the media diversity, media justice movement).

Can the U.S. survive itself? Some days I wonder. While I think the classic liberal position holds great hope for the world, today's Marxists leave no hope for a free society to survive.

In Style

For years I've been wearing bill/baseball caps.  They are useful but ... they lack style.  They're plain.  One might even think of them as less than mature.  They just don't look good.  But is there an alternative?  Yes -- the classic fedora!

I've chosen the woven type.  I've two, and the most stylish one is a wool tweed.  Lookin' good, huh?  And they go well with a tweed jacket.

The only remaining question is -- what does the little woman think?

Separation of Church and State as Marx' Replacement Theology

Back, again, to my primary social concern:  Marxism.  No surprise there.

The first impression of Marxist motives usually leads us to the idea of statism.  The principle that Marx proclaimed, that religion is the opiate of the people, sets the church beneath the state.  That may seem more Hegelian than particularly Marxist, but still plays into the goals of Marx.

Today's popular Marxists, like the ACLU, proclaim the state and church as separate entities.  That is, there is to be no reciprocal relationship between then.  The church is best of being outside the control of government and likewise the government must not approach anything resembling the old theocracies.  So the question becomes plain:  How do we fit this into the Marxist paradim?

It is a simple error to miss the revolutionary intentions of Marx and his end game.  In the end the Marxist intends that the church serves the interest of the state.  To get there, that's another story.  It goes to Marx' view of virtue and ethics, of what is real and what is unreal.  For to Marx only the material is real and that leaves all religion and faith unreal.  And what is unreal is to be rejected, to be set aside and replaced with his materialism.

The process winds its way through two general steps.  The first is to marginalize the church.  The second is use this marginalized position to present the Marxist alternative to a church that is impotent.

Marginalization came by way of a redefinition of theology.  By employing Freuerbach and others of similar persuasion, religious belief was changed from the immanent God who is involved in human affairs to something unreal and merly emotional.  Bockmuehl states it this way (p. 31, The Challenge of Marxism):

Is Christianity real?  This attack leveled by Marx and Engels is of special concern to Christians because the slogan "real humanism," which sums up the attack, was also used to point out the alleged unreality of Chrsitian theology.  "Real humanism" was the battle cry shouted at the thin spiritualism of contemporary Protestant theology as well as at speculative, idealistic philsophy.  bot of these never got anywhere near the actual situation of the proletariat, because they were so occupied with more spiritual things.  Therefore, Marx and Engels looked at this kind of "religious inhumanity" as one of their main enemies.

This approach is part of the Marxist criticism.  His "critical thinking" was not what we would probably term "critical analysis."  For Marx it was an intentional attack on what has been heretofore assumed to be true.  Critical thinking was and his the Marxist method for tearing down obstacles for the establishment of his world view as a system.  This was his "ruthless criticism of the existing order" that we might today read on bumper stickers as Subvert the Dominant Paradigm.

The door has now been opened to replace an unreal and impotent Christianity (or any other religion) with a strictly human way of doing things. As Lennon said, and employing many of the core principles of a Marxist world view:Imagine there's no Heaven

It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today


Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one


Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world


You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

This criticism of religion is Marx' foundation.  Again, as Bockmuehl says (p. 51):

In 1844 Karl marx published his essay entitled "A Contribution to the Critique of hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction."  Contrary to its abstract title, this piece carried significant concrete weight:  It was the manifesto of early Marxism.  the very first sentence contained a two-point thesis:  For Germany the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism."

This is intended to leave religious faith vulnerable, and that was his goal throughout.  But while we may philosophyically prove the assumption to be in error, the step that we must take is to raise our theology above the compromise of pluralism and to make Christianity more and more real -- practically beneficial -- to the world around us.  Calvin did this in Geneva.  Rome did this by ending slavery in Europe during the first millennium.  English protestantism initiated the end of secularism's slavery through Newton and Wilberforce.

And, looking back on the heritage of Marx, we can clarify the impotence and abuses of his world view despite the rantings of Obama and Schaeffer.  The compromise of faith is a plain dismissal of that faith, for the acceptance of Marxism is an acceptance of its atheism.

Today gods from the right and the left compete to impress the church and persuade it, causing it to reduce itself to nothing but the moderate expression of the accepted opinions of the day.  In contrast to this the first task of the church is to find and keep its identity. (Bockmuehl, p. 21)

a thousand pictures

Pick a word.  No, no, not that one.  Don't pick just any word.  Stick with the nouns.  Then build a picture around that word.  Now build several pictures around the word.  See how many you can come up with.

Now let's try some of the words that have been most popular over the past 50 years.  War.  Peace.  Born-again.  Saved.  Hope.  Change.  Green.  Oil.  Profit.  Insurance.  Not only do pictures come to mind, so does a whole range of emotions.  Single words carry more power than whole pictures.

Now let's do something more interesting.  Let's add a second term to the noun.  Oil is a good one to work with.  Oil barron.  Oil change.  Oil well.  Heating oil.  Now we have some specific meaning attached to each exression.  And while each one can still convey a set of images, and some may overlap, each is still the property of the new word pair.

A word paints a thousand pictures.  A collection of words paints a set of ideas.  But unfortunately the current under-30 generation is not one which reads.  Too much X-Box, internet porn, and television porn.  Is it any wonder, after having been taught a few catch phrases in 12 or so years of school, that they have all the answers and that history is now meaningless?  The best thing we can do for our children is to encourage them to read.  And better yet, teach them to write.

Calling Their Bluff

Sarah Flashing challenged the supposed fairness of our critics. Malkin challenged the social justice (in this case media justice) movement and its supposed fairness. These words, to many readers and listeners, sound perfectly reasonable. But is there more? Certainly we have all heard the Marxist and socialist labels being thrown around this past year much more than ever before. Is there even a relationship between thse concepts and the fairness doctrine, or is this only childish name-calling?

Klaus Bockmuehl wrote a very useful small book that outlines the nature and character of Marxism. The Challenge of Marxism covers matters such as ethics -- subjects which set the course for modern liberalism. On the matter of ethics he says:

In studying the classic writings of marxism-Leninism, Christian readers again and again are fascinated by the apparent structural similarity between Marxist and chrstian ethics even when their aims and means are widely different. ...

We are not assuming here that Marxism and Chrstianity could merge. As we observed before, marxism and Chrstianity are incompatible because Marxism -- differing in this respect from other forms of socialism, contains an intrinsic atheism. Nevertheless, the ethics of both Christianity and marxism are at least formally comparable because they both represent programs of establishing a sovereignty: the sovereign in Christianity is God; in Marxism it is man. (p. 86)

It is this difference which also identifies those apostate Christians, as well as those who are otherwise uninformed, who practice the ethics of Marxism and pretend that they are Christian. When one substitutes the "truth" of Marxism for the truth of Christianity then what remains is not only a new heresy, but a sacrifice of Christianity itself.

Today Marxism welcomes theological irrelevance because it makes Marxism look good. When theology fails to confront the real current issues, Marxism moves in to offer its atheist solutions. This is the first consequence of "unreal" theology. (p. 34)

The evangelists for a Marxist world have an eschatology. They imagine a world where needs are met, where class-based wrongs are eliminated , where all are equal -- because equal is the only thing which is truly fair. This eschatology drives them. Bockmuehl clarifies the situation quite succinctly:

Marxists know what their job is and they do it. (p. 35)

A first-hand account of this challenge to Christianity was plainly attested to Becky Pippert in her Out of the Saltshaker video series. She clearly noted the shame of the Christian to evangelize while the Marxist went out with no shame whatsoever, sharing and persuading people with their vision for a better world.

Let us treat those who intentionally compromise Christian doctrine and trade it for Marxist ideals as the apostates they are. Let us also be more outspoken and practical with the solutions Christianity has to offer -- both now an through the past two millennia. We must know better what our job is and be about it.

through a glass darkly

John Mark Reynolds recently drew this conclusion:

Cling to what is permanent, but let go of what is not lasting

There is a corollary from Jim Elliott that I use as my email signature:

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose

It takes little effort to realize that our perceptions are often not a part of the greater reality. No Platonal analysis is necessary. It really is not very complicated. We simply do not always see things as they really are. It is the experience of challenge, what James calls trials (1:2) that frequently provide us with the perspective which we lack in our youth and in our ease. This is our eternal perspective, our eternal view that contributes to our world view, our teleology and eschatology. It is where doctrine becomes real and where doctrine is inseparable from life. But we do not see eternity very well.

I've noticed (having been directed to two of them by others) three situations, three trials, that provide a better eternal perspective. The first is to have a friend who has come to Christ as an adult. I am interacting with one young brother in Christ regularly these days. These people have that "fire in the belly" that drives them to lengths that we too often forget. But why does it drive them? Because they know what sin means and then how significant their salvation is. They just finished living in sin and have turned to something other than an easy life. Then, why does this same motivation not drive most of us? This was one reason that Jim Elliott went to the mission field -- because he saw the church as compromising and lifeless.

The second situation is relationship. This, of course, is much the same in the general world as it is with Christians. But the nature of relationships, or the lack of deep relationships, is a hallmark for failure in the Church. Right now I'm living in the D.C. area where I'll be working for about two months. My wife and sons are at home. Though I've only been apart from my wife for about 24 hours now, I miss her deeply. Same with my sons.  Relationship binds all other matters together.  That's what the body of Christ is much about.

The third is pain. C S Lewis, and easily hundreds of others, have dealt with the topic and the apologetic value is significant. Likewise the ministry motivations and opportunities should not be overlooked. It is pain that may provide an improved perspective for ministry as we realize our mortality. It has been said that, if you have not experienced a severe pain in your life, you will. That is axiomatic and almost so pedantic that saying it seems useless. Of course, we all do. But in life's comforts it is easy to think that we might be immune longer than others, or that this lack of pain is somehow a sign of God's blessings. But after having been hospitalized for a week (a few years ago) I began to understand how easy it is for the body to fail. When your sense of mortality draws you to service for eternal purposes, then you understand. And you also begin to understand how others might be chased from God, another point for ministry.
Like all systematics, these matters are all intertwined. Those things which drive us spiritually are inseparable as they express how the Lord works in hearts and lives. Things like politics and elections sometimes seem to fade into the background as quite trivial compared to souls and eternity. Close relationships that build up the body, that encourage new believers, that are made less complacent by new believers, that minister to those in pain, and that minister through pain -- all these are eternal.

It may be possible for each of us to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden, of my neighbour's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you may talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet if at all only in a nightmare.

All day long we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities it is with awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal, Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or ever lasting splendours.

C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"

NCIS: What I Want

What I want is an episode with R Lee Ermey!

If the writers can't do something really good with him, then they need some help.  And I'd be glad to work with them. ;-)

Campaign Prediction (2): 2012 -- Bachman/Palin

I said earlier that I think Newt could win.  But with the current populism rising in conservative circles, it is time that the Republican establishment give way to the movement that might keep it afloat.  If not, then it deserves the irrelevance brand that it has recently earned.


Fortuately the argument is not about party -- it is not partisan.  This one is about world view.  And as I look back, something similar happene to the Dems in the 60s through the 80s.  The anti-war movement was a populist movement that even fought the party.  But those who fought against the war won certain friends in the party (McGovern) and even joined in (like John Kerry).  And though the substance of the Democratic party remained the same, currupt organization it had always been, it changed just enough to absorb those radical, populist voices.


Today's Republican party is in much the same position.  Today's populist conservative revolution is set to change the nation despite the assertion of our nations first overt and radical Socialst President.  But how will the party respond?  Will the conservative voice be absorbed or will the party change?  And how long will the movement last?

As much as I think Newt can win, is he really the best candidate?  His willingness to coddle with the liberal opposition is disconserting.  Very.  Could we see an even better, more effective ticket with Bachman/Palin?  I think so.