From SoC to Points North

A Yuletide Rumination

2011-12-23T17:54:00.000-08:00

(Note: I have posted this same essay on my other blog, because I believe that it deals with themes that are appropriate for both blogs. If you don't like mixing politics and religion, beware of this post.)

It's that time of year again, isn't it? (For some retail store chains it's been that time of year since before Halloween.) And along with this time of year there are many people who are torn between celebrating, ignoring or denouncing the Christmas season.

As for me, being a Christian, and someone who has for several years had a love affair with ritual and ceremony, I enjoy the thought of having a special season, culminating in a special day, to celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. Note, however, that I did not say that I enjoy the thought of shoving that particular celebration down the throats of any who disagree with me. To those outside the orbit of Christianity, I can only hope that my life may persuade you to think about things you would not ordinarily consider. On the other hand, there are those who claim to be solidly inside the orbit of the Faith who oppose Christmas because it's supposed to have evolved from pagan holidays, and because we don't see Christmas celebrated by the apostles in the book of Acts, yadda yadda. To such people, whether they be Plymouth brethren, Jehovah's Witnesses, subbotniks (субботники), or others, I have a deal to offer you. If you promise not to rain on my parade, I promise that I won't insult you by wishing you Merry Christmas (or Happy Birthday, for that matter).

I have to admit, however, that lately I can't really get into Christmas. Partly it's because for the last few years, I haven't been able to attend church on Christmas due to visits to relatives. But increasingly it's because in this country, the Christmas season has been so thoroughly corrupted to serve the interests of capitalism. Every aspect of the season – even those aspects that were once baldly religious – has been converted into a Pavlovian goad to make people buy stuff. (Just this week I was at Trader Joe's and on the way into the store, I heard a non-stop stream of pop-soft rock arrangements of religious carols and other seasonal music being broadcast into the parking lot, thanks to the outdoor intercom system.)

Christmas has become the complement of the 4^th of July in a certain way. Independence Day is supposed to be a celebration of freedom, yet “freedom” in this country has been redefined by corporate interests into a justification of addictive behavior. Christmas on the other hand is a commercially broadcast appeal to go out and act like an addict. For those who don't choose to live like addicts, Christmas has become a dangerous time of year. Just try bicycle commuting on a daily basis any time between Thanksgiving and New Years and you will see just how dangerous, as you find your life being threatened by tantrum-throwing consumatron beasts in big SUV's. (How many people will be trampled to death or pepper-sprayed at stores between now and New Year's?)

The pushers who run our society have succeeded in turning Christmas into a rather strange season. And this particular Christmas promises to be very strange indeed, as the consequences of our addictive behavior increasingly catch up to us. One of those consequences is the weather. Around here in the Portland metro area, it has been very unsettling – not in a violently demonstrative way, but in a creepy, unsettling way.

For one thing, there has been almost no precipitation this month. According to the Weather Underground site, average precipitation for December should be 4.32 inches. We have received less than two tenths of an inch so far. Not one flake of snow has fallen in the Portland metro area since October. Daytime high temperatures have been exceeding historical averages – not drastically, but by enough to cause concern for those who should be paying attention. I can't predict the future, but I suspect that this may turn out to be a very dry winter. A dry winter may mean a hot summer, and an extreme fire danger, which is not typical for this area. There is a lot to burn here. We may also be introduced to something else that is not typical to this area, namely, drought.

Even with this year's La Niña weather, global average temperatures are beginning to move into dangerous, potentially irreversible territory. Atmospheric CO2 levels are now at 390.31 parts per million. Our addiction is destroying our climate, yet like many dysfunctional families whose members are addicts, our society is unwilling to talk frankly about the consequences of our addiction. This week, as I walked through my neighborhood, I was treated to a sight that I haven't seen since I lived in Southern California – houses decorated with Yuletide lights, Santa Clauses, and fake icicles – and not a speck of snow on the ground. It would be most ironic to find that some of the residents in those homes were listening to Bing Crosby singing about his dreams. This year I think I'll buy myself a weather thermometer for Christmas.

I must bring this short meditation to a close. I will shortly be driving down to So. Cal., and I have a few things to do yet. My MP3 player is loaded full of interesting stuff that I haven't yet heard. One thing I have is a LibriVox recording of The Slavery Of Our Times by Leo Tolstoy. It promises to be good listening for those who don't want to be addicts. Merry Christmas.

Culture Shock, Upside The Head

2011-11-21T20:50:00.000-08:00

Over the last year or so, I've been been wrestling with a rather intricate conundrum. My particular rat's nest of a conundrum – my Gordian knot – my paradox – I now lay before you, whoever you are who may happen to read this blog.

Those of you who have followed my writings know that I used to belong to a fringe, abusive church, and that involvement in that church was a damaging experience for many of the members, including myself. A summary description of that church was that it was both legalistic and excessive in its demands and its strictness, and that this was due to the particular character of the narcissist who was our “head honcho.” The head honcho fostered a culture in which people were measured on the basis of the “authority” they were allowed to exercise over each other, and this led to people competing intensely for positions of “leadership” from which they might boss each other around.

Leaving that particular church meant leaving that culture behind, and the act of leaving produced in me an intense “gun-shyness” regarding authority, strictness and discipline. That gun-shyness extended to my treatment of children, because in our old abusive breakfast-club of a church, it was often considered a godly thing for adults to be extremely heavy-handed and rigid in dealing with children. (If you want to know more of what I'm talking about, see Abuse in Christian Families, Assembly Kids, MK's and PK's and Critiques of 'First Time Obedience'.) For years after leaving, I dealt with both adults and children with a great deal of fear and trepidation, anxious not to make an idiot out of myself by relating to them according to the manner I had been taught in my old 'church.' After leaving, I wanted very much to become a decent person. In fact, I still want this very much.

Fast forward several years, and here I am, living a thousand miles away from where that old church used to be. Now I'm living in a multicultural, multi-ethnic city, and I've had the chance to get to know several people and families from places other than the United States. As I have observed some of them, I've sometimes been taken aback at the strictness of their culture. It goes against the persona I've built up over the last several years – a persona like that of sympathetic, relational Dr . Malcolm Crowe, or like Pete Dixon from Room 222. Yet as I've talked to older members of these cultures, I've heard many who were thankful for the strictness, including people who thanked their teachers back in the old country for spanking students. It's been hard to wrap my Americanized mind around that one...

At the same time, something else has been happening over the last year and a half. I've been teaching engineering courses at a local college campus. I must admit two things about myself when I started teaching college students: first, that I naively believed that college students attend class because they want to be in class, and they are intensely interested in the subject matter. (After all, who in his or her right mind would pay money to attend classes in which they had no interest?!) Second, I tended to relate to my students as if I were Dr. Malcolm Crowe or Pete Dixon. There was only one hitch, however. When I graded assignments, I tried to assign grades based on an honest assessment of a student's competence rather than using grades as a means to build self-esteem. In my book, an “A” grade therefore means that a person is an expert. If a student can't demonstrate expert knowledge, then I can't give that student an A in good conscience.

This approach to grading has caused some, er, friction. I can see that friction in some of the instructor evaluations I have received from students, as well as some of the conversations they have had with me. A number of evaluations submitted by students have complained that I am too hard in my grading or that the class is too difficult or that the material is hard to understand. Students have turned in sloppily written reports and when I have marked them down for sloppiness or poor grammar, the students have become almost combative, insisting that correct grammar, punctuation and spelling have nothing to do with a correct grasp of technical principles. I had a student this summer who yelled at me during a class lab session because I marked down one of his homework assignments due to incompleteness. (The assignment called for a computer plot of a circuit function, and I guess he thought that the plot was “optional”!) This same student protested to me that he was an “A” student and he couldn't understand why I would not give him an A for substandard work. (If ever I wanted to throttle someone... but steady there! Temper, temper...) I had another student who complained that the course required too much reading on his part, as he was dyslexic and couldn't concentrate for very long. When I checked with the student liason, she mentioned that this particular student had never mentioned dyslexia to her. I've had two students try to answer cell phones during exams. I've had students get teary-eyed because I would not accept late work, even though the syllabus clearly stated that late work would not be accepted.

In short, I've seen Americans (and foreigners who have been Americanized) – grown ups, mind you – who act like children with a monstrous sense of entitlement. And here I am in my living room, looking at another batch of student evaluations and seeing in my mind's eye some of the faces who were in my spring term class, remembering some of the battles that were fought, the excuses that were made. On my computer I have open a number of Web pages written by journalists and academics who have sought to probe the roots of the present college student culture of entitlement. Some of them trace its origins to the constant efforts made in upscale schools to guard and build up the self-esteem of students, regardless of whether such self-esteem was realistic or not. Many of these kids have grown up into incompetent adults, yet no one dares to tell them the ugly truth. It's like being among people who don't have the guts to tell a person that his fly is unzipped or that his shirt is buttoned wrong.

At the end of a quarter, I must stay up late finalizing grades in order to submit them before our school's deadline. On such nights, I have fallen into the habit of listening to Youtube videos of young (teen and pre-teen) classical and fingerstyle guitarists. I have a handful of favorite artists, and they are all very, very good. The funny thing is that only one of them is an American citizen, and his parents are Chinese. These people did not get as good as they are without pushing themselves. On the other hand, in the faces of many college-bound Americans today I can see one more sign of the impending death of the American empire. (That death is not necessarily a bad thing, by the way.) Empires grow stupid before they die. (I'll have more to say about that on my other blog.)

Meanwhile, here's a question. Cutting a person open can be a very good thing, or a very bad thing. Getting knifed by a mugger is a bad thing. Having a surgeon perform an operation on you can be a very good thing. In the same way, strictness (or “firmness,” if you will) can be a very good thing if handled properly, and a very bad thing if mishandled. On the one hand, in American evangelicalism we have muggers, murderers and practitioners of mayhem (like Bill Gothard, the Ezzo's, Michael and Debi Pearl, and others). On the other hand, we have a nation of people in dire need of some surgery.

So then, is there a right way to be “strict” or “firm”? Is it possible to learn to do “strictness” or “firmness” the right way?

Poor On Purpose

2011-04-02T21:34:00.000-07:00

There is a moral aspect to the way each of us chooses to respond to the world in which we live. This is true even when we are considering problems that at first appear to be purely technical. Take the depletion of the Earth's resources and the decline and collapse of the global economy, for instance. Among the writers and bloggers whose work I enjoy reading is a man named Dmitry Orlov, author of ClubOrlov, a blog which chronicles the ongoing collapse of the United States. His latest post, Financial Totalitarianism, should arouse the interest of students of the Good Book.

In that post, he writes, “A particularly annoying question I am often asked and have come to hate is: 'How do I invest my money for it to survive financial, political and commercial collapse?' The short answer is: 'Nohow...'” Orlov goes on to criticize the foundations of greed and avarice on which modern American society is based, then he makes the following statements:

You cannot create your own money system, and you cannot change the way the money system works; either you are in the money system, or you are out. Most of us lack the ability to sever all ties with the financial realm, but, as with so many things, having the right attitude is very helpful. To that end, let me drop a Bible-bomb on you. (I do this as someone quite free of any religious sentiment; I just find the Bible to be an interesting and useful work of world literature, filled with highly quotable, pithy remarks.) Here's a particularly nice quote from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Never has a truer phrase been written. Many of the more recent self-styled or so-called “Christians” have attempted to distort it to mean that it doesn't imply depriving yourself of any worldly goods, and that “poor in spirit” is a special, strictly spiritual sort of poverty. That is, of course, nonsense. You do not have to dig deep for the real meaning: “Poor” just means “poor,” and “in spirit” means “on purpose, not as a result of, say, injustice, misfortune, or being lazy, stupid or a gambler.” Oh, and “blessed” means “not damned.” Accordingly, Christian monks take the vow of non-acquisitiveness, which is a virtue, with the corresponding vices of stinginess (“what is mine is mine”) and greed (“what is yours is mine”). It is rather difficult to embrace such basic tenets while remaining within a culture that has elevated avariciousness and rapaciousness to the status of virtues. But here is a key insight: being poor on purpose is much easier than being poor as a result of suddenly having less than you are accustomed to having.

Now Orlov is not a Christian (he has not been “born again”), and he is not writing this in the context of Christianity or “spirituality.” But notice how accurate he is in his interpretation of the plain meaning of Scripture. Regarding the relationship between true Christians and their possessions, he seems to be far more direct than Arthur Simon, author of How Much Is Enough? Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture (Baker Books and Arthur Simon, 2003). How Much is Enough? begins to lead its reader down the road to Biblically based, simpler, less materialistic living, yet at its outset it hedges its bets, as in the following words: “God points the way, but provides no paved road through the wilderness. Each follower of Jesus faces this challenge...Decisions about the use of money and use of our lives more often involve shades of gray than sharp contrasts between black and white...” To be fair, I haven't finished reading the book. And yes, I acknowledge that for every finger I point, there are three pointing back at me. But from the start, I think Mr. Simon will probably let his readers off a little easier than he should. (It is nice to see such a study coming from the Lutherans, though ;) )

Now let's take another look at one of Mr. Orlov's statements: Many of the more recent self-styled or so-called “Christians” have attempted to distort it [Blessed are the poor in spirit...] to mean that it doesn't imply depriving yourself of any worldly goods, and that “poor in spirit” is a special, strictly spiritual sort of poverty. That is, of course, nonsense...It is rather difficult to embrace such basic tenets while remaining within a culture that has elevated avariciousness and rapaciousness to the status of virtues. To this, I can only say “Amen.” It's hard for those of us who are thoroughly marinated in materialist American culture to grasp and start to obey the plain words of the Lord Jesus Christ. It really takes a break with this culture in order to start thinking and acting clearly. That includes making a break from the toxic culture of mainstream American evangelicalism. If a man who admittedly has no religious sentiment can see plain Scripture truths that befuddle the great mass of American evangelicals and their leaders, it seems to indicate two things. First, it may be that Mr. Orlov is himself not far from the Kingdom of God (Mark 12:34). He may well be standing in a place full of wild possibilities. Second, it seems that many American evangelicals have missed the Pilgrim's Progress trail head and have instead hopped a ride on the Celestial Railroad. They may literally be facing a Hell of a surprise once they get to their destination.

Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month - My Two Cents

2011-01-12T15:40:00.000-08:00

Several bloggers have declared January 2011 to be Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month. I feel obligated to add my hearty "Amen" to this declaration. Let's keep putting pressure on the power-mongers, control freaks and abusive leaders who have ruined so much of American evangelicalism. To find other bloggers who are writing posts dedicated to this month, just Google "Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month."

In The Way of Jehonadab

2010-08-22T01:49:00.000-07:00

The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, saying, Go to the house of the Rechabites, and speak to them, and bring them into the house of the LORD, into one of the rooms, and give them wine to drink.

Then I took Jaazaniah the son of Jeremiah, the son of Habazziniah, and his brothers, and all his sons, and the whole house of the Rechabites; and I brought them into the house of the LORD, into the room of the sons of Hanan the son of Igdaliah, the man of God, which was by the room of the princes, which was above the room of Maaseiah the son of Shallum, the keeper of the threshold. I set before the sons of the house of the Rechabites bowls full of wine, and cups; and I said to them, Drink wine!

But they said, We will drink no wine; for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, saying, You shall drink no wine, neither you, nor your sons, forever: neither shall you build house, nor sow seed, nor plant vineyard, nor have any; but all your days you shall dwell in tents; that you may live many days in the land in which you live. We have obeyed the voice of Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, in all that he commanded us, to drink no wine all our days, we, our wives, our sons, or our daughters; nor to build houses for us to dwell in; neither have we vineyard, nor field, nor seed: but we have lived in tents, and have obeyed, and done according to all that Jonadab our father commanded us...

Jeremiah 35:1-10, World English Bible (a public domain translation)

I've been “out-of-pocket” for the last several weeks. This has been mainly due to taking on a part-time teaching position as an adjunct at a local college. But now that finals have been administered and grades have been given, I have a bit of time to breathe and to think. (These were two pastimes I was sorely missing.)

One of the themes that was in the back of my mind is the subject of people, families and communities whose choices have positioned them for maximum survivability in this present time of resource depletion and economic collapse – even though they made their choices for entirely different reasons at the time those choices were made. I've recently met or read about a few such people and families, and have noted those elements of survivability in their lives which they chose for cultural or religious reasons, without necessarily thinking beforehand of the application of those elements to hard times. One characteristic of all these people is their separateness from the prevailing American culture. I'd like to explore the spiritual, Christian side of that separateness in one or two posts of this blog. The purely secular side of this theme will be explored in my other blog, The Well Run Dry. Sometimes the thoughts from both blogs will overlap.

And so we come first to Jehonadab and the Rechabites, of whom we read a little in the passage from Jeremiah which I quoted above. Who were the Rechabites? According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the Rechabites were “...members of a family descended from Hammath, the progenitor of the house of Rechab; otherwise known as the Kenites (I Chron. ii. 55), who were the descendants of Hobab (Jethro), the father-in-law of Moses (Judges iv. 11). In Jeremiah (xxxv.) it is recorded that the prophet took some Rechabites into the Temple and offered them wine to drink, and that they declined on the ground that Jehonadab, son of Rechab, their ancestor, had commanded them not to drink wine or other strong drink, or to live in houses, or to sow seed, or to plant vineyards, and had enjoined them to dwell in tents all their days. Jeremiah used this fidelity of the Rechabites to their principles as an object-lesson in his exhortations to his contemporaries...

“...the Rechabites were a people who endeavored to resist the customs of settled life in Palestine by maintaining the nomadic ideal; that they existed at different times in both the Northern and Southern Kingdoms; that they were especially interested in the worship of Yahweh (the LORD); and that the Chronicler connects them with the Kenites...”

According to the Bible, the Rechabites got their start on the road of separateness via their father Jehonadab (as spelled in 2 Kings; in Jeremiah, his name is spelled “Jonadab”). Jehonadab was a contemporary and acquaintance of Jehu the son of Nimshi, who was anointed king of Israel by the prophet Elisha in order to assassinate the current king, Jehoram the son of Ahab, and to destroy those who worshipped idols in the northern kingdom of Israel. It was via Solomon that idol-worship gained a foothold in the kingdom of Israel, and by means of the rulers of the northern kingdom it had become firmly entrenched. Jehu asked for the allegiance of Jehonadab, which Jehonadab gave to him as they both helped to eradicate the worship of Baal from Israel. But Jehu insisted on maintaining the worship of two golden calves which an earlier Israelite king had made in order to keep his subjects from the true worship of God. (This was a political move, in order to secure his authority over his subjects.)

It is possible to speculate (and some have speculated) that when Jehonadab saw that there had been no real change in the direction of Israel, he became disillusioned with Jehu and chose to withdraw himself and his family from the prevailing culture. By the manner of his withdrawal he created a family structure and culture that was uniquely survivable, in that it had no stake in the established culture of the land, and therefore nothing to lose from the destruction of that culture. The alternative he created was a culture and structure uniquely suited to the preservation of spiritual truth in the midst of hard and uncertain times.

You might say that Jehonadab looked at the evils of his nation's culture, the likely Divine judgment they would receive, saw the “pages of their book on fire” and read “the writing on the wall”, to borrow from a song I listen to a lot.

Which brings us to the subject of how Christians should relate to the present culture of the United States of America. Modern American culture is a universal solvent, in that it dissolves and assimilates anything exposed to it. It should be fairly obvious that our culture is also extremely corrosive and toxic. There are abundant obvious signs that these statements are true, from the garbage broadcast via television and other media to the PG-13 language that has become common even on elementary school playgrounds, to the goo that resides in the flash memories of so many mp3 players, to the disappearance of decent behavior among many members of the broad public. (Speaking of American culture as a universal solvent, I remember a ride on the MAX a few weeks ago during which I observed four Asian teens getting on at one of the stops. Their accents were unmistakable, and marked them clearly as foreign-born, yet they were each wearing baggy shorts at least three sizes too big for them, along with oversized T-shirts that hadn't been washed in a few days and bling jewelry and sideways baseball hats with flat brims, and they were all cussing and swearing like homeboys – even down to the rhythm of the cuss words. Peculiar...)

The Pharisaical members of the American Religious Right are quick to point these things out as “Sinnnn-Fullll!!!” And they are right – much of what we see in American culture is a sinful, sensual, lustful contradiction of Biblical morality, modesty, decency and propriety. But the American Religious Right is just as bad as the things they criticize. And in criticizing the surface symptoms, they conveniently ignore one of the root issues of American culture, namely, its full-throttle, reckless, crass materialism and greed, a materialism and greed which the American Religious Right practices with reckless abandon. For American culture is a construct which has been created by its masters for the sole purpose of making people crave things, thus prompting them to spend money. Popular religion has been co-opted by the masters of our culture, who would have us believe that the blessing of God consists solely of having lots of stuff, and that God wants to “bless” America forever, no questions asked. Spokespersons for this point of view include such sharp-as-a-bowling-ball thinkers as Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, Pat Robertson, and the Tea Party.

Yet perceptive people can see that America's days of hedonism are numbered. They see the “pages of our book on fire” and “read the writing on the wall.” They don't even have to look as far as Divine judgment to see that this is true. Anyone who can do college level math and who is well-read and well-informed about present economic, environmental and resource trends can see that the global economy in general, and the American way of life in particular, are in deep – possibly mortal – trouble. Books such as Limits to Growth, Reinventing Collapse, and Eaarth, and reports like the 2007 Energy Watch Group Oil Report lay the case out very clearly. Where I think Divine judgment comes in is in seeing how this nation has both obtained and spent our abundance, and thinking that because of our choices and the kind of people we've become there will be no miracle forthcoming to rescue us out of the consequences of those choices.

I think the best thing any real Christian living here could do is prudently and wisely withdraw from the prevailing culture, in order to keep his hands clean and to preserve something of enduring value in the hard times now upon us. But here a question arises: is a healthy, Godly escape from this culture possible? I stress the word “healthy” here. For there are plenty of recent historical examples of unhealthy withdrawal – from Jonestown to David Koresh to wacko fundamentalist “Christian” dominionist/supremacist super-patriot nutcase groups like Vision Forum, Bill Gothard, and the Honor Academy of Dave Hasz and Ron Luce. Abusive churches like the Assemblies of George Geftakys and other nut-cases would all like to emphasize the message of “Be ye separate from all else...” with the corollary, “that you may be entirely OURS!”, spoken with a ravenous snarl just as soon as you have come between their jaws. Abusive religious parents (especially fathers) who have drunk the Kool-Aid of the Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements might look at the example of Jehonadab and say, “Cool! I get to be the absolute boss of my own new culture!” I am also aware that there may be survivors of such abusive churches, groups and families who cringe at reading this present post, who have flashbacks at the very thought of being “separate” from the prevailing culture, and for whom the discussion of “separation” brings up all sorts of unpleasant experiences of legalism.

Yet this present culture is going down. And God commands us to be separate from it. Though we are in the world, we are not to be of the world. “Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” - James 1:27, World English Bible.

Jehonadab was able to achieve this separation for himself and for his family, and to do so in a healthy way. What would modern-day Rechabites look like in these present-day United States of America? Can we American Christians achieve a state of healthy separation without totally screwing it up?

Christianity and the Economic Growth Paradigm

2010-06-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

History abundantly shows that the Christianity of the first few centuries was vigorously opposed and persecuted by the Roman Empire. Christianity was a threat to Roman culture and Roman power on a multitude of levels, the spiritual level being foremost. I hypothesize (although I don't have time to research this thoroughly) that the Faith was a significant threat to the Roman economy and its holders of concentrated wealth and economic power. Few things upset wealthy people more than any kind of threat to their wealth. (Try removing a food bowl from under the snout of a German shepherd and see what happens to you.)

The Scriptures contain abundant warnings, rebukes and condemnations of the very practices on which the modern global money economy rests. Yet “Christianity” is not persecuted in much of the First World – especially in the United States, which has a powerful evangelical voter base led by influential, wealthy men (and a few women). I suggest that the “Christianity” espoused by these people bears very little resemblance to the actual proto-Christianity outlined in the New Testament – the Faith which calls us to simple living, the renunciation of materialism and oppression, and the love of our neighbors, a love which is expressed in sharing our material possessions with our neighbors. The Faith outlined in the Good Book condemns the rape of the earth, the murder of indigenous peoples, and the oppression of the poor, yet these are the foundations on which modern industrial economic growth is built.

What if the Church in the First World began with unified voice to actually preach the Faith outlined in the Scriptures? What if we all (not just a few on the fringes) began to teach one another and outsiders to live simply and to stop being good consumers? What if the Church actually began to acknowledge the backstory behind the recent prosperity of the First World, and especially of the United States, and began to refuse to participate in that prosperity? I can't tell you everything that might happen, but I imagine that we who call ourselves Christians would be a lot less popular.

I leave you with a reading from the book of Acts. I read this about a month and a half ago. (Now I am in 2 Kings.) Enjoy.

About that time there arose no small stir concerning the Way. For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen, whom he gathered together, with the workmen of like occupation, and said, “Sirs, you know that by this business we have our wealth. You see and hear, that not at Ephesus alone, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away many people, saying that they are no gods, that are made with hands. Not only is there danger that this our trade come into disrepute, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be counted as nothing, and her majesty destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worships.”

When they heard this they were filled with anger, and cried out, saying, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” The whole city was filled with confusion, and they rushed with one accord into the theater, having seized Gaius and Aristarchus, men of Macedonia, Paul’s companions in travel. When Paul wanted to enter in to the people, the disciples didn’t allow him. Certain also of the Asiarchs, being his friends, sent to him and begged him not to venture into the theater. Some therefore cried one thing, and some another, for the assembly was in confusion. Most of them didn’t know why they had come together. They brought Alexander out of the multitude, the Jews putting him forward. Alexander beckoned with his hand, and would have made a defense to the people. But when they perceived that he was a Jew, all with one voice for a time of about two hours cried out, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”

When the town clerk had quieted the multitude, he said, “You men of Ephesus, what man is there who doesn’t know that the city of the Ephesians is temple keeper of the great goddess Artemis, and of the image which fell down from Zeus? Seeing then that these things can’t be denied, you ought to be quiet, and to do nothing rash. For you have brought these men here, who are neither robbers of temples nor blasphemers of your goddess. If therefore Demetrius and the craftsmen who are with him have a matter against anyone, the courts are open, and there are proconsuls. Let them press charges against one another. But if you seek anything about other matters, it will be settled in the regular assembly. For indeed we are in danger of being accused concerning this day’s riot, there being no cause. Concerning it, we wouldn’t be able to give an account of this commotion.” When he had thus spoken, he dismissed the assembly.

– Acts 19:23-41, World English Bible (a public domain translation)

Farewell, AssemblyBoard

2010-05-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

Most former members of the Assemblies of George Geftakys are familiar with the AssemblyBoard, a website where former members discussed their experiences in the Assemblies and the life adjustments they experienced after leaving the Assemblies. The AssemblyBoard was a very popular site during the first few years after the revelation in 2003 of the corruption of the Geftakys “ministry”. I found out a few weeks ago that the AssemblyBoard site has basically come to an end – that is, as of April of this year the board has been closed to new comments, although older posts are still being maintained for viewing. The board administrator stated that this was because “usage has tapered off dramatically and spam management was becoming more difficult.”

This is not surprising, and I saw it coming a long time ago. On a certain level it would have been inevitable, as a majority of former members moved on from their experiences in an abusive, corrupt church. But in my opinion, there were some things that hastened the AssemblyBoard's demise. Or at least they contributed to my disengagement from the board after a little while.

One of the hardest things to swallow was that there were certain contributors to the Board who were still acting out the “leader” or “honcho” roles they had enjoyed in the Assemblies. I think of one person in particular who assumed a role of “expert survivor and guide to the spiritually wounded,” who seemed to pride himself on being the “voice of reason,” and who therefore tended to disbelieve many of the stories of abusive leaders which were posted by former members from 2003 to 2005. Don't get me wrong – he was convinced that George Geftakys himself was a rotten egg, but he was not willing to believe that some of George's lieutenants were as rotten as they were being made out to be via the stories of our interactions with them. His message was thus: “After all, I knew these men. They always seemed to be reasonable to me. I never experienced the things that some posters are claiming.” This message was an invalidation of the experiences of many people who were severely jacked by the Assemblies. Further, it was an invalidation of the pain these people suffered, and therefore of the anger they felt.

There is an important point to be made about this anger. Anger is a very normal response to the experiences of betrayal, of violation, and especially of abuse of power by people in positions of authority. The Geftakys Assemblies were a violation of many lives, many souls who had been duped into believing that they were part of a God-ordained ministry that was selflessly pursuing the good and the right, and whose leaders were selfless defenders of the good and the right. In 2002 and 2003 we found out that we had actually been involved in one man's narcissistic empire of personal gratification, and that many of this man's deputies and lieutenants had taken on the same capricious, narcissistic characteristics of their head honcho. This explained the treatment we received from them.

So we got mad. What to do with that anger? After all, there was a “whole lotta anger out there.” Yet when we tried to express that anger on the AssemblyBoard, there were “reasonable” and “spiritual” posters who rose up and attacked our anger, describing it as “unspiritual” and telling us about the need to “forgive.” Their intentions may have been good, but their message was, “Your experiences weren't bad enough to justify all this anger.” In other words, their message was an invalidation of our experiences and of the pain of those experiences, the sense of violation that arose from those experiences. That was the wrong way to address this kind of anger.

Having gone through the abusive church experience, I believe that there is a process of working through the anger of being jacked by trusted authorities, of being jacked by power abusers. This process can't be rushed. Those who attempt to rush it run the risk of sending a message to an abuse survivor that his (or her!) experiences are not valid, and that his grievances are not valid. Or, in other words, that no wrong was committed by those who abused him. This is a terrible message.

A better approach for those who want to help power abuse victims would be to allow survivors to be angry (safely), watching to make sure that the anger does not express itself in destructive ways while acknowledging fully the awareness that people have been violated. This phase might take a long time to run its course, but that's okay. Let it run its course. The landing of the Space Shuttles provides an apt metaphor for this process. During landing, the avionics aboard the Shuttles get very hot, because the radiators that normally dissipate waste heat are unavailable. Once a Shuttle lands, ground-based carts must come alongside, hook up hoses and blow coolant into the Shuttle to cool off its avionics. If this doesn't happen, tens of thousands of dollars of computer hardware can get quickly fried. The heat can't be denied or swept under the rug – it must be allowed to dissipate. And it takes time. Similarly, survivors of spiritual abuse must be allowed to vent their anger until they can cool off. Don't put them into a Thermos bottle just because you think a little heat is unspiritual. As time passes, survivors can be steered toward activities designed to help them rebuild their lives. As the rebuilding proceeds, the sense of injury (hopefully) begins to fade, and the anger begins to resolve.

This safe venting of anger was what I was looking for when I was participating in the AssemblyBoard, along with help and suggestions for rebuilding my life from those who were a little farther along on the journey than I was. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by the advice of some of the self-styled “experts.” I think my disappointment was typical of many people who left the Assemblies around the same time I did, in early 2003.

Now I'm figuring out for myself how to rebuild my life. (Yes, the rebuilding is ongoing.) I don't get angry nearly as often as I did in the first several months after I left. Anymore, when I experience something that reminds me of the Assemblies, or I have a dream about some meeting or “seminar” or something like that, I tend to laugh a little to myself and remind myself that, like the Bob Dylan song, all that garbage is “one too many mornings, and a thousand miles away.” But I hope these words I have written serve as a warning and a bit of advice for others who are either running or participating in online discussions for survivors of spiritual abuse, or who are seeking to provide places of refuge for the victims of the American evangelical wasteland.

P.S. I want to commend Margaret Irons and her Reflections website. When it comes to ministering to the needs of survivors of spiritual abuse, I believe she nails it.

P.P.S. Some may notice that I take potshots at American evangelicalism, even though I have identified myself as an evangelical. I'm not sure that the term “evangelical” really describes me anymore. I do consider myself a fundamentalist – radically so. I believe that the Bible is the literal inspired Word of God, and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Lord of all. I can recite the Apostles' Creed and mean every word.

But my fundamentalism has led me to a hard Left turn politically regarding social, environmental and economic issues. Thus I am 180 degrees out of phase with many prominent figures in American evangelicalism and the American political Right. So watch out for that Bible – it's a dangerous book. Reading it might actually cause people to stop worshipping money and start doing good to their neighbors! ;)

A Lenten Fast for 2010

2010-02-28T13:44:00.000-08:00

I remember my first introduction to the concept of Lent and the Lenten season. I was a first-grader at a Catholic school near an Air Force base where my dad was stationed. One day the nuns gave each of us a cool-looking little box with a metal lid in which a slot had been made. We were told to “take up a collection for Lent.”

Silly me, I thought the nuns had said, “Lint.” So over the next forty days, I dutifully collected the lint around my house and stuffed it into my box. When the time came to turn in our boxes, the nuns were more than a little surprised (and not entirely amused) at the contents of my box.

Now that I know a litte more about Lent, I fear that many of us in the United States are making a mistake of the same magnitude. According to Wikipedia, “The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer – through prayer, penitence, almsgiving and self-denial – for the annual commemoration during Holy Week of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus...”, and “In its earliest form, Lent was an intense period of fasting and prayer for catechumens preparing for baptism at the Easter Vigil.”

I consider myself to be Evangelical and not Catholic. I am not trying to push any particular denomination or liturgy (although I like liturgy). But as I have been re-introduced to church traditions by virtue of starting again to attend Lutheran services, I thought I'd comment on some observations that occured to me upon the commencement of this Lenten season.

Last week, our pastor preached from Luke 3 about the fasting and temptation of the Lord Jesus in the desert. He mentioned the need for letting go of those things that stand between us and the will of God, just as Jesus laid aside His comforts during that fast. And some people observe Lent by giving up something during the Lenten season – whether it's 40 days without Starbucks coffee or 40 days without an iPod, or some other easily endured privation. But it occurs to me that the biggest hindrance to Christian spirituality in America is our overwhelming materialism. Here's an idea for a fast: how about giving up the unrestrained pursuit of wealth? How about giving up dreams of a bigger house or a new TV or lots of stuff? How about deciding that you will voluntarily live on $30,000 a year or less, and give any excess over and above that to those in need? Now that would be “letting go.” And many of us will wind up “fasting” this year whether we want to or not.

Lutherans and the Super Bowl

2010-02-07T13:52:00.000-08:00

This Sunday reminds me of a day a few years ago, while I was still living in So. Cal., after I had left the abusive church I described in my first blog, TH in SoC. I had started to attend a Lutheran church a few miles from my house. Even then, I had discerned that the Lutherans were sensible, no-drama types. That's not to say, however, that they didn't have a few colorful characters in their midst.

One lady in particular comes to mind. When I met her, she was in her mid-70's at least. One Sunday after service, she asked me, "So, are you going home to watch the Superbowl?"

"Superbowl?" I repeated stupidly. Then, "Oh, yeah, it's today, isn't it?"

"Yes!" she said. "I just love watching all those bodies crashing into each other!"

That got a chuckle out of me. On a later occasion, I asked her, "So, you really like football. What do you think about soccer?"

"Soccer's for sissies," she said. "All they ever do is run around a lot."

Norma, if you're still alive and if you ever read this, I dedicate this Sunday to you. May your game-watching experience be pleasant and blessed. And may the Saints win. (What's that? You're rooting for the Colts?)

A Matter Of Context

2010-01-24T14:52:00.001-08:00

A few months ago (while it was still sunny here), I had to travel on a weekday afternoon from Portland to Hillsboro. I hate driving, so I took a bus to downtown, then took the MAX. While downtown (I think I was at Pioneer Square), between getting off the bus and getting on the MAX, I saw several interesting sights, which I captured on camera. There was an early afternoon chess game going on between a couple of middle-aged men, surrounded by a small crowd of watching bystanders, both young and old. There was also a young busking banjo player. (I tend to watch buskers, noting which ones are the most successful at drawing crowds. Here's a secret: if you want to be a successful busker, you had better do something more original than standing on a street corner with a guitar and singing yesterday's “oldies but moldies.”)

There was also this:

I have to confess that this sight elicited a set of conflicting emotional responses in me – responses that were very different from the way I would have responded in my early days as a Christian.

I know what these people were ostensibly trying to do. And on a certain level, I have to agree with it. After all, Matthew 28:19 says, “Go, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...” Mark 16:15 says, “Go into all the world, and preach the Good News to the whole creation.” The history of the Church is full of examples of “open-air preachers” who went to public places and proclaimed the Gospel, from the apostles in the Book of Acts to men such as Peter Waldo, George Whitefield and Charles Spurgeon. Indeed, Proverbs 8:1-4 says, “Doesn't wisdom cry out? Doesn't understanding raise her voice? On the top of high places by the way, where the paths meet, she stands. Beside the gates, at the entry of the city, at the entry doors, she cries aloud: 'To you men, I call! I send my voice to the sons of mankind...'”

Yet I also know that Christianity in America has earned a certain reputation, which has unfortunately now spread throughout the world. This is definitely not the fault of the Good Book, nor the fault of those people who truly understand the Good Book and are trying to obey it. But because of certain prominent leaders and shapers of American Christian culture, Christianity has come to be seen as the dogma of the defenders of the priveleged class. This priveleged class has claimed some sort of Divine right for American prosperity, and has refused to publicly discuss the back story behind that prosperity, aside from saying that “Providence” granted them power to prevail over all the people they jacked in order to secure that prosperity. Any threats (including scientific or moral threats) to that prosperity are vilified and demonized by these people. Thus the Democrats and Obama are “godless Socialists!!!”, and the discussion of anthropogenic climate change is “a tool of the Devil to distract us from the mission of spreading the Gospel!” The poor nations of the earth are said to be poor, not because they have been repeatedly jacked by European and American colonialism and neocolonialism, but because they “worship false gods and don't embrace American capitalism!!!” People in countries holding resources that rich Americans want are branded as “terrorists!” and “looters!”

This portrayal of the Faith is reinforced by people like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Tony Perkins, who have ostensibly labored to “restore America's moral fiber,” but who in actuality were also deeply concerned about American economic policy (probably much more so than about American morals), and who all amassed large fortunes to themselves. Both Perkins and Falwell have also had dealings with white supremacist and anti-integration groups. Then there's the travesty of Sarah Palin, another member of the privileged class with a monstrous sense of “entitlement.” But lately, it's Pat Robertson who has taken the cake with his declaration that the recent earthquake in Haiti is God's punishment on that country for having made a pact with the devil two centuries ago in order to break free from their French (white) colonial masters. As I said before, Pat Robertson has a net worth of between $200 million and $1 billion according to Wikipedia.

Thus the reputation that American Christianity has earned is that it is the religion of childish materialists, whose religion promises unlimited prosperity with no suffering involved, and that any call to suffer or to share with others or to deny oneself must be “from the devil!!!” This is very different from the Faith as portrayed by the early Church. When modern-day Christians stand as open-air preachers in public places in modern-day America, bearing signs like the one in the picture above, I'd guess that most bystanders probably think, “Yeah, right. Another bunch of war-mongering, wacked-out, weird, greedy, Fox News-watching, flag-waving idiots.” “'For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,' – just as it is written.” (Romans 2:24)

What Christians in this country need in order to preach the Gospel is to repair the context in which that Gospel is presented. We need to have a few public rejections of certain people and their dogmas. We need to make a few public apologies. We need to start living a lot poorer, some of us, so that we can take our surplus wealth and give to the poor. We need to start acting far more Christian – as in, actually doing all those otherworldly things that the New Testament commands. Otherwise, “it would be better for [us] that a huge millstone should be hung around [our] necks, and that [we] should be sunk in the depths of the sea” (Matthew 18:6) than that we should have to be punished as those whose lives make the Gospel unbelievable.

A Lutheran, Slightly Out Of Phase

2010-01-10T13:46:00.000-08:00

I went to church today. Lately, I've started going again on Sundays. It was a Lutheran church within biking distance from my house. I like the Lutherans so far because long ago, when I was in junior high school, I used to be a Lutheran, and from all my experiences with Lutherans, they seem to be decent, everyday people. Also, in all my experiences in Lutheran churches, I have never had an organist try to sell me a “worship” CD.

The pastor preached on the baptism of the Lord Jesus at the Jordan river, from Luke 3:18-22. He expounded the meaning of the Lord's baptism and how He took on Himself the sins of the world. And he mentioned Romans 6 and how we were baptized into Christ's death so that we might live a new life. But in expounding the meaning of our baptism, he also talked about the joy he had experienced in baptizing...infants. This brought me face to face with the sacramentalism of the Lutherans. As a man who identified himself as evangelical for many years, I have to say that this sacramentalism takes some getting used to. There was a lively internal soliloquy going on in my head as the pastor preached. “Is sprinkling water on a baby's head enough to make that baby a Christian?!” Most mainstream evangelicals are both quick and emphatic with their answer. The leaders of the abusive church I used to belong to were especially quick and emphatic. (They are also quick and emphatic to declare their views on the sacrament commonly known as “Holy Communion.”) But writers like C.S. Lewis seemed to be far less dogmatic. For me, the answer for now lies in going back to relevant passages in the Good Book and coming to my own conclusions. Once I arrive at those conclusions, I promise not to beat anyone over the head with them. However, if I run into a stranger and we get into a conversation on religion, my policy for now will remain as it has been to date: I'll say, “You must be born again.”

* * *

After the service, I got into a fascinating conversation with the youth pastor concerning Christians and intentional community. He told me about Christian couples who share housing with each other, and mentioned Shane Claiborne's “simple way community” which operates in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I talked to him about the need for Christians to figure out intentional community as a response to the ongoing economic collapse and the necessity of re-thinking our living arrangements. From there we got on to discussing Peak Oil. The youth pastor also bikes to church from time to time, and there is a young woman who bikes as well. It was a refreshing surprise to find such an awareness of present social issues in this particular Lutheran congregation.

Christianity And The Project Of The Individual

2010-01-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

Over the last couple of months, I've been re-reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. It was the first Christian book I read after I got out of the Army, and, in addition to the enjoyment of a bit of nostalgia at this second reading, I also enjoyed an insightful paragraph in the chapter titled, “The Three Parts of Morality.”

I won't quote the passage here. (This is due to the vampire fangs of HarperCollins, Zondervan and the media empire of Rupert Murdoch as these entities suck the copyright juices out of the works of long-dead authors. But more on that in another post. Or you can read some of my previous thoughts on that subject in this post: “Money and Christian Books”.) But I'll give a bit of a summary. Lewis was saying that the fact that humans are going to live forever, either in Hell or in Heaven, makes individuals incomparably more important than societies, nations, civilizations or other temporary organizations of merely human origin.

Now there is one collective entity (made of a plurality of humans) that will last forever, and that's the Church. But according to Lewis (and according to many orthodox, sensible, sane Christian thinkers throuought the centuries), the Church can be seen in one sense simply as all true Christians in all times and all places. When the Church comes together, its corporate life is to express the ways and life of Christ. Yet the corporate life of various church bodies does not detract from the importance of the individuals who are part of those bodies.

Now the most important project for individual Christians is to be conformed to the image of Christ, to grow into truly Christlike character. It seems to me that this is the emphasis of the preaching and the ministry of any truly healthy church. An unhealthy church, on the other hand, stresses the importance of the church over the individual, and teaches that the most important project of any individual Christian is to give all his time, money and energy to the building up of that particular church and its “ministries.” Such a church will say things like, “We're involved in a grrreat work, brothers and sisters!”, and, “This church is involved in a great move of God!”, and, “We're part of the Lord's recovery!” and, “I'd rather burn out for the Lord than rust out!” Such a church takes all the life out of its rank-and-file members, then tosses many of them out as depleted, broken people, much like the “See Line Woman” depicted in the Nina Simone song:

See-line woman

Dressed in red

Make a man

lose his head

Empty his pockets

And wreck his days

Make him love her

and she'll fly away

The ironic thing is that such unhealthy churches frequently self-destruct and are soon forgotten, just like other totalitarian organizations which get buried in the sandlot of history.

A healthy church will exhort its members to “grow in the grace and and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” as it says in 2 Peter, and will then give its members time to do so. A healthy church will stress that the Christian's most important project is that of becoming a decent human being. Believe me, this project takes all the time and energy we've got.

And this project is the focal point of my Christianity nowadays. This is the faith to which I have returned: so seemingly ordinary and reasonable, so unobtrusively weighty, ancient and eternal – and not weird. This is where I started as a junior high school kid going to a Lutheran vacation Bible school. I don't always do so well nowadays, but when I fail to do as well as I might, I am reminded by the tagline of this blog that I'm supposed to be on a pilgrimage to Heaven, and that decency, humility and charity are the characteristics of the place where I'm headed. As I make my way on pilgrimage, I'll continue to let you know how the journey is going, pointing out both those things of beauty and inspiration I see as well as the oddities I notice in contemporary American evangelical culture.

Ones Like The Ones On My Car! (Part Two)

2009-11-22T15:41:00.000-08:00

I was talking to a Russian friend recently about American culture, explaining to him my fascination with other peoples and other cultures. I was telling him that American culture has been developed into a tool the sole purpose of which is to make people buy things. It has no enduring value because it is ever going out of style, and must ever re-invent itself in order to continue to grow the profits and sales of its masters. It is a culture of advertising jingles. To prove my point, I asked him (he is an avid watcher of TV) to name at least five ad jingles that he knew by heart. He laughed and said that he could easily name twenty.

American culture is intrinsically tacky, being nothing more than a marketing tool. And this culture has infected the American evangelical church something fierce. When I say this, I know that such a statement attracts a heartfelt Amen from many who are just as disgusted as I am. Yet there are some out there whose “Amens” scare me to death. These are people who say, “TH in SoC, we are just like you in your disgust toward the modern American evangelical church. We also reject it. But we have a solution...” They begin describing their “solution” by saying that the Church has fallen away from true Biblical principles. Then they state that through deep and intensive Bible study (combined, in some cases, with a few visions), they have rediscovered God's true pattern for church order or for marriage, and that I too can experience the fulfillment, joy, etc., that they have found if only I will join their outfit. Of course, those who sign on with these people are usually warned fairly soon that no other church holds the truth the way they do, or sees the light the way they do, or upholds the standard the way they do, and so forth.

I was reminded of people like this a while back when I read a short article on Gene Edwards on the Assembly Reflections website. Gene Edwards was a preacher who had been infected with some weird Exclusive Plymouth Brethren teachings, and went around to conferences teaching people that he alone truly understood God's pattern for the Church. There were those who signed on with him to be part of his ministry, yet they frequently experienced the self-destruction of churches founded by Mr. Edwards, due to cultic practices and Mr. Edwards' tendency to be a control freak.

Mr. Edwards had a protege named Frank Viola, who went on to become a well-known teacher and author in his own right. When Gene Edwards began to be discredited, Frank Viola publicly distanced himself from Edwards. Yet Mr. Viola continued to teach many of the things taught by Gene Edwards. Among these are that people don't have any right before God to just get together and decide to start a church. In the view of both Edwards and Viola, the only true legitimate churches before God are those churches started by an “anointed church planter.” By an extremely odd coincidence, both Edwards and Viola believe that they themselves are such “anointed church planters,” and that God has not raised up very many others. I guess means that if I go to Christmas Eve service at the Lutheran church a few miles away from my house, I haven't really “gone to church”! (For corroboration, see: FAQ - Letters to a church planter)

Now Frank Viola has teamed up with George Barna, a hyperkinetic “expert” on church trends and statistics, and they are both publicly pushing the idea that the Church needs to change to fit their vision of what it ought to be. Yet they sound just like the wacked-out Plymouth Brethren nonsense I used to hear from George Geftakys, nonsense about how so few people really saw the vision of the Church, how hard that vision was to obtain, and how we must slavishly follow only those who had the “vision.” Frank Viola teaches that church should be free-flowing and non-hierarchal, yet he elevates the office of the “church planter” to the position of royalty. This sounds like the same “talk of freedom contradicted by the experience of slavery” that I lived as a member of a Geftakys assembly.

But I don't mean to (just) beat up on Frank Viola. Some other folks are also in need of a whoopin'. I was reading a news report a week ago about some woman who was a former member of the Quiverfull movement, who left the movement (and her husband) because the family's involvement in that movement drove one of her daughters to attempt suicide. The Quiverfull people are those who teach that God's clear commandment is that married women should have as many children as they can. Thus a Quivefull can mean as many as twenty children!

The Quiverfull people are just as strict and regimented as some of the Plymouth Brethren, and their strictness is probably on a par with some of the more hardcore Mormons. They are really big on pushing their idea of the Biblical commandment that wives should submit to husbands. Now I want to tell you that I am definitely not a radical feminist. I believe that the Bible literally commands a woman to submit to her husband. But the Bible also commands a man to love his wife. The kind of “submission” I saw when I was a member of a strict, high-demand, cultic group was frankly degrading (and I'm a guy!). May God keep me from ever again pushing that nonsense on a woman.

All of this is to say that the fact that the prevailing American evangelical culture is a vast wasteland of commercialism leads to a certain vulnerability among those who call themselves Christian. In our search for authentic community, we can easily be led into groups with great appeal, because they have a well-defined culture, and that culture is definitely not mainstream. Yet once the novelty and the sense of the exotic have worn off, the culture of too many of these groups becomes plainly visible as dysfunctional. The dysfunction is not due to novelty, but due to the fact that the culture of these groups is controlled by autocratic heads with a self-serving agenda, a serious lust for control, and a desire to persecute those who don't suit their tastes. Joining one of these groups in order to escape the evangelical wasteland is like going to a doctor because your head hurts, and having the doctor say, “Then why don't I smash one of your thumbs? Then at least you won't be thinking about your head!” Uh, no thanks.

When therefore I talk of church and say that I want “ones like the ones on my car!”, I am not talking about groups like these.

Scary Halloween Guises

2009-10-31T21:26:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in my house right now with most of the lights out, hoping that no trick-or-treaters bang on my door, because I didn't buy any candy this year. And I'm thinking about how it's sometimes interesting in a wryly funny way for me to look back on the time I spent in a strict, aberrant church and to see the similarities between that group and many other group settings I see in the broader society. One thing our head honcho seemed to want is to make sure that we were known for all the things we didn't do, as a means of setting ourselves apart as holier than our fellow men.

One of those forbidden things was to celebrate religious holidays such as Christmas or Easter, because this was supposed to be “worldly.” So it was that a few years after I left that church, while I was still living in So. Cal., I decided to put up Christmas lights on my house as a gesture of rebellion against my past. Trouble is, it does sometimes rain in California – especially in the winter. Being the electrical engineer that I am, I worried that rain might short out my Christmas lights. So one Sunday after the worship service, I talked to the associate pastor at the Lutheran church I was attending at the time. He knew some of my history and we had often had conversations about the disaster of modern American evangelicalism. This time, I had a very important spiritual question: “Pastor, er, um...how exactly do you keep Christmas lights from shorting out in the rain?” (The answer involves plastic bags and duct tape.)

One big thing that we didn't (with a capital D) do was Halloween. The reason given was that the origins of Halloween are satanic, and that as Christians we don't want to acknowledge or celebrate the lies of the enemy. To this day I believe that this is an accurate statement. However, we carried it to a ridiculous extreme, especially in the workplace, where our leaders often encouraged us to go out of our way to be self-righteous sticks in the mud, disapprovingly wagging our fingers at anyone who dressed up as anything other than themselves on Halloween.

This caused many of us to miss a great deal of humor. I remember how, a few years after I had gotten out of the Army, I was working at a defense plant. One Halloween I had to go to work late because of an appointment of some kind or another in the morning. Once I arrived at work, I went to a parts crib on the second floor to get something or another, and I was greeted by a couple of nuns working the parts counter. Taken aback, I wondered aloud if our company had decided to hire members of a South American Catholic society...then I recognized the faces of a couple of co-workers wrapped up in those nuns' habits.

Now that I'm an engineer, I find it refreshing to meet my co-workers from time to time in a guise other than the ones they normally wear. (Engineers can be so straight ;) ) Last year, our office had a Halloween potluck in which lead engineers, assistant department managers, project managers and others let themselve act just a bit silly. One guy dressed up as a geek who had gotten some of his limbs caught in an industrial machine. A project manager dressed as a rock dj, and a project engineer dressed as a folk singer. A couple of women engineers, along with some with designer/draftswomen and secretaries, dressed like kids going to a slumber party. I must say, they all looked cute. (FYI, when a guy says “cute,” he frequently means, quaintly, ridiculously, endearingly funny. That's how I mean it here.)

This year, I dressed up as myself. That's probably scary enough for most people, I think. But as I am reminded of all the nit-picky ways in which our church tried to differentiate itself from the rest of Christendom, and how this nit-picking is characteristic of legalistic, totalist groups – especially some of the Plymouth Brethren (Darbyite) variety and its many offshoots, including those people who run around telling everyone that they are God's deputy authorities on earth – I have come up with an idea for next Halloween. I think I'll dress up as one of the stricter Plymouth Brethren. Now that should be scary!

The Party Of Godliness (?)

2009-10-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,

go ahead and cheat a friend;

Do it in the name of Heaven,

justify it in the end.

There won't be any trumpets blowin'

come the Judgment Day;

on the bloody mornin' after...

one tin soldier rides away.

– One Tin Soldier, by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter; orginal recording by The Original Caste

Sometimes I'm slow to pick up on emerging political developments. So forgive me if you've already heard that Republican U.S. Senator John Ensign was recently found to have had an affair with the wife of one of his staffers, or that in order to cover up this affair, the Senator found a high-paying position in a lobbying firm for that staffer, or that in 2008, Senator Ensign's parents paid the staffer's wife $96,000 as “hush money.”

This is interesting because of the fact that in 2008, as in several previous elections, the American “Christian” right exhorted evangelicals to support the Republican party because the Republicans were the “party of godliness,” and were thus America's last best hope for preservation as a “Christian” nation. Of course, their definition of “Christian” was somewhat narrow, consisting only of the following:

Respect for the American flag and the Constitution
Supporting our troops!
Opposing homosexuality and abortion
Upholding traditional marriage
and supporting unhindered capitalism

(Why did I put the word Christian in quotation marks in the paragraph above? Because it's my way of saying, “You may call this 'Christian', but you overlooked a few things!” Or as a movie character once said, “Finding a mouse in a cookie jar doesn't make it a cookie.”)

2009 seems to be the year for imploding Republicans, as 2006 was. Not only do we have Senator Ensign's immoral and illegal acts, but we have South Carolina's Republican Governor Mark Sanford, who was caught in an adulterous affair and who used taxpayer money to try to cover it up. Then there's California Assemblyman Mark Duvall from Orange County who was also caught “kissing the wrong woman.” I could go on and name former Congressman Chip Pickering, or Charles Jensen, Paradise Valley Mayor Vernon Parker and Arizona conservative talk show host Mike Broomhead. Jenson, Parker and Broomhead were leaders of an Arizona Republican political organization. There are other names, of course. If you are reading this and you think your name should be here, please forgive me if I failed to mention you.

Funny thing is, all the so-called “Christian Coalition” and “family values” groups that condemned people like former President Clinton and former attorney general Eliot Spitzer have been quite silent about recent Republican meltdowns. These people have been extremely quick to condemn the moral degeneracy of the Democrats. Why are they silent now? (Hey, James Dobson and Tony Perkins, I can't hear you!!!) Is it because the threat of moral degeneracy is no longer important to them? And why have so many Republican politicians refused to resign from office after being outed?

Could it be that their real agenda has nothing to do with Christian morality? Could it be that their professed “godliness” is simply a ploy to get votes from gullible people? What do they actually support, beside economic, political and military domination of the world, and the securing of an extremely lavish lifestyle for a small minority of the world at the expense of the rest of the world? Don't get me wrong – homosexuality and abortion are in fact sin. But so are greed and murder and the violation of the poor.

Yeah, yeah, I know – you've heard me say this time and time again. But I just found out about Senator Ensign. Thinking about how hard the Republicans have fought to tear apart all of our social safety nets, I just had to get this off my chest. Thanks for reading.

If you want to read more, check out these links:

Republican sex scandal meets spirituality on C Street, regarding the so-called “Christian” shared housing inhabited by mostly Republican lawmakers, and the code of silence which prevents their talking about housemates who commit high crimes and misdemeanors;

And Another GOP Sex Scandal, whose title is self-explanatory,

And lastly, Audra Shay Wins Young Republican Race Despite Facebook Racism Controversy, which shows something of the Right's real agenda.

Ones Like The Ones On My Car! (Part 1)

2009-10-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

As anyone who has read my blogging can attest, I have a rather low opinion of modern American evangelicalism. (Here's a sample of my thoughts: The Warrens of the Purpose-Driven.) It's probably not surprising then to know that I don't usually visit modern American evangelical churches – especially not the elder-led or staff-led, praise band-driven, “seeker-sensitive” outfits modeled after the guidelines of the “Purpose-Driven Church.” I keep looking for something like the churches I was used to as a kid, where the Lord was worshiped, the Bible was preached, and the pastor was not trying to become some hip, trendy “star” of a religious empire. In my search, I often feel as frustrated as a character in a radio commercial from a couple of decades ago who was shopping for replacement tires for his car. The tire store salesmen kept trying to sell him all sorts of innovative, cutting-edge tires, while he kept repeating “I just want ones like the ones on my car!!!” in an exasperated voice.

Lately I had begun to wonder if perhaps I was not being just a bit narrow-minded, unwilling to give the modern megachurches and wanna-be's a fair hearing. So today I dropped in at a church meeting at an elementary school. Their trendy-looking banner proudly proclaimed, “One True Life Church,” or something like that, and listed their Web address at the bottom. I laughed a bit at the sight of their ultra-cool banner, then worked hard to keep a straight face as I walked up to one of their greeters.

“I already know the answers to my questions,” I told myself, “but just to be fair, I'll ask anyway.” The greeter, an elderly gentleman, eyed me and said “Hello!” in a bright, friendly voice.

“Hi,” I said. “I have a question about your church. Is it a Purpose-Driven church?” The greeter looked at me, puzzled. “Well, we're Christ-driven,” he replied. “What I mean is,” I answered, “are you staff-led or elder-led? Does the congregation pick the leaders, or do the staff? Do you have a praise band that just sings modern worship songs and no old hymns? When you sing your songs, do you have to pay royalties to the CCLI?” The greeter pondered these questions for a few seconds.

While he was thinking, a youthful, burly guy with a goatee walked up and stuck his hand out. “Howdy!” he said, and told me his name. I asked him about whether the church was staff-led or elder led, and who chose the pastor and elders. He looked puzzled. “Gosh,” he said, “well, we've always had the pastor.” “How did you choose your elders?” I asked. “Well, the pastor went around to people who were qualified and asked them if they were willing to be elders,” he replied. “Did the congregation vote on these elders?” I asked. He answered, “No! That's a strange question. Why would the congregation vote on elders?”

“Well then, does the congregation vote on how your money is spent?” I asked. “No, we have a special finance committee that does that,” he said. I asked, “Who chooses the members of the finance committee? Does the congregation?” “No,” he answered. “The pastor and the elders do. Who ever heard of a congregation voting on these things? Why is it such a big deal? You never read of congregations voting on things like that!” “Yes you do,” I said. “In Acts 6, the congregation chose the first seven deacons. The apostles merely laid their hands on those the congregation picked. But I have one last question. Do you have to pay royalties to the CCLI every time you sing a worship song?”

“Who's the CCLI? ...I never heard of them,” he answered. “Do you show your song lyrics on some sort of projection screen?” I asked. “Have you ever noticed at the bottom of the screen, for each song, there is something saying CCLI Number Thus-and-Such?” “Oh...yeah,” he said. “But I never pay attention to those things.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “You've answered all my questions.” Then I walked away, down the street a couple of blocks to a small Korean church whose service was in progress. I sat in the back of their meeting hall and listened. I could not understand a thing. Yet they seemed simple and sincere, without all the show-biz trappings of modern American evangelical churches, and I actually recognized the tunes of some of the hymns they sang. I sang along quietly, in English.

How the LASIK Surgery Went

2009-10-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago, I posted a prayer request regarding an appointment I made for upcoming LASIK vision correction surgery. It has now been over a month since I had the surgery, and I owe a bit of an explanation of how things went. Thanks to all of you who prayed for me. I do apologize for not filling you in on the details sooner.

Everything went quite well. My uncorrected eyes were not that bad. My right eye was the worst, requiring a perscription of just over -4 diopters. The surgeon's office had me eating flax oil and using lubricant eye drops for a few weeks before the surgery, to make sure my eyes were not dry. The surgeon informed me that he had done LASIK for some members of the Portland Trailblazers. They advanced to the first round of this last season's NBA playoffs (although they lost the first round), so I figured they must be able to see well enough to hit the basket. My confidence in my surgeon was helped by this news.

On the day of the surgery, I was given a few eye tests, then a dose of Valium. It wasn't enough to knock me out or even to diminish consciousness that much. Instead, it just made me a bit apathetic. I was glad when it wore off. (Prescription drug addiction isn't one of my besetting sins, I guess.) After the Valium, they led me into a rather ordinary looking room with some sort of apparatus whose details I didn't bother to notice. They laid me into a reclining chair, put a suction cup device on my right eye, and did their business. Then they switched to the left eye. I noticed a profound difference in my vision after they were done.

The first afternoon was the most uncomfortable, although by evening my eyes felt normal. I had to sleep with an eye shield for the first week, and I was told to refrain from rubbing my eyes for the first month. I did notice both glare and haloes around lights at night, although this has gotten quite a bit better.

My left eye seems picture-perfect right now, with vision of 20/15. The vision in my right eye is still settling down, and fluctuates between 20/20 and 20/15, with occasional days where my vision is slightly worse than 20/20. Using lubricating eye drops definitely seems to help. I've been told that the complete healing process takes around three months.

All in all, it's quite liberating to not have to find my glasses when I wake up in the morning, to be free from the terror of losing my glasses should I ever have to travel, and to be free from having to stock up on contact lenses and cleaning solution. Thanks again for your prayers!

The Triumph Of The Love Of Money

2009-09-26T19:26:00.000-07:00

Physics is a fascinating subject, although the fascination can only be sustained by mastery of increasingly complicated mathematics as one delves deeper into it. Otherwise, one soon reaches a point where the subject matter goes entirely over one's head. As a kid, I was fascinated by physics, but was too lazy to dive deeply into the associated math. One very interesting topic was the comparison of forces at scales ranging from the smallest distances (the space within an atom, for instance) to the largest (the space between stars and galaxies).

When we think of forces acting at a distance, electrostatic or magnetic forces often come to mind, because they are very easy to see. Stick a cow magnet into iron-rich dirt and you'll see the dirt clump into a hairy fuzz on the magnet's surface. Put silk or nylon clothes into a dryer in the wintertime and run them through a drying cycle, and when you pull them out, you'll see clothes sticking together and attracting lint because of electrostatic forces. The same forces will give a cat a shock if you rub its fur the wrong way in wintertime, or will give you a shock if you shuffle across a carpet while wearing socks and no shoes, and touch a brass doorknob.

Gravity is another force that's easy to visualize, especially because each of us has to deal with it. Electrostatic and magnetic forces are fun to play with, because they either attract or repel depending on the polarity of the agent producing the electrostatic or magnetic field. Gravity isn't as much fun to play with – unless you're a downhill skier or a skateboarder or a kid building a “land luge” or (do they even have those things anymore?) a soap box derby racer. Otherwise, we relate to gravity primarily by spending most of our lives trying to keep things (such as ourselves) from falling down.

Gravity seems all-pervasive, yet it is actually the weakest force of the the four forces known to physicists as the “fundamental interactions.” As a force, gravity has an infinite range, although the strength of a gravitational field decreases as the square of the distance from the object causing the field. The next strongest force is a very short-range force that acts between subatomic particles, and is called the weak force. It causes certain forms of radioactive decay. It is called “weak,” yet it is 1.67 x 10³² times as powerful as gravity. (That's a lot!) After that comes the electromagnetic force, which is around 7300 times as strong as the weak force, and has an unlimited range with strength decreasing as the square of distance, just like gravity. Lastly, there is the strong force, which is 137 times as powerful as the electromagnetic force, and which has a very short range, just like the weak force. (If you want to know where I got these numbers, look here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/forces/couple.html)

The other three fundamental forces are the foundation for the structure and behavior of matter at scales familiar to everyday life. At these scales, gravity plays a negligible role. For instance, a freeway overpass does not have to be built to withstand its own gravity (although it does have to be built to withstand everyday use within the gravitational field of the Earth). This is true even though the mass of the overpass creates its own gravity, which tends to pull all the parts of it toward its center. But its self-generated gravity is so tiny, and the electromagnetic and nuclear forces of the atoms of its components are so strong, that the gravity of the overpass plays no part in its design. The electromagnetic force, which holds the electrons of an atom in close proximity to its nucleus, is so strong compared to gravity, that if an atom were scaled up to the size of the sun, its electrons would be 400 times farther from it than the sun is from the earth.

Gravity is so weak that one must gather a lot of mass to generate enough gravity to be felt. There are huge rocks (asteroids) in space that are many miles across, but their gravity is so weak that if you stood on one of them, you could put yourself into orbit around it just by taking a running jump. Yet if one accumulates enough mass into one place, gravity can become so strong that it is stronger

than the weak force

than the electromagnetic force

than the strong force;

and that it becomes so strong that it crushes large masses of rock into spherical planets; crushes large clouds of gas into stars;

and given enough mass, crushes everything within its grip into a black hole

from which nothing can escape.

Impressively unexpected for such a weak force, isn't it?

Gravity is just one example of seemingly mundane things with unexpected dimensions. There are moral phenomena that seem quite mundane, yet have the same unexpected, darkly triumphant twist possessed by gravity. One of these moral phenomena is encapsulated in a statement from the Good Book: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil...” (1 Timothy 6:10, World English Bible.) I quote the World English Bible because it is a modern public domain translation. Yet its rendering of this verse is a bit wimpy. The King James version of this verse is more literal: “For the love of money is the root of all evil...” The most literal rendering of this verse reads, “For the love of money is root of all the evils...”

The love of money as the root of all the evils? Is this simply hyperbole, an exaggeration on the part of the writer of these words? Or is it really true?

Back in the day, as the Cold War was entering its terminal phase, a lot of alarmist books were published by members of the American “Christian” media. These books warned against the dangers of various humanist ideologies that were perceived by prominent American evangelical leaders as a threat to the identity and survival of America as a “Christian” nation and as a powerful and rich nation. Many of these books warned against the threat posed by secular humanism, the threat of post-modernism, the threat of multiculturalism, the threat of the New Age movement, and so forth. One particular book comes to mind, namely, Peace, Prosperity and the Coming Holocaust, by Dave Hunt. There were many others like it. The preoccupation with “threat” ideologies carried over into “Christian” fiction as well, as exemplified in Frank Peretti's novels. The focus on “threat” ideologies really kicked into high gear after 9/11.

This focus on ideology as a potential threat really grew out of the major conflicts of the 20^th century, which were largely motivated by ideology. World War II was the world's first modern ideological war, in which the Allied good guys fought against the evil ideologies of Nazism and Fascism. Later, during the Cold War, it became a battle against the Western good guys against “godless Marxist Communism and totalitarianism.” Our relatively lengthy experience of modern ideological conflict convinced many in the West that the deepest evils and the most dangerous moral threats were ideological. This was easy to believe when one saw the insanely fanatical lengths to which ideologues would go to promote their ideologies – from the Chinese “human wave” attacks of the Korean and Vietnam wars to the suicide bombings of the Islamic jihadists. One could also see it in the severe measures taken by ideologue states to enforce their ideology on their citizens, including things that we would call brainwashing.

Against the backdrop of these frighteningly colorful ideologies and the colorful conflicts engendered by them, greed – the love of money – seemed like a wimpy, chump-change sin. How could the love of money really be the root of all evil when we had such obvious, in-your-face evils as atheistic Communism or Islam or the Satanic New Age Movement? Surely the coming empire of the Antichrist would be at its core an ideological empire embodying an ideological evil. Greed would simply be one of its lesser sins.

Yet as I have studied world events over the last two years, I have come to believe that the love of money actually is the root of all evil. I have seen that the world at this time is predominantly owned by a handful of extremely rich interests, who have robbed the poor, have stolen from the needy, have begun to destroy the earth, and have enslaved the powerless – all for the sake of the love of money. And they have invented handy, high-sounding ideologies to justify what is basically an exercise in pure greed. Their ideologies are broadcast over mass media owned by the rich and swallowed unquestioningly by the many gullible sheep among the poor, like Kool-Aid eagerly swallowed on a hot day. Yet it is the greed of the rich that is now driving world events, such as the takeover of world governments by the banking sector and the finance “industry”, the tearing apart of social safety nets for the poor citizens of the world, the invasion of other countries in order to take their natural resources, the persecution of poor ethnic minorities, the defrauding of the Third World via “free trade” agreements, and so forth. The atrocities committed by ideologues in decades past – for the sake of ideology – are now being done by the rich – solely for the sake of greed.

Greed has become the supreme ideology, the real soul behind all the worldly ideologies now pushed on the world, and pushed especially on the American public by America's right wing. And the Good Book seems to indicate that greed – especially mercantile greed – will be one of the chief characteristics of the empire of Antichrist, an empire based on a capitalist economy, as shown in Revelation 18:9-19, which I quote below, for a little bit of light reading:

The kings of the earth, who committed fornication and lived wantonly with her, will weep and wail over her, when they look at the smoke of her burning, standing far away for the fear of her torment, saying, ‘Woe, woe, the great city, Babylon, the strong city! For your judgment has come in one hour.’ The merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise any more; merchandise of gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet, all expensive wood, every vessel of ivory, every vessel made of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble; and cinnamon, incense, perfume, frankincense, wine, olive oil, fine flour, wheat, sheep, horses, chariots, and people’s bodies and souls.

The fruits which your soul lusted after have been lost to you, and all things that were dainty and sumptuous have perished from you, and you will find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, who were made rich by her, will stand far away for the fear of her torment, weeping and mourning; saying, ‘Woe, woe, the great city, she who was dressed in fine linen, purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls! For in an hour such great riches are made desolate.’ Every shipmaster, and everyone who sails anywhere, and mariners, and as many as gain their living by sea, stood far away, and cried out as they looked at the smoke of her burning, saying, ‘What is like the great city?’ They cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and mourning, saying, ‘Woe, woe, the great city, in which all who had their ships in the sea were made rich by reason of her great wealth!’ For in one hour is she made desolate.

As far as sins go, greed may well triumph over all other sins. This is something that American evangelical culture seems to have overlooked.

What The Left Gets Right (And What It Gets Wrong)

2009-09-06T20:14:00.000-07:00

I consider myself to be a Biblical Christian. I believe that the Bible actually is the Word of God, and I believe what the Bible teaches about the holiness of God, the fallenness of man and the remedy for our fallenness in the Lord Jesus Christ. I believe in the Trinity of God (for anyone who thinks the Bible teaches otherwise, let me refer you to Matthew 28:19; John 1:1 and John 10:30, among many other verses). I can recite the Apostles' Creed and mean it, without having my fingers crossed behind my back.

Yet there are many elements of modern American evangelicalism that I can no longer accept. My movement away from its toxic ecclesiastical elements began in 2003. My movement away from its toxic political and economic elements began a bit later, around 2005, as gas prices first soared above $3 a gallon and I started to see just how hard it was for people in America to break free from our predatory economic system. As my movement progressed, I found myself reading and listening to many writers and thinkers on the political Left, people whom I had previously rejected during my flag-waving, Frank Peretti novel-reading, Christian talk-show radio listening, vote-Republican, let's-hang-out-at-the-Christian-bookstore days.

What I found in listening to voices from the Left is that while we usually disagreed on cosmogony (that is, how the universe and the people on earth came to be) as well as matters of personal (especially sexual) morality, there were many matters in which we were in strong agreement. I agreed with the Left's fear that godless, predatory capitalism was destroying the poor of the earth, and that it was destroying the earth itself. I agreed with the Left that the Iraq war was all about oil, and was illegitimate. I agreed with the Left that the world could no longer sustain a society such as ours, that depended on ever-increasing consumption and materialism, and that we would have to change our ways very quickly.

I also began to see the truth of the Left's accusations against the leaders of the Right, namely, that the Right seemed to be nothing more than a bunch of shills for the rich who are the owners of the major pieces of our economic and political systems. Thus I began to listen with new ears when I heard things that I had previously accepted unthinkingly, such as when prominent members of the Religious Right spoke against government-sponsored safety nets for the poor, or opposed the providing of public resources like libraries and mass transit, or railed against attempts to protect the environment. Usually these leaders would denounce such things by calling them “examples of Marxist socialism!!!!” or “governmental intrusion into the (God-given!) free market system.” Now that I was listening with new ears, I noticed that the statements of these leaders sounded like the tantrums of children.

I also noticed how the Left sought to use the discrediting of the Religious Right in order to discredit the Christian faith itself. I talked about this a bit in my post, A Dude In Bedlam. While I agree with many of the criticisms made by the Left, this is going too far. For one thing, it is intellectually dishonest. But the Left has made a further mistake, which, while not a direct attack on Christianity, is yet a result of rejecting one of the central teachings of Christianity. I'll explain it thus:

Many of the writers and thinkers on the Left have correctly diagnosed the present threats and dangers to our modern society and our world, and that these threats and dangers are the result of our greed and exponentially increasing consumption. They have accurately seen the role played by the leaders of our present system in perpetuating that system even though it is destined to break down. They have seen the stubbornness and determination of our leaders and powerful people at all levels of government and economic power in hanging on to their breaking system. They have also seen how many ordinary people are willingly enslaved to that system and its false promise of ever-increasing prosperity.

Yet many of those on the Left continue to believe that humanity is evolving into something better, and that our present difficulty is primarily an evolutionary struggle. They believe that mankind is capable of controlling its destiny in the sense of choosing a better evolutionary path, if only we can be educated to choose it. Thus, when they see the propensity of our society and its leaders to choose a self-destructive path, they propose solutions that don't take the full scope of the human condition into account.

Therefore, there are people who think that if we only teach humanity the proper values, we will all magically start acting differently, and the world will be a better place. There are others who look to evolutionary theory for some key, that if found, would help humanity make the jump to a higher state of being and a more sensible existence. Indeed, there has recently sprung up an entire discipline of “evolutionary psychology,” along with the even more impressive-sounding “evolutionary cognitive psychology,” which attempts to explain destructive and maladaptive human behavior entirely in biological terms. When some of these people give way to cravings they shouldn't indulge, they blame it on their “corpus callosum,” or the remnants of their “reptile brain.” When they see their fellow humans and the people in power making destructive choices, they believe the solution to be education and discussion. So they say things like, “Our leaders and people in power don't seem to understand the threats posed by Peak Oil, climate change, and environmental destruction. Their decisions would be different if they did understand. Therefore we must educate our society. Once they are educated, they will respond differently.”

As a Christian, I see things quite differently. When I see our leaders and the prominent figures of our society choosing the things they choose, I don't blame it on a failure of evolution or a lack of education. I blame it on indwelling evil. The Bible calls certain behaviors evil – and holds these behaviors as evidence that those who practice them are evil. Take the case of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – both the supposed products of thousands of years of “evolution” if you accept the cosmogony of the Left. I don't think that it was a defect of the corpus callosum or an asserting of the remnants of the “reptile brain” that made Bush and Cheney start an unjustified war against a country that had done nothing to us. It's not like they woke up one day and said to each other, “Man, I got a jones on! I've got to have me some Iraqi oil!” No, rather, they manufactured the most elaborate justifications for what they did. This is the nature of evil. Mere biological craving is one thing, but true spiritual evil acts on that craving even when it knows that in doing so, other lives will be violated. And true evil fabricates all sorts of justifications for its actions. The villains of the Right know good and well that what they are doing is wrong, yet they still do it.

Thus we see the failure of the Left – a failure to acknowledge the reality of evil in the world. It's not hard to see why the Left refuses this acknowledgement. For if the Left acknowledged evil as evil, it would also have to acknowledge the existence of an objective, righteous standard that measures good and evil and that exists independently of humans, by which each of us is measured, and which is the product of a righteous Standard-Maker. Acknowledging that the rich and powerful are in violation of the righteous standard of the Standard-Maker would force the members of the Left to look at their own lives and their own violations of that standard. That acknowledgement would force a further acknowledgement of the evil within each of us, our indwelling sin that is untamable by mortal man. Realizing this would lead to the realization of humanity's need for a Redeemer.

Such a realization is too frightening for the Left, whose members cling to standards of their own making suited to their particular quirks, who reject objective morality and an objective God, who blame humanity's present problems on a lack of evolutionary development, and who actually believe that it is possible for humans to create, by their own power, a utopia on earth.

As for me, I don't think we will ever be able to create a utopia by our own power. My views tend to line up with Reinhold Niebuhr, who once said, “It is because we had so completely miscalculated the character of human history that we are so frequently threatened by despair in this day of frustration and disappointed hopes. Our modern culture moved from a too simple optimism to a too deep despair... An adequate faith for a day of crisis will contain what modern men have completely dismissed, namely, a tragic sense of life and a recognition of the Cross as the final center of life's meaning...” (Source: “An Adequate Faith for the World Crisis,” Reinhold Niebuhr, 1947). Left entirely to ourselves, I fully expect that instead of creating utopia, we would create the sort of mess depicted in Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. That book is a unique depiction of original sin, devastatingly funny in places, and in other places, simply devastating.

Prayer request - August 2009

2009-08-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

I just have a short post today (although there are many longer posts that are waiting to be born). It consists of a prayer request. I am going in on Tuesday to get LASIK surgery. Please pray that everything goes well, that my recovery would be swift and without complications, and that I'd see clearly afterward. Thanks much, and thanks for all your readership. (Margaret, I just want to say that I enjoy following your "Assembly Reflections" site. May you have many opportunities to enjoy your children and grandchildren.)

A Dude In Bedlam

2009-08-16T16:35:00.000-07:00

It has been interesting to track the recent reputation of Christianity in America, especially the Evangelical “brand” of Christianity. What has made things especially interesting is my awakening to the great issues which now threaten the global economy and the modern industrialized societies of the First World.

In pondering these issues, I have frequently been arrested by the reaction of many spokespeople for the American Religious Right when they have been confronted with these issues. I think of people like the late Jerry Falwell who said that global warming as an issue was a tool of the devil to distract the Church from the work of proclaiming the Gospel, or James Dobson, who tried to censure the president of the National Association of Evangelicals for speaking out against manmade pollution. I think of the Bible-thumping Republican politicians who have recently bitten the political dust, people like Mark Sanford and Paul Stanley. I think of Monk and Neagle and their pro-Iraq War song, “That's What Soldiers Do.” I think of the flag-waving cheerleaders for the Republican Party who held up John McCain and Sarah Palin as paragons of American godliness during the last election. Then there's the arresting spectacle of Sarah Palin herself, and all of her recent pronouncements against that evil “Muslim,” Barack Obama ;) .

Those on the Left have quite rightly ridiculed many of the things they have seen coming out of the American evangelical community, including its materialism, war-mongering and hypocrisy. But they have gone farther, holding up our examples of idiots as a proof that all of Christianity is therefore idiotic and therefore invalid. To me, such a conclusion is intellectually dishonest; yet there are so few public examples of people who are both reasonable and Biblical, who might be able to refute the conclusions of the Left.

This is a shame. The Good Book itself says, “Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service.” (Romans 12:1, World English Bible) The word rendered “spiritual” is logikos (Greek), and literally means “agreeable to reason, reasonable, logical.” By this “reasonable,” “logical” service, we are to “... be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what is the good, well-pleasing, and perfect will of God.” – Romans 12:2. In other words, Christians are to be a display of the goodness and reasonableness of the perfect will of God.

I would like to be an example of that reasonableness, though I must admit that I'm not always willing to bear the cost of such reasonableness. I look at the antics of many of my so-called “brethren” and feel at times like one of the few sane people in a madhouse (a “dude” in Bedlam, if you will, with all due apologies to the long-deceased author of the song “A Maid in Bedlam” and apologies to the John Renbourn Group). Yet as much as in me is, I will try by both word and deed to prove the reasonableness of the Faith. Hopefully some of that proof will be seen on this blog. So I proceed, cast upon the grace of Christ, to Whom I come again and again to be cured of the same insanity I so often see in my brethren. “For all have sinned...”

Mourning The Death Of Saul

2009-07-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

I fininshed reading Luke a while back and am now in 2 Samuel. There are some interesting passages there about David's reaction to the death of Saul, the death of Saul's commander Abner, and the death of Saul's son Ish-bosheth (see 2 Samuel 1, 3 and 4). David had been anointed king by Samuel, who was obeying God's command to anoint David to replace the disobedient Saul. When Saul saw that the Lord was with David, he feared and envied him, and made his life miserable for over ten years, driving David out into the wilderness and repeatedly trying to kill him.

Eventually Saul died in battle. When David heard the news, he wept. In fact, when the remaining men of power and influence in Saul's house were removed by trickery, David reacted with grief and anger toward those who murdered them.

I found this to be very interesting. When I first left the abusive church I described in my blog, TH in SoC, there were some others who left at the same time who were constantly talking about the need to pray for the leaders of that church, that they might repent. The concern of those who were urging prayer was not that our leaders might otherwise continue to do harm to anyone or pose a danger to anyone, for at the time we left, our church disintegrated, along with many of its satellite churches. It largely ceased to be a danger to anyone. Our “leaders” were neutered, having become “ex-leaders.”

But those who were urging prayer for these men did so out of a genuine care and concern for them. Now there was something. I found that I really couldn't work myself up to any kind of care and concern for them, having been jacked, led astray and continually humiliated by them over a period of many years. And in fact, most of them haven't really repented in any true sense of the word. They haven't come clean about their behavior toward those they led, their abuse of power, their cover-up of abuse and of activities that were probably criminal and that they probably knew to be criminal, and their high-handedness toward the rest of us.

Based on their track record to date, I don't really expect our leaders to become repentant while they are still alive on earth. I certainly don't expect our former head honcho to become repentant. What I expect instead is that on the day of judgment, they all will be basted with napalm and set on the great barbecue grill of eternity. I have to confess that I have derived quite a bit of satisfaction from that thought, especially when I consider the ongoing costs I am still bearing from my involvement with them.

Yet here's David, who had a right to be angry at Saul, yet who mourned over his death. David's mourning is an indicator that he had longed for Saul's repentance and restoration. David had longed to have Abner as a friend, and even to reconcile Ish-bosheth to himself. David is an early example of Christ-likeness. I, on the other hand, have a long way to go. Guess I'd better take the first step...

P.S. Borz Loma Nal has also written a blog post about forgiving abusive church leaders. It can be found here: Forgiving Others.

P.P.S. I still believe that although we are commanded to forgive others, that doesn't mean that we are to associate with people who are abusive, yet unrepentant. Before they can have companions, they must show themselves to be safe. "Bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance..." as the Good Book says.

California Prison Reform Opportunity

2009-07-15T19:15:00.000-07:00

Some readers of my blog The Well Run Dry may have followed my posts on private prison abuse and the prison-industrial complex. The posts are these: Money and Filthy Hands, Our Least Resilient Neighborhoods, Tarnish On The Golden State, Homeboy Culture And The Solari Index, and The Replacement of Petroleum Slaves. For those unfamiliar with this subject, these posts drew on a number of sources who documented how the prison lobby and the private prison “industry” have pushed for harsh sentencing of nonviolent offenders in order to boost the incomes of prison guards and private prison corporations. This lobbying, and “targeted enforcement” by police, have resulted in a disproportionate number of minorities who are locked up in prison.

There is an upcoming opportunity to remedy this situation. On 5 August 2009, the California Rehabilitation Oversight Board will hold a hearing on expanding the Honor Program now operating at California State Prison, Los Angeles County (CSP-LAC). The Honor Program has yielded impressive results in reducing prisoner violence and boosting prisoner rehabilitation, as well as saving taxpayers at least several hundred thousand dollars. A program that heals offenders and sets them straight is a boon to society, even if it means a loss of revenue for private prison corporations and prison guard pensions. Such interests will of course oppose programs that help people escape the prison system. Prison industry lobbyists seem to have a friend in Governor Schwarzenegger, who vetoed a 2007 bill that would have mandated expansion of the Honor Program, and whose proposed 2009 budget would increase California's use of private prisons (Sources: http://www.youthradio.org/news/schwarzenegger-talks-private-prisons-and-budget-cuts; and http://reason.org/blog/show/solving-the-ca-budget-governat)

However, not all Californians (or ex-Californians like me) are so evil that they want to profit from breaking the lives of others. Therefore, supporters of the Honor Program will be out in force at the meeting on the 5^th of August. Their goal is to expand the Honor Program to all California prisons.

I was invited to go, but I don't know if I'll be able to make it. If any readers are available on that date, feel free to attend and help make a positive difference. Here is a link to the Honor Program website: http://www.prisonhonorprogram.org/. I have also included the invitation e-mail below:

Dear Honor Program Supporter:

We are closer than ever to achieving official support of the Honor Program by the CDCR. In recent months, we have been very successful in gaining the attention of CDCR Secretary Matthew Cate and Inspector General David Shaw, who have indicated their interest in the program. There are very positive signs that the CDCR plans to take action in the near future to fully support and implement the program.

However, we need your help to ensure this actually happens! Especially at this time of fiscal crisis, when so much attention is being given to California's state budget (to the exclusion of other important matters), we must remind Secretary Cate of the importance of the Honor Program.

Please plan to attend the upcoming C-ROB (California Rehabilitation Oversight Board) meeting in Sacramento on Wednesday, August 5, 2009. Secretary Cate attends these meetings, which are a perfect opportunity to advocate directly with the decision maker.

We want to see as many Honor Program supporters as possible attend the August 5 meeting to provide public testimony and encourage Secretary Cate to follow through on his plans to support the program. (If you are not comfortable with public speaking, your physical presence alone will send a message to Secretary Cate of the degree of public support for the program.) Please reply to this e-mail if you would like to attend the meeting and have questions or need more information.

For more information on the C-ROB meeting, go to http://www.oig.ca.gov/pages/c-rob.php .

Thank you very much for your support.

Sincerely,

THE FRIENDS AND FAMILIES FOR THE HONOR PROGRAM

Newspapers, Church Culture and Bad Breath

2009-07-12T16:09:00.000-07:00

(I want to give due acknowledgement for this post to ideas I read on Brant Hansen's blog Letters From Kamp Krusty, particularly his post FAQ #24: Shouldn't We Just Stay Where We Are, and Work for Change, Rather than Abandoning the Church? These ideas mirrored ideas that had also occurred to me, but it was nice to see confirmation by Brant and those who commented on his post.)

Let me tell you the story of a ficticious acquaintance of mine, named Fred, who found himself involved in an interesting and rather awkward social situation a while back. Fred was hired as a high school music teacher and band coach. At the school which hired him, music and band had traditionally been the most popular classes, with many more kids wanting to sign up than there were spaces available. But when Fred began teaching, he noticed a curious change.

During the first few weeks of his first teaching term, a number of students dropped out of his classes. Others begged to be let in, yet upon meeting Fred, they quickly changed their minds. The band began to shrink alarmingly, as a number of of trombone players and drummers dropped out. Even the flugelhorn player quit. Fortunately for the school, Fred had been hired at the start of the winter term, so the band's participation in the football season wasn't immediately threatened. Fred also noticed that as he made his rounds on campus, both students and teachers tended to avoid him and to keep their interactions with him as brief as possible.

Now Fred had minored in psychology while in college, so he began to formulate various theories about what was happening at his high school. He thought at first that he was experiencing a simple “generation gap” in which teens felt that they couldn't relate to adults like him. But as he watched students talking with other teachers he was forced to abandon this hypothesis. Then he began to think that maybe there had been a secret shift in Myers-Briggs personality types among both students and faculty – that maybe society as a whole had become decidedly more introverted. Yet as he saw students clowning around during lunch, he had to abandon that hypothesis also. Lastly, he theorized that the rise of “social electronics” such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, texting and i-Pods had conditioned students and faculty to interact with each other virtually, and that they were uncomfortable with face-to-face interactions with their fellow flesh-and-blood humans.

But one day the town dentist showed up at school to give his daughter a ride home. The daughter was a tuba player in Fred's band class. As the dentist talked with Fred, he suddenly blurted, “Man, your breath stinks! I can tell just by looking at your teeth that dental hygiene isn't one of your priorities. Your teeth look like they haven't been brushed in six months!”

Now Fred doesn't really exist (at least as far as I know), yet his rationalizations and his social blind spot are typical of some large-scale American social institutions that are now failing. Over time, these institutions have adopted a view that they are indispensable to American life, and they can't believe that they are now declining. One of the evidences of their disbelief is the invention of imaginative theories to explain or rationalize that decline.

Take newspapers for instance. Many articles have been written recently about the death of newspaper journalism in America. Those articles I have read have blamed such factors as rising American illiteracy; the increasing prominence of electronic journalism such as radio, TV and Internet news; and the rise of social media such as blogs, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and podcasts. (See http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman for instance.) Many pundits who focus on the impact of social media also talk of the changing tastes and culture of young adults. Of course, all these articles have been written by newspapers or other mainstream media outlets. The main point of all these articles can be summarized as saying that the newspaper as an American institution is dying due to large-scale societal and technological shifts that are beyond the control of newspapers.

Yet newspapers (and by extension, mainstream media in general) are neglecting the real possibility that their breath stinks. Let me tell you why I don't regularly buy newspapers. It's because most American papers are now owned by a handful of extremely rich corporations, whose aim is to present a view of the world most conducive to maximizing profits. The fact that this view of the world frequently doesn't match reality doesn't seem to bother them too much. One example is the coverage of the protests at the G20 conference in London earlier this year. Fox News, CNN, USA Today and others uniformly portrayed the protesters as a handful of crazed anarchists and the London police as virtuous professionals who were simply doing their jobs. Yet it took citizen journalists broadcasting video on YouTube to show the reality – that the London police were guilty of savage brutality and provocation. Another example is the recent violent clashes in Peru between indigenous peoples and the Peruvian military and international oil companies who had been granted permission by the Peruvian government to go into indigenously inhabited areas to drill for oil. The indigenous people were rightly upset that their homelands were about to be ruined for the sake of oil company profits. I'll bet that this story wasn't widely published on page 1 of most major papers.

Why should I therefore pay money to someone to lie to me? Why should I spend my money to be dumbed down? When a major event like a hurricane impacts the U.S., why should I rely on American media, who shy away from a rigorous presentation of the strategic impacts of such an event, and who focus instead on “human interest” stories? (An example: instead of saying, “The hurricane is a Category 3 storm with a diameter of XX miles, and will impact the following industries in these regions, etc.” we get something like this: “We're here at the Last Chance Catfish Bar and Grill with Bo and his two dogs, Cletus and Fred. Bo, you fixin' to ride out this storm?”)

This blindness and stinkiness also applies to the present state of American evangelicalism. But here it's a bit harder to get at the truth of what's going on. We do know that there has been an explosion of interest in “church growth” since Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven books and seminars were introduced. There are also examples of impressively-sized megachurches throughout America, as well as anecdotal accounts of increased church attendance during our present economic crisis. Yet there is also evidence of a decline in church membership overall, as well as a decline in evangelical influence within the broader American public.

For instance, a 2007 Church Solutions Magazine article stated that the number of “unchurched” Americans had risen to nearly 100 million. (Source: http://www.churchsolutionsmag.com/hotnews/74h293758.html) This article cited a study performed by the Barna Group, which also found that of that 100 million unchurched, ten million were born-again Christians. An October 2008 article in the Oregonian described the fall in church revenues due to the economic crisis. (See http://nacba.net/Article/Churches_money.htm). And a recent USA Today article stated that megachurch growth is now stalling. (Imagine that!) (Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-09-08-megachurches-numbers_N.htm. See also Megachurch - The Megachurch Future.pdf as well as this from the Suburban Christian blog: Suburbia and the rise and fall of megachurches.) One megachurch pastor cited in these studies mentioned a “back door problem”: “We have over 500 people joining our church every month, but just as many are leaving each month. Our back door is as big as our front door!”

There are various theories floated by pastors, church-growth “consultants” and other members of the evangelical intelligentsia in order to explain these phenomena. The theories sound very similar to those cited to explain the death of newspapers: changing demographics, the rise of social media, changes in culture, and so on. There are also some added, highly creative explanations, such as the rise in a “post-modern” mindset. Some evangelical thinkers have even come up with their own term for this, shortening “post-modern” to “po-mo.” There are also those who talk of how we're in the midst of some new spiritual movement that will result in the appearance of an “emergent” church. Others talk of how we're failing to “meaningfully engage the culture.” But these theorists conveniently ignore the specific ways that modern American evangelicalism is turning people off.

Consider megachurches again. According to a study performed by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, megachurches collect healthy revenues, yet half of their income goes to staff salaries and benefits. (Source: http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/megastoday2008_summaryreport.html). Modern evangelicalism has bred a veritable mob of pastors who want to have their own megachurch. Church growth movements such as the Purpose-Driven movement have formulated a body of techniques designed to make church attenders into unquestioning supporters of their pastors and of their pastors' desires to build religious empires, as I documented on my blog TH in SoC under the post, The Warrens of the Purpose-Driven. I have recently been reading Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford, and in reading his description of how white-collar organizations try to program their employees into organizational drones, I couldn't help but think of the Purpose-Driven movement.

Consider also how the issue of abusive churches has been raised over the last two decades through such excellent books as Churches that Abuse and The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, as well as by means of many websites. Yet in reading of the shenanigans practiced by some large evangelical churches, it seems to me that their pastors have read all the material they could find on abusive churches, then tried hard to perfect the abusive techniques they read about. (In much the same way, I think that Western growth capitalists and Chinese authoritarians are doing their best to steal tips and techniques of control from each other – but that's another subject, for another blog.)

Consider how American evangelicalism and its support structures have become simply a machine for collecting money and political power from a certain sector of the population. Consider how many Americans are turned off by a politicized Christianity that supports consumerism, empires and wars of conquest with talk of “God and country,” yet neglects the charity commanded by the New Testament.

I'd like to suggest that Americans are rejecting the institutional evangelical church because the institutional church has become an exploitative place. They are searching for alternatives to the institutional church, yet institutional church leaders are still bent on building large empires for themselves. In a Barna group study on alternatives to conventional church experience, the church explorations of average Americans were discussed, as well as the reactions of mainstream pastors. Significantly, while two out of three pastors agreed that “house churches are legitimate Christian churches,” less than half of these said that they would ever recommend a house church to anyone. Resistance to house churches was highest among pastors who earned more than $75,000 a year. (I wonder why...) (Source: http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/19-organic-church/47-americans-embrace-various-alternatives-to-a-conventional-church-experience-as-being-fully-biblical)

The American evangelical church needs to repent. Pastors in particular need to repent. If this means getting counseling for egotism, greed and sociopathic tendencies, or even resigning the pastorate, so be it. I have no intention of becoming part of someone's religious empire. Been there, done that. I didn't go to church today (although I would really have liked to). It's not because of some mysterious, inexplicable spiritual/socioeconomic shift in American society. But pastors, it's because man, your breath stinks! You need to brush your teeth!

The Politics Of The Crucifixion

2009-06-28T14:17:00.000-07:00

This last week, I read Luke 23, Luke's account of the Crucifixion. The story as a whole is one of great pathos. Yet Luke's account points out a fact that is not often noticed, namely that among those in Jerusalem on that day there was a sizeable group of people who were grieved by the Crucifixion – a group composed of many more people than the eleven apostles. Note the following passage:

When they led him away, they grabbed one Simon of Cyrene, coming from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it after Jesus. A great multitude of the people followed him, including women who also mourned and lamented him. But Jesus, turning to them, said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, don't weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming in which they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.' Then they will begin to tell the mountains, 'Fall on us!' and tell the hills, 'Cover us.' For if they do these things in the green tree, what will be done in the dry?” – Luke 23:26-31.

There is also this:

It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. The sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was torn in two. Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” Having said this, he breathed his last. When the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying, “Certainly this was a righteous man.” All the multitudes that came together to see this, when they say the things that were done, returned home beating their breasts. All his acquaintances, and the women who followed with him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things. – Luke 23:44-49.

Why was Jesus Christ crucified? The answer to that question is both political and spiritual, and the political aspect is but a pale shadow, the most rudimentary reflection of the spiritual. We know that ultimately, Christ was sacrificed to redeem us from our sins, so that those of us who believe in Him might be made citizens of a heavenly kingdom. Yet why did the earthly rulers of Judea and the Roman empire choose to crucify Him?

The answer is that He was a threat to earthly empire and earthly elites, a threat to earthly rulers who viewed their office solely as a means to maximize their prestige and status by oppressing and exploiting their subjects and making a prey out of them. He was a threat to the scribes and Pharisees, the earthly proxy rulers of the Jews, who “...bind heavy burdens that are grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not lift a finger to help them.” His teachings were also a threat to the Gentile power elites, of whom He said, “The kings of the nations lord it over them, and those who have authority over them are called 'benefactors.' But not so with you. But one who is the greater among you, let him become as the younger, and one who is governing, as one who serves.” Though He never preached violent revolution or armed resistance, He was a threat to the earthly elites of His time and place, because by His words and deeds He threatened their legitimacy and their conscience. Therefore they crucified Him.

Who then were the multitudes who mourned the Crucifixion? These were the earthly poor in Israel, those marginalized and preyed upon by the ruling elites. To them, the teaching of Christ was good news, and He had become their hope. Through His words and deeds they got a taste of a new society, a new kingdom in which righteousness dwells, a society whose subjects would no longer be oppressed, exploited or preyed upon. Though their hope was not realized fully at that time, it is no less valid now than it was then.

This is the hope of all true believers in God, from Abraham and onward. This is what makes Christianity such good news to the poor and marginalized, and it is the reason why the Faith spread so rapidly throughout the oppressive Roman empire. This is the hope of true believers today, who cry to God that justice may be done in the earth. And part of the fervency of the prayer for justice comes from seeing and experiencing the injustice done on earth by the ruling elites of the world.

In my blogging, I cover many social issues and events, things that are frankly quite unjust, and I have to admit that sometimes I get really mad at what I see. At times I feel like flinging my computer against a wall and shouting, “There's no justice!” Luke 23, oddly enough, was a bit of an antidote to the anger, a calming answer. (Luke 24 is even better!)

One other thing to note is how out of touch are the spokespeople for the modern American Religous Right. Rather than siding with the poor and marginalized, they have sided with the ruling elites of our time and place, and have become their mouthpieces.

Note: All Scripture quotations are taken from the World English Bible, a public domain translation. No royalties are owed to anyone for its use, and it may be freely quoted and read in all settings, public and private.

The Sanctity of Whose Life?!

2009-06-21T16:52:00.001-07:00

The United States Supreme Court made the news this week by means of a controversial decision. In the decision, the majority of the Court denied the Constitutional right of convicted prisoners to have access to DNA testing evidence that might clear them. The court case was brought by representatives of Mr. William G. Osborne, who over ten years ago was convicted in Alaska of rape and battery of a prostitute. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged the unparalleled power of DNA testing to exonerate the innocent, yet stated that the granting of the right to such exoneration was a matter “best left to the States.” (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/us/19scotus.html?_r=1)

The trouble is that there are four states which do not have laws granting prisoners access to DNA evidence or testing in order to prove their innocence. Alaska is one of these states. Any state therefore which decides to deny due process to wrongly convicted people can now do so, with the Supreme Court's official blessing. The five Supreme Court justices who formed the majority opinion – Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito – were all appointed by conservative, right-wing, supposedly “Christian” Presidents. Scalia and Kennedy were appointed by Ronald Reagan. Thomas was appointed by President Bush (the First). Roberts and Alito were appointed by G.W. Bush, who brought us the second Iraq War along with Guantanamo and waterboarding.

This is all very interesting, as it reminds me of the arguments often used by the American Religious Right to try to induce all Christians to support the Republican Party and American patriotism. I heard such arguments again recently from people who are upset that Obama won, saying such things as “I don't see how a godly, biblical Christian could vote for Obama!” They get on the soap box of how only the Republicans are willing to defend the sanctity of human life, and they point to traditional Republican opposition to abortion. Then they point to pictures of Republican candidates at religious conventions or at churches, and say, “See? These are God-fearing, church-going men!”

This is garbage. Utter nonsense. As a Christian, I also oppose abortion, and I stand for the sanctity of the lives of the unborn. But regard for the sanctity of human life extends to those who have already been born and who are walking on the earth now. The Religious Right and the Republican Party claim to have concern for all life, yet they show a curious lack of concern for the lives of the people jacked, ripped off and taken advantage of by them and the corporate interests they represent. They are especially callous in their treatment of the poor, the foreigners, and the non-white. (Note the skin color of Mr. Osborne.)

“But ah,” said some during the last election. “We acknowledge that 'mistakes' were made by President Bush. But McCain is not Bush! He will be different! And Sarah Palin is a God-fearing, loving, Christian mother!” But Sarah Palin is also the Governor of Alaska, the state that fought Mr. Osborne's petition for enhanced DNA testing, even though Osborne was willing to pay the cost of the testing himself. The prosecutors for Alaska even acknowledged that this testing could have cleared Mr. Osborne's name once and for all. Sarah Palin is also a Republican politician, and has probably benefited greatly along with other Republican politicians from generous campaign donations from the private prison “industry” and the prison-industrial complex. (Source: Looking for the Next Mr. Goodweimer)

Is it true then, that all it takes to get the support of mainstream American evangelical culture is to host a few photo-ops in a church while holding a Bible? Or while on one's knees, eyes tightly closed and face contorted in an expression of “serious” prayer? How gullible and stupid we are! Will we traipse along behind any liar promoted by the mouthpieces of the Religious Right, just because we see their campaign ads on the “Fox Faith” network or we see books in the local “Christian” bookstore talking about how “godly” these people are? What happened to our Lord's warning, “You shall know them by their fruits”? Those who continue to support the Republicans as the party of “godliness” are neither wise as serpents, nor harmless as doves. Rather, they are so gullible that they shouldn't be let outside their homes unsupervised – especially if they have money in their pockets. Of many of the Republicans, the Good Book says, “They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood.” (Psalm 94:21, World English Bible) Godly? Hah! Gasoline has a better chance of surviving hell unburnt than some of these people.

How Do Children Receive?

2009-06-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the Gospel of Luke lately. I was in Luke 18 and came on three short vignettes that made me think. The first is the Lord's story about the Pharisee and the tax-collector, how they both went into the Temple to pray, and how the Pharisee thanked God that he was better than other men while the tax-collector kept saying, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner!” The second story concerns how people were bringing their babies to the Lord Jesus to be blessed by Him, and how His disciples tried to stop this. The third story is that of the rich young ruler who came to Jesus and asked Him what he needed to do to inherit eternal life.

The story about the children is the one that impressed me most. After I left the abusive church I wrote about in my blog, TH in SoC, I checked out a few older, traditional churches with a more formal liturgy. One thing that I found hard to swallow was their practice of baptizing infants (although I thought their liturgies were cool). While their pastors justified infant baptism via passages such as Luke 18 (and I eventually learned to keep my mouth shut on this point), I don't think that this passage has to do with sprinkling water on babies. To me it seems that the story about the children seems to tie all three stories together, because I think it has an element that is common to all three, namely, that receiving the Kingdom involves a conscious choice to assume a humble and lowly identity, rather than trying to be a big, impressive grown-up.

For instance, the proud, self-righteous Pharisee who prayed in Luke 18:11-12 received nothing in return, but the tax-gatherer, fully aware of his faults, who kept asking God for mercy, received mercy. The children who were brought to the Lord were incapable of putting on adult acts to try to impress anyone, yet they received His blessing. The rich young ruler was offered a chance to receive perfection, if only he was willing to give up his wealth and the privelege and status that went with it.

How very different this line of thought is from our present culture, which manufactures all sorts of societal and organizational ladders composed of our fellow human beings, and trains us all from youth onward to be ladder-climbers. Many of us see the ridiculousness of this aspect of our culture, and we poke fun at it via comic strips like Dilbert and TV shows like The Office. Why do we try to drag this ladder-climbing culture into the Church?

A "Cutting-Edge" Church Trend?

2009-05-31T14:25:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, I had to do a bit of traveling. As I was driving through several small towns, I stopped from time to time to take pictures of things that caught my interest. This picture was especially arresting. It seems that there is a church whose pastor is trying something radical, and who in doing so is breaking away from the rest of the pack.

This pastor is preaching a sermon series, yet his sources are not taken from the usual suspects. No series on books like Wild at Heart, The Shack, The Purpose-Driven Life, The Power of a Man, or Joyce Meyer's Never Give Up. Instead, this guy has chosen to preach on a relatively obscure book titled, The Gospel of Mark. Who ever heard of doing something like that?!

I've come to expect that when I visit a modern garden-variety evangelical church, I'll have to sit through cheesy music from a pop-music “praise band,” followed by a sappy, emotive sermon full of cute “heartwarming” stories centering on sports or lost pets. I wonder if that's what this guy did. I sort of doubt it – having gotten my hands on a copy of the Gospel of Mark, I have concluded that it doesn't really lend itself to that kind of sermonizing. Anyway, I guess I'll never know how this guy's sermon series went, as I had miles to go to reach my destination, and I couldn't stop. Maybe this “Gospel of Mark” thing will catch on in evangelical churches. There seem to be a lot of good books where the Gospel of Mark came from – books with titles like Matthew, Genesis, Luke, Isaiah, and so on.

Splintery Eyes

2009-05-24T23:44:00.000-07:00

Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but don't consider the beam that is in your own eye? Or how will you tell your brother, 'Let me remove the speck from your eye;' and behold, the beam is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye.

Matthew 7:3-5, World English Bible (a public domain translation.)

This passage came to my mind out of the blue recently. I had been thinking about how dismally Religious Right figures like James Dobson had failed to evangelize or even influence the culture around them, and this passage came up. It talks about how a Christian should approach correcting another Christian, but I think it also applies to how a Christian should approach witnessing to the world. Our problem in America has been that we've been running around trying to do eye surgery on others without checking our own vision first.

What rafters, beams, timbers and other large wooden objects might we have to remove from our own eyes? Many of our “splinters” can be characterized by a love of money, a greedy materialism, and the dishonesty that tries to twist Scripture in order to justify our greed. The world sees through this, and often cites this greed as a reason for not believing the message of Christianity. This is seen especially in those who view the Christian witness as simply another tool of American empire-building. Getting rid of our splinters might mean facing the real reasons for our “prosperity,” as well as renouncing the supposed right to excessive consumption. It might mean the divorce of Christianity from patriotism in this country. Then we would see clearly to remove the specks from the eyes of others, and they might actually begin to trust us.

Ah, but for every time I point a finger at the Religious Right, there are three fingers pointing back at me. For I have also been reading the Gospel of Luke recently. A few weeks ago I was reading Luke 3, where John the Baptist is calling his audience the offspring of vipers and telling them to “bring forth fruits worthy of repentance.” When they asked him what they should do to demonstrate their repentance, he gave them an answer that focused mainly on how they treated money and possessions. One big point was that those who have any surplus should share with those who have none. I have a few things – not a huge stash, but there are a few surplus items. Yet I find that I myself don't always share well.

Anger Management On Two Wheels

2009-05-10T17:01:00.000-07:00

A fellow blogger recently described having to battle personal anger earlier this year. This blogger was brutally honest about the battle, and about how their initial angry outburst did not help the cause they were championing, but hurt instead. The blogger also honestly described the process of working through the roots of the anger in order to formulate better responses to it in the future.

Now one thing I've discovered over the years is that when people reveal a bit of themselves in public, their audience often contains quiet people listening with expressionless faces that seem to say, “Your problem is very interesting. But as you can see, I haven't confessed to any such problem; therefore, you must be an unusual case!” If the confessors could only see into the lives of many of their silent hearers, they would know instantly that they are neither unusual or alone.

Anyway, here's my bit of confession for the week. I am an evangelical Christian who believes that many in the American evangelical camp no longer represent Christ, because they are no longer willing to model His otherworldliness, kindness, charity, and freedom from materialism. In my blogging, I've been trying to paint a different portrait of the Faith than that normally seen from the Religious Right. I realize that the work of painting such a portrait extends far beyond blogging, and encompasses all of daily life.

But there is (at least!) one area in which I fall down on the job, and that's as a bicycle commuter. Anyone who reads my other blog, The Well Run Dry, knows what I think about Peak Oil and global warming, and how these are the main reasons why I commute by bike as much as possible. What people may not know (unless they also commute by bike) is how much of a life-threatening struggle it can be at times, because of impatient drivers. The driving culture in America has become ever more “driven” over the years, due to TV ads for ever larger, faster and more powerful cars, SUV's and trucks, as well as ever more lax enforcement of traffic laws. Drivers who get stuck in traffic on main arterials are increasingly barreling through adjacent residential neighborhoods, endangering kids, pedestrians and bicyclists. Residents in these neighborhoods are buying more and more cautionary signs saying things like, “SLOW – KIDS PLAYING,” or are spray-painting words like “SLOW – CHILDREN” on the asphalt of their streets. All these things are a plea to motorists to give up their murderous hurrying impatience, because people don't want a motorist to kill them or their children.

As for me, my response has been somewhat stronger, especially lately. I'm tired of being buzzed by people who can't abide a delay of even a few seconds, and in fact, I've allowed myself to be provoked to real anger. Sometimes I've expressed this anger in a way that I thought humorous (although I'm not sure the drivers I targeted saw the humor) – for instance, when I've been buzzed or threatened by a motorist in passing and have managed to catch up to that motorist at a light, I've been known to sing, “TEN DOLLARS A GALLON! TEN DOLLARS A GALLON! ONE DAY, YOU'LL HAVE TO PAY – TEN DOLLARS A GALLON!” at the top of my lungs.

Other times, the response hasn't been so humorous. I've allowed myself to react with words I haven't used since I was in the Army. I've fantasized about settling a few disputes by physical means. The thing that got me to stop and look at this whole process of anger was an incident that happened last week. That Monday I had passed an accident scene where it seems that a car had cut in front of a bicyclist going downhill, causing the bike to crash into the car and sending the rider onto the pavement. The ambulance and several police cars were there by the time I passed. That provoked a sullen, smouldering anger that stayed with me the whole day, just under the surface.

The next day as I was riding home from work, I got to a two-lane street in a business district. The part I was on was rather narrow, but there was a stop sign about fifty yards ahead, with a much wider stretch of road on the other side of the sign. As I was riding, an SUV turned onto the street and started closing in behind me. I sped up to about 15 miles per hour in order to get quickly to the wider stretch of road beyond the stop sign. But the lady driving the SUV was in a bit of a hurry, and sped up to pass me on the left – just as I got to the stop sign!

We both had to stop, as there was moving traffic on the cross street. This gave me time to shout, “So! A delay of three seconds is enough to make you kill someone?! You selfish, impatient car driver!”

The lady – a middle-aged woman – responded by blowing me a kiss. At that I got even angrier, and as we both rolled through the stop sign I followed her to a shop, where she got out of her car. I stopped and shouted the same complaint to her, and she responded by saying that she had given me plenty of room when she passed. In her response she was not nearly as loud as I was. In fact, she was a model of reasonableness. She explained the kiss as a means of wishing me well and that she was not trying to be hostile.

Truly, “a soft answer turns away wrath,” as the Good Book says. I sort of wilted. “All right,” I said. “You're being reasonable, so I will be reasonable.” But I did give her a (very) condensed version of the story of Peak Oil and climate change, and told her that stupid idealists like me were riding our bikes as a way of reducing our exposure on one hand and our culpability on the other hand. In return, all we were asking was to be allowed to stay alive. She received that statement sympathetically, although she told me that she had different beliefs about climate change. Then she stuck her hand out and wished me a good evening. I sheepishly shook her hand and rode off.

I still think the lady could have waited until we were both on the wider part of the street before she passed. But it occurs to me that I can't be a very good expression of Christ if I get a reputation for yelling at motorists. Those of you who are of the Faith, please pray for me.

A Sabbath Rest

2009-04-25T20:04:00.000-07:00

Are Christians required to keep the Sabbath? That question has been on the back burner of my mind since my last visit with members of the Russian church I described in earlier posts. I know of those who say that the Old Testament Sabbath observance was a picture of the rest believers now have in Christ, and that Christ is the fulfillment of the Sabbath promise of rest. I believe that this is true. Yet I also believed firmly at one time that this meant that Christians were no longer under obligation to keep the Sabbath, as the Old Testament Sabbath observance was simply part of the ceremonial part of the Law of Moses, to which we are no longer obligated since Christ has fulfilled this Law.

Now I'm not so sure. Certainly, while the ceremonial law has been fulfilled and we are no longer under obligation to it, our lives are still to model God's moral law, embodied in the Ten Commandments. It's not okay for Christians to steal, to tell lies about each other, to murder, or to worship idols. But what about the Sabbath?

The Ten Commandments appear in two places, in Exodus and in Deuteronomy. The command to keep the Sabbath is in both places, but the reasons for Sabbath-keeping are different. In Exodus, God says to keep the Sabbath because in six days God created the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested and sanctified that day. That is certainly of prime importance. But the reason given in Deuteronomy is what struck me recently:

“Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. You shall labor six days, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God, in which you shall not do any work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your ox, nor your donkey, nor any of your livestock, nor your stranger who is within your gates; that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm: therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” – Deuteronomy 5:12-15, World English Bible.

The thing about the Deuteronomy passage is that the Sabbath is a reminder to God's earthly people Israel that they were once slaves, and that they have now been set free. What better picture of freedom than the freedom to take a rest? And the enjoyment of that rest was to be a reminder of the God who had provided that rest to His people.

Everybody needs a rest from time to time – a time to sit back, relax, chill, think and get things together. Slaves who are constantly driven by slavedrivers never get such time. (This, by the way, is the reason why some totalist churches who emphasize giving Saturday or Sunday wholly “to the Lord” are so wrong, because what they mean by this is that their members should be frantically busy from sunup to sundown serving the church on its chosen “holy day.” When a person has already worked at least five days earning a wage and tried to cram a day in afterward to take care of house and family, how is he supposed to find “rest” in frantic daylong “church work”?)

Over the years, however, I have noticed the disappearance of seasons of rest in our society, and our transformation into a Sabbath-less society, and I have observed the effects of this transformation. The change began slowly. When I was a kid, I lived in several places where all stores, libraries, movie theaters and other such places were closed on Sunday. During the week, most grocery and drug stores closed around 9 PM (earlier on Saturdays), and most kids had to be off the street by 10 PM. This applied even to liquor stores. But as the culture of America secularized, merchants began toying with the idea of staying open later. When I was a teen, I could find stores that stayed open until 11. Later, some stores began to stay open until after midnight. When my mom was working swing shift and I was at home, during the last year or so before I left high school and joined the Army, I used to sneak out at night and argue politics with a friendly attendant at an all-night gas station.

In the Army, of course, we were able to find many places that stayed open 24/7, like the Denny's restaurants where many of us went after a night on the town. Yet there were occasional reminders of the culture we were all swiftly leaving behind. A somewhat hokey example: I was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and we used to watch old re-runs of the Andy Griffith Show. I remember one episode where Andy and the local preacher were in a home, and Opie came in with another boy. Both boys' clothes were torn and Opie had a black eye, and Andy exclaimed, “Opie! Fightin'? On a Sunday?!” There were also the “blue laws” still enforced in many parts of the South, which resulted in most stores being closed on Sunday.

After the Army, I worked swing shift at a defense plant for a while as I tried to put myself through school. I was able to find a few 24/7 grocery stores, yet they were still rare. Later, when I was switched to the day shift, these stores fell from my notice. Putting myself through school was a hard journey with a few fits, starts and detours. When I transferred from a community college to university, and began to have protracted, difficult computer lab assignments, I found myself out frequently after midnight. I came to appreciate the convenience of the burgeoning number of all-night stores, but didn't stop to count the cost of this trend.

When I graduated from college, the Sabbath-less portion of society was still predominantly in the retail sector. While people in manufacturing would occasionally work overtime, including Sundays, to meet emergency deadlines, it was still almost unheard-of for people in the building professions and trades to work Sundays. But during all this time the Internet and home computing had begun to revolutionize American society, along with stores like Kinko's (now FedEx Office) and Starbucks, and trends like online banking and 24/7 cell phone access. Thus this trend eventually caught up to me as I became a design professional.

It began with design firms competing against each other for market share, and promising ever more compressed schedules for completion of ever more complex projects. This fed clients' desires for instant gratification. As firms began to compete for facility maintenance and construction projects for continuous manufacturing operations, we were frequently warned of the extremely high cost of even the smallest interruption. Professionals increasingly found themselves burning the midnight (and weekend) oil to finish underbid projects on schedule, while project managers and executives walked around giving pep talks and spitting two word slogans: “on time,” “on schedule,” “under budget,” “fast-track,” “mission-critical,” “zero-defects,” “design-build,” “profit margin,” and so on. The pressure that was on designers of projects soon fell on construction crews, who now found themselves working round the clock in many cases to build or maintain facilities projects.

Nowadays, in my profession, it's hard to find stable work unless one is willing to make one's entire week (all 168 hours) available to management, and to frequently travel. Awards and speeches are given to celebrate those employees who routinely “go the extra mile” for the client; yet clients have come to regard these efforts no longer as extra, but as normal and customary, as they demand even more. (“I want to mention Joe, whose wife was pregnant and going into contractions, yet who chose to put the needs of the client above his family and drive 28 miles in the snow to fix a ladder logic program failure on one of our CNC lines. Joe, you saved the client $528,000! Atta Boy!!!”)As chickens on speed might frantically peck away non-stop in their search for grains and grubs, so we are trained to frantically and frenetically peck away in our search for ever more dollars.

Against this backdrop, people like me frequently go home on the weekends to find a pile of “personal maintenance” items left undone, and we try hard (and often fail) to catch up. And it's very hard under these circumstances to carve out one day a week in which to just chill, sit back, reflect, recreate and remember our Creator. Yet what better way to show that we are trusting in God than to take a day off once a week? Israel forgot the Sabbath as they became addicted to idols and material gain, and God forcibly idled them during the Babylonian captivity, a seventy-year period during which the Promised Land “enjoyed its Sabbaths” which it had missed. (Leviticus 26:34; 2 Chronicles 36:21) While I don't believe the United States is some sort of parallel to the Israel of the Old Testament, I do think that our exponentially increasing greed and our 24/7 pursuit of wealth is about to suffer its own curtailment. We (and the earth we have raped) may have many opportunities for Sabbath rest as the official economy of godless capitalism disintegrates. But the exploration of that theme is a topic for my other blog, The Well Run Dry...

As for me, where do I stand in relation to the Sabbath? I'm still working on that one. Meanwhile, here are a couple of things to chew on:

Catching Up And Falling Behind (Again)

2009-04-19T17:00:00.000-07:00

I am running a bit behind on my posting (my excuses are all on this week's post on my other blog, The Well Run Dry). However, for my next post on this blog, I intend to write about the significance of the Sabbath, both in ancient Israel and in modern society. Stay tuned!

Subconscious Right-Wing Angst

2009-04-05T18:52:00.000-07:00

Anyone who regularly reads my blogs knows that I used to be involved in an abusive, aberrant church; that I suffered for a long time as a result of my involvement; and that one day the truth about the real agenda of this church and its leaders was exposed for all us members to see. Seeing this truth enabled most of us to walk away from this church and its corrupt leaders. It also enabled us to recognize the general dynamics of power abuse in religious groups – groups that ostensibly exist to worship God and to study His Word, yet which are too frequently hijacked by mortal human leaders who fool their members into serving and enriching the leaders instead of serving God.

Some of us who left went a bit farther in our realizations. We became able to recognize the patterns of power abuse in other human organizational settings, where selfish leaders of ostensibly selfless groups manage to hijack them in order to serve their own selfish ends. I myself was able to recognize these patterns in the workplace, in the re-ordering of corporate America, and in the political realm as well. That is what led to the changing of a lot of my political views, to my increasing disenchantment with the Republican Party, and my decision to register as an independent in 2006. I realized that the Right was guilty of grievous sins, and that the Religous Right was guilty as well, not only for supporting people guilty of great evil, but supporting them out of evil motives.

I discovered that such realizations and changes of mind regarding politics were common among many people who had left abusive churches and who learned to recognize the patterns of power abuse. But I noticed that there were varying levels of understanding and realization among the fellow victims of my old abusive church. Some still thought this church was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Others were willing to acknowledge that our old group had problems, but they were unwilling to see the larger problems in American evangelicalism. Yet others were unwilling to see the problems in the agenda and leadership of the Republican Party and the Religious Right. As for me, I think I've tried as hard as possible to see things accurately, and to be honest with myself. But I don't think that some of my brethren are being as honest with themselves as they could be – especially when I eavesdrop on some of their online conversations, in which they argue political issues which have already been argued to death, and for which plenty of evidence of Republican wrongdoing was supplied before the last election. I was in on some of the big arguments in 2008, and I dug up and posted much of the publicly-available damning evidence against the Republicans and the Religious Right, and sometimes I get the feeling that some of my brethren didn't read a word I wrote.

I could try to post all of the evidence again, but just the thought of doing so makes me tired. Why bother if people are determined not to listen? Suffice it to say that you can find it on the first blog I ever wrote, TH in SoC (http://thinsoc.blogspot.com), under the posts, “The Anatomy of The Religious Right,” “Fighting With Broken Weapons,” and “The Sins of the Right.” Mine is by no means the only blog or source of information documenting these things. Many have documented the lies behind the Iraq war; the rape of Iraqi natural resources in the aftermath of the American conquest; the attempts to start a war with Iran; the capture, imprisonment and torture of people without due process of law; the hijacking of government at all levels to serve the rich masters of corporations and banks; the abolition of environmental and human rights laws in order to facilitate the gaining of profit by any means while destroying the earth; the removal of governmental protections from the poor; the attempts to overthrow Latin American national leaders such as the president of Bolivia; and so on – and all of this in order to “promote greater economic prosperity and to keep America strong!” All of these things were done under the presidency of George W. Bush.

I could suggest that many of the signs of abusive churches described by sources such as Ronald Enroth in his book, Churches That Abuse, could be applied quite accurately to the Bush presidency, especially such things as control-oriented (read, dogmatic, arrogant, assertive and inflexible) leadership, the fostering of unhealthy dependency, harsh discipline of dissent (Guantanamo and other places), and surveillance of members (think the Patriot Act). And the 2008 Republican presidentian standard-bearers would simply have been a continuation of Bush had they been elected.

Yet the leaders of the Religious Right told us all that we must support the Republicans because they have “Godly values” - or, “their values are at least more Godly than those of the Democrats,” – or, er, um, “Well yeah, I guess they do have their struggles (especially those of them who are now in orange jumpsuits), but at least they go to church!” In the aftermath of the Republicans' significant losses in 2008, there are Religious Right mouthpieces demonizing Obama and the Democrats as the group who will destroy our nation.

When one tells these people that the Religious Right is mistaken in thinking that laws prohibiting two sins are enough to make a nation Christian, they respond by saying that they are trying to be “salt” and “light” in the political arena, and that since the Republicans condemn these two sins, they are more godly than the Democrats. When one mentions the sins the Republicans actually encourage and practice – oppression of the poor, destruction of the earth, murderous wars of conquest, greed, and other forms of materialism, these sins are brushed aside or swept under the rug. Anyone who attempts to prevent the practice of these sins is accused of “Socialism!!!”

I believe this gives us a clue as to the real motivation behind the Religious Right and those evangelicals who are still cheerleading for the Republican party as the party of “Godliness.” On a deep, unconscious level, these people see the Republicans as the party most likely to maintain the priveleged place of the United States in the world, and the priveleged place of these people within the United States. Therefore they support the pro-business, laissez-faire, small-government, individualistic policies of the Republican Party, while doing all they can to portray these policies as “Christian.” They portray wealth as a sign of godliness or of God's blessing, thus justifying their willingness to use any means to get as much wealth as possible. Meanwhile, they are utterly unwilling to recognize the effect their greed and consumerism has on others, and on other peoples and nations. They point to the Pilgrims at Thanksgiving, and extrapolate the thankfulness of those Pilgrims to conclude that it is entirely due to the blessing of God that the United States has such an elevated standard of living.

But they are unwilling to ask hard questions, such as, “If the U.S. has only five percent of the world's population, yet consumes 40 percent of the world's energy, where does the 40 percent come from? How do we get it?” They don't dare to face the real story behind much of our material prosperity. And they demonize anyone who suggests that they might have to share their wealth with others, or – horror of horrors! – to learn to live on less. Thus one former acquaintance of mine, when asked why we don't just get out of Iraq since our war there is unjust, responded by saying “Do you want Iran to get all that oil?!”

Look at the political agendas of many Religious Right organizations during from the 1980's to the 2008 election. See how much of these agendas had to do with economic issues or immigration or environmental issues instead of moral issues. When the world sees this, are they not correct to conclude that many who call themselves Christian in this country are selfish materialists who don't share well with others? As Ken and Peg Balcom once sang,

We have enough

to almost last forever;

Add up our stuff -

The sum is ordinary love.

Ordinary love is nothing new;

We ordinarily love ourselves.

Those lyrics are meant to be a rebuke of the materialism practiced by so many Americans. Let evangelicals hear that rebuke as well. If we were less materialistic – evidenced by a willingness to play fair with the rest of the world and to share what we have – such a testimony might induce more people to repent of their sins (including homosexuality and abortion) and to believe in Christ.

Evangelicals, take a look at yourselves in these mirrors:

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2008/10/torture_and_evangelicals.html

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/09/frc-racist-obama-waffles-flap.html#more

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/13/conservative-political-fo_n_126243.html

Community-Building - A First Step

2009-03-22T17:50:00.000-07:00

Over the last few months, I've paid a few very infrequent visits to the Russian church I mentioned in one of my earliest posts on this blog. I've picked up a few new Russian words and am better able to find my way around the Russian Bible. My last visit was to attend a dinner and church service they had to send off a number of visiting preachers from Russia, Uzbekistan and the Ukraine.

A young, recently married man volunteered to translate for me during the preaching part of the service. Afterward, during the dinner part, we struck up a conversation. He was very curious about my interest in their church, as well as my impressions of it. As for himself, he revealed a sort of wry perspective on customs and practices of their group – a perspective that he said was shared by many young people in the church.

To be sure, their church is rather strict in its attempts to keep the Law and the Sabbath, forbidding even driving and the use of cell phones on the Sabbath. Their meetings are also somewhat similar to those of the Plymouth Brethren, in that there are usually no musical instruments (but sometimes a piano or acoustic guitar manages to squeeze in), most of the women wear head coverings, there is more than one preacher per service, and the meetings tend to be a bit long (as one young man told me, “At least two hours every time. Never less.”) However, this church seems to be somewhat more democratically run than many Plymouth Brethren-styled gatherings. They have not tried to apply any strictness to me, probably figuring that I must be just a “crazy American.”

I told this young man about my experiences in the church I was involved with in Southern California, and mentioned the similarities between the practices of his church and the practices of my former church. I also noted wryly that one of the best ways to find out about a group of people was to ask the younger members of the group. These young people are reading the Bible for themselves, and are beginning to question some of the strictness that has been imposed on them. According to this young man, the young people would like church services to be quite a bit shorter and more lively.

All of this got me thinking about the attempts by parents in my old abusive church to raise “godly” children by burying them under a pile of strictures, by enforcing harsh discipline, and by condemning as “worldly” many of the normal, natural cravings children have for good, clean fun. Thus were many positive, Biblical values poisoned for these children by having these values forced on them as rigid legal requirements.

Anyway, we got together again recently, not at church, but at a coffehouse. This time, we talked a bit more about the Law in relation to the grace of God revealed in Christ. I showed him some passages from Galatians that talked about our freedom from the Law in Christ. For his part, he asked me some rather challenging questions – first, about what I believe concerning keeping the Sabbath. For it is part of God's moral law (as opposed to the Old Testament ceremonial law that dealt with worship and sacrifices), and the righteousness of that moral law is to be fulfilled in us who are Christians. Up to now, I was sure that Christians are no longer under obligation to keep the Sabbath. Yet I have been noticing the transformation of our society into a “Sabbathless” society over the years, and the stressful effect it has had on daily life for most people. This young man's question could basically be summed up in this statement: “Doesn't the command to keep the Sabbath carry the same weight as the command not to murder or steal?” To which my honest answer at this point is, “I don't know!” I'll have to chew on that one some more.

We got to talking about the present economic situation. I mentioned to him that I had read Reinventing Collapse by Dmitri Orlov, whose book described many aspects of Russian life before and just after the fall of the Soviet Union. I told him that I was curious to know whether the Russians in our neighborhood would likely agree with Orlov's descriptions and assessments. He could not give me much help, as he was only five years old when he left Russia, but he was interested in borrowing Orlov's book. He did agree that people in Russia knew and relied on their neighbors far more than people in the United States, and that immigrants from poorer countries are probably much better prepared to face the times now upon us than most native-born Americans. (To paraphrase Orlov, it's relatively painless to fall to the ground from a first-story window.)

One of the most important things we talked about was how the Church in America – the Christians – could be salt and light in these present times, meeting needs, making peace and being a blessing to their neighborhoods. We both agreed that Christians could take the lead in ministering to their neighbors and forging connections within the community, and we discussed ways to make this happen in our neighborhood.

We'll probably get together again soon. He is a guitar player who wants to learn a bit more about the instrument, and I happen to know a little bit, which I volunteered to teach him and anyone else who is interested. In exchange, I asked if he or his friends could teach me a few Russian hymns. By the way, his perspective on the music of his church is quite funny. He said that one of his friends remarked that it sounds like “funeral music.” I, however, like the Russian hymns. But then again, I have some CD's of a cappella Russian folk songs. As Larry Niven once said, “One man's cheese is another man's rotted milk.”

Thoughts on the Loaves and Fish

2009-03-08T00:18:00.000-08:00

The apostles gathered themselves together to Jesus, and they told him all things, whatever they had done, and whatever they had taught. He said to them, “You come apart into a deserted place, and rest awhile.” For there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.

They went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. [The multitudes] saw them going, and many recognized him and ran there on foot from all the cities. They arrived before them and came together to Him. Jesus came out, saw a great multitude, and He had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and He began to teach them many things. When it was late in the day, His disciples came to Him, and said, “This place is deserted, and it is late in the day. Send them away, that they may go into the surrounding country and villages, and buy themselves bread, for they have nothing to eat.”

But He answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They asked Him, “Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give them something to eat?” He said to them, “How many loaves do you have? Go see.” When they knew, they said, “Five, and two fish.”

He commanded them that everyone should sit down in groups on the green grass. They sat down in ranks, by hundreds and by fifties. He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed and broke the loaves, and He gave to His disciples to set before them, and He divided the two fish among them all. They all ate, and were filled. They took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and also of the fish. Those who ate the loaves were five thousand men.

– Mark 6:30-44, World English Bible, a public domain translation.

I am almost through the Gospel of Mark. (Yeah, I know, I go slow, but I've also been reading Judges and Ruth!) One passage I read several weeks ago has stuck with me, as it reminded me of parallels between my experience in my old abusive church and the experiences others have had in their involvement in movements unrelated to our old group. I saw the passage in a new light in my most recent reading of it, and saw a bit more clearly what God really meant by including this story in the earthly life of the Lord Jesus.

First, the parallels. There is a branch of evangelicalism known as the charismatic movement, whose members believe that the miraculous powers employed by Christ and His disciples are still being used today by those gifted with such powers. Many charismatics are very nice people who don't get overly hung up on miracles, yet there is a hardcore element who emphasize the miraculous to extremes. They teach that the evidence of faith in a Christian's life is that he or she is constantly experiencing miracles, especially those miracles that have to do with naming and claiming good health, lots of money and material possessions. Many of their churches are known as “Word of Faith” churches, due to their identification with this sort of doctrine. Some of the blogs in my blogroll are written by ex-members of these churches, who left after they saw not only the errors of doctrine, but the abusive ways of these churches.

In our Assemblies, we used to look down our noses on the Charismatics and the Pentecostals, especially in our early days. We had all our doctrinal reasons why the “sign gifts are not for today,” and all our valid criticisms of wacky Charismatic behavior, criticisms that were often shared with us as anecdotes from our head honcho, George Geftakys. What we didn't realize was that we were as wacky as the people we criticized.

The Pentecostals, Charismatics and WOF types were always seeking the miraculous, and their leaders held themselves up as men and women who always experienced the spectacularly miraculous, because of their spectacular faith – just as our “dear brother” George held himself up as an example of the miraculous, through the tall tales he told about himself and his “missionary labors.” He used to share stories about people from whom he had cast out demons, unseen voices giving him guidance, people who had been healed through his prayers, and so on.

And just as the WOF/Charismatic leaders taught that true and successful disciples would be known by the evidence of the miraculous in their lives, so George taught that the sign of a true servant of God was that such a person had a miraculous ministry. But whereas “miraculous” for a Pentecostal/WOF person meant having lots of material possessions (or “mountains, oh, mountains of things” as Tracy Chapman once sang), for us it meant being in charge of Something Really Big. “Brother, I've preached before thousands. Thousands!! I founded a work which now has hundreds of members!”

And so we come to our Thursday Night Prayer Meetings, where the brothers (adult men, for the uninitiated) were all supposed to come ready and “exercised” with “a word to share with the Lord's people” as each had opportunity. A big part of preparing a “word” to share was reading passages like the passage in Mark quoted above, and to try to figure out how to wring miracles out of God. Each Thursday, one or two of us would stand up in front of everyone else and preach out of a passage of Scripture, saying things like, “Saints, the Lord wants to do great things! If we only do x, y and z, the Lord will surely do for us and for this ministry the sorts of miracles we read about in this passage...”

But now it has been a rather long time since I was at an Assembly “Thursday Night Prayer Meeting.” I no longer read the Bible to try to figure out how to make God do stuff; instead, I read in order to learn more who God is. I know God has worked miracles in the past, and I believe He answers prayer in the present, yet as far as people with supposed miraculous gifts, I suppose I am a “cessationist.” I believe that answers to prayer come largely through the arrangements of providence nowadays, and that miracles are like a potent drug – healthy in the right doses, yet detrimental when employed to excess. As a master Pharmacist, God's chief aim right now is not giving us “mountains of things,” nor a Really Big Ministry, but to change our character – to bless us by turning us away from our sins, as it says in Acts 3. That happens as we learn to be decent people in a world full of limits. The real aim of the story of the loaves and fish is to illustrate who Jesus Christ is. I pray for clearer eyes to see that portrait.

We offer ourselves up to Him daily (or at least we should), and He does with us as He wishes, just as He did with the five loaves and two fish. But are we willing to be satisfied if what He does with us is nowhere near as spectacular as that miraculous meal, if instead, He uses us in ordinary, providential ways, or ministers to others through the testimony of our behavior? A handmade fish sandwich is also nutritious.

Finding Malachi 3:16 People

2009-02-14T17:10:00.000-08:00

“Then those who feared the LORD spoke one with another; and the LORD listened and heard, and a book of memory was written before him, for those who feared the LORD and who honored his name.” (Malachi 3:16, World English Bible, a public domain translation)

My life as an adult Christian was sidetracked fairly early on by my being hoodwinked into involvement in an abusive, cultic church. I am grateful for my escape from that church several years ago. Yet the years since I regained my freedom have not been without struggle. That struggle has been in figuring out whether to fit in the prevailing evangelical culture, to fit into a typical evangelical church, to find nourishment, guidance and community within this culture and its typical churches. It is a struggle which I have largely given up. I am too different from the prevailing American evangelical culture. And it has become decidedly too weird – there's too much that I can't swallow.

So right now I don't attend church regularly, although there are “relevant” trendy wanna-be megachurches nearby that would dearly like my attendance. One such church sent out a mailer before Christmas with a picture on the front titled, “CSI: Christmas Scene Investigation.” The font and layout of the lettering and the associated picture were, of course, very similar to the logo for the CBS Television series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Maybe they thought I was a TV addict. (What's funny is that this very “original” idea for a Christmas sermon series was also seized upon by a few other churches throughout the U.S. at about the same time.) The church that sent out the mailer is doing its best to be trendy, and even has a website (www.coolchurch.com, if you can believe that! Wow, a cool church!), where the church is described as having “refreshments from our Life Cafe..., rockin' worship, the sermon via the big screen, and everything else that provides a 'Come as you are' feel...”

Lots of pastors want to be cool nowadays. So many of them are trying so hard to be “cutting-edge” that they don't see how ridiculously similar they are to each other. A while back, there was an article on another blog, titled “Purpose-Driven Pastor Season,” describing the sight of hundreds of “Purpose-Driven” pastors descending on Irvine, California for the annual pastors' conference with the big fish, Rick Warren. The picture on that blog post is rather funny, as most of these pastors are wearing the same style of pants! (How do middle-aged pastors enhance their “coolness” anyway? Should they learn skateboarding tricks? That might hurt!) There are so many large churches with “Starbucks-style” coffee bars that they may give Starbucks a run for their money. Tomorrow, there will be thousands of churches across the land where one can hear simplistic, inspirational sermons on confronting life's daily problems, sermons chock-full of anecdotes taken from sports, because everybody knows that that's how to relate to us guys. Before and after the sermon, there will be a rockin' good show from a kickin' praise band, because everyone knows that that's how to reach the youth.

To all of this I have said, “No thank you!” And since it is so prevalent, there are therefore a lot of Sundays in which I'd rather do something else with my time than try out a new church. What I'm looking for is people who stand for Biblical truth without being legalistic, overbearing or domineering. I am also looking for people who are gentle toward each other without compromising the Bible. My cultic experience introduced me to people who erred on the side of severity and legalistic harshness. But the present evangelical culture seems to be erring on the side of compromise (although more and more wanna-be megachurch leadership teams are throwing in a bit of severity and harshness of their own).

Yet pilgrims need companionship and community in their pilgrimmage. Fortunately, I have been finding a sort of community in the large number of bloggers who are now writing about their experiences of recovery from the darker side of American evangelicalism. I greatly appreciate some of these bloggers. I can tell from their writings that they are still dedicated to obeying Christ, that they are still willing to submit themselves to the Word of God, even if that means living out that Word as strangers among strangers. We can talk to each other as equals and learn from each other, and no one is trying to sign anyone else up to be part of someone's religious empire.

I have particularly enjoyed a post from the Detox Church Group titled, “Pilgrim, Make Progress.” It seems that the Detox Group finds the present evangelical culture to be as hard to swallow as I do. (Good to hear from you guys again, by the way.) There is also an excellent recent post on the Internet Monk site titled, “The Gospel-Believing Christian In The Midst of Legalism,” in which the lure of legalism as a means of producing immediate behavioral results is explained, as well as a description of why this is dangerous and wrong. And I always learn something from the posts on the Blog of Lema Nal. Then there is the Autonomy of the Believer blog's recent posts on tactics of control and domination used by “Word of Faith” pastors against their “flocks.” I also appreciate the recent Gale Warnings posts on the author's personal working out of strategies for dealing with anger.

These bloggers are people who are “working out their own salvation,” including the process of recovery, and blessing the rest of us by sharing their experience of that process. If we can't find spiritual nourishment within the institutional church in America nowadays, at least we can feed each other.

Facing Our Fears - The Gang Problem

2009-02-07T19:52:00.000-08:00

This earthly life holds unpleasant realities. It is therefore not surprising that people want to escape those realities, nor that they use such means of escape as drugs, alcohol or a change of scenery, among other things. But our present times are days in which people are losing their means of escape. Christians in particular are called, not to escape, but to a mission in the world – especially in our particular localities. If the dangerousness of that mission makes some of us hesitant, maybe it's time to face our fears intelligently.

America is a nation that needs the Gospel, and not in some abstract sense, nor as a message delivered from a distance by standoffish messengers. America is a sick nation, as evidenced by moral decline on every level, in every area of society. One symptom of that sickness is the proliferation of gangs in recent years.

A factual overview: A recent post on John Robb's blog Global Guerrillas (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/02/manufactured-tribes.html) titled “Manufactured Tribes,” describes how economic depressions cause people to shift their associations to line up with “primary loyalties” – family, friends, community, etc. Unfortunately, community ties in this country are often very weak. Family ties have also been weakened over the years, leading to high divorce rates, child abandonment, and so forth. That leaves many young people vulnerable to groups such as gangs which create new primary loyalties, as in, “Yo, schoolboy, I'm from the Fullerton Town Tokers! Where you from?”

Mr. Robb quotes from a 2009 FBI report that states that current gang membership in the U.S. is over 1 million people, a 25 percent increase from 2005. These members are distributed among several types and sizes of gangs. Fifty-eight percent of state and local law enforcement agencies now report that gangs are active in their jurisdictions, as opposed to 45 percent in 2004. In some communities, gangs commit 80 percent of the crime and outnumber police 5 to 1.

And gangs are proliferating in the Pacific Northwest, migrating upward from Southern California and other places. Their signs are becoming increasingly apparent. How then should we look at them?

Some might associate gang activity primarily with certain ethnic groups. Such an association would be easy and tempting, yet dishonest. For American pop culture has itself become gang-tinctured. From hip-hop to gangsta music, from televised NBA games to the explosion of gang-themed movies like Hood Rats, the glorification of gang culture is being sold to youth from every kindred, tribe and people. There are black gangs, Latino gangs, Asian gangs, white gangs, Russian/Eastern European gangs, and so forth. Many young men (and women!) have learned the slow menacing shuffle, the scowl, the proper way to wear a baseball cap sideways, and what to do with a spray paint can.

Much can be said about the stupidity and destructiveness of gang culture – its worship of random violence, its destruction of those things of value that benefit a community, its destabilizing effect on everyday life. Much can be said about how stupid and undesirable the invasion of gang culture is at a time like this, when the nation is faced with economic collapse and troubles caused by declining resources and environmental damage. Much can be said about how evil, wrong, and deserving of punishment gang-bangers and wanna-be gang-bangers are, and it would all be true. But here are a couple of questions, in line with the theme I have been considering for the last few posts:

How should Christian peace-makers (strangers and exiles on the earth) respond to the presence of gangs in their communities? What is the Christian response? (My two cents: I don't think it's agitating for tougher laws.)
What is the New Testament telling you to do about this? (You, as in you personally.)

Trapped in a Salt Shaker

2009-01-31T02:41:00.000-08:00

I have said beforehand that I don't believe in trying to bring the Kingdom of God upon earth through political action. What role, then, should Christians play during their sojourn in a dangerous world? I believe the answer can be found in such Scriptures as Matthew 5:13-16; “You are the salt of the earth...you are the light of the world.” So said the Lord Jesus to His disciples. Salt is a seasoning and preservative. Lights are put out in places where people can see them. As long as salt remains in a salt shaker or in a cupboard, it does no good for food. Only when it comes in contact with food does it fulfill its function. It seems as if to be the salt of the earth, we must come in contact with our fellow residents on the earth. “Even so, let your light shine before men; that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

Yet as I have said beforehand, too many of us are afraid to have any contact with our neighbors. This fear is partly justified, especially nowadays. Yet it is also taught to us to an unreasonable extreme by our mass media, both in “news” and in entertainment. And it leads to some rather tragically weird extremes.

There is the normal sort of reserve, of course. At least, I hope it's normal, since I have a large amount of it myself. Difficult life experiences have taught me not to warm up immediately to strangers. And once a person learns to be reserved, he finds in many cases that he saves a lot of energy by keeping his mouth shut. This can be habit-forming. So it is that when I go to work, as I ride the light rail line or bus line, I tend to dread chatty fellow riders. (It's hard to make small talk when you don't feel fully awake until the afternoon!) And on those rare occasions when I ride home from work on the light rail line, I get more than a bit intimidated by the presence of dozens of bodies – some of them quite strange – jammed in close proximity to me. I am working on not being stand-offish.

But there are more bizarre cases of this reserve. One example: my city has a community garden program available to residents who sign up to obtain the use of a city plot for a several months out of the year. It's a really neat program which fosters community-building and food security, but most of the garden plots are located far from where I live on the east side. I recently learned that the Oregon Sustainable Agriculture Land Trust teamed up with our county to try to start a new community garden on the east side, on a 3000 square foot vacant lot.

The only problem is that there are a few neighbors near that plot who are deathly afraid that strangers might come to their neighborhood to...garden, of all things! Of course, they have other fears also. One neighbor said, “We're not going to know who we are going to get in there. There are strangers in our face, casing our homes, looking in our mailboxes.” Another said, “Our neighbors throw their garbage out there. They're not going to go garden there; they're going to go smoke their crack or shoot up or let their kids go play there.” Yet another said, “I don't think you're going to get much support from neighbors on the street because we're not involved with each other.” This neighbor objected particularly to the potential use of the community garden to help provide food and education for the children of struggling families. “I have a pre-teen daughter. I don't want to leave her at home if we're going to have strangers gardening across the street from my house.”

Yet another person said, “We don't want to get to know them (those who would use the garden). We work hard to buy homes of our own, and we don't want the homeless or poor people coming in and planting gardens when they should be out looking for jobs.” Think on that for a moment – that a person would say such a thing at such a time as this, when the official unemployment rate in the U.S. is past 7 percent and the actual unemployment rate is probably at 15 percent, when the economy is crashing to pieces all around us, when that person's job might be the next to vaporize.

Fear leads to uncharity, then to passing wrong judgments on others, then to hatred.

I hate to say it, but this fear is alive and well and kept in a state of vigorous health in certain sectors of American evangelicalism. It was widely emphasized and taught and nurtured by the American Religious Right during the last election. It can be summed up in this statement: Instead of meeting people who are different from us, let's attack them and destroy them in order to make the world safe for us. To accomplish this, let's elect leaders who will keep us strong!

The most extreme example of this which I have encountered is found in a description of the writings of a so-called “Christian survivalist” named Jim Rawles, who wrote in his fictional Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse about a group of refugees walking unawares on land held by a survivalist group who captures the refugees, then determines that they really are in need of material help. Their response is to give the refugees an entire five gallon storage bucket of grain (wow! so generous!), along with other food and ammunition for their weapons, while leaving the refugees with a warning that if they came back and lived on that land the survivalists would cut them down like sheep. I haven't read the book myself, but from the description of it by other survivalists, it seems to be an expression of Jim Rawles' personal approach to life. Hmm...does it sound very “Christian” to you? His “charity” moves me to tears.

For true Christians, to live in this sort of fear is to remain trapped in a salt shaker – jealously hoarding your own things, and unwilling to come in contact with anyone else. So what would the Lord have instead? “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” – Matthew 10:16. We are commanded to go out, to meet our fellow men and women. We are commanded to love our neighbors – and not just theoretically. As Aaron Tate once wrote,

Let the bread on your tongue

leave a trail of crumbs

to lead the hungry back

to the place where you are from.

“But it might be dangerous!” someone will say. “Therefore be wise as serpents...” is the answer. Part of that wisdom consists of forming an accurate picture of one's neighbors, so that one can intelligently go out to meet them. Maybe we all need to take some time to study our fellows to see what sort of people they really are, and to see how much of our preconceived notions regarding them are due to lies taught to us by those who stand to gain from keeping us afraid.

Peace-Makers In The Danger Zone

2009-01-19T18:13:00.000-08:00

We live in dangerous times. This fact is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. In my blogging, I have made room for two separate trains of thought: first, the physical, ecological, geopolitical and economic aspects of our present danger, and secondly, the process of recovery of a Biblical faith in the aftermath of an abusive church experience. These two trains of thought can be traced in my two blogs, The Well Run Dry and From SoC To Points North.

But lately, thoughts and reflections from the one train of thought have been spilling over into the other, to the extent that the one train of thought has come to dominate my thinking. Peak Oil, climate change, economic collapse, societal breakdown – these are things that get a man's attention. As Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” All around me I see the signs of a gathering storm. The storm-winds have reached even to my own place of employment, where last week, layoffs and furloughs of non-billable people began. I still have a job. For now.

The trouble is not merely economic. Everywhere I look, I see abundant evidence of the depravity of man, the soul-sickness of our original sin. Gangs have begun to make their presence known in the Pacific Northwest. People of every stripe are doing irrational, hostile things. Hungry, cold and desperate people in Europe are poised to explode into rioting. The greedy at every level of society are grabbing as much as they can for themselves, without any fear of God.

For too long, those in America who call themselves evangelical have willfully hidden their eyes from these things, content instead to be distracted by the sort of entertainment found in Christian bookstores and trendy megachurches, or eager to hear from less-than-honest preachers who talk about how God wants to make everyone rich. When genuine, 100 percent USDA sinners have infiltrated their ivory enclaves, they have fled to ever-more-exurban McMansionized hideaway “gated communities.” Or they have rallied round right-wing political candidates endorsed by the Religious Right who promise to do away with all not-so-nice people, “for the children's sake!”

Now there's no place to hide. Gangs have come even to suburbia. Increasingly the citizens of the gated enclaves are finding that they can no longer pay their mortgages. Our nation and world are facing severe challenges which require cool heads and clear thinking, yet we are a society of people who have fallen into the habits of dysfunctional, destructive thought and behavior.

Against this backdrop, God has a mission for His true people. It doesn't consist of agitating for political action or more “white flight” (or any other flight of privileged people for that matter). Over the next few posts, I intend to explore some of the dangers facing the earthly societies in which we live, and what I believe the Bible says about a Christian response in the face of these dangers. I just finished reading the Gospel of Matthew and am now in Mark, so I think I'll have plenty of material to draw on for inspiration. And if anyone has comments, ideas or thoughts to share on this subject, feel free to chime in.

Stay tuned...

"Shall I ... Wave Over The Trees?"

2009-01-11T00:31:00.000-08:00

I read Judges 9 this week. It is the story of Abimelech, a son of Gideon whom he had by a female servant. Gideon was one of the Old Testament judges of Israel, and after his death Abimelech killed all of Gideon's other sons except one, and made himself king over Israel. The son who was left alive got out of town quickly, of course, but before he did, he gave a little speech to Abimelech and the men who backed him. The speech consisted of a parable about how God would cause Abimelech and his backers to destroy each other, but it also contained an interesting observation concerning the things people give up when they decide to live solely for the chance to be in charge of others. Here is a portion of the text:

When they told it to Jotham, he went and stood on the top of Mount Gerizim, and lifted up his voice, and cried, and said to them, “Listen to me, you men of Shechem, that God may listen to you. The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said to the olive tree, ‘Reign over us.’ But the olive tree said to them, ‘Should I leave my fatness, with which by me they honor God and man, and go to wave back and forth over the trees?’ The trees said to the fig tree, ‘Come and reign over us.’ But the fig tree said to them, ‘Should I leave my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to wave back and forth over the trees?’ The trees said to the vine, ‘Come and reign over us.’ The vine said to them, ‘Should I leave my new wine, which cheers God and man, and go to wave back and forth over the trees?’ Then all the trees said to the bramble, ‘Come and reign over us.’ The bramble said to the trees, ‘If in truth you anoint me king over you, then come and take refuge in my shade; and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.'”

Now I know that the main and specific point of this parable was to address the evil done by Abimelech and those who supported his evil deeds. But the parable of the trees got me thinking about how many benefits come to the world through people who are just content to live their lives as useful, honest citizens doing good work, and how such a useful and worthy life is forfeited by those who only want to have power over others. The only tree among the trees that was willing to wave over the rest was the bramble – a plant which does not have any obvious uses. Even so, there are many people in this world who want to be “in charge,” not because they have anything to contribute to others, but simply because they've always wanted to be over everyone else. They are rather useless people in every other respect.

This makes me think of the megachurch culture in American evangelicalism and the associated culture of celebrity which seeks to manufacture “Christian superstars” on a regular basis, complete with their own little (or big) personal empires. I'm still recovering from my involvement with one such wanna-be big shot, and memories of my involvement were fresh in my mind as I checked out a couple of blogs I recently discovered. I've been reading more posts from The Autonomy of the Believer, which I mentioned last week. It still amazes me to see how common are the tricks used by selfishly ambitious abusive church leaders, even when the churches under consideration have never even heard of each other. I have also been reading Letters From Kamp Krusty, whose author is running a spoof of church leadership seminars titled, “The 417 Rules Of Awesomely Bold Leadership.” Quite funny, actually.

The serious truth, though, is that there are still scoundrels at the helm of many evangelical churches, and I still feel the need to be on my guard when going to church. There are still churches whose pastors' main message seems to be how much authority the pastor is supposed to have over his congregation. There are still too many leaders in American evangelicalism who are tarnishing the testimony of Christ by their power abuse games. This is a shame. Some of these people are in sore need of a righteous kick in the pants.

Starting The Year On A Lutheran Foot, And Other Matters

2009-01-04T00:36:00.000-08:00

I recently discovered another Lutheran church near where I live. It's part of the “Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod.” I wonder how they differ from the Missouri Synod. I think I'll check them out this Sunday. My experiences with Lutheran churches have been pleasant and normal, for the most part.

I haven't been attending the Russian church very much lately, simply because I've been too busy. Consequently, what little Russian I've picked up is starting to evaporate. I would like to visit them again, however. When I compare their culture to that typically found in the United States, I see how much American culture has been hijacked to satisfy someone's profit motive. All our “art” (entertainment, actually) and most of our interactions have been bent toward this end. Compared to cultures radically different from ours, American culture is quite tacky.

One thing about this Russian church is that they are pretty serious about literally keeping the Sabbath (Saturday for them). Their strictness extends to such things as teaching members that they should not drive on the Sabbath. This is very good for fighting global warming and reducing American dependence on fossil fuels, and I could almost wish that every day was the Sabbath ;) . Yet the form of their Sabbath-keeping strikes me as a bit legalistic. I guess I'm being challenged to look more closely at what the New Testament says about the Sabbath.

My busy-ness has had an unfortunate side-effect: I have slowed down considerably in my Bible reading. I am sort of stuck in Judges in the Old Testament and Matthew in the New Testament, although I'm almost done with Matthew.

I recently discovered a blog by someone who is traveling a journey quite similar to the one I've been on for the last few years. His blog is called The Autonomy of the Believer, and it describes how he and his wife were seduced into an abusive and aberrant church, the things they saw while they were involved, and their thoughts upon leaving – especially their thoughts on “the strange state of Evangelical Christianity in America.” I wholeheartedly agree with him that American Evangelicalism is truly strange nowadays, and I look forward to reading more posts from his blog as he sorts things out. I have added his blog to my list of “Blogs I Follow.” I am encouraged to see more Christians waking up to the abusers who have crept into positions of prominence in the Church. It's high time for a little housecleaning.

Snow Days

2008-12-21T14:57:00.000-08:00

I don't have anything new or insightful for this week's post. So I'll just tell a bit about what's going on where I live and mention the work of a few of my fellow bloggers.

First, it's snowy and cold here. It's been that way for a solid week, with temperatures usually below freezing. Last night, it got down to 15 degrees Fahrenheit. There's enough snow around right now to choke several Abominable Snowmen. This is posing quite a shock of adjustment for an ex-Californian like me. I find myself craving a sight of palm trees and sunlight. The National Weather Service is saying that later we could get freezing rain, ice and sleet on top of everything else. By the way, did I mention the fact that it is snowing?

As far as fellow bloggers, I'd like to thank Stormchild for her kind mention of me on her recent post, “The Wisdom of Mr. Singh,” from her blog, Gale Warnings. Her blog is an interesting and informative read, as it deals with the things individuals can do in individual daily interactions to protect themselves from being victimized by abusers.

I've been enjoying Borz Loma Nal's posts on Biblical exposition and study on The Blog of Lema Nal. Those posts contain valuable helps and suggestions for recovering the ability to properly study the Bible after escaping from an abusive church. This understanding is especially necessary because a key characteristic of abusive churches is the distortion of the Bible by the church leaders in order to serve their own purposes. One of the blog posts, “Hermeneutical Errors,” has some very funny examples of mistakes in Biblical interpretation.

I haven't heard from the DeTox Church Group authors in a while. How are things going? I hope you are doing well. Are you getting a lot of snow in Idaho?

I hope to begin tackling the subject of Christian community in more detail. The damage done by abusive churches is not only their distortion of Bible doctrine, but that they distort the experience of community and fellowship. Therefore I think that an important element in recovering from an abusive church consists of discovering what real Christian community is, and beginning on some level to experience it.

But that subject will have to wait. I'll be traveling to visit relatives this week, so I probably won't be posting anything this coming weekend. (I'm going to the Promised Land – the land of palm trees and sunshine!) Stay safe, everyone, and have a blessed Merry Christmas.

The Casuistry of Collapse

2008-12-13T22:42:00.000-08:00

I've been learning a few words over the last few months. These words are useful shorthand for complex concepts that I've been carrying around like a loose bag of tools for a while. One such word is “Constantinianism,” which can loosely be defined as the attempt to marry Christianity to politics, nationalism and earthly patriotism. This has been the defining characteristic of the leaders of the American Religious Right, who long ago ceased to confine themselves to matters of strictly Biblical morality, and who have for a long time tried to define Christian duty mainly in terms of being a patriotic, flag-waving American defending the American way of life.

Constantinianism is named after the Roman emperor Constantine who ostensibly became a Christian when he was 40 years old, and who decreed that Christianity was to be the official state religion of the Roman empire. As a result of his decree and profession of Christianity, conditions improved greatly for Roman believers, who had heretofore been violently persecuted. But Constantine went farther than simply becoming tolerant of the Faith. He began to see himself as a guardian of the Faith, responsible for using his earthly political power to maintain orthodoxy. Thus he led a military assault against the the North African Donatist Christians, who were accused of heresy by bishops and clergy loyal to Constantine. In fact, the “heresy” of the Donatists consisted of nothing more than refusing to accept the authority of bishops who had renounced the Christian faith and turned their brethren over to Roman authorities during earlier persecutions, and had then asked for reinstatement to clerical office under Constantine. (It appears, then, that eritheia, power games and abusive churches are not a new phenomenon.) (Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_I#Religious_policy)

Under Constantine the religious authority of the Christian Church was married to the political and military power of the state. Thus the “state church” was born, and was empowered to stamp out any churches not officially sanctioned by the state, using military force if necessary. Members of the state church were taught that one of the highest Christian duties was for each member to zealously and unquestioningly support the state in which their church resided, to the extent of full military service if called for. And the state church legitimized the wars and conquests fought by its sponsor state by teaching the concept of a “just war.” After the Reformation, when there were several European states each having its own state church, each state church functioned along the same Constantinian lines, each teaching its members their supposed obligations to the states which sponsored them, and teaching the same “just war” concept. This frequently led to contradictions that were ridiculous enough to be quite funny if they had not been so tragic: the armies of two European nations at war with each other, each praying to God in the Name of Jesus Christ for the annihilation of the other army. One example of this is World War 1, with the British Bishop of London advising in 1915 that Britain should be mobilized for a “Holy War,” and the Germans inscribing “Gott mit uns” (God with us) on the buckles of soldiers' belts and praying “Gott strafe England!” (God punish England!)

Is all war unjust, then? I cannot answer that question. I, for one, am glad that the American Civil War was fought and won by the North. As a result of it, I am a free man instead of being a victim of inhuman exploitation. But there have been many supposedly-just wars fought by the supposedly “Christian” nations of the First World. History, and the Day of Judgment, will show that the vast majority of these wars were not just at all, but mere land or resource grabs or colonial conquests designed to enrich the elites of the warring nations. As the years have passed, I have come to see Constantinianism as a worldly corrupting influence in the Church, whose members are supposed to be living as strangers and exiles on the earth. My rejection of the American Religious Right is a rejection of Constantinianism.

I am not alone in this rejection. Over the last several months, I have met several other bloggers who think along the same lines. One of them is Sarah, author of the Accidental Blog (http://accidentalweblog.blogspot.com). A recent post of hers, “Responsibility To Protect,” asks how Christians ought to relate to the state if our relation is not supposed to be Constantinian. She makes a very good point that Christians may be making a mistake by just walking away from involvement in the polity of the state, since polity is part of everyday life and not a separate sphere. The main thrust of her question is this: should Christians attempt to use earthly power at all in order to promote a godly outcome in their own state or in other states?

Her question is a good one; it forced me to think – a lot! People who ask such questions perform a valuable service for their neighbors. In fact, I think a good goal for a thinking person is to try each week to ask a question that gives someone else a headache from having to think a lot to answer it :). I have to admit, though, that while I have some opinions on the subject, I don't have an answer to her question.

But there is one aspect of her question about which I think I can speak with assurance. She was thinking specifically of Christians using the power of their state to help the citizens of “failed states,” that is, states whose governments are crumbling and unwilling or unable to provide justice, basic security and essential services for their citizens. The example she cited of a failed state is that of Zimbabwe, whose citizens are suffering from hunger, violence, disease and monetary hyperinflation. I think she was thinking that Christian citizens of a rich, privileged nation such as the United States should have some power to intervene for good in the affairs of a backward nation like Zimbabwe.

I'd like to offer a rather different perspective. First, I think that there are many uncomfortable and heretofore un-noticed similarities between many failed states as they are now and the United States as it now is. I think that these similarities will lead to conditions in the United States deteriorating rapidly very soon, and that it's entirely possible that parts of our country may end up suffering just as badly as Zimbabwe.

It's hard to get at the truth regarding Mugabe's role in Zimbabwe, since news about that country is brought to America largely by major media corporations owned by Western economic elites who have their own agenda. But it is also true that there are many African (and other) nations which are ruled by self-seeking leaders who sell out their citizens and the natural resources of their lands to the West for the sake of massive personal gain. This has also been true of the leaders of the United States ever since Ronald Reagan. The selfishness and looting of our nation's wealth by politicians accelerated through the reigns of Reagan and Bush I, and really took off during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Under President George Bush, the term “looting” has become totally inadequate to describe the raiding of this country by the rich. We may have to come up with a new term, something like “hyper-looting.”

A country whose leaders raid its resources for their own personal gain has no resources left to provide for the common good. Such a country is characterized by increasing disorder and failure of infrastructure – including roads, sewers, bridges, water treatment plants, law-enforcement and public protection agencies, financial systems, and even whole cities. Increasingly, we don't have to look overseas to find evidence of such failure. We need only look at the American South in the aftermath of the hurricanes which have passed through since 2005 to see destroyed infrastructure that will probably never be rebuilt. Or we can look at Detroit and the urban ruins that are reverting to prairie wilderness there. We can look at the strong probability that the U.S auto industry will be bankrupt before New Year's Day, the massive job losses, the partially-finished new housing tracts that will never be finished and that are being stripped for salvage, and any number of other signs of state failure right here in the U.S.A.

The U.S. is hardly alone as a candidate for the designation of “failed state.” Jeff Vail at http://jeffvail.net and John Robb, author of the Global Guerrillas blog (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/), have argued that the early 21^st Century will be a time in which the nation-state loses its legitimacy due to resource constraints and system failures, and that local “resilient communities” will become a much more important part of everyday life.

In short, many of the nations of the West, or the Global North, or the First World, however you want to describe them – nations which have for so long considered themselves to be the privileged, the rich, the advanced – are on the verge of becoming failed states in their own right. This is especially true of the United States. (How many of you have read Reinventing Collapse?) So here's my question to make thinking heads hurt, if anyone out there is reading this and wants a headache for the next few weeks: how should Christians live and act in a land that is falling apart?

Ya Better Be Good...Joel Osteen's Coming to Town

2008-12-07T13:14:00.000-08:00

For those who still think that the blessing of God consists primarily of material possessions, I have some good news. Joel Osteen is coming to Portland, Oregon next weekend, and he has a message that will fit right in with your views. Ticket prices are $15 per person. If anyone does not have the $15, they can just name and claim that money, and they should be all right. Or if they have extra faith, they can just name and claim a seat at the Rose Garden arena, and they won't even have to worry about money. I won't be attending his event, so you can name and claim my seat.

Defining the Blessing of God

2008-12-07T01:09:00.000-08:00

I'm going to talk like a geek for a few sentences. I hope no one minds. Being a geek is what I get paid for; “it's what I do.” Anyway, here goes.

On my job, I recently had to specify some electrical power protective relays for generator and transformer protection applications. I was basing my selection on guidance that I had been given to base my design around Schweitzer or General Electric Multilin products. But I got to talking to a fellow engineer who told me about another company's protective relays – how good they were and how easy they were to program, as well as how much less they cost than the Multilin products. I already knew a fair bit about Multilin and Schweitzer products, but I knew very little about the this other company's relays. So, being intrigued, I checked out the other company's website (I'll call them Company X).

The home page of their site has a tab titled, “About Company X.” It also has a tab dedicated to the founder's artwork. Though I get paid to be a geek, I also have a human side, and am always curious to find out more about the non-engineering side of engineers who have additional sides to their personalities (some engineers don't). (BTW, the last time I took the Myers-Briggs test, the results indicated that I should have been a psychologist or tutor instead of an engineer.) I checked out the founder's art (he's actually pretty good) and a few other things; then I read the “CEO Message” from the founder's son. A few sentences caught my eye and made me stop and think (don't worry; I soon kicked myself in the pants and got back to work). Here's an excerpt of the “CEO Message”:

“There are those in this world who believe that the only way to get ahead is to look out for #1 first. God's Word says - NOT SO! We are to humbly serve others first. We are to treat the other guy like we want to be treated. We're to consider his welfare above our own. None of us meet these goals to perfection, but if these aren't our goals, then we don't meet them at all.

“A business, subject to the Lord, based on these goals cannot fail. God won't let it. In fact, He promises, 'Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap.' Now what CEO could resist an offer like that!

“So, when we regard our customers' needs more highly than our own and act accordingly, then God blesses the business more abundantly than we could ever imagine. If we look out only for #1, that's exactly how many we've got on our side. When we care for others first to the Glory of God, we have all the creation power of the universe on our side. May we at Company X always keep this foremost in our minds.”

Now I've never met the CEO, but I do know the reputation of his products, and I believe that he is a reputable, hard-working, honest man. But his portrayal of the blessing of God aroused questions in me, because what he said about blessing seems to be typical of the idea of blessing which is standard in many evangelical circles nowadays – namely, that the blessing of God on someone's life is seen primarily in their material prosperity.

I have a few problems with that idea. First, it seems to me to be a peculiarly American idea, although I cannot rigorously defend this statement, since I haven't studied world history deeply enough to state such a thing categorically. Yet when I think of the bits of history I remember from college and high school classes taken long ago, it seems that the Christianity of other places and other times regarded this earthly life as a time of suffering and trial, and reserved the hope of a better existence for the hereafter. Indeed, Dmitri Orlov says the following in his book Reinventing Collapse: “(The message of the Russian Orthodox Church)...has always been one of asceticism as the road to salvation. Salvation is for the poor and humble, because your rewards are either in this world or the next, not both. This is rather different from Protestantism, the dominant religion in America, which made the dramatic shift to considering wealth as one of God's blessings, ignoring some inconvenient points rather emphatically made by Jesus to the effect that rich people are extremely unlikely to be saved. Conversely, poverty became associated with laziness and vice, robbing poor people of their dignity.”

Orlov's observation is a good one. According to many spokespersons of modern American evangelicalism, material prosperity is the sign of God's blessing, and poverty is a sign of failure of some kind in those who are poor. Yet what does this say about the many poor saints throughout history? What does it say about the many poor and suffering Christians who live now in foreign countries? What does this say about a person like Dr. Paul Brand, a poor missionary doctor in India who discovered the neuropathic damage caused by leprosy and invented treatments for leprous patients, yet who refused to get rich from his discoveries? Indeed, James 2:5 says, “Listen, my beloved brothers. Didn't God choose those who are poor in this world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the Kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?”

But there's an additional problem with identifying the blessing of God as receiving ever more material wealth. The fact is, as many have said many times, that the world is running against functional, structural limits to consumption and economic growth. Much of the growth that has taken place over the last several decades has come at the expense of the environment and the poor of the earth. There is therefore not only a moral danger in living large; there is also the practical matter that living large will not be possible for many people for much longer. The comfortable, affluent way of life of First World citizens – of Westerners – of Americans – is coming to an end, to be replaced with something a lot less comfortable, something quite a bit more rugged.

That new existence which is coming upon us is something for which most American evangelicals are ill-prepared. Indeed, it's hard to find Christian bloggers who openly and honestly discuss Peak Oil and climate change, or the immoral nature of excessive consumption. We don't tend to think realistically about these things, and when we think about them at all, we tend to think that God will work some miracle to prevent us from having to suffer or live more simply. I think it's time we all grew up. Part of that growing-up will be a repentance from materialism (“Don't lay up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consume, and where thieves don't break through and steal...” - Matthew 6:19-20, World English Bible), and a new, accurate understanding of what the blessing of God actually is in this day and age. I don't claim to have that new understanding, but I'm working on it.

Now perhaps the CEO of Company X has this accurate understanding, and I simply misinterpreted his “CEO Statement.” Also, I don't mean this in any way as a criticism of this company's relays. I too think they provide a lot of value for the money, and the next time I have to specify a protective relay for medium- or high-voltage applications, I will look first at this company's products. And I am sure that the company CEO is a very charitable person, and it would not surprise me to find that he gives very generously of his material resources to help the less fortunate. It's just that I think we American evangelicals need to start looking at things differently. Please kindly consider this post as the chicken-scratches of a guy who's trying to figure all of this out.

The Cost of a Christian Witness

2008-11-29T16:35:00.000-08:00

It's been obvious to me for a while now that being a Christian witness in the world is not the same thing as upholding American patriotism. The two are different; they are not equivalent. Seeing the difference between these two things means that I can never again go along with the agenda of the American Religious Right. But that has brought me to a question: what does it mean then for Christians to uphold God's interests in this present world? What would God have us do?

It's a question I am trying to figure out, although I have a very rough idea. Does God want us to advance His Kingdom on earth? Or does He want us to invite people on earth to come out of the present social arrangements of this world and to become subjects of His Kingdom? Is advancing God's Kingdom on earth the same thing as inviting the citizens of this world to join a kingdom that is coming? If our goal is to try to make all the nations of earth conform to the laws of God's Kingdom, I don't know if such a goal can be accomplished by fallible mortals as long as this present age lasts. That's something that only God can do, although His earthly subjects can exert some influence over the things that happen on earth. But if our goal is to invite the citizens of this world to join God's Kingdom, that is more achievable. Our invitation to others to join that Kingdom consists of us acting as witnesses of that Kingdom.

But the witness must first and foremost be the witness of our lives. Talk is cheap, and too many people have already said too many words. And the deeds of some of these people have contradicted their words. On the other hand, deeds are costly. Living out the Sermon on the Mount can be very costly, especially at this time in history when our present global economic and political systems are failing, when moral and ethical expectations that were common a few decades ago are trampled, and when life as a whole is becoming more chaotic. I read a lot of blogs and articles relating to Peak Oil and financial collapse. And I read (and sometimes witness firsthand) the stories of the breakdown of American society, stories about ordinary Americans doing increasingly bizarre and incredibly selfish things, like trampling store employees to death just to be the first in line to score a deal on discounted consumer electronics.

Hearing about these things leads to anxiety. Certain things could ease that anxiety, I suppose. I could hoard my resources instead of sharing them. Or I could buy a gun. My neighbors have several guns. One neighbor and his wife are active in their church, but they are also armed to the teeth. I could also get back into martial arts, which I haven't studied since I got out of high school. If that's too much for conscience to bear, I could cheat just a little bit – maybe put up a punching bag in the garage, do a bit of shadow-boxing, rig up a few homemade devices to practice with to improve my speed and coordination. But there's Matthew 5:38-42, and the Lord's words to Peter in Gethsemane: “All those who take the sword will die by the sword.” And taking up the sword would disqualify me as a witness, I think. So there's a conflict.

That conflict was especially pronounced this week when I drove to a restaurant (one of the few times I drove this week; I suppose I should have walked or ridden my bike instead) and found upon leaving that someone had smashed the passenger window of my vehicle. Whoever did it was too stupid to take anything valuable, like the radio or my vehicle registration; instead they just lifted a pair of gloves that had been on the seat. My vehicle is over ten years old and wasn't expensive even new, so I wondered a lot about why someone had chosen to target me. Later came the anger and fantasies about what I would have done if I had caught the vandal in the act.

I think I'll have many more occasions to face this conflict between the requirements of Christian witness and the natural desire to preserve myself. Every time the conflict comes, I'll be faced with a “Gethsemane moment.” I'm facing one now.

Ted Haggard, Sociopath, Rises Again

2008-11-23T17:46:00.000-08:00

Ted Haggard, disgraced former minister of New Life Church in Colorado, is seeking to make a comeback as a preacher. (See http://news.aol.com/article/is-disgraced-pastor-reinventing-himself/258087?icid=100214839x1213997335x1200907067) This is less than a year after he was ordered by his church to refrain from preaching for a period of a few years in response to the revelation of sexual sin and drug use by Mr. Haggard.

Haggard is justifying his earlier return to preaching by pointing to his "gift" and "call from God," and he has a band of supporters and yes-men who are singing the same tune to anyone who will listen. Rather than face the fact that he has become a toxic person, he has sought to shift the blame for his toxicity onto others, going so far as "chastising church leaders for missing an opportunity to use his scandal to 'communicate the gospel worldwide,'" and boasting that he has emerged from his scandal with a stronger Christian faith and marriage than he'd ever had.

This is really bizarre, yet it is typical of many fallen and disgraced "ministers" in American evangelical culture. The fact that they are able to stage "comebacks" after exposure of serious, long-standing sin says something about the people who are still gullible enough to listen to them. It shows that there are still too many of us who call ourselves "evangelical" who are willing to give their lives and resources to leaders whose gift consists of nothing more than being able to organize or speak well and entertainingly, and who don't know how to live what they preach.

It also shows that too many of us don't have enough confidence in our own ability to understand the Bible, and is seen in our insecure search for "experts" whom we worship as heroes. And it shows that there is still too much money to be made in starting a big megachurch ministry. It's the money that ruins things, by attracting unscrupulous men to positions of power in much the same way that flies are attracted to hot, smelly dung.

A Few Rabbit-Trails

2008-11-22T20:00:00.000-08:00

Shortly after I started this blog, From SoC to Points North, I began to fear that I would quickly run out of things to say. I never had this fear with my original blog, TH in SoC, nor with my other blog, The Well Run Dry. But I guess if people are attuned to the things that happen to them every day, they can find something to talk about – especially in these present times.

I had another dream about my old church, a church which I must ashamedly describe as an aberrant and abusive group of people, as I described them in TH in SoC. But I also had a flash of insight after the dream, and I figured out why I still have dreams about that place and those people. It has to do with community. Like many high-demand, totalist groups, these people held out the promise of instant community to anyone who was willing to submit to their demands. Because they set themselves as the definers and mediators of “community” and because their demands were so intense, many of us who left had trouble establishing our own circles of community after we left.

I know it has been a struggle for me. While I lived in Southern California, during the days after I left that church, I had some healthy distractions and experiences of community in which people were free to be themselves. For instance, there was the experience of getting to know the neighbors on my street and talking to all of their kids. The kids used to come to my front yard so often to hang out that I once humorously thought to myself that I should have become a child psychologist instead of an engineer. Then there was a guitar class and a creative writing class I was involved in, and my discovery of Peak Oil two years ago, which took my mind off a great many other things. (Ah, but Peak Oil is a subject for another blog...)

Anyway, since I left Southern California over a year ago, the process of rebuilding the experience of community has been rather slow. It is not that there are not opportunities here; in fact, it seems that it would be easier here than it ever would in the vast suburbs of So. Cal. It's just that it's up to me to do the rebuilding, and not to lazily cede control of my social life to some authority figure usurping the place of a parent in my life. And the rebuilding involves adults coming together as free individuals who are free to be themselves as they interact with each other. Once that rebuilding is underway, I will be able to say that a major portion of the damage done to me by that old church is fixed, and that I've scored a victory over them.

There are other things I've been thinking about, such as the place of Christian art in the present world, and how to find and support artists whose work doesn't stink like corporatist cheese. I am also pondering the challenge of being a Christian witness in a dangerous world, as I think about the things I have learned over the last two years concerning energy, climate, and the evils of the present worldly power structures. That makes me think of a statement on Stormchild's blog Gale Warnings: “...most of us spend our lives as prey, economically and psychologically...” In a world dominated by rich and powerful predators, living as a Christian and not becoming prey will be a very big challenge. I've also been seeing the need to re-learn the “mechanics” of how the supernatural actually works. This is because of my exposure to wacky teaching in my old church over the years, as well as the craziness I have been seeing among many who are involved in the Charismatic/Pentecostal side of Christendom.

But this next weekend I am going on another long bike ride with a local club, providing that it doesn't rain on us all. I may even take pictures. To anyone reading this, I wish a happy Thanksgiving.

The 2008 Election - A Rearview Mirror Look

2008-11-15T21:44:00.000-08:00

They say that you're not supposed to talk about politics and religion. I wonder if that means that people are not supposed to talk about these subjects publicly at all, or whether it just means that you're not supposed to talk about them together at the same time. Perhaps politics and religion are like two substances that, when mixed together, undergo a hypergolic reaction and burst into flames. Anyway, I've been careful in my blogging not to do as “they” say. I hope I haven't set anyone on fire (but maybe it would be good if I had). And I'm about to talk politics and religion again. Why here instead of on my other blog, The Well Run Dry? Because I'm in the midst of covering alternative transportation and peak oil on that blog, and I don't want to interrupt the flow. So if you are flammable, you may want to stay away from this blog post.

The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States has produced some rather interesting reactions from various sectors of the American public, including reactions from many leading members of the Religious Right. According to a recent article in The Daily Advertiser titled, “Clergy Urge Prayer for Obama,” James Dobson told his radio audience that he was “bereft” after the election, “in the midst of a grieving process...over the loss of things that (he) has fought for 35 years.” Earlier in the year, he had threatened to sit out the 2008 election if John McCain was chosen as the Republican nominee, but later reversed course and endorsed McCain after McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate, stating that “it's probably obvious which of the two major party candidates' views are most palatable to those of us who embrace a pro-life, pro-family worldview.” There have also been stark warnings from Georgia Republican congressman Paul Brown calling Obama a Marxist with a Nazi agenda. And there is a Roman Catholic priest in South Carolina who told his parishioners that any who had voted for Obama needed to do penance before partaking of holy communion.

On the other side of the aisle, there are reports of joyful dancing in the streets among Democrats and those who call themselves “progressive.” Many of their spokespeople have called this election an historic moment in which old racist and class barriers were broken, and they speak of the dawn of a new day of “tolerance” and “diversity” and “progressiveness,” dwelling much on the symbolic value of this past election.

To both sides, I have a few things to say, things that will be very hard to swallow. Since I am a conservative evangelical Christian, I will start by addressing the conservative side of the aisle.

As I have said, I am a conservative evangelical Christian. I believe that the Bible is actually the inspired Word of God. My theology is summed up in the Apostles' Creed. I believe that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and that becoming a Christian means repenting of one's sins. I also believe that homosexuality and abortion are sins, because the Bible says that they are. Such beliefs are in direct contradiction to the views of most people aligned with the Democratic Party. In fact, I disagree with Barack Obama's position on these issues.

Yet I voted for Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States.

Some who know me will say that I voted for Obama because, like me, he is black. Others will question my Christian credentials, unable to grasp the reasoning behind my vote. Really, though, it is very simple to explain. My vote for Obama was not because he is black, although there are advantages to having a man like Obama in the sort of public spotlight granted to presidents. Obama – urbane, thoughtful, educated and well-spoken – is a powerful contradiction of the stereotypical def'-jammin, jive-talkin', b-ball, gangsta-thugga-rappa portrayal of black culture typically presented by the mainstream media. This stereotype is frequently the only portrayal shown in mainstream entertainment, so that when real-life events force people like Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Nelson Mandela or Barack Obama into public view, it's a surprise to many. Now at least, America gets to be surprised every day for the next four years.

Why then did I vote for Obama? Because the conservatives, Republicans and members of the Religious Right proved themselves to be supporters of a corporatist agenda that benefited a small group of rich elites while destroying poor nations and the poor of this nation, as well as destroying the earth. The evidence of that destruction has been well-documented on my blog, TH in SoC, in the posts titled, “Fighting With Broken Weapons” and “The Sins of the Right.” Here I will list just a few examples: the Iraq war, which was started on a pretext solely to seize Iraqi oil; the subsidizing of biofuels and genetically-modified food which inflated the price of basic food and lead to widespread hunger; the expansion of the private prison industry, which brought many people convicted of nonviolent crimes into long-term slavery while forever depriving them of the right to vote; the promotion of global laissez-faire neoliberal trade policies which destroyed the local farms, manufacturing enterprises, natural resources and economies of foreign nations while enriching Western corporations; the privatizing of public utilities and services in order to enrich private corporations at the expense of the poor and working-class; and the refusal to admit the reality of anthropogenic global warming and environmental degradation.

These are just a few sins of the Right. Many more have been documented in books such as the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and on websites such as the OXFAM site, Casaubon's Book and Navdanya by Vandana Shiva. Eventually these things would lead to the ruin of the United States and any other nation which allowed its economic elites to practice such sins. But the coming ruin has been accelerated by the increasing speed of manmade climate change, as well as the decline in resources due to Hubbert's Peak. Because of resource peaks and climate change, our present corporatist economic system is breaking. Yet under President Bush and the Republicans, average working-class people are being forced by their government into continued reliance on that system while being deprived of the ability to build a safety net of alternative systems. After examining the public service records of John McCain and Sarah Palin, I was convinced that these two persons would have continued the corporatist agenda pursued by President Bush. Therefore I voted against them.

The American evangelical “Religious Right” has sought to portray the Republican party as the party of godliness, Christianity and “family values,” stating that the Republicans are the most “pro-life” of the two major parties. I personally believe that the spokesmen for the Religious Right have been acting simply as builders of a political power base for candidates who have a corporatist agenda. The leaders of the Religious Right have pushed two issues to identify whether a candidate has a “Biblical” worldview and agenda, yet they have ignored the fact that the Bible does not confine itself to just two issues. Also, the Bible defines being “pro-life” much more broadly than just being against abortion. Abortion is sin – make no mistake. But oppressing and robbing those who have already been born is just as much of a sin as killing the unborn; yet the Religious Right is silent when it comes to condemning the murderous practices of rich Western elites.

But suppose I were to believe that the leaders of the Religious Right are sincere in their lobbying and use of political action to try to make America a “Christian” nation. It would be a great stretch to believe this, since they are just as vocal about opposing issues about which the Bible says nothing, issues like mass transit (since when is that a sin?!) and climate change legislation. Still, what if I were to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they sincerely think they are doing God's work? I believe that I would still end up scratching my head in wonder at them. Take Sarah Palin's statement to James Dobson before the election: “I'm going to know, at the end of the day, putting this in God's hands, that the right thing for America will be done.” Indeed, there were many prayers and calls for prayer made by Religious Right leaders in the days up to November 4. One minister at an Iowa McCain rally prayed for a McCain win because an Obama win would cause Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists to think that their god is bigger than the LORD. Let's assume then that religious evangelical conservatives were wholeheartedly committed to the rightness of their cause and to their strategy of political action as a means of advancing the Kingdom prior to November 4.

What then did November 4 teach them? Things certainly turned out differently than they had hoped and prayed. God didn't give these people what they asked for. Does this mean that God does not exist? Is God weak? Was it merely that these people did not have enough faith? Or could it be that they are mistaken about who God is and what He considers important? Most of us evangelicals have been down the political action road before. For years, I unquestioningly supported the Republican party as the party of God and country. For years I actually believed that it was possible to make a nation Christian in character through laws and elections. Much later I realized that this approach cannot work, because it's impossible to get unsaved people to act like Christians via political action. God is calling His people to live on this earth not as supporters of earthly empire, but as strangers, aliens, and witnesses of new life. Certainly all the political agitation of the Religious Right has produced less-than-stellar results. In fact, the country has gone very much in a direction opposite to that in which the leaders of the Right were trying to lead it. Yet they are unwilling to think on the implications of this. Perhaps it's true that the mark of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting a different result.

I assert that while the American Religious Right has stated that it's agenda is to use political action to create a Christian nation, its real agenda has been to legitimize the agenda of the rich and powerful, and to promote American (and Caucasian) domination of the world. Their narrow focus solely on homosexuality and abortion galvanizes potential members of their political power base, yet it poses no threat to established economic elites.

What then of the Left? The Left has historically been a critic of the greed and excesses of the Right. The Left has produced many spokespeople who were fearsomely anti-corporate and anti-capitalist, people like Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King, and folk singers such as Woody Guthrie. Yet in recent years, traditionally “left-leaning” mainstream media outlets have re-defined the “Left” solely in terms of rejecting Biblical sexual morality and being “progressive” regarding sexual issues. This too poses no threat to established economic elites. Thus we were told during the Democratic primaries that we should vote for Hillary Clinton because she's a woman with “progressive” values, and that a vote for her would be a vote for “change!” We know how Barack Obama was able to market himself as a “progressive” candidate, a “change agent,” with a message of “hope” and “inclusiveness” for America. Now that Obama has won, the mainstream media focus has largely been on spokespersons and proponents of sexually “alternative” lifestyles who are celebrating and giving their views on the meaning of Obama's victory for their cause.

My vote for Obama was not a vote for sexually “progressive” values, but a hope that he might tackle a far more difficult job, namely, the preservation of our country from ruin at the hands of economic and political elites. The danger is that the elites of our country may succeed in defining “progressive” values solely in terms of “alternative” sexual morality just as they defined evangelical conservatism solely in terms of sexual morality. Defining societal values in these terms poses no threat to the members of these elites, and allows them free rein in continuing to practice immoral deeds which enrich them while ruining, robbing and enslaving the poor of the earth. Yet by their actions, these elites are on the verge of destroying our nation and our planet.

Therefore I have a challenge for Mr. Obama and the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. If they are as “progressive” as they have been saying they are, they will quickly enact legislation to break the power of the rich and to prevent the possibility of any one individual or small group of people gaining inordinate wealth or power over the many. They will tell the truth to the American people about our present economic, environmental and energy crises, rather than trying to maintain the unsustainable American lifestyle of ever-increasing consumption. They will lead us into a truly sustainable way of life in which each person's needs – not greeds – is met. And they will remove the power of multinational corporations to extract the wealth of poor nations while destroying the people of those nations.

A good legislative/executive agenda for the first year of Obama's presidency might well look like this:

Break up economic monopolies and oligarchies in America, starting with the media. Enact rules and laws preventing one man or corporation from owning more than one percent of all newspapers, radio/television stations or Internet media services. Period.
Stop bailing out failed businesses that are dying because they based their business models on unrestrained growth of profits. The Big Three automakers don't need a bailout. If they are to be saved at all, let them re-tool to make railroad rolling stock and components, or to make bicycles. Poor “Joe-the-Blogger” Americans do not want to be turned into collateral for bailouts given to cover the bad choices of the rich.
Repeal all government regulation enacted by the Bush administration to prevent poor and working-class people from finding alternatives to products offered by big business. Abolish the National Animal Identification System for starters. Abolish all rules and laws which hinder small businesses through excessive regulation while letting big business off the hook.
If you want to “stimulate” the economy, require creditors to forgive the majority of debts owed by members of the working class, and to forgive all subprime mortgage debt. This will rein in many of the excesses and evil effects of our present credit economy, and will force a change to a more sensible economic arrangement.
Bring American troops home from their far-flung bases, ASAP. Bring the troops home from Iraq NOW. They never should have been sent there in the first place.
Repeal the Patriot Act NOW.
Shut down Guantanamo NOW.
Start NOW to build the policies and infrastructure that will help Americans live in a future with far less natural resources and energy. This does not require new leaps of technology, but simply requires that we honestly face reality. This is imperative, because a poorer, lower-energy, lower-consumption future is coming our way whether we like it or not.

Obama, you and the Democrats have identified yourselves as the “progressive” party, the party of “change.” How about it? Are you enough of a change to enact an agenda like this? Symbolism means nothing to me; I'm only interested in deeds. Show me what you've got.

Wanted - A Good Bard

2008-11-09T01:16:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been exposed to some interesting music videos from the late 80's and early 90's. One captivating example is the Billy Joel video The Downeaster Alexa. It tells the powerful, evocative story of fishermen struggling to make a living and provide for their families against the backdrop of the depletion of their fisheries by overuse and environmental damage. It's a very good video from a technical standpoint, and The Downeaster Alexa is a strong song, a good story well-told. Its lyrics were pounding in my head last Saturday as I rode my bike along the Columbia River in the early afternoon, pushing against a hard wind while yellow leaves fluttered and went airborne and gunmetal-colored clouds scudded overhead.

That song and its story have got me thinking. Christianity is also a strong, rich, multilayered story, and its bards should be just as skilled, just as excellent as artists like Billy Joel, if not more so. Yet the last time I checked out a “Christian” bookstore, all I found was commercialist cheese. My blog, TH in SoC, was in part a protest against the commercialism which has taken over Christian culture in recent decades. Hearing The Downeaster Alexa has aroused a hunger in me. I need a good story. Good stories, skillfully told, instruct and inspire pilgrims on their journey and help to keep them oriented toward their goal. But I don't know where to look for a good story. I am wary of going to the usual places to find stories, fearful that I will be charged lots of money for mediocre work.

I've started wanting again to be an artist. Not to (starve while trying to) make a living at it, mind you. Being an engineer is a reliable gig and it gets the bills paid. But I want to be an artist, not as a way of making money, but as a way of learning to tell the best and most edifying of stories. As Aaron Tate once wrote, “So I write a book of life/using the best words I can find/for some struggler to snuggle up/when the world becomes unkind.” I want to learn to tell good stories as a freewill offering. But this means two things: first, learning the craft of good storytelling, whether poetry, visual art or music; and secondly, being a living, breathing example of what I preach. It's the second part that's the hardest, since often I am tempted (and sometimes I yield to the temptation) to act in a way that denies the truths I profess. Anyway, I've been itching to start practicing guitar regularly again.

But that alone won't satisfy my hunger for a good story. I want especially the sort of stories that can be packed into short, pithy poems. I can take these with me and remember them when going to work or when stuck behind my computer doing a project. Maybe I should search other people's blogs, since I have recently been learning many though-provoking things from the blogosphere. And blogs are freewill expressions; most bloggers don't ever dream of making money from their writing, so the commercial motive is not present to corrupt what they say. Are there any blogs by skilled bards out there? Does anyone have any suggestions?

A Scripture for the Election Season

2008-11-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

As anyone reading this blog can probably tell, I've started regularly reading the Bible again. It's something we were compelled to do in my old abusive church, and something I did for a bit even after I left. But work got busy and other projects took up my time, and my regular reading became highly irregular. I don't know that I feel very guilty about this. Maybe I should, since the psychological damage I experienced in my old church environment did not go so far as to render me incapable of bringing myself to read.

Anyway, that's all water under the bridge now. But a couple of weeks ago I read something in Deuteronomy that hooked my interest, and I went back again tonight to study it in more detail, because I wanted to write about it for this post. The oddest thing happened while I was studying the passage, and it had nothing to do with what the passage was saying. I had to remind myself that I am not in the Assembly (the name for our old church) anymore, and that I am not preparing a “word of ministry” for Sunday morning. I'm just re-formatting my soul's “hard drive” and re-installing software that had gotten corrupted, if you get my drift. It's amazing how much it takes to fix good and noble things after bad men have gotten their hands on those things to screw them up.

But on to the passage. It is Deuteronomy 17:14-20, and it reads thus:

When you have come to the land which the LORD your God gives you, and shall possess it, and shall dwell therein, and shall say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me”; you shall surely set him king over yourselves, whom the LORD your God shall choose: one from among your brothers you shall set king over you; you may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother.

Only he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he may multiply horses; because the LORD has said to you, “You shall not go back that way again.” Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart not turn away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.

It shall be, when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book, out of that which is before the priests the Levites: and it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life; that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them; that his heart not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he not turn aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he and his children, in the midst of Israel. (Quoted from the World English Bible, a public domain translation.)

Among the things that struck me from this passage was the command that the king of Israel must not be a materialist – “Only he shall not multiply horses to himself...neither shall he multiply wives to himself...neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.” The Bible elsewhere equates greed with idolatry. Getting “stuff” was not to be the king's priority, and his choices and lifestyle were to be a reflection of this.

What was the king's priority to be, then? The law of God, the word of God – the king was to study it in order to obey it, that his reign might be an expression of the justice of God on earth, and that the king might remember always that he was simply one of the sons of Israel – "one of us," not superior to his brothers and sisters – and that all people are under God.

Note the contrast between the distraction of lusting for material possessions versus remembering the justice of God.

I am not quoting this passage in order to argue about what a “Christian” nation should look like; nor am I trying to force America to submit to the law of Moses. But if one looks at our most recent leaders, one sees a remarkable contrast between what this passage in Deuteronomy says and the character of the lives of our leaders. In order to get into elected office, they must both have and raise lots of money. While they are in office, they are servants of a corporatocracy, and after they leave office their corporate masters reward them richly with extremely lucrative appointments to leadership roles in the private sector. I think of former President Clinton, who according to some reports is one of the richest ex-presidents ever, and who was still busily shoveling dollars into his bank account as of the beginning of this year (See http://www.newsweek.com/id/105650, and http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?pagewanted=print, for instance.) But I also think of the greed of President Bush and the Republicans, as seen in such things as their tax cuts for the rich and their multi-hundred-billion dollar taxpayer-funded “bailouts” of their friends in high places.

In short, I see our former, present and (possibly) future leaders stuffing themselves with earthly wealth, gorged to bursting with possessions, and unable to stop themselves from their continued bingeing. While I am not reading or discussing the Deuteronomy passage in order to push some political action plan, I guess I am thinking about this passage as an aid to help me understand why our government seems so warped right now. Understanding is a key to coping.

I've gotten enough campaign mail in the last month to choke a camel. Most of it has very little effect on me, since I know who and what will get my vote in this election, and I hold no illusions about any of the candidates I am voting for. Yes, I am voting. But I am also doing other things as I see fit, in order to adapt to the future I think we will all face. Am I cynical? Maybe not; maybe I'm simply being realistic. But I'll be glad when, after this Tuesday, my mailbox contains only bills again.

A Prayer for Hard Times

2008-10-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

Our Father which art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil:

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.

Amen.

I'd like to consider for a moment Matthew 6:9-13, commonly known as the Lord's Prayer.

It is a “pattern prayer,” taught by our Lord as a pattern of the priorities which we should have when we pray, the things we should all be wanting when we ask. It was given under circumstances remarkably like those we face today. In giving this prayer the Lord was addressing a group of people who held an otherworldly hope of a coming age in which righteousness dwells. This group of people, while large in terms of absolute numbers, was yet a very small percentage of the total Jewish population of Palestine at the time. They lived in a world dominated by corrupt and self-serving elites, from the rulers and agents of the Roman Empire to the self-seeking leaders of the Jewish political/religious class (Pharisees, Saducees, Herodians, tax-collectors) who had sprung up to accommodate the Roman occupiers and conquerors of Palestine. The members of these elites used their power to devour the poor and powerless who were under their reign. The Lord's Prayer was a prayer for hard times, given to people living in hard times.

Therefore it is a good prayer for today, a day in which those Christians who seek to conduct themselves as strangers and exiles on the earth must live in the shadow of a corrupt, dominating, exploitative global system – a system which has invaded every area of common life, including the religious/evangelical institutional realm. In considering this prayer, I think it may be helpful to study each of its clauses and ask what it is we are really praying for when we recite each of its requests.

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

Yes, Lord, teach us reverence. Our society has so corrupted us that we mock everything and consider everything a joke. Teach us to appreciate those things that are worthy of honor, to give reverence where reverence is due. Above all, may this world learn to hallow Your Name.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

May righteousness reign on earth. Lord, You see the injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the poor, and how it seems that the powerful will never be brought to any earthly justice. Lord, behold the wars started on the basis of lies, in order that rich, powerful elites may steal the resources of other countries. Lord, behold the exploitation of the poor by the rich, the unjust imprisonment and enslavement of the poor by the rich, the swaying and corrupting of earthly governments by the rich, the destruction of the earth in order to satisfy the appetites of the rich. Thy Kingdom come. Bring in a day of judgment and justice in which these evils will be righteously and swiftly stopped. And prepare us for that day by turning us away from unjust deeds in our own lives. Maranatha.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Yes, Lord, we repent of asking to be rich, of asking to be spoiled, of living as materialists, of overconsumption. We simply ask for our daily bread, our needful bread for the coming day – knowing that in the days now upon us the answering of this prayer must rightly be regarded as a miracle, for which we will give thanks.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

Lord, we know that hard times will bring out the worst in many people. May we be part of the solution and not part of the problem. Deliver us from vindictiveness.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Lord, in the coming times, may we behave honorably. May we not face a temptation so severe that we would compromise ourselves or deny You by our words and actions.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

Remind us in the coming days that no matter what happens, You are still enthroned in Heaven. We acknowledge that You are still in command.

Thoughts, anyone?

People I Meet (And Run From) In My Dreams

2008-10-18T20:55:00.000-07:00

One thing about enduring interesting times is that a person who does so spends a long time afterward processing what happened to him. That processing tends to show up at night, in the things that go through a guy's head during R.E.M. sleep.

So it is with me. It's been over five years since the last time I attended the abusive church I described in my blog, TH in SoC. For the first several months afterward, I very regularly had dreams about some of the more difficult people in the group (that includes almost all of the leaders, by the way), people that were a royal pain in the ... uh, neck to me. Most of that time I was quite angry. It finally occurred to me that I should do things to distract myself from rehashing the things I'd had to put up with during my involvement in the group.

During that time God providentially arranged for me to be assigned to a long-term consulting engineering contract in downtown Los Angeles, so I had to ride the Metrolink every day (expenses paid by my company, of course), which I had never done before. It was a welcome change of scenery and I encountered loads of new faces and new situations. During that time I also took a night class in creative writing at a local community college. Yet there were too many mornings when I'd wake up after a night of dreams re-hashing and processing old situations and encounters with old familiar faces, and I'd wonder why I never dreamed of work or school or riding the train instead.

Thankfully, the severity and frequency of the dreams has diminished quite a bit since then. I'm not really angry anymore. And if you want to talk about a change of scenery, I now live a thousand miles away from So. Cal. Yet even here there is an occasional night when old faces and old scenes insinuate themselves into my dreams.

Maybe I should write a song about this. Jackson Browne wrote “Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate.” Billy Joel wrote “River of Dreams.” Shawn Colvin wrote “Diamond in the Rough,” which has a memorable line, “I have lost too much sleep and I'm gonna find it.” If I have another “flashback” dream, I'll write a song titled, “Hey you! Get out from under my eyelids, man!” Then I'll have a good wry laugh. Does anyone out there from a similar background find that they're still “processing” things? How do you deal with it?

* * *

I attended Saturday evening service at the local rescue mission. Afterward, I asked one of the staffers a bit about the mission and the sorts of people they are seeing as visitors. He told me that while most of those who come to the mission are over 25 years old and dealing with substance abuse problems, there are some who come because they are victims of the current American economic mess. We talked about the needs of the residents and opportunities for volunteers to help out as he handed out bed tickets to a line of waiting men and the light rail trains rumbled by in the darkness outside. As I was leaving, he invited me back and said that I was welcome anytime. I may indeed make a return visit soon.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I'm going to hook up with some bicycle riders and go on a long recreational ride. It's more fun to do it with a group than to ride by myself. The weather should be good. And I have a post in the works which I will publish soon, titled, “A Prayer for Hard Times,” a look at the Lord's Prayer found in Matthew 6.

A Faith for Hard Times

2008-10-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I work too hard at writing. I wrote a little story for my most recent post on my other blog, The Well Run Dry; I intended to just bang out a cute, quirky little allegory, but I spent way too much time doing research on Wikipedia and other sites in order to provide enough detail to make it believable. This post on From SoC to Points North will take a lot less time.

First, I want to point out a very good article, “Helps to Spiritual Renewal,” written by Margaret Irons, webmaster of the Assembly Reflections website. She came out of the same abusive church from which I also escaped. Her article is at http://www.geftakysassembly.com/Articles/Recovery/HelpsToSpiritualRenewal.htm.

It seems undeniable that hard times are ahead for our world, and particularly our nation. The most helpful thing when facing hard times is to have a clear-headed, adult perspective. This is especially true for Christians, who are supposed to be a display of wisdom in the midst of hard times, instead of clinging to erroneous beliefs that lead to disappointment and harm.

I recently finished reading the book of Numbers and am now in Deuteronomy. One thing confronted me inescapably: the knowledge that God is holy and that He punished nations which turned to wickedness. This is why He told Israel to conquer the nations of Canaan. But He told them that while, if they lived according to His law – if their deeds were a reflection of His character – He would bless them, He also told them that if they too turned to wickedness, He would punish them in the same way that He punished the nations they dispossessed.

People in the “post-modern” West don't like hearing this, and they tend to get very agitated and hostile whenever the holiness of God is mentioned. Yet that holiness is a fact, as is the fact that we have all fallen short of it. The failure extends across all lines – Left and Right, rich and poor, red, yellow, black, white. The evidence of our failure is the mess we have made of our country and of the world. “Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” But God has promised to the repentant an inheritance just as He promised an inheritance to Israel. One day, His people will inherit a new earth. The future heirs of the earth are known by this sign: that they are gentle and meek – Matthew 5:5. The first element of a faith for hard times is to acknowledge that God is holy, and to humbly accept His judgments and wait on His vindication.

There is a second element. I visited the Russian church I wrote about last week. I didn't understand everything (though I had a capable translator), but one day I'll write more fully about the parts I did understand. One thing that struck me was a hymn they sang at the end of their service. They sang it a cappella, with multiple parts, in a peculiarly Russian rhythm. I have to say that it was beautiful. My translator told me that it was Psalm 121 set to music, and since I had my English Bible, I opened it to that psalm and read it while everyone else sang. I was struck by another thought: that God has promised to keep His people. He is the unfailing Keeper of His people. “The LORD will keep you from all evil. He will keep your soul. The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in, from this time forth, and forevermore.”

I had to ask myself whether I really believed this. It's easy to distort Biblical promises of God's care and safekeeping to mean that He will give each of us a Mercedes-Benz, a lifetime supply of gasoline, a McMansion all paid for, perfect health, and a trophy spouse. Then when things don't work out according to our greeds (as opposed to needs), we get “disillusioned.” I don't believe that God has promised an easy life to anyone. In fact, when the Bible mentions people who have an easy life, they are usually numbered among the wicked. But God wants His people to trust Him – even in the times now upon us – that He will be our Keeper. What that means, we will all find out shortly. But whatever the shape of His keeping, it will be evident in the end that He did the right thing by us.

I'm thinking of heading over to a local rescue mission tomorrow for Sunday service. I'll come bearing gifts for the offering box – not money, but things like toothpaste, toothbrushes, shaving gear and the like. (Things like clothes and underwear also go over very well.) I'll tell more about it next week.

P.S. This is slightly off topic, but today I read a major news article about several states illegally purging voters from their voter registration rolls prior to the November Presidential election. The Republican party is trying to take advantage of this to influence the election. The news article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/us/politics/09voting.html?em. Please let others know about this, if you would. Fellow bloggers, let's do what we can to ensure that this election is honest. Thanks!

Perils and Promise of Christian Community

2008-10-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

On my other blog, The Well Run Dry, I have been writing about how the present global system known as the “official economy” is breaking, and how it is necessary for those who are not rich or powerful to begin building safety nets of alternative systems. One such system that I mentioned in a recent post is cohousing as a form of communal living in which community members could provide mutual support to one another.

After I wrote that post, I started thinking to myself, “What have I just written??!” Two things came immediately to mind: the relatively smooth experiences of some members of a secular cohousing community I recently visited, and my experience with communal living many years ago while a member of an abusive, unhealthy church. It seems from reading the Lord's commands in the Sermon on the Mount and the Upper Room discourse (Matthew 5-7; John 13-17) that Christians should have no trouble living communally when necessary, and that in the midst of widespread uncertainty and economic hardship, Christians should be a model for others to imitate. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, just like I have loved you; that you love one another. By this everyone will know that your are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Why then was my experience of “Christian community” so screwed up? I know the answer: I was hoodwinked into joining a fraudulent organization that was not a genuine church, but merely one man's personal empire established to exploit its members. But I found after leaving this “church” that the founder's attitude was typical of many leaders and would-be leaders in modern evangelicalism. It is an attitude that loves hierarchy and domination, and the culture of that attitude is widespread in many parts of the American church.

So I guess I have a question: can Christians associate regularly with each other in a non-hierarchical way? Could Christians form cohousing communities in which every decision was reached by mutual consensus? Or are we doomed to be forever looking for popes to rule us? Will we always be easy prey for would-be religious empire-builders? I'd like to think we can get beyond that. (By the way, I'm not protesting the Biblical prescription for leadership in the Church. But I am protesting the obsession many wanna-be leaders have for trying to establish a pecking order in every situation where Christians come together.)

I ran across a Wikipedia article describing an encouraging example of a community that seemed to get beyond that. According to the article, “Clarence Jordan was a Baptist scholar and theologian who founded Koinonia Farm, a small but influential religious community in Southwest Georgia” in 1942. Koinonia was a radical community whose members regarded each other as equals, shared possessions, and practiced ecological stewardship. They were also racially mixed, which swiftly brought them into conflict with their neighbors, including the KKK. From Koinonia Farm arose organizations like Habitat for Humanity.

Mr. Jordan is an intriguing character, and I intend to find out a bit more about his life. One other thing about him is his “Cotton Patch Gospel” translation of the New Testament from Greek into early 20^th Century American English, Southern style. Check out his translation of Matthew 21:12-13: “Then Jesus went into First Church, pitched out the whole finance committee, tore up the investment and endowment records, and scrapped the long-range expansion plans. 'My house shall be known for its commitment to God,' he shouted, 'but you have turned it into a religious racket!'” I like the sound of that!

I checked out the small elderly church I wrote about in my last post. This weekend I think I will check out a Russian church. (Imagine that – a black man visiting a Russian church. And why? Because the American church seems so vacuous!) I know how to say good morning, good afternoon, good evening and farewell in Russian, but after that I'm lost. The week after next, I may attend Sunday service at the local rescue mission. (Why there? I'll explain in another post. I'll just say for now that I think I'd be more likely to meet the Lord among poor people than at a glitzy megachurch.) After that, I'll take a Sunday off to go on a long bike ride and do some thinking and evaluating.

The Road North

2008-09-27T19:27:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new blog, From SoC to Points North. I am the author of the blog, TH in SoC. But while I am still TH, I am no longer in SoC, having moved a thousand miles north from Southern California a year ago.

I suppose this is a second phase of my recovery from an abusive church experience. The first phase culminated in the writing of my first blog, TH in SoC. It was with a great deal of pathos and not a little anger that I wrote that blog, and though I put a lot of research into several of the posts, it was much more than just an academic study. Rather, finishing that blog gave me the sort of release and quiet that comes from having just successfully concluded a long fist fight. I hope I caused an appropriate amount of trouble for some perpetrators who badly needed troubling.

But now, it's time for me to take a little care of me. Chiefly, it's time for me to take some time to seriously figure out what the Christian faith is really about, since the teaching of the Bible was severely distorted in my old abusive church in order to serve the ends of the church leaders. I haven't abandoned the faith; I am still a pilgrim. But over the course of years my compass was smashed and someone scribbled in magic marker all over my map. It's time to sort things out. That sorting-out process is likely to be a very large subject. And I want to connect with other pilgrims.

I guess that means it may be time now to start looking for a church. If I confine myself to churches within walking distance of my house, three interesting choices come to mind. There is a very small church composed of people whose average age must be around 65 or 70, people who probably own collections of old vinyl records of Andy Griffith or Jim Nabors singing old Gospel favorites. I don't know how well I'd fit in there, but I don't think I'd be in much danger from stupid church games. Then there are at least two Russian churches nearby. Once a few weeks ago I saw a bunch of Russians walking to one of the churches, and I asked one of them about resources for learning Russian. His reply was that if I joined their church, they would teach me Russian. But I don't know if I want to pay that kind of price for a language lesson. Something about the word "join" makes me sweat a little, even now. Lastly, there is a wanna-be "Purpose-Driven" church within easy walking distance, complete with praise band and jeans-clad cool pastor. I'm definitely not going there. I think I'll probably try out the elderly congregation tomorrow.