Month: March 2005

Self-styled “anarchist” Noam Chomsky (what, you didn’t know he had a blog?) thinks not only that there should be military conscription, but that all jobs (or at least the unpleasant ones) should be divvied up by conscription:

One preliminary question is whether it is a democratically determined community decision that an army is necessary. Sometimes the answer is pretty clearly Yes: in World War II, for example. There were some people who refused conscription, dedicated pacifists mostly: courageous and honorable, but doesn’t bear on the issue. Suppose that assumption holds. Then conscription is not a violation of basic human rights any more than parcelling out other unpleasant work equitably is. Say garbage collection. In a decent society it shouldn’t be “volunteer” in the sense that it’s undertaken only by people who are driven to it by need. Rather, it should be equitably distributed—which one can call “conscription” if one likes. These are basic issues discussed in all thinking about decent participatory societies, within the PARECON discussions, for example.

What the–? If that’s anarchism, I’ll take tyranny! (Or, whatever the opposite of anarchism is – monarchy? Whatever.)

See here.

Also, Australian bioethicist Michael Cook argues that ineptitude doomed the effort to keep Ms. Schiavo alive.

Meanwhile, The Netherlands continues to position itself on the cutting edge of Western civilization’s slide into barbarism.

The very erudite Secret Agent Man has the most thorough debunking of the Republicans’ efforts to intervene in the Schiavo case that I’ve seen:

The federal government’s role in the American mythos is the deus ex machina, swooping down onto the stage of corrupt local politics and setting all things right. So it may be mystifying to see that government so quickly and adamantly refusing Terri Schiavo even a day’s respite from the Florida court’s order condemning her to death by starvation and thirst. I hope to take some of the mystery out of these events by explaining some things about the supposedly “heroic” passage of the federal version of “Terri’s law.” At worst, that law is a simple bit of electoral window-dressing. At best, it’s the tardy reaction of a party of foolish virgins who, despite great promises, have been caught short by events. That Party, I believe, doesn’t deserve the support of Christian voters. It does not prevent evil or do good. I sometimes wonder if its only role isn’t to distract Christians from conducting the real work of pro-life politics. But whatever its motives, I think it’s clear that the Republican Party has done its best to save Terri, and proved that it’s best isn’t good enough.

Much, much more here.

Camassia (recently returned from bandwidth limbo) posts on her experience of giving up meat, fish, dairy, and eggs for Lent. She also hints that she may make it a regular thing (at least the beast, fowl, and reptile – hey, alligators are amniotes too!).

I’m what you might call a “demi” vegetarian (or, as I prefer, “half-assed”). I avoid beef, pork, and poultry, but eat fish, dairy, and eggs. I haven’t been convinced that it’s wrong per se to kill animals for food, but I have been convinced that the methods of factory farming, by which much, if not most, meat in the U.S. is raised, is inhumane and indefensible. It is possible to buy meat that is labeled “free-range” or “grass fed,” but my understanding is that standards for such labeling are pretty loosey-goosey and are no guarantee that the meat was raised humanely. Obviously, if you raise your own meat or know someone who does, that’s a different matter.

My point is that my half-assed vegetarianism is not motivated by a conviction that eating animals is absolutely wrong, but that under present circumstances I find it nearly impossible to engage in what we might call “just meat-eating.” I pick that label intentionally because the argument is formally similar to that which provides the rationale for what you might call my half-assed pacifism. I remain unconvinced, as a strict pacifist would have it, that it is always wrong to take a human life. However, I do have serious doubts that a just war is possible under present conditions. (We could combine the lines of inquiry and ask whether it is immoral per se to kill a human being for food! But I’m not going there.)

The reasoning is similar to the pro-vegetarian argument in that both depend on certain contingent institutional factors. In the case of meat eating, the practice of factory farming makes it difficult, if not impossible, to engage in just meat eating. In the case of war, there are reasons for seriously doubting whether any modern nation-state is institutionally committed to waging war in just war terms. Why do I think that? Just to take one example that I think I’ve mentioned here before, consider that oft-repeated claim that “we don’t do body counts” – i.e. that the Pentagon doesn’t, at least officially, keep track of civilian casualties.

Now, any version of just war theory worth its salt maintains that a) civilians cannot be directly targeted and b) the killing of civilians may be permissible if it is unintended, indirect, and meets the test of proportionality. Proportionality here means that the good achieved by the act that results in the civilian deaths “outweighs” the evil of those deaths.*

But if we don’t know how many civilians are being killed, then how can we possibly make the judgment of proportionality? The fact that there doesn’t seem to be an institutional commitment to making that judgment indicates to me that our government is less than fully serious about just war principles, even though those principles are often used to justify our wars.

Other examples could be offered, but the bottom line is that appeals to just war principles are worse than meaningless if there is no institutionalized way of putting them into practice. If institutional arrangements virtually guarantee that those principles will be violated (just as the institutional arrangements of factory farms guarantee that animals will not be treated humanely), then it would seem to follow that anyone committed to just war principles would rarely, if ever, be able to support a war carried out under those auspices.
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*It’s worth noting that I also have serious doubts about whether proportionality can be measured in any objective way.

Eric at Xphiles is doing a series on Lutherans and the so-called Emerging Church. See here, here, and here. I myself am a bit skeptical of this “new and improved” version of Christianity which tends to throw around buzzwords like “postmodernity” a little too cavalierly for my taste, but Eric makes a good case that there’s much to be learned on both sides.

(via I Am a Christian Too)

What does it say when probably the highest-profile advocate in America of a “consistent ethic of life” is a Jewish atheist? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

Link here. (via A Conservative Blog for Peace)

At Counterpunch Carl G. Estabrook writes on “The Subversive Commandments”:

Ignoring government assaults on the Bill of Rights (for which, admittedly, the remedy under the present US Constitution is impeachment, the responsibility of Congress) the US Supreme Court has instead fastened its attention on a political fetish-object: the Ten Commandments. In the midst of an illegal war, a torture scandal, and lawless administration actions — such as imprisoning an American citizen, Jose Padilla, for almost three years now without trial or charge — the court recently heard arguments on the question (as the New York Times put it), “what does it mean for the government to display a copy of the Ten Commandments? … a six-foot red granite monument that has sat since 1961 on the grounds of the Texas Capitol, and framed copies of the Ten Commandments that were hung five years ago on the walls of two Kentucky courthouses.”

In an impressive confirmation of the Postmodernist-cum-Humpty-Dumpty theory of the meaning of words (“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all”), both sides (as we say) tell us what the Ten Commandments mean. Conservatives defend the postings in Kentucky and Texas on the grounds that the Ten Commandments “formed the foundation of American legal tradition.” Liberals on the other hand insist that the posting is an “establishment of religion,” contrary to the first amendment to the Constitution. In fact, both are wrong: the Ten Commandments in their historical setting are a revolutionary manifesto, dedicated to the overthrow of traditional authority and religion.

[…]

The Ten Commandments in their proper historical context commend atheism in regard to the religion of the gods and anarchism in respect to the laws of the kings. Arising from a revolutionary people, they support the overthrow of authoritarian structures in the name of human community. That sounds pretty good to me.

Also see Estabrook’s very interesting essay “Abortion and the Left.”

Speaking of Atonement theories, Hugo had a very good post yesterday talking about his attachment to traditional theories of the Atonement despite the fact that many in his progressive milieu sharply reject them. He also linked to an article by Richard Mouw defending a Reformed doctrine of the Atonement against criticisms that it promotes violence and acquiescence in unjust suffering (the link Hugo offered requires a subscription or fee; you can read an abridged version here).

One of the points Mouw emphasizes is that he thinks of Christ’s suffering in our place more in terms of experiencing God’s wrath than suffering physical punishment. By “wrath” he means the experience of separation from God that would be our just punishment as sinners:

These formulations [i.e. in the Heidelberg Catechism and the Geneva Catechism], then, locate the redemptive significance of Christ’s suffering, not so much in pain that can be thought of as being actively inflicted upon him by the Father, but rather in his profound experience as the innocent one of the cursedness of being abandoned by God on behalf of those who do deserve that abandonment. Thus the greatest redemptively significant agony that he experienced on the Cross, on this view, is not when he gasped in pain when they pounded the nails into his flesh, or when he pleaded that his thirst be quenched, or when he heard the mockery of onlookers, but when he cried out in utter forlornness, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

Mouw highlights this aspect of Christ’s redemptive suffering in part in order to defuse the criticisms from some feminist theologians that Atonement theory promotes “divine child abuse” and encourages Christians to imitate Christ by submitting to unjust suffering. Mouw says that it is precisely this aspect of Christ’s suffering that we can’t emulate. Because his suffering has a once-and-for-all quality, Christians need not seek to imitate Christ’s experience of abandonment.

One thing that Mouw doesn’t make explicit, but which seems implied by his account, is that this understanding of what Christ suffered on our behalf helps explicate the connection between sin and punishment in a more compelling way than it is sometimes presented.

A common problem with Atonement theories is that people will say, “If God is so compassionate, why doesn’t he just up and forgive us and forget about punishment? Why the need for someone to be punished on our behalf?” This can make God seem like some petty bureaucrat enmeshed in a web of rules that he is unwilling or unable to break.

But if punishment for sin is understood as abandonment by God, then things aren’t quite so simple. The understanding of sin this seems to imply is a kind of “turning away from God” or separating ourselves from him. This is how Augustine, for instance, seems to have understood sin – we turn away from God (our true Good) and toward some finite good(s). But this is essentially irrational because God is the source of Being; so to turn away from God is to turn toward nothingness. It’s like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.

This understanding of sin seems to imply that punishment has a much tighter connection with sin than we might think. We often think of punishment as a kind of arbitrary penalty tacked on to a particular offense. Rob a convenience store and get ten years, say. But if sin is separating ourselves from God, then punishment, understood as final separation from God, would seem to simply be a logical consequence of sin. This punishment would seem to be an inevitable (barring intervention) outcome of the sin, not a penalty that God arbitrarily attaches to particular acts. Separation from God just is what sin is all about.

This would seem to indicate why God can’t simply “commute the sentence” as it were, since the punishment involved is an inseparable aspect of the sin itself. Instead, God is somehow able to take the punishment onto himself. The inevitable consequence of sin is “deflected” from us and onto the Cross. And through the Resurrection the power of sin is absorbed and transformed into the life-giving power of the Spirit. As Mouw says:

In the death on the Cross, God also took our violent impulses upon himself, mysteriously absorbing them into his very being in order to transform them into the power of reconciling love; and then he offers that love back to us as a gift of sovereign grace.

Randall Sullivan, author of The Miracle Detective, isn’t so sure (link via Amy Welborn):

I was discovering something a lot of people on the right already understand very well, and that is the depth and breadth of America’s cultural divide, especially when it comes to religion. Back when Publishers Weekly praised The Miracle Detective as the rare book “that should appeal to believers and skeptics alike,” I imagined I could bridge this divide. I had a lot to learn.

I remember trying to tell Air America talk show host Janeane Garofalo (when I interrupted her in the midst of a particularly vituperative anti-religious rant) that polls consistently indicate that at least 90 percent of the people in this country believe in God, and that when asked, “Do you believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God?” more than 75 percent answer yes.

I was attempting to make the point (to my fellow Democrat) that she and her allies on the left could never hope to build a political consensus with less than a quarter of the population, but it soon became obvious that Ms. Garofalo was unimpressed. All this told her was that the vast majority of U.S. citizens remain in thrall to archaic superstitions and that I now was one of them.

[…]

When I reflect upon my book tour, a moment to which I often return was one that took place in a Berkeley bookstore. During the question-and-answer period after my reading, several members of the audience insisted upon turning our exchange into a test of my political correctness. Although I was willing to concede that I disagreed with many of President Bush’s policies and that I was genuinely outraged by his handling of the Iraq invasion, my refusal to mock Mr. Bush’s religious faith infuriated several of my interrogators, who stood up and walked out when I said that, as Christians, I believed Mr. Bush and I shared some common ground.

S. Mark Heim reviews a number of recent books on the Atonement, some of which argue that Christianity should jettison the doctrine altogether, others arguing for a revised understanding of the Atonement, and others defending a more traditional understanding.

One pet peeve of mine is that in discussions of the Atonement Anselm’s theory is often conflated with penal substitution (and usually an extremely crude form of penal substitution at that). But in Cur Deus Homo Anselm explicity denies such an understanding. First of all, Christ’s death is not something inflicted on him by the Father, but the inevitable result of Christ’s living a life of perfect obedience in a sinful world:

God the Father did not treat that man as you seem to suppose, nor put to death the innocent for the guilty. For the Father did not compel him to suffer death, or even allow him to be slain, against his will, but of his own accord he endured death for the salvation of men. (Bk. I, Ch. 8, emphasis added)

[…]

God did not, therefore, compel Christ to die; but he suffered death of his own will, not yielding up his life as an act of obedience, but on account of his obedience in maintaining holiness; for he held out so firmly in this obedience that he met death on account of it. (Bk. I, Ch. 9)

Secondly, Anselm denies that satisfaction for sin can be made by punishing the innocent in the place of the guilty. For Anselm, punishment and the voluntary offering of satisfaction for sin are mutually exclusive. Either man offers satisfaction for his sin or God extracts it by punishment.

The problem is that fallen humankind has lost its ability to make voluntary satisfaction for sin. This is because everything we have, we already owe to God. This includes our death, since death is the consequence of sin.

In Anselm’s scheme Christ saves us, not by volunteering to be punished in our stead, but in offering up his life of perfect obedience and holiness, even unto death. Christ, as the God-man, need never have died, but in voluntarily surrending his life he has blotted out the evil of sin. Christ’s self-offering is a sacrifice of such incomparable goodness it completely overcomes, envelopes, and destroys the evil of humankind’s sin. Orthodox theologian David B. Hart calls it “a gift exceeding every debt.”

This isn’t to deny that there are problems with Anselm’s account (such as his, perhaps, excessively quantitative understanding of the mechanics of salvation), but it definitely shouldn’t be equated with the cruder versions of penal substitution (and it should be noted that there are, in my opinion, credible and sophisticated versions of penal substitution).