Month: August 2005

Doug Bandow writes:

I don’t think it is Clinton bashing to point out that President Clinton side-stepped the UN because he knew he could not win Security Council approval. I opposed both the Kosovo and Iraq wars, but in my view at least the latter arguably involved fundamental U.S. security interests, and could be solved by no one else. Kosovo was a tragic civil war, not unlike dozens elsewhere around the globe, but Milosevic was a bit player with no capacity to harm America. And the Europeans were capable of acting if they desired to do so. So the argument for acting without international sanction there was far weaker than in Iraq. (Of course, the ultimate consequences of the Iraq war are proving to be far more deleterious.)

Moreover, I believe that Kosovo was more important than Iraq in encouraging countries like India, Iran, and North Korea to develop or expand nuclear arsenals. It was Kosovo that dramatically demonstrated there were two categories of countries: those which bomb and those which get bombed. If you wanted to get into the first category, developing nukes was your best strategy. The Bush administration’s attack on Iraq has reinforced this lesson for any state that might have missed it the first time around.

A lot of the criticisms of the Bush administration have focused on the “neocons” or “the Christian Right” or some other nefarious cabal that has allegedly “hijacked” U.S. foreign policy and altered it in some fundamental or radical sense. However, it was Madeline Albright, recall, who referred to the U.S. as the world’s “indispensable nation” and asked Colin Powell “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” And any Democrat who is likely to be nominated in 2008 will almost certainly be from the “hawkish” wing of the party (this most certainly includes Sen. Clinton, who has long favored the judicious use of the cluster bomb).

Uh oh, if this gets out it could really wreak havoc with political fundraising:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. I’ve been trying to figure out why.
A lot of the credit has to go to the people who have been quietly working in this field: to social workers who provide victims with counseling and support; to women’s crisis centers, which help women trapped in violent relationships find other places to live; to police forces and prosecutors, who are arresting more spouse-beaters and putting them away.

The Violence Against Women Act, which was passed in 1994, must have also played a role, focusing federal money and attention.

But all of these efforts are part of a larger story. The decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends. To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous. Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years ago. They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives. A result is an improvement in social order across a range of behaviors.

The decline in domestic violence is of a piece with the decline in violent crime over all. Violent crime over all is down by 55 percent since 1993 and violence by teenagers has dropped an astonishing 71 percent, according to the Department of Justice.

The number of drunken driving fatalities has declined by 38 percent since 1982, according to the Department of Transportation, even though the number of vehicle miles traveled is up 81 percent. The total consumption of hard liquor by Americans over that time has declined by over 30 percent.

Teenage pregnancy has declined by 28 percent since its peak in 1990. Teenage births are down significantly and, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions performed in the country has also been declining since the early 1990’s.

Fewer children are living in poverty, even allowing for an uptick during the last recession. There’s even evidence that divorce rates are declining, albeit at a much more gradual pace. People with college degrees are seeing a sharp decline in divorce, especially if they were born after 1955.

I could go on. Teenage suicide is down. Elementary school test scores are rising (a sign than more kids are living in homes conducive to learning). Teenagers are losing their virginity later in life and having fewer sex partners. In short, many of the indicators of social breakdown, which shot upward in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and which plateaued at high levels in the 1980’s, have been declining since the early 1990’s.

More…

I freely admit to not knowing that much about the whole “emergent” church phenomenon, but if this article is at all accurate, it really is starting to sound like a re-hash of liberal Protestantism. Or liberal Protestantism with jangly rock guitars, a more casual dress code, and some faux-medieval trappings.

The two elements that stand out are an emphasis on “social activism” over a narrow focus on individual salvation (it’s interesting how the evangelical Right gets criticized both for not being concerned enough about politics and for being too concerned about politics!), and a focus on “following Jesus” rather than the “rules and doctrines” of the institutional church. But isn’t this just liberal Protestantism in a nutshell? Though it styles itself as a movement “that rejects what it sees as the rigidity of the religious right and the timidity of liberal mainline churches,” it’s hard to see anything radically new here.

And despite all the postmodern mumbo-jumbo, the idea of peeling away “doctrine and rules and just loving people” in order to uncover the essential kernel of Christianity is the quintessential modern project. Will emergent leaders start writing books about how the “simple faith” of Jesus was obscured by the theological chicanery of Paul who excessively Hellenized (or Judaized, depending on the critic) Jesus’ message of brotherly love?

(Also, from a Lutheran point of view it’s worth pointing out that simply telling people to “follow Jesus” is a classic confusion of Law and Gospel. If you keep telling people they should be like Jesus without preaching the Gospel you threaten to simply terrify consciences and leave people in their sins. As Luther liked to say, Christ must be received as a gift before he can be followed as an example.)

It’s hard not to see the notorious American evangelical penchant for ignoring history at work here. Will this just be an evangelical recapitulation of the history of liberal Protestantism, or will it result in a genuinely new form of Christianity for the 21st century? And do we need such a thing?

Today’s Inquirer ran an interview with an Iraqi Catholic priest who is working to secure a constitution for Iraq that separates religion and state.

As part of a religious minority (Christians constitute about 3 percent of Iraqis), editor of a theology journal, member of Baghdad’s literati, social activist, and dogged bridge-builder across faiths, [The Rev. Yousif Thomas] Mirkis brings an unusual perspective to the conflict. In a recent interview during his Philadelphia stop, the 56-year-old Dominican pressed his urgent case for a new Iraq “beyond ideology.”

Like many others, Mirkis believes the United States “succeeded in making war but didn’t succeed in making peace.” Still, he says, Saddam needed to be toppled, and Mirkis is not eager to have coalition forces pull out soon. He leaves it to Americans to hash out American policy, focusing instead on the volatile realities of Iraqi society that preceded the occupation and will outlast it.

Inquirer: Since the war, Christians have suffered attacks from extremists. Was it different under Saddam Hussein because his regime was secular?

Mirkis: Yes, but I cannot compare our situation before and now. Saddam’s government was never afraid we could collapse the regime, so we weren’t enemies of the regime. We wanted only to live peacefully.

But it was a big prison. Christians were doctors, engineers, but we didn’t feel involved in politics. Politics was prohibited for everybody who was not with the regime. Now, the situation is very different. We can be a target for all kinds of fundamentalism, terrorism, even gangs who are now free to kidnap people, to take money. The ancient peace was false. The new chaos is not to compare with it.

Inquirer: Many Christians are fleeing the country now, right?

Mirkis: Some try. Others cannot go because they have no economic possibility. And there are those who don’t want to go because they believe their place is in Iraq and they can do something.

I like this third kind and try to encourage them. Yes, stay, but we have to change our mentality. We are not only 2 to 3 percent of the population. We have between 30 and 40 percent of the high [college] diplomas. Twenty percent of doctors in Iraq are Christian, 30 percent of engineers and architects. And we can have another role in this society.

Inquirer: Are Christians involved in drafting Iraq’s constitution?

Mirkis: Yes, we have at least two among the 71 members of the constitution [drafting committee]. Before I left, I spent one month gathering interviews about the constitution with different kinds of people, not only Christians. By Internet, and with readers of my magazine. Fifteen percent of my readers are Muslims. I asked about 600 people 40 questions.

Inquirer: What were the main findings?

Mirkis: They didn’t want to speak about “minorities.” We all belong to Iraq, so that word is very bad. Until now, in our identity cards we wrote the religion. We don’t want it anymore… . There is something that can unify all our religious denominations, which is Iraq. Our model is Switzerland, which is four nations with four languages. Why can’t we do it like them?

[…]

Inquirer: What are the consequences for Christians if Islam becomes the official religion of Iraq?

Mirkis: We are afraid, because they can oblige our women to wear the veil. They can oblige the population not to drink alcohol. The situation of women is dangerous, not only the Christian woman. Even if the [Saddam] regime was difficult, the situation of women was rather good… . The problem is, 35 years of terrorism under the regime created a kind of passivity in the Iraqi population. People are frightened. They have not enough strength to go in the streets to make manifest against this kind of decision.

Inquirer: What can the American church do?

Mirkis: Pray for us. Not only the church, but all Iraqis who suffer too much. We need to take some rest.

When you read stuff like this it’s hard not to conclude that we have an obligation to stay on and try and help make something decent out of this mess.

The Inquirer ran a story this morning touting signs of John Roberts’ possible “liberalism.” According to the story, one of the pieces of evidence for his alleged liberalism was his advising President Reagan to strongly and unequivocally denounce abortion clinic bombers when working as White House legal counsel.

As a legal adviser to President Ronald Reagan, Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. joined a scathing denunciation of abortion-clinic bombers and urged Reagan to stay out of an effort to post tributes to God in Kentucky schools.

Roberts’ advice, in documents obtained by the Inquirer Washington Bureau before their public release later this month, might help him counter critics who portray him as a doctrinaire conservative. Abortion-rights groups and groups that advocate a clear separation between church and state oppose his nomination.

[…]

“The president unequivocally condemns such acts of violence and believes that those responsible should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” their draft reply said. “No matter how lofty or sincerely held the goal, those who resort to violence to achieve it are criminals… .

“Neither the cause that these misguided individuals mistakenly believed they were serving, nor the target of their violence, will in any way be considered to mitigate the seriousness of their offense against our laws.”

Now, call me paranoid, but isn’t the irresistible implication here that it’s chiefly liberals who are opposed to the bombing of abortion clinics? If strongly favoring the full prosecution of clinic bombers is taken to be prima facie evidence of Roberts’ “liberal streak” doesn’t it follow that the Inquirer thinks that conservatives generally favor the bombing of abortion clinics? Or at least aren’t really strongly opposed to it?

(See here for previous post.) Suppose we grant that Allen’s description of the “experience of perfect love” – a loving apprehension of the givenness of beings which don’t exist for our sake or to be of use to us, but which have their own integrity and goodness – correspondes to a real, if fleeting, part of human experience. Why should this experience be taken to be particularly revelatory of the nature of reality in general? Why privilege this experience over those of pain, futility, hatred, boredom or any of the myriad other states that make up our experience?

Allen says that a portrayal of the universe such that the experience of perfect love is central is necessary “for one experience among many to be given overriding importance, as the one experience that allows all others to be ordered around it. Given an appropriate view of reality, we see how it is that the experience is the correct one for people to have as their goal and standard. To give it a setting, then, allows us to understand how that experience may be a bearer of truth” (p. 40).

This may sound like he’s begging the question. After all, why construct a picture of the world specificially to provide pride of place to one kind of experience? Following Iris Murdoch, he says that one reason to trust the experience of perfect love as a truth-bearing experience is that it enables us to take a more realisitc perspective on things. When I realize that I am just one particular thing in the universe rather than that around which everything else revolves, when I see other things and people as having their own integrity and goodness quite apart from any use they might be to me, I attain a truer understanding of the world. “The experience of perfect love is a bearer of truth precisely because we are but one reality among many others” (p. 40).

But his purpose, at least at this point, is not to compel us to accept this account of reality, but rather to show how an interpretation of reality that takes perfect love as its animating principle can be a “plausible and attractive one, and this view can be used as one standard in the evaluation of other theological interpretations” (p. 57-8).

Although he doesn’t elaborate at this point, part of what I take him to be saying is that our interpretation of reality is “underdetermined” by the “data” of human experience. That is to say, our experience doesn’t “force” any one interpretation on us, but allows for a multiplicity of views about the ultimate nature of reality. So how we determine which view will guide our lives depends, at least in part, on factors like “attractiveness.” He maintains that Christian teachings shed a certain light on our experience and can show us why love matters. “If love matters, this doctrine matters, since it expresses love on a cosmic scale; love does matter, as we have seen, because to perceive from a moral position is to perceive more realistically” (p. 45).

Allen goes on to explain how the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and the Trinity portray a God of perfect love. “Prior” to creation (if we can talk that way) God, while alone, lacked nothing. He exists in perfect, self-sufficient blessedness. Creation, then, is an act motivated entirely by God’s love. God freely ushered into being a universe of creatures and delights in their existence. Rather than an abstract piece of speculative metaphysics, the doctrine of creation shows us what it means for God to be a God of love. What this picture of reality allows us to do, Allen thinks, is to test competing views to see if they can make adequate sense of our experience.

One thing I like about Allen’s approach is that he’s “postmodern” enough to realize that he’s not going to offer an argument that will compel any sufficiently rational person to accept the truth of Christianity. And he also realizes that the hegemony of the Enlightenment account of truth and rationality is waning. But that doesn’t mean that Christians should retreat into their own little cultural-linguistic enclave where there is no point of contact between the Christian account of reality and general human experience. No amount of post-modern hand-waving is going to prevent people from asking the question But is it true?

Nice article on Flannery O’Connor in the Washington Post. I’ve had an affection for O’Connor since I took a class on her in college. I had never read her before then and was just trying to fill up my course schedule. The Library of America edition of her works contains everything she wrote, I think.

This anecdote O’Connor recounts in a letter about a conversation on the Eucharist with writer and critic Mary McCarthy is great:

“Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

This article from the Christian Century gives the lay of the land on the homosexuality issue in the ELCA as we go into the churchwide assembly this month. Despite what the article says, I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up with essentially the status quo. A “local option” has been vigorously opposed by some of our top theologians (Robert Jenson, Carl Braaten, etc.) as theologically and ecclesiologically incoherent. And a full-fledged overturning of the existing policy seems even more unlikely.

Toward the end of the article my old pastor Jeff Johnson is quoted:

To Jeff Johnson, the openly gay pastor of the University Lutheran Chapel at the University of California at Berkeley, “the trajectory of the church is clearly moving in a progressive direction.”

His bishop, David G. Mullen, has chosen not to remove at least 13 openly gay, lesbian or bisexual pastors serving in the Sierra Pacific Synod, said Johnson, who cochairs Good Soil, a Lutheran gay alliance. “The current policy of the church really serves no one,” Johnson said.

“The progressive wing is frustrated and unsatisfied because the policies intimidate a class of people unjustly,” he said. “The conservative wing is frustrated because the policies are inconsistently followed or ignored.”

Despite putting in a year at “the Chapel” as we called it, I remain a squishy fence-straddler on the whole issue. Ironically, I was considerably more pro-Bush then than I am now (this was pre-Iraq), and used to dread the anti-Bush polemics we would occasionally get from the pulpit. Ah, Berkeley…

Has any concept from physics been more abused and imported into more inappropriate settings since, well, Einstein’s idea of relativity?

Granted that picking on Deepak Chopra seems a little like shooting fish in a barrel, but still…

When Heisenberg first presented it to Einstein, he made the famous remark “I don’t believe God would play dice with the Universe.” More recently Stephen Hawking made the statement, “not only does God play dice with the Universe, sometimes throws the dice where you cannot find them.”

In essence, every act of observation transforms the Universe. Since observation cannot happen without interpretation, every interpretation becomes a reality. For us Human Beings, this has enormous implications, because we are linguistically programmed. Language does not describe, it creates. It conceives, governs, constructs, and becomes reality. Many times in many conversations, even with intimate friends, I have found myself in a quandary because we were using the same words but they meant different things to us. On looking up the dictionary, I found we were both right! Freud remarked “neurosis is the inability to tolerae ambiguity and ambivalence.” Our current need for certitude as a society may be an indication of our collective neurosies where we always want to see things as black or white, right and wrong, etc.

Despite being aware of this, I find myself constantly falling into the habit of certitude.

So, becuase subatomic particles defy the simultaneous determination of their position and velocity it therefore follows that the world is constructed by language and therefore…er, Bush is bad? Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Well, within limits…

It is guaranteed to raise a cheer among those who enjoy a tipple: moderate drinkers are better thinkers than teetotallers or those who overindulge.

Research by the Australian National University in Canberra suggests drinking in moderation boost your brainpower. But none at all, or too much, can make you a dullard.

A study of 7,000 people in their early 20s, 40s and 60s found that those who drank within safe limits had better verbal skills, memory and speed of thinking than those at the extremes of the drinking spectrum. The safe consumption level was considered to be 14 to 28 standard drinks a week for a man and seven to 14 for a woman.

Questions ranged from verbal reasoning problems to tests of short-term memory. Surprisingly, perhaps, teetotallers were twice as likely as occasional drinkers to achieve the lowest scores.

Read the rest here.

“To alcohol! the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” – Homer Simpson