Food for thought: Morality March 28, 2007
Posted by Alien Drums in Democracy, Religion.1 comment so far
“Human passions unbridled by morality and religion … would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” — John Adams (as quoted by William J. Bennett in Our Sacred Honor, p. 16)
I hear very few people saying this kind of thing today, and most of those who do are part of the religious right with a one-sided view of both morality and religion. I wish more progressive/liberal folks would speak up about the importance of morality and religion, and I think maybe they are. But morality and unselfish religion are not easy. With both, an “anything goes” or “do your own thing” mentality is just not consistent with letting standards beyond oneself serve as a guide for living. And both the left and the right have such tendencies at the extremes.
I’m a Republican right now who has voted Democratic as much as GOP through the years and am definitely leaning to the left right now. I have trouble finding that either party has a monopoly on wisdom. I’m not trying to be far or against either party here. I think all Americans, left and right, need to understand the importance of morality and religion if our nation is to remain strong.
Our current president talks very religious, but his administration has been a moral failure in many way, primarily by prosecuting an offensive war against a perceived threat — emphasis on “perceived.”
But I get too far afield. Back to the main point.
“As the poet Robert Frost observed, the ‘vision’ of the Founders was ‘to occupy the land with character … with people in self control.’” (from Our Sacred Honor, p. 16)
That’s not easy, but it is possible.
The Confederacy lives, unfortunately March 27, 2007
Posted by Alien Drums in Christianity, Racism.Tags: South
5 comments
What are these people thinking?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a bill has been introduced in the Georgia General Assembly to designate April as Confederate History and Heritage Month in the state. The second paragraph is the one that leaves me stratching my head.
“Sen. Jeff Mullis (R-Chickamauga) is the main sponsor of Senate Bill 283, which would encourage Georgians each April to honor the Confederacy, its history, soldiers and the people who ‘contributed to the cause of Southern Independence.’”
I’m all for teaching history, honest history; but honoring people who “contributed to the cause of Southern Independence” (note the capital “S” and “I”) should be anathema to Americans today.
In other words, read it this way. Let’s honor people who …
… contributed to sustaining the practice of owning other humans.
… contributed to the effort to divide the United States of America, which so many in the South today honor with great patriotism.
I grew up in the South (Texas) and live today in the South (Texas), but I repudiate this part of Southern and Texas history. The rebellion of the South to protect the institution of slavery and Southern identity was wrong. We should study this part of our history not to honor but to learn from mistakes, just as people in Germany today should study the blight of Nazism.
Yes, I just equated the Confederacy with Nazism. Both devalued human life because of arbitrary ethnic distinctions; no, they didn’t just devalue, they treated such people as non-human. That is a disgrace.
I’m a Christian, but I find it interesting that these two depravities surfaced in cultures that were primarily Christian (at least I think of Germany as primarily Lutheran in the early 20th century).
Nazism and slavery are of Satan. It shows just how badly people who say they follow Christ can be led astray by the spiritual force that seeks by lies and hate to pull all of creation away from God. That spiritual force apparently is still at work today, at least in Georgia.
Sight appreciated March 27, 2007
Posted by Alien Drums in Christianity, Spirituality.add a comment
I sat in a church auditorium with my team of nine-year-old soccer players the other day waiting for the team to be introduced and take the stage at the end of the indoor season. I’m watching the stage and everything is clear, then everything went to blur. Because it had happened before, I knew what was going on. The left lense on my glasses had fallen out.
Screw lost, sitting in semi-darkness, there was no chance of repair. I had two options — remove glasses completely or keep on the one-lense version. I quickly experimented with both.
No glasses gave me the benefit of consistency, but my eyes are really bad so this approach left everything beyond eight inches in serious blur.
The one-lense approach played tricks on my mind. Even when I shut my left, un-lensed eye seeing was difficult. Depth perception askew.
I decided on the one-lense approach. With hundreds of kids and adults watching, I stood as my team was introduced and sent them running forward as each player’s name was called. Then my name. I jogged forward (some coaches had walked but I’m no wuss). I approached the steps to the platform. I shut my left eye, concentrated and made it up without stumbling.
Standing in the bright lights with my team, I wondered if people in the crowd could tell a lense was missing. I could imagine the thoughts. (What is this idiot doing without a lense in his glasses.) I stayed to the right of my team so I could look toward them and sort of hind my missing eye, I mean lense.
Applause. We headed down the other side. Closed left eye. Focused. Made it. Found seat in semi-darkness without too much problem.
Those of us who wear glasses tend to take them for granted until something happens to them. They become a part of us.
I think aspects of the spiritual life can be that way, as well. We can take prayer for granted until we imagine what life would be like without being able to call on the Source of all being. We can take fellowship for granted until we are alone. We Christians can take Christ for granted until we try to live life with no example of right living and no means of deliverence from our own shortcomings.
Blindness, quite simply, helps people appreciate seeing. I do not want to be physically or spiritually blind. People do not have a choice when it comes to physical blindness, and many are wonderfully able to develop other aspects of their being in order to live happy and productive lives. Spiritual blindess is different. We have a choice. I want to see.
A grace guy for president? March 19, 2007
Posted by Alien Drums in Politics.2 comments
“I’m a grace Christian,” says Mike Huckabee in the March 26 issue of Time, “not a law Christian. The Second Commandment–do unto others–is the basic tenet of my faith. And so I believe that life begins at conception, but I don’t believe it ends at birth. I believe we have a responsibility to feed the hungry, to provide a good education, a safe neighborhood, health care. …”
This former governnor of Arkansas is running for president, but he really hasn’t been on my radar. The above quote will cause me to explore.
Modern day Persians March 19, 2007
Posted by Alien Drums in Military, Movies.Tags: Middle East
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I haven’t seen it, but the movie “300″ may provide the United States, my beloved country, with an important reminder. That reminder will not come from the movie itself, I suspect; but it will come if people learn about the true story of the battle of Thermopylae. The reminder — the arrogance of the powerful will lead to destruction.
In America, we want to identify with the Greeks of this battle; but I fear we have much in common with the Persians. They had the greatest empire of their time, unbelievable in scope and power; and, from what I can tell, the Persians were not terrible rulers. They allowed a measure of independence and religious freedom in the lands they ruled.
The problem with the Persians was that they got mad and sought to teach the Greeks a lesson. The Greeks had burned Sardis, a city under Persian control, and the greatest empire in the world sought to teach the Greeks a lesson. Their first attempt, a sea invasion, failed; so Xerxes sent a giant army and navy to do the deed. The army won the land battle at Thermopylae and then burned Athens, but their navy was damaged to the point where Xerxes had to tuck tail and run. The Greeks eventually, over a number of decades, pushed the Persians back to central Asia and gained an empire of their own.
The United States is now the world’s largest, most powerful nation. And we have made the Persian mistake — we have thought that we can do whatever we want because we are the biggest and the baddest.
Greece stood because the Persian threat brought the various warring Greek city-states together in common defense. With our uncalled-for attack on Iraq and our threatened attack on Iran, the United States is on the verge of doing the same thing in our time. (Afghanastan was a different matter. It really was part of a war on terror.)
The victory of the Greeks over the Persians made possible the flowering of Western civilization. If the West, read United States, is not careful we will doom Western civilization. Just because we have the power to pursue certain ends does not mean we should.
The United States of America is the greatest nation in the history of the world. I pray we can learn again that principles of right and wrong must govern the use of our power.
Books, books, books March 17, 2007
Posted by Alien Drums in Books.6 comments
I am taking Jenna’s challenge at the Cranberry Corner because it involves my primary addiction — books. Like Jenna, I am a bit embarrassed by the number of books I have not read, but if Jenna (whom I just now “met” through my a-muse-ing friend) is willing to be transparent, then I shall do so, as well. I was a little put off that The Lord of the Rings trilogy was not in the right order, but I’ll get over this slight of my favorite story. And my favorite author of all time, C.S. Lewis, is missing.
Take a look and see which ones you’ve read. Then, if you’re a blogger, post it on your blog. If you play, leave me a comment so that I can come visit!
Here’s what you do:
* Bold the ones you’ve read.
* Italicize the ones you want to read.
* Leave in normal text the ones that don’t interest you.
* Put in ALL CAPS those you haven’t heard of.
* Put a couple of asterisks by the ones you recommend.
1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)**
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien) **
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien) **
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien) **
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)**
9. OUTLANDER (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A FINE BALANCE (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone(Rowling)
17. FALL ON YOUR KNEES (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. THE STAND (Stephen King)**
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)**
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)**
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)**
24. THE LOVELY BONES (Alice Sebold)**
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)**
28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)**
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)**
35. THE MISTS OF AVALON (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE (Wally Lamb)
39. THE RED TENT (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)**
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible **
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)**
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)**
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)**
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible(Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)**
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)**
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. FIFTH BUSINESS (Robertson Davies)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY (Helen Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
73. SHOGUN (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden(Frances Hodgson)**
76. THE SUMMER TREE (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN (Betty Smith)
78. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
79. THE DIVINERS (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. NOT WANTED ON THE VOYAGE (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. REBECCA (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. WIZARD’S FIRST RULE (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)**
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)**
88. THE STONE DIARIES (Carol Shields)
89. BLINDNESS (Jose Saramago)
90. KANE AND ABEL (Jeffrey Archer)
91. IN THE SKIN OF A LION (Michael Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. WHITE OLEANDER (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy(James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)
Dancing evangelism March 16, 2007
Posted by Alien Drums in Christianity, Evangelism, Spirituality.1 comment so far
Neo, in Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian, says evangelism should be like a dance. “You know, in a dance, nobody wins and nobody loses. Both parties listen to the music and try to move with it.” (p. 62)
I’m a Baptist, but I like to dance, or at least I used to when I was younger. I’ve often said I plan to live in the dancing wing of heaven. There’s something enchanting about allow one’s body to move with the rhythms of music.
My favorite kind of dancing was and is ballroom dancing, and that experience does offer a corrective to McLaren’s perspective. When doing a waltz or fox trot, the man leads. Using gentle nudges of his right hand on the woman’s waste, he guides the two in moving with the music. I stress gentle, and I think a good male partner senses the movements of this female partner and responds to it, thus creating a unique dancing moment together.
Witnessing should be like that. It is a dance that is flowing to spiritual music, but it is OK for the believer to gently nudge and guide, to flow with and respond to his or her “partner”.
And, like McLaren said, it is not about winning and losing; it is about experiencing something divine together.
Looking at a Jesus-centered future March 15, 2007
Posted by Alien Drums in Christianity, Church, Jesus, Religion, Truth.2 comments
If we think about a future-church possibility, what might it look like? If we can learn anything from the temple-to-church transition then we can surmise that the church-to-future church transition will involve a carrying over of the truths of the church into a broader understanding of God’s means of shining His light into reality.
Jesus said He didn’t come to do away with the law; He simply gave us a new way of understanding what God was doing through the law. If a new transition were to take place, God might say to us that He is not doing away with the Old and New Testaments; rather, He is giving us a new of understanding what He was doing through those revelations.
And if He does that, what will he say about other religions. I suspect He might say that He’s been revealing truth to mankind in many different ways through the centuries and that some of that truth is expressed in other religions. He might also help us to see that other faiths are linked to specific cultures. Just as some parts of Gentile, pagan culture was absorbed into Yahweh workship, what if some parts of Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic culture were absorbed into Yahweh worship today?
Brian McLaren comes at this differently, but makes a good point.
“… [I]t should be possible to be a Christian and yet be culturally Buddhist, Muslim, or Navajo,” says McLaren’s Neo character in A New Kind of Christian. “We have to realize that Buddhism is more than a religion, more than a culte. It is also a culture. So I can’t see why Jesus couldn’t invade Buddhist culture, just as he invaded Jewish and Greco-Roman culture in the first millennium and European cultures in the second. … That to me is the missionary challenge of the third millennium: not eradicating Buddhist or Islamic or tribal cultures but blessing them with Christ–letting Christ enter them and drive the evil from them. … And my guess is that each will bring something that will enrich our Christian heritage, too.” (p. 75)
Of course, Jesus is driving some of the evil from Christianity, as well.
However the future shapes up, with Jesus at the center it will be good.
Developing a moral agenda March 14, 2007
Posted by Alien Drums in Christianity, Ethics.add a comment
Jim Wallis, of God’s Politics fame, has a great post today regarding a Christian moral agenda. It deals with James Dobson and others’ criticism of the National Association of Evangelicals’ efforts to combat global warming and with the NAE’s just-completed board meeting.
Wallis challenged Dobson to a bebate on the question, “What are the great moral issues of our time for evangelical Christians?” Dobson lamely deflected the challenge by offering a supposed Goliath from his Focus ranks to do battle for him; but Wallis is holding out for a face-to-face with the “king” of Focus (my labels, not Wallis’).
Wallis also has some great words about the NAE, Carl F.H. Henry and the importance of a moral agenda.
Something is right March 14, 2007
Posted by Alien Drums in Christianity, Church, Jesus.3 comments
The other day I wrote about the shortcomings of the church writ large. Today I’m writing about the greatness of the church in the local sense.
I’m the member of a great church — not a perfect one, but a great one. There are self-centered people, there are petty disagreements, there is too much money spent on buildings; but it’s still a great church for two primary reasons — there are some wonderful, loving people in it and the church is commited to reaching out with love to meet the needs of hurting world.
We have a 40-something pastor, very intelligent and highly educated (has a real Ph.D. but doesn’t “doctor” himself or expect others to do so), energetic, creative, open to new ideas, patient with the older members, with a passion for missions all over the world. He is not slick handsome, so he doesn’t fit the megachurch plastic pastor mode. He’s also not great at pastoral care, but a guy can’t be perfect. Quite simply, he’s challenging and fun to be around. He has been our pastor for 10 years. It was a good church before he came, but it’s a great church now. He has patiently followed his heart’s desire to reach people and give some others time to make adjustments.
His leadership is so good that the greatness of the church is not centered around him. It’s centered around Christ and loving people.
So while I wonder about the future of “the church” on the large stage, I do not wonder about the future of this type of church. There will always be a place in this world for exalting Christ and loving people.
Those of you who do not have such a local church, I offer a blanket prayer — that you will join God in creating one.
