Petros7's Xanga

Things Evangelicalsim Likes

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 22:44:47 GMT

The following list is by an incredible blogger/writer who you can find at http://jenellparis.blogspot.com/

She is a professor who teaches at a Christian college in Pennsylvania. I highly suggest adding her to your list of frequented blogs.

by Jenell Paris

I’m an evangelical first and foremost for cultural reasons. But if pressed to discuss theology, I still uphold Jesus as Lord and Savior and have a high view of the Bible. My credentials are sound. Why, then, do evangelicals keep suggesting to me that my membership in the movement is becoming increasingly tenuous?

Over the last 18 months or so I’ve attempted to publish lots of stuff and have done some public speaking. The stories in this series of posts are from these experiences, but all are anonymized (if you think you recognize yourself, by all means learn from it, but it probably isn’t you – it’s really anonymized.) Some of the pieces discussed won’t ever be published, and others will be or already are…all that to say don’t waste your time trying to figure out the specifics of my stories.

I get along with evangelicals pretty well, but evangelicalism … I think it might be turning on me. The “-ism” suffix indicates a set of beliefs that guide a social movement. Some –isms seem affable, like conservatism or liberalism (pick one) or realism. Others, like authoritarianism or fascism, seem terrible. But they share in common the –ism, the turning of a thought or practice into an ideology that guides a group of people toward some end.

Evangelical beliefs are supposedly widely held by a very large group of people out there called evangelicals. Evangelicals don’t have an organization, a denomination, or an official leader – we exist by power of our “-ism,” and we grant authority – informally - to particular persons and groups to represent the movement. In addition to publicly visible evangelicals, pastors and editors serve as culture brokers, articulating what evangelicals want, ascertaining what pleases them and what offends them, and deciding how much of what they really need they can handle in any given sermon, book, or speech. That’s mostly how I hear about my breaches – from editors and publishers who deliver religious goods and services to large groups of evangelicals, and paid church workers who do essentially the same.

My problem is not with individual evangelicals, and it’s not about core doctrines or church membership or life experience. I’m good on all those counts. If I understand our conflict (and I may not), evangelicalism and I have nine points of disagreement, based on the likes and dislikes, not the core beliefs, of the –ism. I’ll post a series over the next few days about “What Evangelicalism Likes”, and how my scholarly work is displeasing it.

1. Evangelicalism Likes Lots of Scripture in Small Doses
I wrote an essay that used Scripture as a framing theme, but didn’t discuss specific Bible verses as proof of my point. According to expert feedback, my approach was Christian, but not evangelical. An evangelical approach would have listed the six verses that discuss my topic, and articulate pre-existing points of view on each. My PhD in anthropology allows me to develop ancillary thoughts related to culture or humanity, but I am still obligated to write extensively about Bible verses, even though my Bible study would either be derivative of actual Bible scholarship, or wing-nutty because I had pretended to be a Bible scholar.

I argued that the entire Bible addressed my topic, not just the six verses with the topic’s main phrase. This is often perceived by evangelicalism as a liberal approach that allows free-wheelers to generate any theme whatsoever. It is important to remain ‘close to the text’, maybe literally holding the Bible so close that one’s eye can only see one or two verses at a time.

This strikes me as Bible-ism, turning the Living Word into a set of doctrines and ideas that support a religious movement. But please learn from my experience with evangelicalism: if you use the phrase “finger pointing at the moon” to describe the relationship between the Bible and God, you’re sunk.

2. Evangelicalism Likes the word “Jesus”
I based a pages-long analysis on one of Jesus’ encounters with his disciples. Evangelicalism said I wrote about Jesus appropriately, but with insufficient repetition. And in addition to Jesus’ name, his moral prohibitions should have been stated earlier and more often.

Jesus is a historical person whose actions and sayings should be cited often. Fair enough. But in addition, it seems that evangelicalism likes Jesus used as a blank screen onto which we project our notions of perfection, completion, beauty and the like. Evangelicalism may think it lifts up Jesus to use him as a master metaphor, but I’m not so sure. I’d call it Jesus-ism, turning the person of Jesus into an ideology.

3. Evangelicalism Likes Merging Exegesis and Hermeneutics
One commenter questioned my acceptance of liberal scholarship (“reliance upon!”, I said) that distinguishes between what same-sex sex meant in biblical cultures and what it means in our day. Though evangelical scholars separate exegesis and hermeneutics, evangelicalism often doesn’t. Evangelicalism wants the Bible to speak plainly and unproblematically into our culture on every issue currently of interest to us, regardless of differences in language, culture, and worldview between our world and the world of a particular biblical author. It’s also unwise of me to lean so heavily on liberal Bible scholars and secular queer theorists, arguing as I did that it’s possible for evangelicals to learn from their analysis even while disagreeing with their politics.

4. Evangelicalism Likes Believing Things

Evangelicalism likes believing more things rather than fewer things, and believing confidently rather than doubtfully. I articulated beliefs that were conservative enough for one publisher, but not confident enough. Specifically, I acknowledged that I could be wrong about all of it – I wrote that I’ve read the Bible, searched my conscience and learned church tradition, and reached some conclusion that I put forward as my own – Jenell’s views, not God’s views. Evangelicalism would like me to claim them as God’s views. Additionally, I point out the complexity of various sexual identities and how a single message of condemnation doesn’t cover every single situation and disrespects individuality. Evangelicalism didn’t like that either – it wanted me to offer a single message of condemnation in a loving way.

5. Evangelicalism Likes Claiming that the Phrase “God is in Control” is in the Bible
A theologian recently told me that the entirety of evangelical theology is built on the cornerstone of God being in control. His book, in fact, devotes a chapter of biblical exegesis to the phrase which, strangely, is not actually in the Bible. We read words like “powerful”, “I AM,” and “King” and take them to mean “control.” Seems like the control issue might be our deal, not God’s.

Since my triplets died five years ago, I’ve refused to believe that God is in control, and numerous evangelicals have encouraged me to heal, move past anger, and grieve thoroughly (good advice) and readopt the notion that God is in control (bad advice). Surely my personal situation influences the objectivity of my theology (hence my reluctance to speak for God, noted in number 4). Surely my sanity didn’t emerge from grief entirely intact. Fair enough, but still, the Bible doesn’t say that God is in control.

6. Evangelicalism Likes Prioritizing the Superiority of Its Point of View
I wrote about a man who moves from Christian faith to atheism, and evangelicalism worried that I was showing more credence for his point of view than I was defending the Christianity he had abandoned. Indeed, because I was writing for an audience predisposed against atheism, I thought I’d show the marginal point of view in as empathic a way possible. It’s just what anthropologists do – we try to see the world from other points of view, not simply showing how Others are deficient versions of Us. Evangelicalism disagrees with anthropology on this point, preferring to discuss things like atheism, agnosticism and other religions primarily in terms of how they rely on flawed logic and personal immaturity, and how our superior logic and maturity could potentially convert their adherents.

7. Evangelicalism Likes Euphemistic Curse Words
In my evangelical upbringing, heck and darn were dicey, but acceptable. The “dicey but acceptable” category has expanded these days to include suck, blow, and even piss. The real swear words, however, are very bad. Please don’t ask me to list them – I know you know what I’m talking about here.

I tried raising the question of “Why are you so much more concerned with the fact that I wrote “shit” than that there are thousands of children starving to death in our world?”, but as it turns out, Tony Campolo has already ridden that train to its last stop.

8. Evangelicalism Likes Women in Their Place
Recently a powerful evangelical man explained to me how Christian workplaces are beginning to open to women in leadership. The women are nearly ready, he said, and as they continue refining their skills in lower-level administrative roles and in their graduate programs, then the most gifted of them can begin assuming mid- to upper-level leadership roles. This attitude translates into the publishing world as well. Evangelicalism prefers ladies to write for other ladies about lady issues: mothering, wifing, homemaking, homeschooling, beauty, and prayer. Women who write about non-lady subjects are preferred to develop points of view derivative of the men who lead public discourse on the subject at hand. Evangelicalism recently told me that a Famous White Man had already published the definitive book on my subject, and that I should consider whether or not there really is anything more to be said.

9. Evangelicalism Likes Suits
Evangelicalism ascribes authority to men in suits. Rick Warren is an exception, and has really thrown us for a loop by no longer wearing the Hawaiian shirts that we all spent fifteen years trying to get our heads around. It just feels right – words spoken by a white American standard dialect-speaking man in a suit just sound more plausible than the same words spoken by a woman, a person with an accent, or a shlumpy white American standard dialect-speaking man.

I’ve heard evangelical women, on numerous occasions, justify the way they dress at work in terms of how their attire is like or unlike a man’s dark suit. We talk about how we look, and how men interpret how we look, and whether or not we want to be perceived as pretty and why, and why our appearance has to matter so much. It’s not that we’re longing for the authority of the Suit. We’re just trying to get our work done.

Good Lyrics, Good thought.

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:12:37 GMT

I can’t direct the universe
I can’t pull off the road and take a rest
I can’t go on for evermore
I can’t refuse the weight of intellect
I can’t avoid the hands of time
I wish her touch was of a softer kind
and if the world decides to melt

there’s nothing i can do to change her mind

(fee da da dee)

Imi! Imi! i think i’m getting it

(fee da da doh)

our heads are a haunt for the ghosts of

alphabet

(fee da da dee)

our hearts are tigers chasing tigerness

(fee da da doh)

Imi! Imi! i think i’m getting it

tip your hat to the willow tree

resigned to what it can and cannot be

all you dreamers wishing for tomorrow
‘life is elsewhere’ only brings you sorrow

By the http://www.myspace.com/guggenheimgrotto.com

Money doesn't mean happiness, I still need to learn this.

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:45:49 GMT

by Eric Weiner

If there is one formula that we all subscribe to — Republicans, Democrats and Independents, alike — it is this: a strong economy equals happiness and, conversely, a weak economy equals unhappiness. There's only one problem: It's not true.

America is four times wealthier than it was in 1950, yet we are no happier, according to many surveys. Wealth, it turns out, is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Beyond a certain point, it takes a lot more money to make us just a little bit happier.

Look, I realize that if you've lost your job, or your home, or your 401k has taken a big hit, you're not likely to be happy. But for most of us, that is thankfully not the case. We might be anxious about the economy, worried, but that doesn't mean we're miserable.

It takes a lot to shake our national happiness. The attacks of Sept. 11, horrific as they were, did not do so, according to surveys conducted shortly afterward. If there is such a thing as a happiness bubble, it is a much tougher, resilient bubble than the stock and real estate ones that have burst recently.

So, if it's not material prosperity, what makes us happy? Study after study has found that the answer is — in two words — other people. Warm, caring relationships; high levels of trust; strong families. None of which, of course, has anything, to do with the Dow or the NASDAQ or — our favorite economic barometer — Gross Domestic Product.

GDP is the sum of all economic transactions in a given year, a giant national cash register that tallies everything. Everything, except — in the words of Robert Kennedy — "the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages or the intelligence of our public debate."

A few countries recognize this mismatch and are trying to do something about it. The tiny Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan has implemented a policy of Gross National Happiness.

The French and even the dour British are also exploring ways to come up with a national happiness index. There's no reason why we couldn't do the same. It's far from infallible — happiness being such a slippery, subjective thing — but it would do no harm.

I can envision a day when, along with the Dow and the GDP, the NHI, or National Happiness Index, flickers across our TV screens. Perhaps then we'll realize what we've known all along: it's the only number that really matters.

Eric Weiner is the author of The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World.

Your Guide to Contemporary Christian Music

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:46:12 GMT

By Dale Peterson

Thank you for choosing to worship with us today. If you are from a church that uses traditional hymns, you may be confused. Please take a moment to read through this guide to contemporary Christian music.
In our church you will not hear "How Great Thou Art," "Wonderful Grace of Jesus," or "Like a River Glorious." (Generally, hymns that have words like “Thou” are not used. They are too archaic and are normally replaced by words like “awesome” and “miry clay”). Yes, okay, we may do "Amazing Grace" or "Peace Like a River" at some point, but as a general rule we avoid songs with too many different verses or those that can't be played easily on guitar and drums.
If you are new to worship here, you may wish to know the reasons for this. One is that deep theological concepts do not belong in contemporary Christian worship. We frown on songs that change more than one or two words for each verse. For example, our version of "Holy is the Lord" consists of repeating that phrase six times per verse and then changing "Holy" to "Worthy," "Mighty," "Jesus" and finally changing "the" to "my." Isn’t that much simpler to sing and easier to remember? The twin goals here are a) repetition and b) chanting quality. We don’t focus on what we’re singing, but how we’re singing it. The main thing is to get that kind of tingly, "olive oily" feeling. Don't worry if you don't get this right away. It will come as you learn to disengage your intellect. Just free yourself. Immerse yourself. Relax.

Nevertheless, a traditional hymn may sometimes be used. For example, we’re not averse to "Holy, Holy, Holy." You may be tempted to sing this as you would have in your former church, but please note that it is sung here with changes, mainly the fact that we repeat it several times and try to sing as slowly as possible, thereby emphasizing the funereal nature of the verse.
Repetition is very important in contemporary Christian music. We repeat: Repetition is very important in contemporary Christian music. Just because a song may have one verse and one chorus does not mean that you only sing it through once. Old hymns have several verses, each of which introduces a new theological concept, and are meant to be sung once followed by "Amen." This is no longer how it’s done. The correct procedure is to sing the identical verse and chorus at least three times. Often it is preferable to repeat the verse two times initially before moving on to the chorus.

Also the worship leader may want to repeat a verse or chorus found in the middle of the song. This is signaled by “calling an audible." When this occurs, the worship leader will say the first few words of the verse or chorus he will be singing next. Sometimes, due to the similarity of the verses, this may be confusing and the overhead projector may flash several pages of text until the correct one is arrived at. Don't panic, this is normal. Just continue singing as though you know the words and soon either the correct slide will appear or a new chorus will begin.
After the verse and chorus are sung at least three times, it is permissible for the song to end. However, the chorus must first be repeated in its entirety, then the last paragraph, then the last line. When singing the last line it is important to slow down a little and look upward. Raising a hand is permissible and often done at this time. This may take a little getting used to but don't worry, if you just join in, in a short time you won't even notice and soon you will forget that you ever did it any other way.
We are just really glad you chose to share the worship experience with us today. Thank you and we hope to see you again soon.
Thank you and we hope to see you again soon. Thank you. Thank.

Did anyone know that yesterday was Constitution Day?

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:58:35 GMT

by John Nichols
Constitution Day has arrived without major statements from Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain on the need to restore this country's commitment to the rule of law.

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader shows a copy of the U.S. Constitution during a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008 with third-party candidates calling for greater inclusion of candidates beyond the Republican and Democratic majorities. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)In contrast, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader's campaign produced a video statement detailing his commitment to constitutional renewal.

Here's Nader's video, in which he says, "You and I cannot turn our backs on the Constitution, as the two parties have done."

Even more powerful is the statement made by Senator Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee's Constitution subcommittee, at the opening of Tuesday's hearing -- which Obama and McCain should have attended -- on how to repair the damage done by the Bush-Cheney administration to the system of checks and balances and our fundamental liberties.

Decrying the administration's record as a "shameful legacy that will haunt our country for years to come," Feingold declared that America needs to "get started right away on this immense and extremely important job of restoring the rule of law."

The Wisconsinite pondered seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency this year but instead backed Barack Obama.

Would that Obama was speaking up as Feingold is on the Constitution.

Here's the Constitution subcommittee chair said in his call to action:

Tomorrow, September 17, is the 221st anniversary of the day in 1787 when 39 members of the Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution in Philadelphia. It is a sad fact as we approach that anniversary that for the past seven and a half years, and especially since 9/11, the Bush Administration has treated the Constitution and the rule of law with a disrespect never before seen in the history of this country. By now, the public can be excused for being almost numb to new revelations of government wrongdoing and overreaching. The catalogue is breathtaking, even when immensely complicated and far reaching programs and events are reduced to simple catch phrases: torture, Guantanamo, ignoring the Geneva Conventions, warrantless wiretapping, data mining, destruction of emails, U.S. Attorney firings, stonewalling of congressional oversight, abuse of the state secrets doctrine and executive privilege, secret abrogation of executive orders, signing statements. This is a shameful legacy that will haunt our country for years to come.
There can be no dispute that the rule of law is central to our democracy and our system of government. But what does ‘the rule of law' really mean? Well, as Thomas Paine said in 1776: ‘In America, the law is king.' That, of course, was a truly revolutionary concept at a time when the King, quite literally, was the law.

Over 200 years later, we still must struggle to fulfill Paine's simply stated vision. It is not always easy, nor is it something that once done need not be carefully maintained. Justice Frankfurter wrote that law:

is an enveloping and permeating habituation of behavior, reflecting the counsels of reason on the part of those entrusted with power in reconciling the pressures of conflicting interests. Once we conceive ‘the rule of law' as embracing the whole range of presuppositions on which government is conducted . . ., the relevant question is not, has it been achieved, but, is it conscientiously and systematically pursued.

The post-September 11th period is not, of course, the first time that events have caused great stress for the checks and balances of our system of government. As Berkeley law professors Daniel Farber and Anne Joseph O'Connell write in testimony submitted for this hearing: ‘The greatest constitutional crisis in our history came with the Civil War, which tested the nature of the Union, the scope of presidential power, and the extent of liberty that can survive in war time.' But as legal scholar Louis Fisher of the Library of Congress describes in his testimony, President Lincoln pursued a much different approach than our current President when he believed he needed to act in an extra-constitutional manner to save the Union. He acted openly, and sought Congress's participation and ultimately approval of his actions. According to Dr. Fisher:

[Lincoln] took actions we are all familiar with, including withdrawing funds from the Treasury without an appropriation, calling up the troops, placing a blockade on the South, and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. In ordering those actions, Lincoln never claimed to be acting legally or constitutionally and never argued that Article II somehow allowed him to do what he did. Instead, Lincoln admitted to exceeding the constitutional boundaries of his office and therefore needed the sanction of Congress.... He recognized that the superior lawmaking body was Congress, not the President.

Each era brings its own challenges to the conscientious and systematic pursuit of the rule of law. How the leaders of our government respond to those challenges at the time they occur is, of course, critical. But recognizing that leaders do not always perform perfectly, that not every President is an Abraham Lincoln, the years that follow a crisis are perhaps even more important. And soon, this Administration will be over. So the obvious question is: ‘Where do we go from here?' I believe that one of the most important things that the next President must do, whoever he may be, is take immediate and concrete steps to restore the rule of law in this country. He must make sure that the excesses of this Administration don't become so ingrained in our system that they change the very notion of what the law is.

That, of course, is much easier said than done. It's not simply a matter of a new President saying, ‘Ok, I won't do that anymore.' This President's transgressions are so deep and the damage to our system of government so extensive that a concerted effort from the executive and legislative branches will be needed. And that means the new President will, in some respects, have to go against his institutional interests.

That is why I called this hearing - to hear from legal and historical experts on how the next President should go about tackling the wreckage that this President will leave. I've asked our two panels of experts who will testify to be forward-looking - to not only review what has gone wrong in the past seven or eight years, but to address very specifically what needs to be set right starting next year and how to go about doing it.

In addition to the testimony of the witnesses here today, I solicited written testimony from advocates, law professors, historians and other experts. So far we have received nearly two dozen submissions from a host of national groups and distinguished individuals. I want to thank each and every person who made the effort to prepare testimony for this hearing. You have done the country a real service.

All of this testimony will be included in the written record of the hearing, which I plan to present to the incoming Administration. The submissions we have received so far can be seen on my website at feingold.senate.gov. I hope that many of these recommendations, along with the testimony we will hear today, will serve as a blueprint for the new President so that he can get started right away on this immense and extremely important job of restoring the rule of law.

Leaving Church

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 11:56:54 GMT

The following is by a fantastic blogger named Julie Neidlinger. She is in the same vein as the iMonk, but brings a female touch to the issues of spirituality and Christianity. In the following blog she talks about her reasons for leaving a church service recently and brings up many good points. Her observations are dead on. And her cartoons are extremely creative. Enjoy.

Today, I went to Bismarck Evangel Temple, sat through the worship and most of the sermon, and then...walked out before it was done.

I don't blame that church; it is my own inability to fit that literally forced me to leave. I don't really doubt their sincerity, and that many people love the programs and opportunities that church provides. I've even found, in the past, a few sermons to be interesting. But...

I believe what I believe -- my Christian faith -- not because of tradition or because I was raised that way. Not because I want fire insurance or hell-avoidance. Not because I want to find a group or place to belong. I believe it on my own, I believe it to be real, I believe it to be important and valid, and I believe the way we have made Christianity out to be is completely wrong. And that's why I have such a hard time going to church as it is now done.

Reaching people with trendiness
A recent cover story at World Magazine about "NextGen Worship" inspired a strong desire to smack the pastors depicted in the article and in the photos. The cover photo alone enraged me, with the pastor wearing baggy jeans and untucked button-up shirt with flip flops and an ear microphone. Later, the same guy is shown out front of a church holding a paper Starbucks-like cup of coffee. Could he try any harder to be lame?

I'd have liked to have taken that cup of coffee and dumped it on his head. But it's nothing personal against that guy or his beliefs or sincerity. It's an anger at something else.

I'm not going to be one of those starched-collar Christians who, based on personal preference, say that this is a sign we're going to hell in a handbasket and that all things are wrong unless they are done as they were with the Puritans. What I'm saying is that I can't stand the phoniness, or trendiness, or sameness -- or whatever I'm trying to say here -- that the church seems to catch onto at the tail end, not even aware of how lame it is. The fact that this is not only actually successful in appealing to people, but attracts them, also disgusts me.

It makes me want to throw up.

It's buying into some kind of lie or substitution of cool culture as being relevant when it isn't.

If I see another cool Bible college student or pastoral studies major wearing the hemp choker necklace, flip-flops, open-at-the-collar shirt that's untucked, and baggy jeans, saying words like "dude" and "sweet", I will kick their ass. It's like the Christian version of annoying hipsters, an overly-studied and homogenized "with-it" faux coolness.

Perpetual youth group culture
In recent conversations with a couple of my girlfriends, I expressed an extreme disinterest in Christian guys of my generation.

"I've pretty much had it with Christian guys," I said. "The main problem is that they are 'guys' for too long and never become men."

They are, I theorized, stuck in the youth group culture. The church has encouraged them to never leave that mentality, and so it takes until about age 35 for them to extract themselves into adulthood-land where the women have been waiting for years and have been steadily growing fed up. Men not raised in this evangelical youth culture, I've noticed, tend to be vastly different in maturity level.

Youth group culture is a place of video games and pizza parties and perpetual "here we are now entertain us" (thanks for the lyrics, Cobain). When youth leave the appropriate age level (i.e. graduate from high school), they face a difficult moment, a moment made difficult because of age segregation, which I'll talk about next.

Instead of helping them get on into adulthood, we've introduced single's groups -- in the name of helping the unmarried, of course -- which are mainly youth groups for those in their 20's. Which, instead of helping people not be single actually encourages them to never grow up and, instead, use the group as their relationship fix. I see this particularly with Christian guys, this stunted maturity, and it somehow seems to permeate Evangelical culture today.

Age segregation
It would behoove some of the leaders in church to read The Death of the Grown-up. While some of the book becomes a little too nostalgic for specific generations and, oddly, jazz music, it nails it on the idea of how we segregate by age and, sadly, create a self-feeding monster that means teens look to each other for cues and kids look to each other for cues, and the adults "leading" them are pandering to them to get their attention. The end result? Idiocy. Never-growing up. Never asking for behavior beyond what we have let them tell us is normal for their age. They only learn to function in their age level and have no examples or incentive to reach beyond that and mature. We make no demands on their behavior, only bemoan its current state.

The church is especially notorious for doing this. We have kid's ministries and youth ministries and young adults and older adults -- all separated from each other because of age, thereby negating any positive and necessary influence the different ages might have on each other.

The children are removed from the boring main service for their benefit, and the parents get a break. The youth are in youth groups and, consequently, only learn to be youth and actually intensify the silliness of their age by reflecting off of each other. The adults trying to lead the youth fall for the idea that unless we have games and parties and other dumbed-down stuff, we can't keep their attention.

Why would we be able to keep their attention? We've let them take ours and tell us how to treat them. We've taught kids and youth to expect to be entertained and now we are in a vicious cycle on how to up the quotient and keep their attention. This is magnified and made even more ugly in a church setting when we try to find a way to insert the gospel into this machine of age segregation.

Focus on the family
Churches now tend to focus on the family. This is good, if you have a family. But, for those of us who are not married or do not have kids or a family, it really sucks. Sure, there's the obligatory single's group (which tends to peter out by the 30's and those still left, at that point, can fend for themselves), but the focus is really on the family unit, and raising children.

Today's sermon at church, for example, was on the importance of children's ministry. I walked out at the part where we were told, as the call-to-action part of the sermon, to do our duty and sign up for the various children's ministries. This was right after the explanation that children's ministries accounted for the largest chunk of the church's budget because kids won't pay attention if you just show up with a Bible; you have to have all kinds of programs and themes and activities...

I left.

I had to.

I don't know that the minister was wrong, though I think he was in some things he said. I am sure parents appreciate the ability to leave their kids at children's church and know they'll have activities and learn a Bible story or whatever, but it annoyed me.

If it isn't a sermon about marriage, it seems to be a sermon about family. I've pretty much had it. The only answer I get, as a single, is a few verses by Paul* which are supposed to make me feel good about being single since it's "the higher road" or some such crap. And then we go back to another sermon directed to those on, I guess, the "lower road." Or, I'm encouraged to find the other single women of my "advanced" age since the singles group doesn't really reach up that high anymore.

Whatever. I'm not looking for a program or ministry geared for me and my situation. I'm just looking for people to connect with and be church with. I'd like marrieds and singles and old and young in that group. I'm not looking for easy homogenization.

It won't work
As it is, I, and others like me, will walk out of churches. The coffee bars in the foyer, the casual attire, the buzz words, all the programs and activities imaginable, the big-screen video monitors, the contemporary music -- it is actually repulsive and fake to a large chunk of people.

These are the people churches aren't aware of, because they aren't anywhere near a church. They slip in, walk out, and aren't even missed. They don't fill out visitor cards. They don't want to be part of a flow chart or be managed as part of a Church-as-Corporate-Hierarchy system. They don't want a polite follow-up call or to hear a voice on the other end say that they just wanted to "touch bases" with them to let them know they're important. Even if those actions are sincere and the only plausible route when a church is so huge, they ring insincere.

Such people, like myself, sound impossible to reach or include in the system of church as we know it today, which is my point. They way we do church today isn't necessarily being church. There needs to be something else for those of us who can't stand the way services are arranged, the way emotions are herded into a set time frame (which today involved -- what was impossible for me -- going from the whole congregation doing "the wave" as instigated by the children's pastor into, about ten minutes later, "surrendering to Jesus" with soft piano music and hushed tones), how discussion is nil and being preached at in silence is the accepted method of learning...

...nope. Not gonna work.

I'm not looking for starched Baptist legalism, but Casual Friday Church is as equally fake and disgusting.

My church
I miss my own, small church, from back home. It's filled with uncool, normal people who just want to help and talk and connect and be real and accountable to each other. It's filled with people who want to go to the Dairy Queen after service and maybe have an ice cream cone. People who help change a flat tire in the parking lot. The building isn't huge or fancy. The church doesn't have programs and any other accessories to attract sub groups, like teens or kids events or anything that smacks of entertainment; there's no program there to attract me to stay, but instead, it is the real relationships that have done the trick. We greet people not as a job or because we're the assigned greeter, but because we see they're new and we want to get to know them.

I feel more like part of the body than an attendee when I go there. I have a place, an integral part, just like all the rest of the people. As it is, the more I attend these larger churches and hear about programs and activities and see places to sign up for classes and possible facility expansion projects...the less I want anything to do with it. I feel like a barcode in the pew, and little else.

I'm having difficulty putting this into words.

I hate to church hop. I don't want to waste my time here going from one church to the next. I would like to find just a small group of people and meet and talk about our beliefs and struggles and study the Bible and connect on a real level, and let that be church. Because isn't that what the church is, meeting together with other believers and being accountable and real with each other in our walk?

False Arrest

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:46:04 GMT

By Amy Goodman of DEMOCRACY NOW

ST. PAUL, Minn.—Government crackdowns on journalists are a true threat to democracy. As the Republican National Convention meets in St. Paul, Minn., this week, police are systematically targeting journalists. I was arrested with my two colleagues, “Democracy Now!” producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, while reporting on the first day of the RNC. I have been wrongly charged with a misdemeanor. My co-workers, who were simply reporting, may be charged with felony riot.

The Democratic and Republican national conventions have become very expensive and protracted acts of political theater, essentially four-day-long advertisements for the major presidential candidates. Outside the fences, they have become major gatherings for grass-roots movements—for people to come, amidst the banners, bunting, flags and confetti, to express the rights enumerated in the Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Behind all the patriotic hyperbole that accompanies the conventions, and the thousands of journalists and media workers who arrive to cover the staged events, there are serious violations of the basic right of freedom of the press. Here on the streets of St. Paul, the press is free to report on the official proceedings of the RNC, but not to report on the police violence and mass arrests directed at those who have come to petition their government, to protest.

It was Labor Day, and there was an anti-war march, with a huge turnout, with local families, students, veterans and people from around the country gathered to oppose the war. The protesters greatly outnumbered the Republican delegates.

There was a positive, festive feeling, coupled with a growing anxiety about the course that Hurricane Gustav was taking, and whether New Orleans would be devastated anew. Later in the day, there was a splinter march. The police—clad in full body armor, with helmets, face shields, batons and canisters of pepper spray—charged. They forced marchers, onlookers and working journalists into a nearby parking lot, then surrounded the people and began handcuffing them.

Nicole was videotaping. Her tape of her own violent arrest is chilling. Police in riot gear charged her, yelling, “Get down on your face.” You hear her voice, clearly and repeatedly announcing “Press! Press! Where are we supposed to go?” She was trapped between parked cars. The camera drops to the pavement amidst Nicole’s screams of pain. Her face was smashed into the pavement, and she was bleeding from the nose, with the heavy officer with a boot or knee on her back. Another officer was pulling on her leg. Sharif was thrown up against the wall and kicked in the chest, and he was bleeding from his arm.

I was at the Xcel Center on the convention floor, interviewing delegates. I had just made it to the Minnesota delegation when I got a call on my cell phone with news that Sharif and Nicole were being bloody arrested, in every sense. Filmmaker Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films and I raced on foot to the scene. Out of breath, we arrived at the parking lot. I went up to the line of riot police and asked to speak to a commanding officer, saying that they had arrested accredited journalists.

Within seconds, they grabbed me, pulled me behind the police line and forcibly twisted my arms behind my back and handcuffed me, the rigid plastic cuffs digging into my wrists. I saw Sharif, his arm bloody, his credentials hanging from his neck. I repeated we were accredited journalists, whereupon a Secret Service agent came over and ripped my convention credential from my neck. I was taken to the St. Paul police garage where cages were set up for protesters. I was charged with obstruction of a peace officer. Nicole and Sharif were taken to jail, facing riot charges.

The attack on and arrest of me and the “Democracy Now!” producers was not an isolated event. A video group called I-Witness Video was raided two days earlier. Another video documentary group, the Glass Bead Collective, was detained, with its computers and video cameras confiscated. On Wednesday, I-Witness Video was again raided, forced out of its office location. When I asked St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington how reporters are to operate in this atmosphere, he suggested, “By embedding reporters in our mobile field force.”

On Monday night, hours after we were arrested, after much public outcry, Nicole, Sharif and I were released. That was our Labor Day. It’s all in a day’s work.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America.

Phenomenal Video

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:35:14 GMT

Words and Thoughts in RGB from Eduardo Morais on Vimeo.

Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:31:27 GMT

The following is taken from an interview between John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute and David Cay Johnston, a reporter who is incredible and was the first reporter to break to the public Donald Trump's true net worth. Very interesting stuff this guy brings. If you read nothing else read the first opening statements about who Johnston is and what he's accomplished.

"To succeed in the long run, rules must have a moral or practical basis and the support of the people. If society says that you may do one thing and not another, there must be some rationale or the rule will be flouted. There is no legitimacy in officials writing rules as they choose simply because they have the power to do so. Such is tyranny.

The Founding Fathers recognized this when they took that great leap to create our republic more than two centuries ago. They provided for checks and balances, recognizing the need to limit power and to control it. To many people, power is of little consequence, just as many people care little about beauty or riches. But to those who lust for power, of what use is acquiring power unless they can abuse it? In this, the philosophy of the power monger is no different from that of the cancer cell, which mindlessly seeks growth for the sake of growth until it overwhelms its host."
—David Cay Johnston

How does a strong and growing economy lend itself to job uncertainty, debt, bankruptcy and economic fear for a vast number of Americans? In Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) (Portfolio, 2007), David Cay Johnston argues that the answer lies in today’s governmental policies and spending that reaches deep into the wallets of the many for the benefit of what he calls the “rapacious rich.”

Johnston shows how, under the guise of deregulation, a whole new set of governmental regulations quietly went into effect—regulations that thwart competition, depress wages and reward misconduct. From how George W. Bush got rich off a tax increase to a $100 million taxpayer gift to Warren Buffett, Johnston puts a face on all the “dirty little tricks” that business and government pull. A lot of people are getting free lunches. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch. So who is paying the bill? You and me, the American taxpayer.

Johnston reveals how we ended up with the most expensive, yet inefficient, health care system in the world, how homeowners’ title insurance became a costly, deceitful, yet almost invisible oligopoly and how our government gives hidden subsidies for such things as posh golf courses.

In these instances and many more, Free Lunch shows how the lobbyists and lawyers representing the most powerful 0.l percent of Americans manipulated our government at the expense of the other 99.9 percent. In fact, Johnston reveals the forces that shape our everyday economic lives—and shows us how we can finally make things better.

David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, has hunted down a killer the police failed to catch, exposed LAPD abuses, caused two television stations to lose their licenses over news manipulations and revealed Donald Trump’s true net worth. He has uncovered so many tax dodges that he has been called the “de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States.”

His last book, Perfectly Legal, was a New York Times bestseller and was honored as Book of the Year by the journalism organization Investigative Reporters and Editors. Over his 40-year career, he has won many other honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and eighth child in Rochester, New York.

David Cay Johnston took a few minutes out of his busy schedule to answer some questions I posed concerning his new book.

John Whitehead: If you could sum up the basic point of your book in a paragraph, what would it be? And why is it important that people read your book?

David Cay Johnston: The American economy has been rigged to produce higher prices in some markets, rather than lower prices, to force the American taxpayer to subsidize all sorts of businesses and wealthy individuals—Donald Trump, Warren Buffet and George Steinbreinner, for example, all get gifts from the taxpayers—and to force you to overpay for products like title insurance when you buy a house. Free Lunch is an expose of government interference with the competitive market on behalf of people who are campaign donors.

JW: When you say government, are you mainly talking about the federal government? Or is it all government?

DCJ: I’m talking about government at every level, from cities to the federal government.

JWW: Are you saying that every level of government in the United States is corrupt?

DCJ: No. I don’t necessarily say that it’s corrupt. If you can persuade the government to give you a benefit, I don’t know that that is inherently corrupt.

JW: But if government officials are not telling the American people about such benefits, isn’t that corrupt?

DCJ: Many of these things are in the public record. The news media is not reporting on them in some cases. In others, government asserts that to tell you how your tax dollars are being spent would interfere with the privacy rights of the people receiving gifts of government money. This is a fundamental systemic problem where government is behaving as a power unto itself and is responding to the interests and wishes of the people who donate to politicians. And the government is forcing the public as a whole to subsidize these wealthy people. This is a major reason that incomes at the very top have been soaring, while for the bottom 90 percent of Americans incomes have stagnated now for 30 years.

JW: The whole governmental system is set up to benefit the rich?

DCJ: That is exactly correct. My fundamental argument is that government has become a servant of that element of the rich who are rapacious and are milking it for all they can. It is much easier to mine gold from the public treasury than to earn it in the marketplace. And if you can get the government to put its thumb on the scale for you, then you are probably going to try to do that. I show how, for example, that locally owned stores are being pushed out of business by disguised government subsidies of big national companies like Wal-Mart, Target, Lowes, restaurant chains and big developers of shopping malls.

JW: How is Wal-Mart getting government subsidies and tax breaks?

DCJ: When Wal-Mart builds a new store, they typically try to get the local government to buy the land they want and to finance the construction of the store with tax-free municipal bonds. They then lease the store until it’s owned from a government agency. How do they pay the lease payments on the store? Not from the money they earn in the market. Instead, in many cases, the sales tax you are required to pay at the cash register is kept by Wal-Mart and used to pay the cost of building the store. That means two things happen. First, the schools, the police, the library, the fire department and other government programs don’t get that money. Second, if you are a locally owned competitor and you own Joe’s Department Store, you now have to compete against a company that is getting its building and land for free. Eventually, economic theory says, they will run you out of business because of this government subsidy.

JW: Is Wal-Mart, then, good or bad for America? If they’re skimming money off the top, are we really buying cheaper goods?

DCJ: I am not willing to go so far as to say that Wal-Mart is bad for America. But they should earn their money in the marketplace, and they should not be getting subsidies. There are a lot of things to subsidize—public education, public health, research—but the government should not subsidize big business, which destroys locally owned competitive retail businesses and which also starves local government, police, schools, libraries and fire departments.

JW: It wipes out small-town America.

DCJ: That is exactly right. If they can wipe out small-town America, it may be a competitive market issue, but government should not be helping them do it. And small merchants seem not to understand that it is their local city and county government and special agencies called enterprise zones that are being abused and misused to destroy local businesses on behalf of the big national chain stores. The big national chains always emphasize to the news media that they are creating jobs, but they do not create jobs. They are more efficient, but, by nature, they destroy jobs. If you want a job creation program based on inefficiency, let’s ban all earth-moving equipment at the construction sites and require that gangs of people go out with teaspoons and move the dirt around.

JW: Why don’t they increase jobs?

DCJ: Because all they do is concentrate jobs at the location where the subsidy is. A new subsidized retailer like Wal-Mart comes to town, and let’s say there are 200 jobs at their site. But as they draw business away from the local merchants, they’re destroying the jobs at those other locally owned businesses and wiping out the fortune of the local family that owns the business. Thus, all the chain stores do is concentrate jobs at that location. And when government gathers data, it doesn’t measure the other losses. It only measures the overall numbers.

JW: Do we actually save money at these chain stores with their so-called cheaper products?

DCJ: I demonstrate in Free Lunch that the local merchants are cheaper than the big national chains. One of the stories I tell is about a guy who owned a hunting and fishing store. The way he made his living was to charge lower prices than Cabela. Then Cabela came to his little town and got a $32-million subsidy. It was the equivalent of the city council buying every family in town a brand new Honda Accord with leather seats and a 6-cylinder engine. It ran him out of business. And the new company charged higher prices.

JW: But if the public doesn’t know this because their public officials aren’t telling them, isn’t that corrupt government? Don’t the people have a right to know that?

DCJ: The public should know about all of this. I call for openness and transparency in government. No member of Congress or any elected officials, for that matter, should have a meeting with anybody that we don’t have a record of and know the issue that was discussed. We don’t need the fine details. But we do need to know who they met with and for how long and what they discussed. Also, subsidy contracts should be public record. The news media should be reporting on them. And this will stop when the public wakes up and starts demanding through calls to talk radio, letters to the editors and contacting politicians on those rare occasions when they present themselves to the public for questioning. We should be asking, “Why are you forcing me to pay taxes to give to big corporations and rich people? I won’t put up with it anymore.” It will only stop when the public wakes up and demands change.

JW: If you have the power to put a large financial thumb on the scales of government—like a Donald Trump or a Warren Buffett—you can get your way. But your average citizen is never going to be able to do that.

DCJ: An individual is not going to have that type of power. It will take collective power. But too many Americans waste their time finding out who will be the next American Idol or what Britney Spears is doing instead of being citizens. When people start behaving like citizens and support organizations that favor their interests, then government will be responsive to them. In the meantime, if you are a politician, what do you care what the ordinary person thinks? They don’t contribute to your campaign. They don’t work on your campaign. They are not important to your being reelected because your district has been gerrymandered to be mostly Democratic or mostly Republican. So if people want a government responsive to them, they have to decide to be citizens. Outsourcing jobs has not been good for blue-collared workers. Outsourcing democracy to the rapacious among the rich and large corporations has been even worse for our government.

JW: While working-class Americans are getting poorer (there are five million more poor people today than in 2005), studies show that the rich are indeed getting richer. According to the Center for American Progress, 37 million Americans, a size roughly equivalent to the population of California, live below the official poverty line. Thus, in a nation of almost 297 million people, 12.6 percent are poor (for instance, a family of four that makes less than $19,971 is considered poor). And one out of every three Americans is considered low income. At the other end of the spectrum, 19 percent of the nation’s income is held by the richest one percent of Americans who have gotten richer as a consequence of taxes, subsidies and regulatory policies that, as you say, “take from the many to give to the already superrich.” And, as a result, government policies are favoring the super rich. What does this mean for the working poor? A class system has developed in America where there are only two classes—the rich and the rest of us.

DCJ: We still have a middle class, but it is under tremendous stress. This is not good for the future of the country. It is the unstated but de facto policy of government to make the rich richer at the expense of everybody else. So long as our government follows a fundamentally atheistic policy that capital is more important than people, we will continue down this road. We did not create America to get rich, although a surprising number of college students I have interviewed believe that is the reason we created this country. But this is not true. We created this country to be free. There are six purposes laid out in the Preamble of the Constitution, such as providing for justice and the common defense. They don’t include individual riches or narrow wealth. But now the overarching purpose of the American government at all levels is to benefit the richest of the rich. That has to change or we are going to destroy our country.

JW: How is it going to change? Simply look at the United States Congress. For example, the Center for Responsive Politics reported in 2006 that about half of the Senate’s 100 members are millionaires and their average net worth is $8.9 million. Even those members of Congress who do not belong to the so-called “Millionaire’s Club” enjoy a host of congressional perks. In addition to their six-figure salaries, our representatives also receive millions to maintain offices in their home state and in the nation’s capital, as well as other benefits such as free life insurance, a generous retirement plan for life, 32 fully reimbursed road trips home a year, as well as travel to foreign lands—all of which comes at taxpayer expense. And then there are the “extras” ranging from discounts in Capitol Hill tax-free shops and restaurants, $10 haircuts at the Congressional barbershop and free reserved parking at Washington National Airport to use of the House gym or Senate baths for $100 a year, free fresh-cut flowers from the Botanic Gardens and free assistance in the preparation of income taxes. It is little wonder with such entitlement that elected officials who have, and have in abundance, are ill-equipped to relate to the struggles of those who have little to nothing at all.

DCJ: First of all, many of the greatest reforms came about because rich people were participating in them. The rich are not a monolith, just like the poor aren’t. There are people who are poor and work hard. Then there are people who are poor and don’t work. There are rich people who care about their country, and there are rich people who are totally greedy. It’s the greedy ones we need to be after. A tremendous problem we have deals with campaign finance. If you are a senator or a congressman, the reality of your life is what your donors say to you. That matters. And the money they give you matters—not the votes. We need to look at expanding the size of Congress. That may seem counterintuitive, but we increased the size of Congress every 10 years until 1920. There are three times as many Americans today as there were in 1920. Let’s triple the size of Congress and cut back on their massive staff entourages, as well as their perks.

JW: Do you really believe they’re going to cut back on their perks?

DCJ: They will cut back on them when and if the public rises up and throws out some of the people who are not paying attention to what the people need. Herbert Stein, President Nixon’s Economic Advisor, used to say that a trend can only continue until it can’t continue anymore. This trend of the rich milking the government for everything they can get will eventually come to an end. My book Free Lunch is part of the effort to arouse people to recognize what is happening so they can act. There is only one thing you can say that is un-American, and that is that we can’t solve this problem. We started this country saying, “We don’t need King George to tell us what to do, and we don’t need the British Parliament to tell us what to do. We will solve our own problems.” We got rid of slavery. It took a war that killed over 600,000 Americans, some 40,000 of them Black Americans. Women got the right to vote. Men voted to let women vote. We can change this system, but people have to spend time and effort. It is not easy. It is not simple. But no one else is going to do it for you. If you want to live in a free society, if you want to have your liberty, if you want a government that looks out for you, instead of the already rich, then you have to spend time getting organized with other like-minded people and being citizens.

JW: We are in an election year. This year, we have two candidates that hail from a Congress that does very little for the American people. This is a provable fact. And these are also wealthy people. John McCain boasts an individual net worth of $29.21 million. His wife is also very wealthy. And Barack Obama has assets valued up to $1.1 million. However, his $1.9 million book advance in 2005 puts him on track to catch up with McCain. These two candidates are supported by millionaire gifts from the oil industry. Where is the hope? We’re reduced to voting for two people that we have to vote for. How are they going to change anything? Again we are voting for the rich. How do we get around the problem that we are always either ruled by the rich or we are voting for the rich? Is there a way out?

DCJ: John, there is a way out. First of all, remember that the two greatest reformer presidents in America were rich men—Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. They brought us all sorts of reforms to protect ordinary people. The issue is not that you are rich. It is how you regard your money. We did not get into this problem in one election, and we will not get out of it in one election. It will take time. As long as we have the current campaign finance system, we are going to continue to have candidates who are chosen because they are acceptable to the rich who want to live off corporate welfare and hidden gifts from the government. We need to break the campaign finance system, but it will take time. The abolition movement went on for decades. The suffrage movement went on for decades. I don’t think this will take decades. I think we can have change in a couple of election cycles. People need to start first and foremost talking to their friends and neighbors. The conversations need to begin in coffee shops, hair salons and on church steps. It will filter out through society and reach the upper levels. We need to start shaming people like the Walton family. They are the wealthiest family in America. They’re worth more than $100 billion, and they are taking your tax dollars for their enrichment. We should be shaming them. Charities that give gifts to people who live off the public taxpayer should be getting letters from people. We should be staging demonstrations in front of their offices to shame them. It is one thing to be receiving government money because you are disabled, elderly or sick. But what possible excuse is there for the healthy and the wealthy to be taking money from the government? We should be organizing to shame these people and to elect people to office who say, “I am going to stop this.”
JW: The American economy is in a shambles. We’re in a recession. You state that in America today there is economic anxiety aplenty—a rational response to the loss of so many well-paying jobs to China and other countries. However, you then go on to say that it would not take much to turn that anxiety into irrational fear. Why would such fear be irrational, especially in light of such other statements in your book as,
“Warren Buffett calculates that America is selling close to 2 percent of its wealth each year to sustain our appetite for imported oil and cheap manufactured goods, many of them mere trinkets.” And, “Just a generation ago we were the world’s leading creditor nation and now we are the world’s most indebted nation.”

DCJ: I am concerned about what happened in the 1930s, where the plunging economic fortunes of people made them turn to fascism and Communism as a solution to their problems. And we got World War Two, among other awful outcomes. The rational response to all of this is to organize and demand that the government change, which the people have done over the years. Government has changed because people took definitive action. Market capitalism works when the government doesn’t put its thumbs on the scale. We need to be active as citizens and not just vote. We need to do this not only for our sake but for our children and our grandchildren. And we need to stop listening to simplistic slogans. Look at Ronald Reagan. He changed America in big ways. He promised us balanced budgets, lower taxes and less government. But the government has balanced the budget only twice since then. And the government is just as big as it was back then. If Reagan had just kept the promise to balance the budget, we could cut our income taxes by 40%. We need to recognize that we were sold a bill of goods by people who didn’t perform the way they said they would. We have had our government captured by the rapacious among the rich and by large corporations, which by their nature are not concerned about the welfare of the country. They are concerned about the bottom line—profits. We need to reign in that behavior. The only way to do that is for people to rise up in every way they can—talking about it, educating people, writing letters, voting, contributing, volunteering their time and shaming people who are living off the public dole. It means being citizens.

JW: Speaking of Reagan, you start your book off with a twist on Ronald Reagan’s simple question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Your question being, “Are we better off than we were a generation ago?” Reagan’s question, which resounded with a majority of the American people, spoke to the individual. Your question is broader—assuming that there is a collective ready-to-respond. You already mentioned that people sit in front of their TV sets too much. Every poll shows that most Americans know the Three Stooges, but they can’t tell you anybody sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court. They can’t even tell you who represents them in Congress. Who are you speaking to in today’s self-absorbed society?

DCJ: There are people who are listening. The groups I have found listening the most are those church groups that have some sense of social justice. Unfortunately, we have lots of churches today selling the concept that Jesus wants you to be rich. That is not in any New Testament that I have read. But church groups that understand the message of the Bible—both the Old and New Testaments—and understand our duty to the rest of the world and the poor, they get it. There are various union groups and some small business groups that get it and are in fact responding. A major problem here, however, is with the news media. The news media increasingly does three awful things. One, it covers a very narrow range of political views and attitudes at the top. Two, you turn on the TV and the main thing you see is one white male after another spouting off about this and that issue, often with a corporatist point of view. There is an enormous loss of skepticism. The news organizations used to be staffed with people who came largely from blue collar backgrounds. Now they tend to be staffed with reporters and editors who come from prosperous backgrounds. Many of them have no contact with and have never dealt with the poor. I say this of someone who has personally taken other journalists with me to places like South Central Los Angeles and the South Bronx and talked with ordinary cops and school teachers to see how the world really works. They live out in this cocoon. The third problem is the superficiality of much of the coverage. I spent a lot of time in my research going back and reading news accounts from the 1950s and when I began as a journalist in the 1960s. Those news accounts are much more fundamentally skeptical. When the president said something, it wasn’t just accepted as received truth.

JW: Thus, the corporate media is a major part of the problem?

DCJ: The corporate media is a major problem. We used to have independent owners of newspapers around the country. Some of them were terrible publishers, and some of them were great publishers. Many of them were quirky, but you got a lot of different voices and you heard a lot of different things. Now you have a handful of big corporations where the publishers of the papers are not the owners. They are hired help.

JW: The TV networks are the same.

DCJ: Look who owns the TV networks. How many Americans know that Disney owns ABC? Disney is an entertainment company. General Electric, one of the biggest companies in the country, owns NBC. A tobacco family owns, or did own, CBS. Such an environment has not been good for the interests and coverage of ordinary people. The industry also has been involved in covering silly nonsense, such as someone wearing a flag on their lapel or how long the skirt of a candidate’s wife is. What utter nonsense. There has been a sharp deterioration in the skill and the quality level of journalists and their understanding of how the world works. This has been an awful tragedy for democracy.

JW: I have always believed that it is the common person (you and I) who needs to participate in our government, not just by voting but in determining government policy. As Abraham Lincoln observed, “Wise men established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began.” Is it too late for us now?

DCJ: I sure hope not. If we do not do the business of being citizens, then we are hastening the day when high school students will sit down and open up a book with a chapter on history that will begin with these words, “The United States of America was.” If we do not participate in governing ourselves, we will lose our country. If we do lose our country, a form of violence will arise which will be vastly worse than anything history has ever seen. Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia will be less violent than we would be if we fall into a revolution. The only way to avoid that is diligence. We don’t so much solve problems as work them through and then work through the next problem and the next problem and the next one. Right now, our biggest problem is that our government has been captured by large corporations and those among the rich who are rapacious. They are slowly destroying the economic fibers of America and, as a result, the moral and political fiber of the country as well. We need to organize, and we need to fight back. We can solve this, but watching American Idol is not going to solve it.

Sorry, had to post just one more religious topic!

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:30:34 GMT

By Chris Hedges

The German chemist August Kekulé fell asleep in his study after a fruitless struggle to identify the chemical structure of benzene. He dreamed of a snake eating its own tail and awoke instantly. The dream gave him, through the ancient language of symbolism, the circular structure of the benzene ring that had eluded his conscious mind. The dream may have had its basis in Kekulé’s experiments, but it was the nonrational that brought him his discovery.

Many physicists see “string theory”—in which the structure of the universe is made up of resonating, one-dimensional submicroscopic strings—as plausible. Yet no scientist has ever seen a string. No direct experimentation has established a firm ground for strings. Cosmology routinely bases arguments on things that cannot be seen in order to explain things that can, as in the case of “dark matter,” whose effects can be seen. Quantum physics demolished the assumption that physical elements are governed by fixed laws.

Science is often as inexact and intuitive as theology, philosophy and every other human endeavor. A mirror demonstrates the randomness of nature. A mirror reflects about 95 percent of light hitting it. The other 5 percent passes through the mirror. Photons, which are invisible, are either reflected or pass through the mirror’s surface. But there is no way of knowing which photons will be reflected and which will be absorbed. Electrons are also subject to these quantum effects. This led Werner Heisenberg to formulate his “uncertainty principle.” This principle states that we cannot know everything about a particle. If we can determine a particle’s position we cannot determine its momentum. We can measure momentum, but in this measurement we lose the particle’s exact position. We can know a particle’s momentum or its position. We cannot know both with definitive accuracy.

Science is not always directly empirical. Science is not governed by absolute, immutable laws. Science, and especially quantum mechanics, far from telling us we can know everything, tells us there will always be things we cannot know. No one ultimately understands. Science affirms the complexity and mystery of the universe. Science, like the religious impulse, opens us up to a world where we face mystery. There are forces in the universe that will always lie beyond the capacity of the human mind.

The New Atheist writers from Richard Dawkins to E.O. Wilson to Sam Harris have become the high priests not of science but the cult of science. Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore, for example, call religious beliefs “memes.” Memes are defined as cultural artifacts—prototypical ideas—that invade and restructure minds in order to reproduce themselves. A meme replicates in human minds, they argue, the way genes replicate in human bodies. Memes include a word, belief, thought, religious ritual, dance, poem or any of the myriad of behaviors that are copied and reproduced in human societies. Although memes, unlike genes, are not identifiable physical structures, Dawkins uses the image of a virus to describe them. Religion, for Dawkins, is equated with a disease, and the religiously inclined are disease carriers.

The attempt to equate patterns of human society with the behavior of genes, while it sounds plausible, and may even be instructive in some settings, is part of this cult of science. The genetic coding that permits the transfer of DNA-encoded units of information is fairly precise. But this model fails to work for the transfer of cultural, social, ethical and political behavior. Patterns of morality are easily reversed or erased, especially in ages of revolutionary fervor, war, anarchy, fear, social decline and despotism. Those who are schooled in identical religious texts, even within the same communities, have different views of morality and ethics. It is possible to transfer literal meaning. It is possible to transfer genetic information. It is possible to pass on heritable characteristics mediated by hard-and-fast rules of chemistry and physics. These rules, however, have no counterpart in the dissemination of ideas. Ideas do not replicate like genes. Ideas are snuffed out or forgotten, often for centuries. Ideas that prevail are often not the best ideas but more often ideas backed by power. The rise of Christianity owed more to the brutality of Constantine and the Holy Roman Empire than it did its particular theology. Those who advocate the theory of memes ignore the role of power, repression, persecution and force in human history, as well as the inherent chaos and irrationality of human thought. Human thought cannot be treated like an object in a laboratory. There is no scientific mechanism that explains cultural evolution.

Those who endorse the meme theory speak of memetic engineering. This memetic engineering would involve the conscious manipulation of intellectual evolution by disseminating good memes and curtailing bad ones. The question of who decides which memes are good and which bad is not raised. Dennett has argued that human evolution can be shaped and directed through memetic engineering. He advocates not science but indoctrination, an updated version of thought control. The theory of memes and memetic engineering, like the idea of the new man, is another form of magical thinking. It is not real. It has no more scientific validity than Intelligent Design. And, should it ever be adopted it would result in anti-intellectualism, a war on science and democratic freedom and a silencing of those who fail to conform. The world the high priests of memetic engineering propose is as repugnant as the fundamentalist utopia advocated by the radical Christian right.

Einstein’s quest for a unified field theory explaining subatomic structure or the Big Bang no more undermined religious contemplation than evolutionary biology. The questions of science are not the questions of religion. Science does not attempt to address, nor is it capable of addressing, the final mystery of existence, our moments of transcendence, the moral life, love, our search for meaning and our mortality. Science, limited to what can be proved and disproved, is a morally neutral discipline. It serves human needs and human ambitions. There are times when it protects and advances life. There are times when it empowers ambitions that are immoral and deadly. Science, like all human endeavors, comes with good and bad, possibilities of hope and possibilities of destruction.

When Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life” in 1859, he named natural selection as the mechanism that drives and defines life. Evolutionary science, however, swiftly became for many a surrogate religion. It was used to promote racism and pseudo-science, such as eugenics, a theory of biological determinism invented by Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin. It was turned like a club on religion and used to justify exploitation and neglect of the poor and disadvantaged.

There are unfortunate implications in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin believes in the possibility of compassion and benevolence. He argues that these adaptations give one species advantage over another. He uses compassion to insist that sooner or later the “superior” races—those with compassion—will exterminate the “more savage” races. Compassion, he implies, does not exist, or certainly not in the same abundance, in others as it does in us. But Darwin left the championing of these implications to others such as Herbert Spencer, a utopian and a doctrinaire Malthusian. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who argued that step by step we were progressing as a species and would end with the perfect human being. And it was Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.”

The atheists, while they do not endorse the hierarchy of races or espouse the crude racist doctrines of earlier Social Darwinists, continue to argue that natural selection is social selection. They continue to create moral hierarchies among human beings and use these hierarchies to sanction violence. They do this because they insist we are moving toward a final good. This is not a position supported by human history, human nature or evolutionary biology.

Wilson, in his book “On Human Nature,” uses evolutionary biology to justify power structures such as the subjugation of women and social inequality. All behavior in society, he argues, has a genetic basis. Religious belief exists, he writes, only because it gives humans a biological advantage. Religion helps “congeal identity,” provides “unquestioned membership in a group claiming great powers” and gives to a human being “a driving purpose in life compatible with his self-interest.” Wilson, while correct in assuming that many of the laws that govern animals also govern the behavior and habits of the human species, goes much further. He leaps from science to the unscientific propositions that evolution means we can, as a species, morally advance. He dreams of a day when the human race, having jettisoned religion and embraced science and reason, will be able to alter human nature and control its own destiny:

“… [G]enetic evolution is about to become conscious and volitional, and usher in a new epoch in the history of life. ... The prospect of this ‘volitional evolution’—a species deciding what to do about its own heredity—will present the most profound intellectual and ethical choices humanity ever faced ... humanity will be positioned godlike to take control of its own ultimate fate. It can, if it chooses, alter not just the anatomy and intelligence of the species but also the emotions and creative drive that compose the very core of human nature.”

Dawkins writes that the human species, unlike other animals, can transcend its biological map. “We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators,” he says.

This leap by Wilson and Dawkins is not science. It certainly is not Darwinian science. Darwin wrote nothing to indicate that the human species had risen above its biological composition. He argued that human morality was linked to the behavior of animals. The social instincts that constitute humankind’s understanding of moral behavior can be found, he wrote, in monkeys, pelicans and dogs, as well as other animals.

Wilson and Dawkins build their vision of human perfectibility out of the legitimate theory that human beings are shaped by the laws of heredity and natural selection. They depart from this position when they assert that we can leave that determinism behind. There is nothing in science that implies that our genetic makeup allows us to perfect ourselves. Those who, in the name of science, claim that we can overcome our imperfect human nature make a leap of faith. In this leap they leave the realm of science. They operate on a belief system that functions like religion. It gives meaning. It gives purpose and hope. But it is a myth. It is not true. And there is nothing, when you cut through their scientific jargon, which supports their absurd proposition.

The attempt to impose the methodology of science onto collective and personal relationships also has grave consequences. If a scientific hypothesis does not work it is discarded. Pluralism has no place in science. Neither do competing truths. Science, when set up as a model for our moral and social existence, implicitly banishes compromise and tolerance. Scientific ideas, because they can be demonstrated or disproved, are embraced or rejected on quantifiable evidence. But human relationships and social organizations interact and function effectively when they are not rigid, accept morally ambiguity and take into account the irrational. Politics, for example, is about channeling and managing human drives and desires. It is only fitfully in contact with reason. This profound understanding of the irrational element in politics led Sigmund Freud to write his masterpiece “Civilization and Its Discontents.” The secular fundamentalists, in a gross misuse of Darwin and of science, turn biological evolution into a methodology to champion moral progress for the human race. They seek to give to their arguments the patina of unassailable truth. But what they sell are myths, bizarre utopian visions of a new heaven and a new earth dressed up in the language of scientific rationalism.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of “I Don’t Believe in Atheists.”