Monthly Archives: November 2004

holiness

This article from the NY Times describes the fact that in all regions of the country the same shows that have generous immorality in them are embraced by all. The point is that even in Red States folks like to watch sin on TV. I guess we could argue that the 30-48 percent of the population that voted for the Democrats are the ones watching Desperate Housewives in all these states; but the article resonates with me.

I think most Christians have viewing habits that do not differ much from their pagan neighbors. I believe this is because we have found ways to avoid the implications of holiness and what it means to be a called out people. On the Reformed side you have “liberty of conscience” which appears to mean “I can watch or listen to anything and if you tell me I can’t you are pietists”. On the other side I think there is just out and out hypocrisy or searing of the conscience. We watch things we know are wrong and we don’t care. One quote from the article illustrates this point:

Herbert J. Gans, professor of sociology at Columbia University and the author of “Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste,” said, “For some people it’s a case of ‘I am moral therefore I can watch the most immoral show.’ ”

I have to plead guilty to this. I have let my standards slide and watched about anything lately. And I can remember vividly being a kid and being baffled by Christian adults who watched trash; it was a very confusing message to me. If “moral values” meant so much to Christians we wouldn’t try to boycott or picket, we would just turn the channel – obviously we aren’t in great numbers. It is time to remember:

“Let everyone who names the name of the Lord abstain from wickedness.” (2 Tim 2.19)

Iraq gets bad

The current issue of the New Yorker has a good look at Iraq and what is going on there. I don’t see a good end in sight there no matter what happens. I have been reading about Rome for my Western Civ class and the paralell is in some ways startling. Rome always said it was launching a war to defend itself and then the wars it launched expanded the threats to its security from which it had to defend itself. The current situation with Iran comes to mind — one justification for invading Iran is the threat they are posing in Iraq. (see this report to find out more)

The sad part of this New Yorker article is the way some realtive innocents have been treated by us, this doesn’t surprise me but a Greek tragedy. The story focuses on Samir Khairi, a mid-level official under Hussein, and what happened to him at our hands:

On the night of July 19, 2003, Khairi said, American soldiers kicked in the front door to his house, dragged him out to the street in his pajamas, and threw him to the ground as his neighbors watched. When he asked a soldier why he was being arrested, the soldier bashed him several times with his rifle. He was left with four broken ribs.

Khairi was held in an Army detention center without food and with little water for twenty-four hours. He was then taken, with some other prisoners, to a facility in Kadhimiya, the former headquarters of Saddam’s military-intelligence service. “We were put in a cell with no toilet,” Khairi said. “We had to use the floor, like dogs.”
[...]
At the end of August, Khairi’s wife was allowed to visit. She told him that his father had died after hearing of his arrest. That afternoon, Khairi had a second heart attack. He stayed at Bukka for two months and then, on November 4th, he was sent to Abu Ghraib.

When Khairi and other prisoners arrived at Abu Ghraib, he said, “the guards took everything we had brought with us from Bukka—all of our clothes, everything. They left us in our pajamas. An American soldier—a big fat guy—took the reading glasses my wife had brought to me and stomped on them. The translator said to us, ‘This is not Bukka. That was a five-star hotel. This is Abu Ghraib.’ They took my medicines. It was cold, and we slept in a tent, on the ground.”

Khairi’s heart problems became worse, and he was medevaced out of the camp twice. Khairi said that although many of the Americans he had met at the clinics where he was treated had been kind, some military policemen with German shepherds would barge in and allow their dogs to terrorize the patients. (It was only later that he learned about the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.) Once, he had seen a hooded, half-naked prisoner being herded by American soldiers into a wooden trailer, and leave some time later, hobbling as if in great pain. But, he said, “I don’t know what they did to him.”

Khairi was bewildered by the demeaning treatment of Iraqi prisoners. “The young men in my tents told me they were just waiting for the day they would get out so they could fight,” he said. “In the early days at Bukka, the Shia prisoners were not too much against the Americans, but after a few months even they changed their minds. I’d say that about ninety-five per cent of the Shia I met were talking about taking revenge.”

Almost every day, there were mortar attacks, Khairi recalled. “We noticed that they only attacked the American positions inside the prison, not where the prisoners were. The Iraqis were very happy when the attacks occurred. Some of them yelled, ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and said, ‘This is God’s punishment to the Americans for their ill-treatment of us.’ Once the attacks became more frequent, they began hooding us whenever we went anywhere because the prisoners were telling their visiting relatives the Americans’ positions.”

Khairi was held at Abu Ghraib for three and a half months without seeing his family; he found out later that they had tried to see him many times, and had been told that he wasn’t there. He was finally released in February, dressed only in a hospital gown.

Kulturkampf

I thought this article from the New Republic was the best assessment of where the Democrats are as a party and what they are missing. The author, Brad Carson, ran for the Senate against Tom Coburn in Oklahoma. He says in part:

For the vast majority of Oklahomans–and, I would suspect, voters in other red states–these transcendent cultural concerns are more important than universal health care or raising the minimum wage or preserving farm subsidies. Pace Thomas Frank, the voters aren’t deluded or uneducated. They simply reject the notion that material concerns are more real than spiritual or cultural ones. The political left has always had a hard time understanding this, preferring to believe that the masses are enthralled by a “false consciousness” or Fox News or whatever today’s excuse might be. But the truth is quite simple: Most voters in a state like Oklahoma–and I venture to say most other Southern and Midwestern states–reject the general direction of American culture and celebrate the political party that promises to reform or revise it.

That is what Antonin Scalia famously called the Kulturkampf. And there can be no doubt either that this is a fundamental dynamic in American politics or on which side of this conflict the electorate rests. Last Tuesday, I ran 7 percent ahead of John Kerry, and my opponent ran a full 13 percent behind President Bush. In most states, this would have been more than sufficient to ensure my victory. But not in Oklahoma. At least not last Tuesday. And, while the defeat was all my own, the failure was of the party to which I swear allegiance, which uncritically embraces a modernity that so many others reject.

polis

The Greek polis was a community centered in a city that brought together religion, politics, family, and more to become the basic building block of Greek society. The Greek polis provided examples to the west of how to organize government and of what the role of the citizen should be in relation to this government. To understand the roots of modern constitutional republics and democracies it is helpful to have a grasp of what the polis was and how it functioned.

In determining what a polis was and what its’ goals were it is most helpful to turn to Aristotle. He writes:

It is clear, therefore, that a polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange. These are indeed conditions which must be present before a polis can exist; but the presence of all these conditions is not enough, in itself, to constitute a polis. What constitutes a polis is an association of households and clans in a good life, for the sake of attaining a perfect and self-sufficing existence. (Barker 119-120)

Earlier in Politics Aristotle says that the polis exists “for the sake of a good life” (Barker 5). Self-government then to Aristotle and early Greeks was not an end in and of itself. The polis did not exist just because people lived in the same physical vicinity and had to have some sort of government. No, the polis was dedicated to the good life. This good life was conceived of in terms of the administration of justice and the ability of people to have a say in forming the laws that governed them. But more than that the good life of the polis was a spiritual pursuit; it meant the ordering of life according to the will of the gods, the divine law.

In contrast to other civilizations the Greeks had no Scripture by which they ordered their lives (though Homer fulfilled something of this role). Thus the exact contours of what constituted the good life in terms of ethics and duties were in flux. The schools of philosophy argued amongst themselves as to just what the end of life should be. And in the political structure of the polis the ordering of life was worked out in law. Aristotle writes “Justice [which is his salvation] belongs to the polis; for justice, which is the determination of what is just, is an ordering of the political association” (Barker 7).

It should be noted that the polis was considered to be the primary focus of the life of a man. His individual self and his family were to be subservient to the polis. The modern notion of the autonomous and sovereign self which consents to meet in a group only occasionally was not known to the Greek. I doubt very much whether the founders of the United States could have foreseen the plague of individualism which now infects the west. The ability of the institutions of government to function over the long haul in a society where self-interest is the highest good is doubtful. Such a society would have been unthinkable not only to the Greeks, but also to our own founders. Aristotle said:

The man who is isolated—who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient—is no part of the polis, and must therefore be either a beast or a god. (Barker 6)

It is easy to imagine how the polis could be a source of strength to a people. A place to air concerns, a place where the rituals of the religion were enacted on a regular basis, a concept that could inspire dedication in war and peace, this was what the polis was to them. People are not made to live alone, in isolation from each other. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our modern existence is that with all of our affluence and knowledge we tend to live in complete ignorance of those around us. There is no loyalty to city and little to country. And why should there be when these entities provide no vision of the good life but are merely utilitarian geopolitical realties?

I would argue that the greatest inheritor and competitor to the concept of polis was the Christian church. It was established as an alternative polis, the true polis if you will. Its members share the same table fellowship and are united by the same story. They enact the ritual of their God on a weekly basis in the breaking of bread and the drinking of wine. The church offers a vision of the good life that is accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. I believe this connection was intentionally made by the Apostle Paul and became foundational to all of later western history. Saint Augustine ran with this vision of the polis of God, which will find its final realization after the eschatological judgment day. The concept of polis is with us still, though we may not realize it.

Epworth Chapel

We were accepted as members at Epworth Chapel on the Green this past Sunday -the Feast of All Saints. 18 people total became members, and we had one baptism of an adult. I believe he has been a Christian all his life but was never baptized-amazing. I don’t know if baptism just doesn’t matter to some churches or what. It was nice to tie together the saints who have gone before, a baptism, and all the new members coming in.

“O God, whose merciful providence has from the beginning sown the seeds of grace in the hearts of people everywhere, and whose only son Jesus Christ, by his holy doctrine and life and precious death, infinitely increased the means of salvation and the number of your saints; grant that we, whom You have favored with so many advantages by your calling us into communion with them, may obtain your grace to imitate them here and to rejoice with them in your kingdom hereafter; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with You and the Holy Spirit, be all glory forever.”

Noah and marriage

I just noticed that Shem, Ham, and Japeth all had a “wife” not wives. Though we know polygamy existed prior to the Flood it was not so from the beginning. Interesting that Noah’s family was apparently living after the pattern of creation, not the later reality.

Election 04

It is a gorgeous Fall day with leaves falling and crisp air underneath the blue sky. Turnout was normal I think, but I live in a place where it always seems brisk due to all the senior citizens voting. I didn’t know who I’d vote for until I got in the booth and all I could think of was Bush’s “gay unions are ok” line. It was ringing in my ears. So I voted for the Constitution Party again.

Reading the latest issue of Chronicles magazine also convinced me that the corpse that is the GOP needs to be ditched by Christians. It’s time to do the long, hard work of constructing something new -just like the GOP came from the Whigs. That said, I do hope Bush wins tonight and I think he will.