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  • Sarah Palin and the Chinese “Piano Moms”

    Spengler has put his finger on something that the Elitist Snobs don’t understand:

    What does America have that Asia doesn’t have? The answer is, Sarah Palin – not Sarah Palin the vice presidential candidate, but Sarah Palin the “hockey mom” turned small-town mayor and reforming Alaska governor. All the PhDs and MBAs in the world can’t make a capital market work, but ordinary people like Sarah Palin can. Laws depend on the will of the people to enforce them. It is the initiative of ordinary people that makes America’s political system the world’s most reliable.

    America is the heir to a long tradition of Anglo-Saxon law that began with jury trial and the Magna Carta and continued through the English Revolution of the 17th century and the American Revolution of the 18th. Ordinary people like Palin are the bearers of this tradition.

    Outside of the United States, the young governor of Alaska has become a figure of ridicule – someone who did not own a passport until last year and who quaintly believes that her state’s proximity to Russia gives her insights on foreign policy. How, my European friends ask, was it possible for such an an ignorant bumpkin to become a candidate for America’s second-highest office? They don’t understand America.

    Provincial America depends on the initiative of ordinary people to get through the day. America has something like an Education Ministry, but it has little money to dispense. Americans pay for most of their school costs out of local taxes, and levy those taxes on themselves. In small towns, many public agencies, including fire protection and emergency medical assistance, depend almost entirely on volunteers. People who tax themselves, and give their own time and money for services on which communities depend, are not easily cowed by the federal government or by large corporations.

    But I, the husband of a music teacher, found this to be especially charming and true:

    “Hockey Moms,” to be sure, may not be the optimal promoters of America’s future. One for one, the “Piano Moms” of China are cleverer people and produce smarter offspring. China’s 30 million students of classical piano are one of the two great popular movements in the world today: the other is the House Church movement in Chinese Christianity. Children who play hockey will grow up to get coffee for children who study piano. As a pool of talent, nothing compares with the educated segment of the East Asian population that has embraced and mastered Western culture. Nonetheless, Asia still can’t invest its own money at home, and seems farther than ever from that objective.

  • Blast From the Past: A Punch in the Face for Capitalism (Sarbanes-Oxley)

    I originally posted this 11 September 2005.  It bears repeating in view of the current Wall Street mess.  It’s tempting to send some of these people to jail, but the rest will simply bail, and we won’t necessarily be the better for it.

    Long ago, I attended a prep school in South Florida. Our Junior English class was in the corner of the building, with nice windows giving a view of the wraparound sidewalk and whoever strolled it. One day, we were listening to our teacher go on about something (he’s since gone on to his reward as a Provost of a small college on the West Coast) when we noticed the Assistant Headmaster and one of our fellow students at a standoff on the sidewalk.

    It just wasn’t any student: it was a scion of the Oxley family, the clan who started out with a fortune made in oil and ended up as the leading family of polo (complete with Ralph Kramden’s poloponies) in South Florida. (They only recently sold the polo practice field near the school for a development.) My experience with the Assistant Headmaster was that he wasn’t one to take a lot of guff from a student, and Oxley, having shown up to school an hour or two late, wasn’t getting very far. So Oxley, in public school fashion, took a swing at the Assistant Headmaster.

    We suddenly realised we literally had ringside seats to the fight. But our cheering Oxley on was to no avail: that was Oxley’s last day at our school, and things settled down after that until someone else was caught with pot, or worse.

    Today we’re trying to sort things out from another “punch in the face” from another Oxley, this time Rep. Michael Oxley (R-OH) in the form of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed three years ago in the wake of scandals such as Enron, Global Crossing and the like. The basic purpose of Sarbanes-Oxley is to regulate the relationship between publicly held corporations and their accountants, and to force corporate executives to “certify” their financial results, under criminal penalty.

    This legislation was passed in the great American tradition of “there ought to be a law…” We have a crisis, it costs people money, Congress (the opposite of progress) reacts by passing legislation to “fix” the problem, everybody congratulates themselves for being good boys and girls, and then everyone forgets until something else comes up, when the cycle comes up all over again.

    It’s true that the relationship between corporations and the “independent” accountant-auditors they retain can be more complicated than they are in theory. This is for two reasons. The first is that the corporation pays for the audit, which builds in an element of subservience into the process. The second is that accounting firms have attempted to diversify their own services with management consulting and other types of revenue-generating activity that takes them beyond boring auditing. Having seen the latter in action myself, I think that accounting firms are better off sticking to their original mission.

    Having said this, knee-jerk reactions such as Sarbanes-Oxley ignore two important facts.

    The first is that people actually are going to jail under existing law for the crimes committed that inspired this legislation. Congress didn’t wait to find this out. They had already been treated to Arthur Anderson’s demise, which was an object lesson no one missed. Such events beg the question as to whether this legislation was necessary in the first place.

    The second is that raising the bar of liability for any action only inspires people to avoid it altogether. In the case of Sarbanes-Oxley, putting additional liabilities on executives of publicly held corporations will only inspire people to shy away from such corporations, i.e., to stick with privately held ones. Results of this range from companies avoiding going public to those which are going “dark” (becoming privately held corporations.) Anyone who has been involved in a corporation whose stock in unlisted knows that both the availability and marketability of the stock is limited. This means that, to varying degrees, any privately held corporation is an “inside deal,” benefiting those who were invited to partcipate.

    The growth in participation by ordinary investors in our economy has been facilitated by publicly held stock freely available, either directly or through mutual funds. As the long-term impact of Sarbanes-Oxley takes root and people work to avoid the liabilities it imposes, the access of a broad range of investors—especially small ones—will be progressively worsened. This will accelerate the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, which is always dangerous in a democracy, making it easy for demagogues like Huey “The Kingfish” Long to play on peoples’ desperation.

    And since the subject of Louisiana has come up, we’re sure that, in the wake of the general bureaucratic failure that followed Hurricane Katrina, we’ll see congressional hearings with the object of passing legislation to prevent such failures from happening again. However, it should be evident that the slow relief response wasn’t a lack of procedures or warning. Plans and procedures were in place; the bureaucracies involved, however, didn’t forcefully put them into action. They looked at Katrina like a deer into oncoming headlights. Such failures cannot be fixed by legislation, but by putting people into office and position that will forcefully carry the plans out, as Rudy Giuliani did four years ago in New York.

    Liberals used to love to say that “You can’t legislate morality.” They quit saying that when their “morality” was what they wanted to impose. You can’t legislate character and decisiveness either, and we would be better off if Congress would quit trying.

  • The Vice Presidential Debate, and Why I Don’t Trust Joe Biden

    Art Rhodes weighs in on this:

    As a quasi-political operative, I would have liked to have seen Palin give more detailed responses on some issues. However, the focus groups seemed to love her folksy, straight forward (although often illusory) responses. When she responded about the economy that Americans “are just not going to take the greed of Wall Street any more,” her numbers went off the screen from the focus group. They loved her tough talk!!

    The other big difference of the night – Biden talked to the moderator while Palin talked to the television camera (and the American people). She was comfortable, folksy, and even got off a few winks to the crowd – and cameras. Even saying that the kids watching the debate would get extra school credit was a hit.

    For me, the debate reminded me of something else: why I don’t trust Joe Biden.

    To start with, he reminded everyone of the shift in his idea of vetting judicial nominees from simply being accomplished jurists of good character to having to have proper ideology.  Conservatives have taken the rap for this transition, but Joe glibly took credit for the change himself.  He lead the fight to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork to SCOTUS, an episode which added the term “borked” to the English language and which was IMO one of the most shameful trashings the U.S. Senate has ever administered to any human being.

    Second, Gwen Ifill (I think) pointed out that he was an interventionist in places such as Bosnia, Kosovo and the like, and he openly agreed.  Now, you’d think that, after Iraq, the Democrats would have had their canfull of interventionists, and they went to the trouble to put an anti-interventionist at the top of the ticket.  But evidently Biden hasn’t had all the fun he (or we) can stand.  Our adventure in Bosnia should have been a test for European humanitarianism (it was, they flunked) and Kosovo should have been at least partitioned.  But both of these interventions (especially the latter) may prove costly, as the Russian intervention in Georgia can be seen in opposition to ours in Kosovo.

    Finally, he has made noises of bringing up Bush and others on war crimes charges.  Such show trials about the past would have the effect of distracting the American people from the serious issues of the present.  Sarah Palin put it to him to focus on the future rather than the past.  After the debate, she and her family’s lovefest around the Bidens after the debate made good camera.  But she needs to be careful.  If Obama wins, she goes to the top of the list for the Republicans in 2012, and if you’re going to criminalise your opponents, you’d better dispatch the best.  He may have wanted to get a good look at his next victim.

  • Traffic Accidents Increase on Election Day

    This is a good reason to vote early:

    Could voting for president be hazardous to your health? An analysis of Election Day traffic deaths dating back to Jimmy Carter’s 1976 win suggests yes, but the authors say that’s no reason not to go to the polls.

    The study found that on average, 24 more people died in car crashes during voting hours on presidential election days than on other October and November Tuesdays. That amounts to an 18 percent increased risk of death. And compared with non-election days, an additional 800 people suffered disabling injuries.

    The results were pretty consistent on all eight presidential Election Days that were analyzed, up to George W. Bush’s victory over John Kerry in 2004.

    “This is one of the most off-the-wall things I’ve ever read, but the science is good,” said Roy Lucke, senior scientist at Northwestern University’s Center for Public Safety. He was not involved in the study, which appears in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

    But I don’t see a campaign against voting and driving getting cranked off…

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  • Christianisation of the Masonic Lodge?

    With all the recent complaining I’ve had to deal with from James Alexander, now this, from a Masonic site:

    For instance in some states conservative Christian evangelicals have overtaken some Grand Lodges and written into their state Masonic code a Christianization of their state’s Freemasonry. Freemasonry had previously gradually evolved into being religiously neutral and it still is in many American jurisdictions. Prayers to Jesus, extra Bible readings in Lodge, no Holy Book permitted on the altar but the Bible, District Christian Church services, Bible presentations upon raising, no gambling permitted, no alcohol on Lodge property are just some examples of the way some Masons have codified their own personal moral and religious beliefs into the Constitutions and by-laws of their Grand Lodge. The Freemasonry in Louisiana, Georgia and Tennessee looks a great deal different from the Freemasonry in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and California.

    I get the impression that the author thinks this is something new, but it isn’t.

    Both of my grandfathers were Masons.  I spend some time on my father’s father and his Masonry here, but my mother’s dad came from very different circumstances.  He lived most of his life in small town Arkansas, and in addition to his membership in the Lodge and the Shrine (he was his shrine’s chaplain) he was very active in his Missionary Baptist church.  When he died, before they threw the evergreen over his casket, about all his Lodge brothers could say is what a great Christian he was (and they were right about that.)

    Personally, I think that anyone who believes that Jesus is the only way to God should not join a syncretistic organisation such as the Lodge.  My father’s father (and my dad too) more accurately reflected a “purer” Masonic view of God and religion.  But my maternal grandfather’s membership was his choice.  That kind of choice is decried by Christians, but it seems that it creates heartburn for Masons as well.

  • Mass Confusion: Praise and Thanks to Yahweh

    This week’s installment of Mass Confusion is Praise and Thanks to Yahweh, from the Texas group the Kairosingers.  It’s not quite a responsorial psalm, but it’s good.

    Since the Vatican has outlawed the use of the word “Yahweh” for the divine name, you might want to restrict this to Masses in very small settings, where you can close the blinds and post someone at the door to warn of the authorities coming.  Then again, you might not…

    The rest of this album is here.

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  • Laïcité (Secularisation) is Great. For Some People. And Then There are Others…

    In my recent post replying to the fundamentalist-obsessed James Alexander, I said that “Since 9/11 they (European secularists) have become quite vocal, because they realise they face being overrun by same Muslims whom they don’t have the stomach to fight.  So they attack the Christians once again, because they know the Christians won’t resort to force of arms to resist them.”

    He (and you) might find that statement strange, but truth frequently is stranger than fiction.  The flip side of that is that Europeans work to curry favour with their Muslim minorities, and a good example of this appears today.

    French Minister of the Interior Michèle Alliot-Marie lays it on thick for her Muslim “subjects” (I know that’s really ancien régime, but I can’t help it) to celebrate their holiday:

    Michele Alliot-Marie addressed a message of wishes to the Moslems of France, at the time of the festival of Eïd-ul-Fitr which marks the end of Ramadan:

    “At this time when the Moslems of France are celebrating Eïd-ul-Fitr, I make a point of addressing you, while asking you to be my faithful interpreter to all near you, my most sincere and cordial wishes. I join in thought at this time of meditation and joy to which all the French unite. Many of them will express to you their friendship and attachment in this circumstance.

    I am pleased with the evolution of CFCM (the French Council of Muslim Worship), representative authority of all the Moslems of France, since your election and with your contribution to the implementation of programs which hold the attention of faithful of our country such as ritual slaughter and construction of places of worship.“

  • Vice Presidential Moderator’s “Tilt,” Equality in the Elitist Snob Age, and Good News about ‘Expelled’

    World Net Daily is just brimming with interesting stuff.

    First: it seems that the moderator for Thursday Night’s Vice Presidential debate, Gwen Ifill, is planning to release a new book on Inauguration Day entitled The Breakthrough, which celerates an Obama victory.  So much for an objective moderator…

    According to WND, “she argues the “black political structure” of the civil rights movement is giving way to men and women who have benefited from the struggles over racial equality.”  But this is a strange argument when applied to this particular presidential race.

    To start with, Barack Obama, whose ancestors never knew slavery (unless the Arabs subjected them to it at one time,) doesn’t share that experience–and the agony that went with it–with most black people in this country.  That’s something that the black leadership is painfully aware of, and it has surfaced from time to time.  It does make a difference.

    Second, the “black political structure” isn’t going quietly, irrespective of what Obama or Ifill might want.  It may suit their purposes now, but Obama may find it a headache later (Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson have given us a preview of that.)

    Third, the struggle for gender equality (which parallels that of race) suddenly becomes meaningless for people like Ifill when a conservative like Sarah Palin becomes an exemplar of that.  But the party that threw feminism under the bus for Bill Clinton can’t be expected to be very supportive in this regard.

    Fourth, in an Elitist Snob world such as Barack Obama moves in, equality is like Janis Joplin’s definition of freedom: another word for nothing left to lose.  To move up, one must show that one is superior and that everyone else must step aside as a consequence.  There are movements which give indication that they have figured this out.

    Finally, some good news:

    A federal court has decided against a claim by Yoko Ono that Ben Stein’s intelligent design film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” illegally used her husband John Lennon’s song, “Imagine.”

    As WND reported, Ono brought the suit within weeks of the movie’s release this spring, claiming the brief use of the song in the film constituted copyright infringement.

    “Expelled” is a documentary that highlights perceived academic persecution of scientists that espouse intelligent design, a theory that the universe is too complex to be ordered by chance and random evolutionary forces alone. The movie was an immediate hit, debuting in the national top 10 and becoming history’s No. 12 biggest box office documentary film.

    Ono’s lawsuit, however, producers say, sapped the film of its momentum and dissuaded many people from seeing it.

    “We heard from many people who wanted to see the film but were put off by the lawsuit and weren’t sure if they wanted to support a film that was under a legal cloud,” noted the film’s producer John Sullivan in a statement.

    Now freed from the Ono suit’s legal entanglements, the filmmakers of “Expelled” plan to re-release it to the big screen for those that may have missed its first run. The film’s distributor has chosen to make it available for private screenings, offering “Expelled” to groups of 300 or more that want to bring it to their local theater, for a ticket cost less than most cinemas charge.

    I covered this issue earlier.  There are a few people left who want to defend freedom.

  • Reply to James Alexander on Fundamentalism and Public Education

    James Alexander has finally surfaced to reply to my two “blast from the past” posts (here and here) on the aftermath to Public Education: A Christian Perspective.

    Before I plough into his response let me begin by making one opening statement.

    If there’s one persistent bother I have with Evangelicals, it is that they are too deep into their own stuff.  They are so much the product of their own upbringing and development that they struggle to see the world from any other perspective other than their own.  For those of us who are not of such a background, it can be frustrating.  This seems to also apply to “recovering” types such as Alexander, who is making a career out of his “liberation” from his own “fundamentalist” background.  Frankly, that process hasn’t gone as far as Alexander would like us to believe, as will be shown.

    So let’s get to what he has to say:

    In an earlier posting, this site made reference to an article by Saul Adelman entitled “Antifundamentalist Rejoinder,” written in response to Warrington’s 1990 article dealing with Christian public education.  In the posting, Warrington notes that I cite Adelman in my recent book, Stories of a Recovering Fundamentalist:  Understanding and Responding to Christian Absolutism (Alexander, 2008).  Warrington takes issue with Adelman’s comments (in a 17 year-old article) and my citing of it.  He is especially concerned that he didn’t get credit for inspiring Adelman’s article in my book.

    One would think that, given the enthusiasm he displays for attacking me in his response, he was highly remiss in passing up barbecuing me in the book.  He will find that he should have taken the chance when he had it.  Adelman took full advantage of the Forum’s print format and reticence in allowing me a response.  But Alexander is no Adelman.

    I would like to respond to this on several fronts.  As freely admitted elsewhere on this site (quoted– approvingly, I might add), Adelman does not respond to Warrington’s appeal to add ‘a pinch’ of fundamentalism to the public school curriculum.  Adelman instead offers a rather ‘free ranging’ assessment and rejection of fundamentalism.  Indeed.  It is in that assessment and critique that I use Dr. Adelman as a source.  Why not?  Even this site recognizes the nature of Adelman’s assessment.

    I’m not sure why the fact that “this site recognizes the nature of Adelman’s assessment” is such a big deal, other than perhaps to give me credit for knowing what I’m looking at, which is probably a major concession for Alexander.  What this site does recognise is that “Adelman showed a decided preference to attack an homme de paille of his own making rather than dealing with what I wrote.”

    Part of the problem may be that Alexander, trapped in his own upbringing, doesn’t know what an homme de paille is.  It is a “straw man,” and straw men (or people, to be politically correct) are the bane of this whole discussion.  Adelman constructed one in his “Antifundamentalist Rejoinder,” and Alexander, while acknowledging that in a backhanded way, promptly turns around and does the same thing.  It seems that one thing that all “antifundamentalist” people have in common is an inability to deal with their opponents as they are, which makes one wonder what the real value of their “venting of the spleen” really is.

    Currently. Warrington has posted the article he intended for publication in 1990– the one which elicited Adelman’s “Rejoinder”– in full.  It is available on this site.  However, Warrington states that the published version was greatly truncated and the one posted on his site is the real McCoy.  How are we to evaluate Adelman’s response relative to a version of Warrington’s article which was not available to him?  It seems to stretch the generally polemical character of Warrington’s site into the realm of the absurd.

    If I hadn’t have mentioned this difference, Alexander would have never known it.  But the truth is, Alexander has already evaluated that response himself: “…offers a rather ‘free ranging’ assessment and rejection of fundamentalism.  Indeed.”  He knows that Adelman didn’t really respond to what I was saying, as did Thomas Schwengler (one of the contemporaneous respondents in the Forum.)  It’s hard to conceive what he would have changed, and in fact Adelman’s response to Schwengler indicates that he would have changed nothing.

    I also note that Alexander ignored my other stipulation that Adelman didn’t know: “…having grown up in South Florida, I was well familiar with Jewish people and their religion. One of the main reasons why he has run into so much ignorance on the subject is that there are so few Jews in the South. Many Southerners go through life with little or no contact with Jewish people.”  That may be so because Alexander himself falls into the latter category.

    I did read Warrington’s full article.  I was non plussed.  It sets up the favorite fundamentalist straw man, “secular humanism,” and attempts to set the record straight when it comes to public schools.  Supposedly, the article responds a quote by Franklin and Parker, and states the quote is nonsensical (see this site).  Point well taken, it is.  But what is the context?  After pulling the “here’s my full article” trick in attacking Adelman, I take Warrington’s quote with a grain of salt.

    I’m glad that Alexander takes my point well; it was a rather strange point that Franklin and Parker tried to make.  Now he comes up with this “straw man” business about secular humanists, and that deserves some discussion.

    I hate to break the news to Alexander, but there are people out there who don’t believe in God.   I also should remind him of my “decidedly “European” theist/secularist dialectic.”  I actually spent some time in the original article elucidating that viewpoint. Most Europeans who object to any kind of Christian view (excluding, of course, the Muslims that now live there) are secularists.  Since 9/11 they have become quite vocal, because they realise they face being overrun by same Muslims whom they don’t have the stomach to fight.  So they attack the Christians once again, because they know the Christians won’t resort to force of arms to resist them.  They now have a growing following on this side of the Atlantic.  Bringing up secularists was and is a legitimate point.

    But for people like Alexander who are still agonising from their own background, people such as this might as well live on (or come from) the moon.  Evocations of the French or Russian Revolutions (not to mention things like déconfessionnalisation in places like Québec) mean nothing to an individual whose worst demons come from his staggering through the “Jesus Movement” without resolution or satisfaction (a result that was not shared by everyone.)  It’s hard to communicate with people whose view of history is that narrow.

    He says he desires to see a “Christian viewpoint represented.”  By this, I think he means a Christian fundamentalist viewpoint, for he surely does not speak for all Christians.

    Neither, mercifully, does Alexander.  But I’ll issue a challenge to Alexander and anyone else: what kind of fundamentalist viewpoint is represented in blog posts such as the following examples:

    • Society and the State are Different: “The State is, and probably has to be Secular. It has a position of neutrality as regards religion.  But the State is in the service of Society – and does not replace it. Society cannot be secular because so many of its members are not secular – and their religious conviction manifests itself publicly just as people go to Football matches, the Last Night of the Proms or what have you. The only way to try and make Society secular would be to get rid of religion and its manifestation. This would “neutralise” it, “privatise” it and prevent it from occupying any public space in society. Such was the reaction against The Church at the French Revolution, later on the Communists tried the same thing and in our own day various ideological relativists like Richard Dawkins are persuaded that this is the vision that must be applied. But in so doing, the State ends up taking over all of the Public space that is normally occupied by Society.  And this is called Totalitarianism.”
    • Pope Benedict XVI and Ferdinand Lot On the Christian and the State: “It seems obvious to me today that laïcité (the French policy of exclusion of any religious content in the life of the state) in itself is not in contradiction with the faith. I would even say that it is a fruit of the faith because the Christian faith was, from the start, a universal religion, therefore not identifiable with a State and present in all States. For Christians, it has always been clear that religion and faith were not political, but another sphere of the human life…politics, the State, were not a religion but a secular reality with a specific mission… and both must be open one with regard to the other. In this direction, I would say today, for the French, and not only for the French but for the rest of us, Christians of today in this secularized world, it is important to live with joy the freedom of our faith, living the beauty of the faith and making it visible in the world of today. It is beautiful to be a believer, it is beautiful to know God, God with an human face as Jesus Christ… to show the possibility of belief today. Beyond that, it is necessary for today’s society that there are men who know God and can thus live according to the great values that he has given us and to contribute to the presence of values which are fundamental for the building and survival of our States and our societies.”
    • Book Review: Velvet Elvis: “Before I get into the book itself, I’m going to make a statement that will probably make some people mad.  (Having written some edgy stuff myself, I know that’s not difficult.)   I’ve just about come to the conclusion that the phrase “Protestant theology” is an oxymoron.  Protestants don’t have theology; they have doctrine.  They teach it, they make it a litmus test for acceptance and, if they’re really on their game, they live it.  But the word “theology” implies that one has to think out the “why”–the mechanics, to use an engineering term–behind something, and Protestants in general and Evangelicals in particular seem to be afraid of that.   Too many people have the idea that such a quest will end up with an unBiblical result.  That’s why I say that Roman Catholic theology, for all of its problems (the biggest of which is the institution of the Roman Catholic Church itself,) is the premier intellectual tradition in Christianity.  It also makes me glad that I spent my undergraduate years as an engineering student while ploughing through St. Thomas Aquinas on the side rather than sit in a seminary listening to “doctrine” be pompously exposited.”
    • Rowan Williams: Old Earth Creationists Still Hung Out to Dry: “For me, however, as a Christian, an old earth creationist, an adjunct and someone who deals with geological issues in Soil Mechanics, this was a perilous situation. If the evolutionists win, I get the boot over the origin of the universe and being a theist (the evolutionsts are for the most part rabid secular humanists.) If the new earth creationists win, I get the boot over the age of the earth. Real academic freedom these days consists of forcing the administration to find really creative ways to give people the boot!”

    I looking over these, it occurs to me that most of them assume that same European theist/secuarlist dialectic that stumps Alexander so badly.

    In fact, he suggests we should consult the folks at Regents University to give us history and philosophy lessons.  Does he refer to Regents University founded by Pat Robertson, the guys who begs daily for money, heals folks and offers prophecies over the TV airways, and promised to “pray back” a hurricane when he was running for president?  Yeah.  Sure.  That’s a good place to learn about logic, reason, history, philosophy, etc.

    The accreditation page for Regent University is here.  My suggestion to Alexander is for him to contact all of these accreditation agencies (starting, of course, with SACS) and convince them to pull their accreditation.  Perhaps that will absorb his time in a way that he finds satisfying (the accreditation agencies may have another opinion of that, however.)

    Warrington makes a case for the role the Founding Fathers recognized for “Christianity in our society at all levels.”  Sorry, Don, try though you may, you cannot make the Founding Fathers into a bunch of fundamentalist.  The Creator they spoke of is decided not the fundamentalist God you represent.

    Alexander is nothing if unoriginal: Adelman brought up the same point, and my response to both (if they bother to read it) is as follows: “The idea that the Founding Fathers were uniformly deists does no more justification to their thought than any other sweeping generalisation. On the one hand many of them asked for the aid of Divine Providence too often to justify the characterisation of true deists. On the other hand their acceptance of deism was tied to their acceptance of Freemasonry, not Protestant Christianity. This puts them in contrast with their fellow Masons in Europe, who were taught atheism in the Lodge, as was all too evident in the French Revolution.  It is interesting to note that liberals don’t discuss deism much these days. This is because they have progressed to the “living document” theory of the Constitution, that it is too hard to know the Founders’ original intent to attempt to discover it. This is their way using the non-ecclesiastical nature of the American state to facilitate state-imposed atheism as they are trying to do today.”

    I don’t know if Alexander knows anything about Freemasonry, but Masons in this country generally posit that their God is the “Great Architect of the Universe.”  Same Masons posited in the Declaration of Independence that God was active enough in his creation to endow his creatures with inalienable rights.  Which leads to the question I posed in the original article: “What kind of inalienable rights do evolved creatures have?”

    You seem to imply that the assessment that most Americans don’t want a religious state is wrong (see quote in article by Ralph Martin).  In a September 11 Pew Poll, less than 40% found abortion a very important issue in the current elections and less than 30% thought gay marriage to be a deciding issue.  But these are THE big evangelical/fundamentalist issues– and that is exactly the group that seems concerned about them.

    If I imply such as thing, I am unaware of it.  As far as the two issues Alexander mentions are concerned, regular readers of this blog know that a) I seldom mention abortion and b) I believe that civil marriage should be abolished altogether.  (Some fundamentalist position that is!)  BTW, the term “gay marriage” is a misnomer, because it leaves out lesbians and does not properly delineate the nature of what is being demanded.  The LGBT community’s campaign is for “same-sex civil marriage,” and it should be termed that way.

    All in all, I find a basic problem with all parts of your web site.  The overall idea is that you are right and everybody else is wrong.  Of course, as an evangelical/fundamentalist you are compelled to make sure the rest of us are as well.

    Considering the problems Alexander is having just getting around this site, it’s hard to understand how he can make such an illogical sweeping generalisation!  But how many single-author blogs aren’t this way?  One thing for sure: if you want to see a one sided view of things, just visit Alexander’s own.  As he says, it’s impossible to get away from a fundamentalist background.  The best one can attain, based on that, is that one can only swap one form of fundamentalism for another, and Alexander does a stellar job in that regard.

    ,

  • Blast From the Past for Rosh Hashanah 2008 and the Shofar: Blowing Your Own Horn

    I originally posted this 21 October 2005.  It’s appropriate with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur upon us, and it speaks for itself.

    Everybody likes to blow their own horn whether they admit it or not. Politicians certainly do, especially if they can do it at taxpayers’ expense (this is at the core of the advantage incumbents have.) It was this way in New Testament times: Our Lord commanded us as follows: “When therefore you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be honoured by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.” (Matt 6:2 NAS) He wouldn’t have made this commandment if it were not a problem.

    The horn blowing we’re considering today, however, is the blowing of the shofar, the ram’s horn that was used in ancient Israel and still finds its place in the synagogue. It’s gritty, primitive sound has found its way into Christian worship in many churches. Today we’re told that, when the shofar is sounded, there is a special sweeping of the presence of God which results in praise and worship. We are also told that this is Biblical.

    Shofars have cropped up everywhere. At the beginning of this millennium I found myself working for a ministry which had a booth at a major ministry conference. We were right around the corner from the shofar salesman. We spent the entire week listening to one demonstration after another. This will drain the spirituality out of any event. But it got me thinking: is what people really say about this instrument true?

    The biggest problem in associating the shofar primarily with worship is that the trumpets actually used in tabernacle and temple worship in the Old Testament were metal:

    quote:

    The LORD spoke further to Moses, saying, “Make yourself two trumpets (Heb. chatsotserah) of silver, of hammered work you shall make them; and you shall use them for summoning the congregation and for having the camps set out. And when both are blown, all the congregation shall gather themselves to you at the doorway of the tent of meeting. Yet if only one is blown, then the leaders, the heads of the divisions of Israel, shall assemble before you. But when you blow an alarm, the camps that are pitched on the east side shall set out. And when you blow an alarm the second time, the camps that are pitched on the south side shall set out; an alarm is to be blown for them to set out. When convening the assembly, however, you shall blow without sounding an alarm. (Num 10:1-7 NAS)

    It is interesting to note that the trumpet wasn’t used here for worship; it was used as a signalling device for the movement of the camp and for summoning of the congregation.

    But let’s look at the shofar itself. The word appears 72 times in the Old Testament, and the use of the ram’s horn can be broken down as follows:

    • Military application. The shofar was used as an instrument of war. Ancient armies used horns as signalling devices, using different note and rhythm sequences to give different orders in battle to different portions of the front. Proper blowing of the horn was critical in sending orders to the troops in battle: “For if the bugle produces an indistinct sound, who will prepare himself for battle?” (1 Cor 14:8 NAS) The shofar, with its distinctive sound and long throw, was ideal, especially since there was an abundant supply of them growing out of the rams’ heads. An example of this was in the siege of Jericho: “Also seven priests shall carry seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark; then on the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets.” (Josh 6:4 NAS) Although many look at this as a praise and worship session, the reality is that the siege of Jericho was first and foremost a military operation which was ended by divine intervention, probably an earthquake. It could also signal a retreat or cessation of hostilities: “Then Joab blew the trumpet, and the people returned from pursuing Israel, for Joab restrained the people.” (2 Sam 18:16-17 NAS) Gideon used them in a military setting to unnerve (successfully, again with divine intervention) the Midianites: “And when they blew 300 trumpets, the LORD set the sword of one against another even throughout the whole army; and the army fled as far as Beth-pooptah toward Zererah, as far as the edge of Abel-meholah, by Tabbath.” (Judg 7:22-23 NAS)

    It should be noted that using trumpets, bugles and the like (not necessarily shofars) survived in military usage through the American Civil War, and are in many ways the basis for modern military bands. A use of a ram’s horn that many of you have seen took place at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, when Boromir blew his shofar for the last time.

    • Announcements: They were used to announce a new king: “Then they hurried and each man took his garment and placed it under him on the bare steps, and blew the trumpet, saying, ‘Jehu is king!’” (2 Kings 9:13 NAS) It also announced the return of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem: “So David and all the house of Israel were bringing up the ark of the LORD with shouting and the sound of the trumpet.” (2 Sam 6:15 NAS)
    • Alarms: A blast of the shofar in a city frequently indicated impending attack or other disaster: “If a trumpet is blown in a city will not the people tremble? If a calamity occurs in a city has not the LORD done it?” (Amos 3:6 NAS)
    • Call to penance: It was used as a call to community penance: “Blow a trumpet in Zion, Consecrate a fast, proclaim a solemn assembly, Gather the people, sanctify the congregation, Assemble the elders, Gather the children and the nursing infants. Let the bridegroom come out of his room And the bride out of her bridal chamber.” (Joel 2:15-16 NAS) This is where its used survived in Judaism into modern times, in synagogues on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement: “’You shall then sound a ram’s horn abroad on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall sound a horn all through your land.” (Lev 25:9-10 NAS)
    • Praise: The one part of the Old Testament that speaks of the shofar as an instrument of praise is the Psalms. “Praise Him with trumpet sound; Praise Him with harp and lyre. Praise Him with timbrel and dancing; Praise Him with stringed instruments and pipe. Praise Him with loud cymbals; Praise Him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD!” (Ps 150:3-6 NAS) Here it is listed with a list of other instruments, including the human voice. Shouting before the Lord could be done with more than one kind of horn: “With trumpets and the sound of the horn shout joyfully before the King, the LORD.” (Ps 98:6 NAS) The following could better be interpreted as an example of heralding: “God has ascended with a shout, The LORD, with the sound of a trumpet.” (Ps 47:5 NAS)

    Our point is all of this is to show that the shofar had a number of uses in ancient Israel, and that praise and worship (which was probably liturgical to some extent) wasn’t the first among them. Today in Israel some of these functions have been taken over by modern military communications in what is, person for person, the finest military force on the earth. Alarms can be sounded through air raid type sirens, radio and television. The Jews, however, have stuck to the shofar when the time comes to have their sins forgiven, and therein lies a lesson for us today.

    Evangelicals have been very successful in reducing Christianity to its essentials. In the process they have stripped away many traditions built up over the centuries. A by-product of this process is that evangelical Christianity has lost most of its sense of “culture.” As long as Christians can identify with and lead the culture at large, this isn’t a problem. The problem comes now that Christians in the US find themselves following the culture, usually with disastrous results. Christians need some kind of group culture to help identify the community and keep it together.

    Instead of looking at other Christian churches that do have a definite culture and worship traditions, evangelical Christianity has turned to Judaism to try to fill the gaps. The main reason for this is that the Old Testament is the book of the Jews and it is easier to be Biblical (or at least look Biblical) if one follows what’s there. Another factor is the Darbyite change in how Christianity looks at Judaism, jettisoning “replacement theology” with a central place for the Jews in the end-time drama. This strategy has two dangers.

    The first is that Christianity and Judaism are different in profound ways even if they have common roots and the same God. The rationale for the separation of the two is well documented in the New Testament. Evangelicals, with their narrow view of the history of Christianity, are unaware that part of the problem with institutions such as Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches is that they considered themselves the real replacements for temple Judaism and many of their liturgical and doctrinal practices are moulded around that vision, especially their concept of the priesthood. Evangelicals thus risk repeating history even as they try to remain faithful to the Word as they see it.

    The second is that Evangelical Christians are too quick to mould what they see in the Word around their own view or idea without considering the real roots behind it. The issue of penitential rites—a central use for the shofar—is a case in point. Evangelical churches, largely because of their Calvinistic view of perseverance (not necessarily of election,) have consigned penitential rites to the Roman Catholics and Anglicans. They are simply missing in most Evangelical churches, even those who do not hold a Calvinistic view of perseverance (those in the Wesleyan tradition, such as Pentecostal churches.) But in Judaism the one use of the shofar remains in a penitential rite. Are we so triumphalistic that we think that we never need ongoing forgiveness for sins? “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8 NAS) And then there is the matter of war. Liberals don’t believe it, but evangelicals were drug into the public arena to defend the legality of their religion kicking and screaming. What will happen if and when persecution breaks out on a large scale in the US?

    If we want to get back to the shofar’s original use, let’s start by scrapping these sappy “calls to worship” and blow the horn (preferably through the church PA system) to announce the end of Sunday School and the beginning of the service. From there we can have a shofar blast to announce a time of penance—not every now and then, but regularly in our services. Then we can take them to start our marches and public demonstrations. And then…but by then we would be far better off waiting for God Himself to do the job:

    quote:

    For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. (1 Thess 4:16-18 NAS)

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