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  • Society and the State are Different

    This interesting comment from “JaquesArden54” in Why Anglican England is better than Secular France:

    The French Etat – and the French people in general – have forgotten that there is a difference between the State and Society. This confusion of two distinct realities is an error found within New Labour, Dave’s Tories and the European Union as well.

    As such, everyone gets in a tiswas when the President of France asks the Church to play a role in Society – because they think it means asking the Church to play a role in the State, thereby making the State theocratic.

    Poppy-cock.

    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.

    And it is not nice. Apparently, during the Beijing Olympics there were very few crowds turning out to simply enjoy the atmosphere. Why? Because the State has spent the last 50 years occupying all of the Public Space and Society has been “statified”. The other road that was followed, of course, was the taking over of Society by Religion where the State really does become Theocratic. It was tried by Calvin in Geneva, by the Puritans in the Commonwealth and by various Caesero-Papists throughout history – the Byzantine Emperors, Henry VIII, and other Absolutists. It is, likewise, the only model of government that Islam has to offer where there is no meaningful Sharia distinction between Society, State and Religion. They all come under Islam. Consequently, a kind of Religious Apartheid reigns: The Whites are the Muslims, the Coloreds are the People of the Book Christians and the Jews and the Blacks are the non-monotheists and atheists.

    This, also, is not very nice and invariably leads to Totalitarian Absolutism.

    The Pope reminded the French that whilst historical periods have seen Secular State powers trying to acquire authority over the Church, and periods where the Church exercised secular authority (especially in the vacuum left after the Fall of the Roman Empire) – Christ Himself makes a distinction between Religion and The State.

    At the same, the Pope reminds us that the State exists for Society’s good, for the Common Good of all society’s members. Society does not exist for or in the service of the State. Too many people have forgotten that and it is a forgetfulness that will probably costs us very dear in the years ahead.

    Unfortunately there are people on this side of the Atlantic who make the same confusion, and, if allowed to triumph, will result in the same totalitarianism.

    This remark should be compared with some of the Pope’s own comments during his visit to France.

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  • Palm Beach Gets Mooned. And There are Stars, of Course.

    Joyce Reingold notes the following astronomical event later this week:

    Our Star Watch columnist Mike Lynch also advises we mark our calendars for Friday, 9/19, when — conditions willing — the waning gibbous moon will partially cover the Pleiades between 9:30-11 p.m. “It should be quite a sight to begin your weekend,” he writes.

    A preview of this is below:

    This was generated by the Stellarium program.  Palm Beachers need to look out to the ocean to see this rise.

    I found this very useful when doing things like this (Moody Blues fans will instantly recognise what I’m talking about.) And my Stellarium is always set “on location” in Palm Beach.

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  • One Church Allows People in the Congregation to Text Questions to the Preacher During the Sermon

    As a lay person in the pew, I’ve always thought it would be cool to flash questions, commentary, etc., at the pastor during his (or her) sermon.  (At my church, that’s possible because there’s a screen right in front of the pulpit, but…)

    Well, near Charleston, SC, one church is trying just that:

    I’m sure that only my tech guys are as excited as I am about a new feature we launched this morning at St. Andrew’s.  Never-the-less . . .

    This morning we inaugurated a system that allows individuals to text message a central number – during the service – with a question relating to the sermon.  Our communications team then culls the questions and passes along to the preacher the “best” question(s) allowing them (if all goes well) to answer before the service ends.  Other questions will then be addressed via blogging throughout the week.

    Now a challenge to my anointed friends at MissionalCOG: whom among you is cutting edge (and sure of himself) enough to try this?

  • The New York Times Catches Up on Online Textbooks

    The New York Times finally catches up on the subject of online textbooks, many of which are free:

    It is that fact that can suddenly turn the good guys into bad guys, especially when the prices they charge are compared with generic drugs or ordinary books. A final similarity, in the words of R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost and thus usually don’t think twice about it.

    “The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” he said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always O.K. to add $5.”

    In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.

    “This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”

    So where have these guys been?

    Last year my site vulcanhammer.net–which offers free, downloadable books for students, academics and practicioners in the geotechnical and marine engineering and construction industries–celebrated its tenth anniversary.  I can’t tell you how many reference books (to say nothing of the free online textbook Soil Mechanics by the Dutch academic Arnold Verruijt) that have gone around the world.  And if you think textbook expense is a problem here in the U.S., just think of what a challenge it is in poorer places.

    Read the reviews–and a detailed explanation of my rationale–for yourself. It’s great to teach people how to fish (or at least how to keep the dock in place!)  And there’s reasonably priced in print stuff too.

  • Blast From the Past: Public Education, A Christian Perspective: The Responses, Part II

    This was originally posted 11 December 2005, and is a continuation of this (with explanation.)

    Dr. Saul Adelman’s piece in the Fall 1990 issue of the Forum was not the end of the back and forth. His hard-hitting piece did get two responses.

    One, from Georgia, discussed some intentional distortion of the Bible translations during the time of the Reformation. With the plethora of Bible translations—including the one we offer for download—we feel that this situation can be corrected in our time, so we will not pursue this further.

    The other, more germane to the discussion, came from Thomas Schwengler of Danville, IL, and was on this wise:

    quote:

    Saul Adelman’s “Antifundamentalist Rejoinder” is more a denunciation of fundamentalists than a refutation of Don Warrington’s Winter 1990 Article. Warrington’s article was written to explain fundamentalist political involvement and to refute the charge (from an earlier National Forum article) that fundamentalist pressures had forced religion out of textbooks. Adelman, however, barely addresses these issues.

    Instead, Adelman attacks fundamentalists, appealing to virtually every antifundamentalist stereotype and prejudice extant in our society. In various places, he calls fundamentalists anti-intellectual, intolerant, militant, totalitarian, dangerous and arrogant. He links them to Muslim fundamentalists, openly mistrusts them, and implicitly accuses them of hypocrisy. He even derides their children as uncritical, brainwashed, intellectual cripples.

    Adelman’s disdain for Christian fundamentalists is so strong that it seems to have precluded a rational discussion of Warrington’s thesis. I am personally disappointed that a man of Adleman’s intellect would resort to such blatant, prejudice-based ad hominem instead of a carefully reasoned argument.

    Honestly, I couldn’t say it much better, and was glad for the help, as the Forum was unenthusiastic about such a response from myself. With Adelman matters were different; his response to Schwengler’s letter found its way into the Winter 1992 issue, two years after my original piece:

    quote:

    I considered Don Warrington’s article (Winter 1990) solely on its own merits. Thomas Schwengler’s response (Spring 1991) to my “Antifundamentalist Rejoinder” (Fall 1990), rather than rationally addressing my arguments, hysterically dismisses them as a collection of stereotypes and prejudices. He strengthens my contention that fundamentalism is a universal religious phenomenon by finding that my disdain is directed toward Christian fundamentalism rather than that of my co-religionists. Although I have found that many fundamentalists are sincere in their beliefs, nevertheless I am profoundly disturbed by individuals who desire the products of our modern scientific revolution yet reject its pragmatic, rationalist points of view. This is hypocrisy.

    Hypocrisy is a moral fault. In a purely materialistic scheme of things, morality has no objective reality, along with many other things that people take for granted, such as the “meaning of life.” Secularists want to have it both ways, rejecting any religiously based morality and ethics but at the same time expecting people to adhere to a standard of their own making. The only secularists that have made a serious effort to eliminate morality are the Marxists, and the wreckage they have left behind have forced other secularists to attempt to cover this serious lacuna up. But ultimately they cannot.

    Perhaps the best way to express what I want to say about Adelman’s whole view of things is to relate it to personal experience, not irrelevant since we are both products of a scientific higher education. Four years after “Public Education: A Christian Perspective” was published, I began graduate school, pursing a master’s degree in civil engineering. I thank God that I did not have to face the attitude evidenced in “An Antifundamentalist Rejoinder.” Instead I had four men who were aware of my faith commitment and who judged my work very fairly and on its merits. (You can click here to view this thesis.) Two of them have since passed into eternity. The third brought me back to teach Soil Mechanics and Foundations on an adjunct basis. The fourth is a Jewish mathematician from the old Soviet Union whom I consider one of the most brilliant human beings I have ever met, and who took my understanding of mathematics to a new level. He too wanted me to teach on an adjunct basis, but for mathematics we were stymied by the requirements of SACS, an institution that Dr. Adelman is all too familiar with.

    Adelman frets that fundamentalism will dull the minds of children. But we now see that secularists are trying to use their pet dogmas as litmus tests wherever they can, rather than simply laying out the actual requirements and judging the results. Such policies—policies necessary to solve the “hypocrisy” problem Adelman posed in his last riposte—will discourage talented people whose convictions are not to the secularists’ taste from entering the sciences, and the “pragmatic, rationalist” results that Adelman so cherishes will be come scarcer than gratitude.

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  • Lehman Brothers: More Than an Ox in the Pit

    Churches that empahsise Sunday legalism get this verse recited frequently:

    And Jesus answering spake unto the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath day? And they held their peace. And he took him, and healed him, and let him go; And answered them, saying, Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day? And they could not answer him again to these things. (Luke 14:3-6)

    New York’s extraordinary Sunday session is indicative that the whole herd is stuck in a major way:

    Wall Street readied for a potential Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankruptcy after Bank of America Corp. and Barclays Plc pulled out of talks to buy it and the government indicated it wouldn’t provide funds to prevent a collapse.

    Banks and brokers today held a session for netting derivatives transactions with Lehman, or canceling trades that offset each other, in case the New York-based firm files for bankruptcy before midnight.

    “The purpose of this session is to reduce risk associated with a potential Lehman” bankruptcy, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association said in a statement today. The ISDA includes 218 banks, brokerages, insurance companies and other financial institutions from the U.S. and abroad.

    The step indicates Wall Street lacks confidence that three days of talks to find a buyer for Lehman, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, will be successful. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who has led the talks with New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, was adamant two days ago against using taxpayer funds to help a purchaser take Lehman over.

    U.S. regulators are betting that the financial system will be able to withstand the failure of a large institution without severe disruptions to an already weak economy.

    As the Chinese would say, I hope they’re right.  The biggest danger in the whole derivatives business is that no one really knows where the “buck” stops.  The reselling of debt has created a condition which is so convoluted that the collaterisation of loans is unknown in some cases.  So the pain has been spread worldwide, with failures coming everywhere.

    Message: don’t be in a hurry to see this crisis stop.

  • Blast from the Past: Public Education, A Christian Perspective: The Responses, Part I

    I am reposting this, originally put up 7 December 2005, for two reasons.

    The first is that the topic this article discusses is still very relevant.

    The second is that Adelman’s response was quoted in James C. Alexander’s book Stories of a Recovering Fundamentalist, without, I might note, any reference to my original article.

    My only comment in rereading this response is that I wasn’t hard hitting enough, but if either Adelman or Alexander want to discuss this further, this deficiency can be fixed.

    Those of you who have perused this and related sites have found a lot of “old” material on these sites, especially photographs, reminiscences and historical information. In terms of articles and books, excluding the fiction such as Paludavia, my own oldest monograph on the site is Public Education: A Christian Perspective, which I wrote in 1988 and which was published in the Winter 1990 edition of the National Forum of the Phi Kappa Phi honour fraternity. In spite of the fact that it was a decade old when posted on this site, it remains an oft visited page.

    With the Internet instant response is the norm to such things, but in those days we went through cycles of letters to the editor and what not. In a quarterly publication such as the Forum, this cycle was especially glacial. However, given the readership of the Forum, I was prepared for an angry response.

    I wasn’t disappointed. Same didn’t come in a flurry of letters to the editor, but in one article in the Fall 1990 issue entitled “An Antifundamentalist Rejoinder” by one Dr. Saul J. Adelman, Professor of Physics at The Citadel in Charleston, SC. Having spent much time with “Luddite liberals,” I wasn’t expecting the response to come from a scientific secularist, let alone someone in a military institution. However, given my decidedly “European” theist/secularist dialectic, perhaps I should have.

    In any case, Adelman didn’t pull any punches. He opened his barrage by characterising my article as “gross anti-intellectualism in the guise of reason.” Before I get into some of his points and my own response, let me make two allowances.

    The first is that he didn’t get to read the whole article. The Forum seriously cut the article down for publication even after they had asked me to do so and I complied. Such is the way of editing.

    Additionally, he spent a great deal of time concerning his own Jewish experience, how people were ignorant of Judaism, how he had his “civil rights abused,” etc.. Readers of this site know all too well what Adelman could not: that, 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. It is also interesting to note that, then as now, many of these “fundamentalists” that Adelman pilloried are major supporters of the State of Israel, itself created to avoid a repeat of the Holocaust. But gratitude is a commodity in short supply these days, and in any case Adelman showed a decided preference to attack an homme de paille of his own making rather than dealing with what I wrote.

    Now let us turn to his first major point:

    quote:

    While in principle fundamentalism does not have to be, in practice it often is intolerant towards other philosophies, militant in the need to proselytise, and totalitarian in its attempts to silence anyone expressing an opinion which evidences any shade of difference from the official line. Although it is best known in this country among Christians, there are counterparts to Christian fundamentalism in most religious groups. Muslim fundamentalism is no less dangerous, especially as it has been applied to the detriment of minorities—to say nothing of women. In Judaism the struggle over fundamentalism consumed much of the intellectual energies of the community in Eastern Europe for over a century.

    9/11 should have put paid to the whole business of “all fundamentalism is basically alike” that this quotation evidences. It is our conviction, however, that had the left been in power when the planes struck the World Trade Centre, the government would have used the event to round up as many conservative Christians as necessary to intimidate the rest. It is also interesting to note that the term proselyte was first applied to Gentile converts to Judaism.

    As far as the business of “ totalitarian in its attempts to silence anyone expressing an opinion which evidences any shade of difference from the official line” is concerned, if Pat Robertson can go on the 700 Club and state flatly that he could not sign Patrick Henry University’s faculty requirement of belief that the earth was created in seven literal days, something is amiss with Adelman’s concept of “fundamentalism” as a monolith.

    From there he throws at me three rhetorical questions, which he seriously doubts that I would entertain a “nonfundamentalist” response. So let’s see:

    quote:

    Will we discuss the changes in Christianity imposed by the Romans when it became the state religion?

    We certainly could. One could argue that the Reformation was an attempt to undo these, albeit not with uniform success. Evangelical Christianity has attempted to take this unravelling process further, although, as we noted in our discussion of the shofar, this effort has its own pitfalls.

    quote:

    Will we discuss how the decisions of the Church fathers to accept the views of the Ancient Greek philosophers led to the downfall of the authority of the Church via the confrontation with modern Science?

    Most “fundamentalists” are institutionally and intellectually divorced both from the Church Fathers and those who attempted to impose Aristotelian dogma on nascent Renaissance science. It is important to note that one of the major influences on the doctors of the church with regard to Aristotelian thought was none other than the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. It would be interesting to hear Dr. Adelman bloviate on the subject of Maimonides’ insistence on the creation of the universe at one point in time by a Creator.

    quote:

    Will we emphasise that many of the Founding American Fathers were deists whose version of Christianity is almost as remote from fundamentalism as is possible in the Protestant tradition?

    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.

    From here we “progress” to the following:

    quote:

    Christianity has its roots in the Jewish, in the Ancient Greek, and in the Roman worlds…People who view themselves chosen by God as opposed to having chosen to find God—the nominative Jewish viewpoint—are dangerous individuals.

    Someone who has done as much research as Adelman claims to have done on history should be aware that, even before its contact with the Gentile world, Christianity was very much involved in the various disputes and differences within Judaism itself. The Qumran Essenes—all Jews—were very strong on the idea of predestination and being chosen by God, but they were opposed by Pharisaical Judaism. There is no doubt that there was considerable interchange and influence between the Essenes and the early Christians. But the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD facilitated the triumph of Pharisaical (better now characterised as rabbinical rather than Adelman’s triumphalistic “nominative” Judaism,) which led the Jewish community through two millennia of wandering until their return to Jerusalem in 1967.

    quote:

    Many Christian fundamentalists assume that the Bible in English is the literal Word of God. This is absurd as the Christian testament is a translation of a translation whose original is lost.

    Adelman is obviously unaware that the generally accepted definition of inerrant inspiration is that the Scriptures—Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek—are inspired and inerrant in their original manuscripts. He ignores the fact that most seminaries—including “fundamentalist bastions”—require their ministry students to take Greek and Hebrew so that they can understand the original scriptures. And his statement about the “Christian testament” is another sweeping generalisation; how much of the New Testament is a “translation” of Hebrew or Aramaic is evidenced by the text, and this varies from book to book.

    quote:

    I find it peculiar that a fundamentalist has complained about children not knowing the Christian point of view. Several years ago I went to a local sixth grade class to explain my religion. It was quite easy to identify the children from a fundamentalist background. They knew how to quote scripture although I doubt they understood what it meant. If they had paid equal attention to other intellectual activities, I would not worry about the future of the United States. Unfortunately, for the most part they had never encountered someone who espoused a completely different point of view and lacked even the remotest idea that there was such a thing as critical thinking. They had been brainwashed into believing that their parents’ point of view was the only view possible. These children cannot experience or learn form the diversity of this world as long as they believe their way of life is good and all others are evil. These attitudes produced intellectual cripples who cannot be intellectually productive members of our society.

    When I was a freshman in prep school, they invited a rabbi in to blow the shofar for Yom Kippur and explain the holiday. After he left, the only complaint I heard was that his fee was so high! Dr. Adelman would be better off sticking with schools such as this; he would have a more receptive audience and would be paid a better honorarium to boot!

    As I noted before, many Southerners have very little contact with Jews; this should not be held against them. It would be interesting to see what kind of reaction an Orthodox rabbi would get, but our schools are so rigidly secularised that it would be very difficult to have one come in. And that leads to the core of the problem. People such as Dr. Adelman are so enraged by “fundamentalists” that don’t agree with them that they cannot see their own rigid dogmatism in the opposite direction. But we will leave this discussion for tomorrow, when we continue following the aftermath of “Public Education: A Christian Perspective.”

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  • Pope Benedict XVI and Ferdinand Lot On the Christian and the State

    From here, relative to his visit to France:

    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.

    France has a much longer and more deeply rooted tradition of secularism than we do in the U.S., and there are many lessons to be learned from that.

    It is also instructive to compare this statement with that of the French historian Ferdinand Lot:

    In spite of its efforts, the (Catholic) Church will not come to dominate the State. The basic reason, as we have seen, is that the Christian Church was not set up for the life of this world. It did not bring to society any new social or judicial concept. She accepted without resistance (or real repugnance) the institutions of the Roman State. She could keep its management and continue its life. This was even more the case with the barbarian states, of which Christianisation was superficial.

    The medaeval and modern State, heir in part of the Roman State, could not be absorbed by the Church. Bathed completely in Christianity, it kept its identity from becoming a part of the Church. If the roots of the State had not been not profoundly grounded in the Roman past, the medaeval State would have been dissolved in the Church and the Church in the State, and one cannot see how the modern concept of the separation of religious conscience and the State could have developed, let alone be born.

    And there is the secret of the basic difference, more basic than one might believe, between Christian and Islamic states. Islam carries not only a religion but a system of justice, a political system, of which one searches in vain for an equivalent in the Gospel. Thus this way of speaking is inexact: with rights, customs, even methods, none of this can be discerned from religion. It is impossible to touch what it is without running into, without risking offence, of dogma. And since rights, customs, and methods are rudimentary in a little-evolved society, it is a superhuman task to adapt an Islamic society to modern life. Here the religion will not allow itself to be reduced to a part that fits. It is in vain to find a place for it, because its place is everything or nothing.

    (Ferdinand Lot, La fin du monde antique and the début du moyen âge (The end of the ancient world and the beginning of the middle ages) Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1968, p.64 (originally published 1926)

  • The Sh’ia/Sunni Divide Heats Up

    It looks like the Sh’ia/Sunni divide (also the Arab/Persian divide) is heating up:

    Slowly but surely, Arab columnists have started filing story after story critical of Iran’s role in the region. That became strikingly clear when prime coverage was given to the death of General Hisham Sabah al-Fakhri, a decorated officer from Saddam Hussein’s army, who made a reputation for himself for fighting the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

    He was treated as a celebrated Iraqi, although nothing had been said of him since he fled the violence in Iraq and took up residence in Syria in 2003. He is now hailed in several Arab dailies as a war hero. Last week, veteran Palestinian journalist Jihad al-Khazen wrote in the Saudi daily al-Hayat, “I call on Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to seriously strive [at obtaining] nuclear abilities.”

    He added that they should embark “immediately” on a nuclear program, “in action not just words, because Arab citizens should not remain under the mercy of the nuclear Israeli arsenal, when Iran’s arsenal is forthcoming”. The column adds further proof to just how afraid certain powers are in the Arab world of a nuclear-armed Iran. Khazen wrapped up, “Iran strives to have a nuclear weapon no matter how strongly it denies that.”

    Americans–left and right–tend to look at the Middle East solely in terms of a U.S. vs. Iran or Israel vs. Iran divide. But the biggest divide in the Middle East is this one. As I said more than three years ago:

    In the meanwhile, we are seeing a setup for a major Sunni-Sh’ia rivalry across the Gulf. Having the great forces of Islam more worried about each other than us is a potential boon for the West, but until we find the best way to make the transition to that state, any thought of using that to the West’s advantage will remain a dream.

  • Blast from the Past: Coming Home from Heathrow

    In 1976 I made a month-long trip to the UK.  At the end of this I headed to Heathrow Airport for the flight back to Miami and from there home just up the coast.  This piece was originally put up 11 August 2006, the 30th anniversary of my return. I’m reposting this on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy for three reasons:

    1. It involves both the air transport system and terrorism.
    2. It shows how thin the line is between one course in life and another.  It’s easy to demonise people (you’ll see a lot of this during the election campaign,) but you may be closer to becoming the person you’re trashing than you think.
    3. It’s my reminder that all religious belief isn’t alike either in its objectives or in its temporal results.

    Any time terrorism or its threat strikes our air travel system, things turn into a mess, with long lines, cancelled flights, and a lot of precious cargo ending up as rubbish. Our security agencies keep “moving the goalposts” on what’s contraband on board and what’s not in response to the latest threat, successful or not. Because of the drastic change in security wrought by 9/11, we’re conditioned to start our “security clocks” at that date.

    In reality, things really got going on airport security in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in response to two events. In North America, people were hijacking planes and taking them to Cuba. In Europe and the Middle East, the Palestinians were hijacking planes and blowing them up. Zero Halliburton tried to capitalise on this: their advertisements showed their aluminium luggage surviving the plane’s demolition. So, when it was time for me to make my first overseas jaunt to the UK, I trotted off with Zero Halliburton case.

    I spend some time—probably too much—on this site about my first trip to the UK. From going atop Hergest Ridge (the photos from which now enjoyed by the Goths) to watching a film about Mohammed with a theatre full of his followers, the trip was fabulous. But it was also at an important point in my own walk with God. I had grown up in a church and society which tended to set definite limits on how transforming the power of Jesus Christ in one’s life could be, and now those limits could be discarded without retreating into a monastery.

    In this quest I was not alone. As an engineering student, I had many friends who were experiencing the same kind of thing. Some experienced renewal; others were simply reborn in Jesus Christ for the first time. For me, I had concluded that ridding our country of those who were destroying it was beyond the existing political process. Living in love with fellow Christians deflected my thinking from that. Many of those watching us thought we had gone off of our individual and collective rockers. But the aftermath has been singularly boring: most have married and raised families in the intervening years, complete with gloriously bourgeois careers in industry or government.

    Thinking about engineering students in the 1970’s should make a person think about one in particular. The scion of a successful family, he wandered about his native region as a student, visiting various places of sin on the way (sangria at the Mexican restaurant was about as far as most of us got in that.) At one point, this engineering student had a religious experience that changed his life and catapulted him in a trajectory that ended up crediting him with a well-publicised “engineering” feat: the destruction of two of the world’s tallest buildings. The student, of course, is Osama bin Laden, and the buildings were the World Trade Centre, destroyed on 9/11. The religion is Wahhabi Islam.

    Liberals, of course, would be unhappy with both of the courses taken on either end of the oil patch (they weren’t happy with the oil patch either.) But they need to have a serious, collective reality check and come to the understanding that all religion isn’t the same. There’s a significant difference between people who’s most potent political weapons are prayer and the ballot box and those who are willing to kill themselves if they can take enough “infidels” with them. Christianity has, in some ways, been too kind to its mortal enemies. Think, for example, what the result of l’affaire Dreyfus would have been in an Islamic state rather than Catholic-secular France? Dreyfus wouldn’t have made it to Devil’s Island, let alone back.

    Getting liberals to see daylight isn’t easy. In the meanwhile we must go on, hoping that our civilisation has enough grit to stand down its most serious rival this century without throwing Christians into jail to satisfy their leftover hatred from the last one. The stakes are high because, if the West fails, all of these baubles we count as necessities will vanish and there will be no coming home from Heathrow—or anywhere else.

    If you want to see the message that made the difference, click here.

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