Stones Cry Out

Good morning.

1. Women and combat … testosterone matters.
2. On aggression.
3. Wonder why the White House is equipping IRS SWAT teams? What for? What’s coming down the pike?
4. Maybe they figure the piper will have to pay when people figure out the song and dance they’ve been given is untrue?
5. Advice for the married(s).
6. On Caucasian stereotypes.
7. Flashmob.
8. I’m in the first 45%.
9. A thought experiment.
10. Timor.
11. Movements in American Orthodoxy.
12. This raises, indirectly, an interesting question. Stimulus advocates argue that it doesn’t matter what the stimulus gets spent on, just so the money gets moved. That necessarily would include “not raising taxes on the rich?” Oops.
13. Bonhoeffer.

Good morning.

1. A letter posted.
2. The fluidity of language.
3. Mr Roberts reluctance.
4. Much to lose means having much in the first place.
5. Visiting other places and rites.
6. Talking tough, sort of.
7. Who is “really Black” or really Native American, or White, or whatever … the problems with the left’s race identity politics. Someday, we’ll judge people by the content of their character … but before the left can let go of their racism, they have to admit that their racial identity crap is racist.
8. Grrrr.
9. Civilization ending? Yikes.
10. Betting on ignorance.
11. Now there’s a question that displays lack of self-examination. “Where’s the atheist fiction.” Hello? That describes most fiction, almost all science fiction and probably 98%+ of regular fiction. Look at the NYTimes best seller lists for the last year. Name three books in which religion and theology factor in a meaningfull way. I’ll wait. Name a mainstream science fiction book written in the last 20 years in which any character is religious, in most of them religion doesn’t even exist and/or is never mentioned. How about thrillers?
12. Pedagogy.
13. Look at the places you can go if your premise if false. I suspect a true statement would be that the motives behind charity are varied and that there is not one.
14. St. Patrick.

Good morning.

1. As people in US talk about the lifeguard who was fired because his employer (probably rightly) feared liability suits. This struck me as similar in some ways, culture/politics/law coming to the wrong conclusion.
2. Academic freedom? Or just a complete lack of pedagogical sanity?
3. Smelling another big war (read as global conflagration) in the next decade or so.
4. Hope and prayer … found and needed.
5. In which the left thinks that painting themselves as the Nazi Jew haters is a good move. I’m just a bit confused by that strategy.
6. Some advice regarding the tax/Obamacare ruling. I have a question for those watching the “tax vs penalty” debate? Is the child rebate in the tax code a penalty or a tax on those without children?
7. DADT and the chaplaincy.
8. Lots of places are citing the large storms resulting in power outages over the Eastern US as signs of global warming, ’cause that storm was so unusual. Alas it wasn’t.
9. This reminds me of William Safire’s grammar puns, for example “A preposition is something that you should never end a sentence with.”
10. Recommended books.
11. A health care “what if” considered.
12. The culture war and demographic collapse.
13. A lights show … what I noticed most was the lightning.
14. ’cause in Florida they dislike shopping at Staples and Home Depot.
15. And we’ll finish with a slight understatement.

Help for atheist preachers
From CNN,

The transition from preacher to outspoken atheist has not been easy, and DeWitt is trying to smooth the way for other former believers. He is executive director of Recovering from Religion, an organization founded in 2009. Its slogan: “Thousands of organizations will help you get INTO religion, but we’re the only one helping you OUT.”

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Youth Ministry:  Content and Context
What a concept.

From the post,

Our teaching and Bible study should help students engage with Scripture. Long ago I moved away from the traditional youth talk of sharing my ideas supported by a few verses. I started teaching from passages, allowing God’s Word to speak more directly to students. If you have not experienced the difference, you might not understand what I mean. Expounding Scripture can be done in a variety of ways, yet the result is the same—getting a clear sense of the Bible’s meaning and figuring out how it applies to our lives.

Allowing God’s Word to speak? What (another) concept. Imagine what would happen if we moved from trying to be relevant to an unbelieving culture and actually depending on God’s Word?

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Grade Inflation? Say it isn’t so!
When I was a high school student (way back when) there were just a few students that achieved a 4.0 GPA (with 4.0 as the max). Nowadays it seems like the 4s just flit about unfettered from the shackles of herculean effort.

And, of course, along with this news we’ll also be hearing that the quality of students graduating from our public school system is extraordinary?

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GradeInflation.com
Yikes! There’s even a website devoted to the subject.

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And people were afraid of a Vice President Sarah Palin?
From the article,

Vice President Joe Biden told the graduating seniors of Cypress Bay High School in Florida today that they should imagine a world where hunger no longer exists because crops grow without the need of soil, water or fertilizer.

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The connected generation
How will it impact, if it will, the near future economy of the United States?

From the post,

The most interesting part of the survey, though, is the finding that parents will go to great lengths to help their kids find work. Nearly a third (30 percent) of recent graduates report that their parents are in some way involved in their job search process. Nearly one in 10 (8 percent) recent graduates say that a parent has accompanied them to a job interview, with 3 percent of grads saying their parents have actually joined the interview itself.

Murphy’s law and others give not exactly hard and fast guidelines for prediction of events and interpretations. My (just coined as such) first Rule is the following

Conventional Historical Wisdom is always wrong.

In what follows this will be applied to the third rail of historical discourse … vis a vis to suggest that the Jewish narrative concerning the Holocaust is wrong. This may or may not be a historical third high voltage line as suggested above, but there are blogging/pirate rules that state any you mentions Nazis loses the argument … and Nazis will be noted in this piece.

For a long time references to the Holocaust have bothered me, in that the focus on that particular feature of German/Nazi atrocities has overwhelmed our historical recall of other Nazi (and concomitant Soviet ones). When one recalls mass murders in the mid 20th century …. with rare exceptions only one thing will be recalled and the others minimized or forgotten. This is wrong. Do not misunderstand, the fault for this lies with historians, teachers and educators … not with the Jewish people. Their memory, their remembrance is apt and warranted. What is not is for the rest of us to forget that this was just a small part of a larger horrific picture.

If, in a recent non-mass killing like that at Columbine, if 10 persons had been killed of which 4 Muslims had been killed if conventional wisdom called this an attack on Islam that would be wrong. It would not be wrong for Islamic faith communities to remember this in their own way. It would however be wrong for everyone to do that. Similarly remembering the mass murders of the 20th century in Eastern Europe as being only about the Holocaust would also be wrong.  This is however, the conventional story.

Read the rest of this entry

Good morning. We’ll try a comma, pause, comma edition.

1. My youngest daughter starts driving this fall, so,  is this good advice or not?
2. A problem of our time for, well, many.
3. So would that poster/graphic work, perhaps, as the main thread of a graduation speech?
4. Diaspora, and then, return.
5. Here’s an interesting question, does your the meta-X work consistently with the micro-X and macro-X as exemplified here with ethics and political theory (and I couldn’t figure out how to transform that into comma, pause, comma … sorry). Note, that’s not specific tenents of micro/macro but the meta layer.
6. While Congress wastes its time on college loan matters, surprise, they ignore arguably more important flaws within the secondary educational system.
7. Remember how the liberal of so many stripes bemoaned certain language in political discourse after a certain shooting, well, will this be remarked?
8. Tears don’t work, really its true, in Legislative bodies in a close vote.
9. Slurp and Zaap!
10. This didn’t turn out how I’d expect, really, not at all.
11. Considering wages and minimums, and well, justice.
12. The reality of the so called reality based party is, alas, based on lies.
13. Mr Romney has shown himself to be very weak regarding his notions of foreign policy, however, so has his opponent.

With every head bowed, and every eye closed…
And so begins the invitation to enter into a personal relationship with Jesus. Just like Paul did? Peter?

The “Sinner’s Prayer”, long used not in Christendom, but in American Evangelism, is the subject of a post by David Platt. From Platt,

It seems that “praying the prayer” is often used in a worship service or an evangelistic conversation to “cement a decision” or “close the deal” regarding someone’s salvation. People are often told immediately, “If you prayed that prayer, you can always know that you are saved for eternity.”

Lest anyone think he is anti-evangelism, he also states,

Most importantly, once someone repents and believes in Christ, be willing to lead that person as a new follower of Christ. Remember, our goal is not to count decisions; our goal is to make disciples.

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VBS under attack – the new norm?
One trend that seems to be in vogue, amongst evangelicals, is to alter the traditional Vacation Bible School (VBS) marketing to cater to “non-churched” (those who used to be known as non-Christians) in a manner which doesn’t overtly imply prosyletizing. Yet, society appears to not be that stupid. Case in point is this story from New York.

A Baptist church in New York City is facing backlash after they passed out flyers inviting children from a nearby public school to attend Vacation Bible School. Some neighborhood parents accused the church of being discriminatory because they oppose gay marriage.

Heh. We evangelicals may end up being forced into living counter-culturally, whether we want to or not!

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Not enough Sun?
What’s the gov’t subsidized world coming to when a solar panel outfit can’t survive in the middle of the Southwest United States?

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Google search gets a B+ while Apple’s Siri gets a D?
But, of course, none of the Apple-heads out there will get wind of this news since they live in a closed system type of world. ;^)

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The Parent as the “Youth Pastor”
Considering that the vocation of youth pastor is a very new phenomenon, it seems that the notion of parental involvement in the theological training of children has merit. Oh, yes, it’s also kind of Biblical. From the post,

…if we are going to stem the tide of youth leaving the church, I believe a key component is a fresh awareness of the centrality of the parents for youth ministry. Parents are the church’s primary youth pastors, and a central place in youth ministry today must be given to helping parents embrace that privilege and responsibility, and equipping them to do it. Youth ministry has a valid and important supporting role to the parents, but it must never become a substitute. Our youth are too important to allow that to happen.

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A camera that keeps your home safe?
From the post title, “Solar-powered security camera keeps your home safe without wires”. Interesting. I’d be interested to know how a camera can manage to keep my home safe.

Good day (if just a tad hot).

1. On rights and the 4th. Those who thing rights important or useful need to deal with Rousseau’s (if I remember correctly) criticism that rights are insufficient against government which can redefine/define them as they see fit for their purposes … and we see that in action today.
2. A reading/viewing list … interesting intersection, I’m trying to read Moby Dick in parallel with China Meiville’s Railsea, ?as the latter seemed from the outset to draw a lot from the former and my memory of Mr Ahab and company is dim.
3. Slipped through the liberal eugenics screening programme.
4. Making it a law … as if everything were free and adding ~$2k to the cost of a table saw is inconsequential.
5. A liberal/progressive maxim … “the US is no longer the greatest country in the world” which oddly enough never proposes an alternative. The reason is that the statement is false. Others may be catching up, but in the words of UK educational maxims (as expressed in this wonderful book) if the US is not “top nation” who is? China with $4/day labor? India? France? Germany? Sweden? Cuba? Get real. If you want to name the US as not “top nation” you need to indicate which nation replaced the US.
6. Of taxation and consent.
7. Which founder?
8. Oooh, I did this (sort of) for my kids. When they were little and worried about the noise from the freight trains going through town … I told them, don’t worry, if it gets off the rails, the “snake” will get it.
9. To what purpose.
10. A Saint and romance.
11. Unnoticed and forgotten peoples.
12. There will always be war?
13. On union labor and freedom.

– image © 2012 AR Lopez

Episode 5 of the "Consider This!" podcast is out today and it’s all about a single topic, so I thought I’d post the script here for those who don’t do podcasts. If you do do podcasts, click here for the show notes and ways to subscribe, or just listen, to the show.

I mentioned previously that while the individual mandate was struck down as an exercise of the Commerce Clause, it hung in there as an exercise of the taxing authority of the federal government. That is to say, the way it was sold to the American people, and the way the Obama administration is continuing to try to defend it, is unconstitutional. By being given the authority to regulate commerce, Congress cannot force you to engage in commerce so that they can then regulate it. However, if arranged in a way such that you have to pay a tax if you don’t comply, well then it’s all hunky-dory. So then, when you hear Democrats insist that the mandate is not a tax, as they have been saying, remember that they are therefore arguing that it’s unconstitutional. They’re trying to have their mandate and eat it, too.

The main reason they’re arguing that it’s not a tax — going against a Supreme Court ruling that they are ostensibly in favor of — is because of the legislative ramifications. A tax can be repealed on a bare majority vote, and is not subject to a 60 vote Senate filibuster. This makes it much easier for, say, a President Romney and a Republican House and Senate to repeal. I would have thought that trifecta tough to accomplish this November, but with this ruling, I suspect a fire is going to be lit under many a conservative, and I hope that this translates into votes. I think Democrats, too, see this scenario as more plausible today than it was before the ruling, which is why they’re trying to make this particular hard sell. Billy Mays, the TV pitchman who used to try to sell you so many handy items, would be proud.

If you insist, against the advice of the Supreme Court, that the Commerce Clause should be good enough to implement a mandate, consider this. The intention of the clause itself was a negative power; a preventative, restraining one. It was written so that there was an authority to appeal to when there were trade disputes among the states. It was never intended to be a positive power by the federal government; one that allowed it to act on its own. Those aren’t my words. Those are James Madison’s. But hey, he’s just what some people call The Father of The Constitution. What would he know?

Read the rest of this entry

Good morning.

1. Kinda like “life is too short waste drinking bad beer”
2. Scientific malpractice.
3. On American heresies.
4. A famous American Orthodox man passed away. He will be remembered.
5. ’cause companies like Staples and Home Depot are such job killers.
6. Well, self-esteem was the 7th sin (of 8) in the list before Pope Gregory dropped it.
7. Two posts on the Higgs in the news, here and here.
8. The only thing in this notice of antisemitism is any notice of actual antisemitism (and I’m sorry “investment in Caterpillar” doesn’t cut it).
9. The Russian Federation modernizes their army.
10. Health care and top down designs.
11. A church in the midst of economic movement.
12. Thinking race shouldn’t be a factor does not make one a racist … it’s the other way around, thinking race is a factor when that is unwarranted is racism.

Tupperware parties are sooo Bush-era. The USDA is now suggesting  you throw a Food Stamp party to let folks know in on the free stuff. (Link is to a PDF file.)

Throw a Great Party. Host social events where people mix and mingle. Make it fun by having activities, games, food, and entertainment, and provide information about SNAP. Putting SNAP information in a game format like BINGO, crossword puzzles, or even a “true/false” quiz is fun and helps get your message across in a memorable way.

The document gives you new and "fresh" ways to tell seniors about the program. Try that at your next get-together.

Good morning.

1. Of poisonous politics and personal consequences.
2. I think there is a theological error lurking here, something to do with western views of individualism.
3. Cookstoves and third world activism.
4. Another approach to gun buyback programs, that is to fund NRA youth camps. Whaddya think?
5. Asian conservatives coming on over “most think you get ahead with hard work” …. yep that would be about right.
6. Drones in our future.
7. Examining colonialism claims.
8. Misinterpreting Zeno … which was about limits and continuity not quantitative vs qualitative.
9. The fate of ATF whistleblowers.
10. Regulations and the Colorado fire.
11. Considering the hear-after.

Mainstream Media ignores 2,000 deaths in Afghanistan
Unlike they did at the same metric for Iraq. Difference? Bush vs. Obama.

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Well at least someone linked with the Mainstream Media doesn’t like it
From the post, regarding the Mainstream Media,

Forget it. I’m done. You deserve what they’re saying about you. It’s earned. You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you. You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more. You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.

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Are all schizophrenics creative? Or are all creative people schizophrenic?
From the article,

Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia.

Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.

It could be this uninhibited processing that allows creative people to “think outside the box”, say experts from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.

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Relief Efforts for Theological Famine
The internet age has opened up teaching opportunities our ancestors could not have dreamed of.

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Three reasons offered for young adults giving up on God
The reasons given,

1. Fundamentalists are turning off some young people

2. Atheists and agnostic role models are getting more vocal

3. Liberal attacks on religion are to blame

Herein lies the fallacy of current secular (and some evangelical) worldviews – that truth is defined by what one considers to be true rather than what is true. Follow this slip-n-slide notion and you must conclude that if our society can evolve towards acceptance of specified behaviors, then nothing prevents it from evolving towards rejection of specified behaviors.  What these adherents to plurarlism don’t seem to realize is that their “truth is what I think it to be” paradigm has no defense against itself.

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How’s that Private Sector doing, now?

Jesus is not your boyfriend
Or your homeboy.

Has our evangelical culture, in its eagerness to emotionalize our personal relationship with God Jesus, trended towards an essentially erotic view of said relationship? From the post at Her.meneutics,

It was not uncommon at my conservative Christian college to overhear girls say that Jesus was their “boyfriend” until God brought the right man along. I once had a girl tell me she could not hang out on a Friday night because she had a “date” with God. In our churches, many of our praise and worship songs border on the “love song” language, leading many girls to equate those warm and fuzzy feelings that come with attraction with Jesus. This is a dangerous place to be. Not only is it an incomplete picture of who our Christ is, it also sends the message that the girls (and women) who are truly devoted to Jesus equate contentment in him with a romantic relationship with him.

Reading the comments left at the post is also interesting. A sampling,

We used to sing this at a young adult study I used to go to:

“I wanna sit at your feet Drink from the cup in your hand. Lay back against you and breath, feel your heart beat This love is so deep, it’s more than I can stand. I melt in your peace, it’s overwhelming”

I could never sing the song and it took me completely out of worship. I’m a dude and this in NO WAY represents my walk with Christ. It’s borderline creepy to me and almost sexual. It did, however, REALLY make me curious as to how women see a relationship with christ differently than a man does due to gender differences.

Posted By: b | June 25, 2012 1:26 PM

and,

just can’t handle the “So in love with you” songs about Jesus any more. It just seems too close to the eroticism of love songs.

One of our younger male pastors (when he was working with youth) would often talk about “being so in love with Jesus” and used other language that had a boyfriend feel to it. I told him this way of talking could have a rather creepy feel about it, especially to the adolescent boys just coming to terms with their sexuality – he looked at me like I was crazy. It may also have a certain appeal to young females so wanting to have a boyfriend experience.

…

Posted By: Annie | June 25, 2012 3:11 PM

Yet what of the Biblical references to Israel’s rebellion being akin to having an adulterous affair, or the overt sexuality found in Song of Solomon, or that the New Covenant church is referenced as the bride of Christ?

It’s my understanding that such analogies always refer to the corporate body (i.e., the nation of Israel or the church as a whole) and are not indicative of the personal relationship each individual follower of Christ has with God. Note that in the upper room discourse Jesus calls his disciples friends, or how Paul refers to Christ followers as sons of God, or how virtually all of Jesus’ disciples and followers addressed him as Lord, Rabbi, Teacher, etc., and not as Lover.

I think that because our culture emphasizes the emotional aspect of relationships (and, that is not necessarily a bad thing) we sometimes mistake the relationship, or direction, of various Biblical analogies. We need to remember that the various earthly analogies we have are but reflections of the heavenly aspect being presented. Thus, when Paul writes that all Christ followers, both men and women, are sons of God, he is not ignoring or deprecating the status of women, nor is he equating us to the Son of God. Rather, he is indicating that, as in the culture of his time, just as all sons received the family inheritance, so all sons of God (Christ followers) will receive God’s inheritance.

As the author of the post states,

Just as self-marriage misses the mark for what God designed marriage to point to, “marriage” to Jesus misses what his work accomplished. Marriage to Jesus while waiting for a husband can often trivialize our Savior in a way that makes him more like a sweet boyfriend who takes us out on dates, rather than the God-man who paid for our sin on the cross. Jesus did not accomplish redemption to marry us individually. He died for the church corporate, of which we are apart [sic]. His death accomplished something much greater than simply meeting our deep-seated desires for a significant other. That is what Paul is getting at in Ephesians 5:22–33 when speaks of the mystery of marriage.