Tag Archives: Bible

Trolls and Dolls

Posted on by
1

TrollWe’ve all seen it. The beautiful girl on the arm of a troll. A troglodyte. At best, a man who is physically average. We never see the opposite, do we? A gorgeous man paired up with a fat ugly girl. Sometimes there is still a first wife in the picture, pretty average by today’s media standards…the high school sweetheart, the smart one, probably athletic, the one with the good DNA. The child-bearing thing can complicate the beauty pursuit significantly. Every man knows that he wants brilliant and competent children. Even his daughters. But once that goal is met, all bets are off. Enter the trophy wife. Arm candy for the insecure man.

Why is this? Let me enlighten you (and I claim expert status here for a variety of reasons). My favorite book (and all-time bestseller) says that man is the glory of God, meaning that man is God’s highest achievement, a source of honor and great praise. Well guess what? The Bible also says that woman is the glory of man. Woman, more than anything else, can bring happiness and respectability to a man. That is why the experts say that the happiest people on the planet are married men.

Hooters girls, models, women who are defined by beauty and little else, and whose personalities reflect that, don’t make great mates for intelligent evolved men. Besides, outward beauty will undoubtedly fade. Real beauty will not.

I think most men figure this out because statistics show that 80% of second marriages to Marla Maples ultimately fail.

Ted Haggard New Life Church

Posted on by
2

This is FABULOUS! We find out tomorrow when his accuser takes a polygraph test live on a Denver radio talk show, but the preliminary report is that Ted Haggard, fundamentalist scourge of lesser sinners, will be borrowing a page that wasn’t even in Brother Swaggart’s play book.
 
It’s not that Ted Haggard is gay. Who isn’t? Or, who says it’s wrong to be gay?
 
It’s not that Ted Haggard paid for sex. For some that’s the only sex they want. Who says it’s wrong to pay someone to have sex with you?
 
It’s not that Ted Haggard did/does methamphetamine. Who hasn’t or wouldn’t if they were stupid enough?
 
It IS that Ted Haggard has been condemning gays and standing in the way of their equal partnership rights, all the while being gay. For me there is absolutely not much worse than a gay bastard!

That may sound a little strong, but it’s a curiously universal prejudice, isn’t it? Evil enhanced by being gay evil?

To celebrate, I’m going to have a second look at a documentary that came out earlier this year called Conviction, about three Dominican Sisters who were convicted and sentenced for the Plowshares action they took against a Colorado nuclear missile silo.

In particular, the documentary features a splendid interview of Ted Haggard, critical of the sisters’ actions, gloating about the prospects of them serving time in federal prison. He brags about the hand-in-glove relationship of church and military in Colorado Springs, frothing at the mouth to condemn the sisters. “This is just inappropriate, it’s bad bible interpretation, it’s bad Christianity…”

Halloween and What Would Doctor Dobson Do?

Posted on by
3

I have just been visiting over at the Focus on Family website and am relieved to find that Dr. Dobson approves on allowing children to go Trick or Treating in the neighborhood. As long as they don’t go as black cats, witches, devils, or Satan himself. Nothing occult, he says. And certainly don’t allow your little ones to go in drag.
 
This is a relief to me, since too many of our kids have been finding themselves shuffled off to shopping malls and churches, on what used to be the best kid Holiday of them all. Just finding a neighborhood with Trick or Treating kids on the prowl has become increasingly more difficult for parents with kids. So thank you, Dr. Dobson, for taking this particularly controversial stand. Next we know, you’ll be encouraging parents to play penny ante poker with their kids, and teaching them to dance with the other sex without a Bible in hand. Praise the Lord!

A rational assessment

Posted on by
Reply

A guy friend of mine said to me not long ago, “Even when I’m falling in love I’m still aware of the rational assessment I am making.” Really? I’m sure I’m wrong but it seems to me that rational thought and love are polar opposites…unable to understand each other…mortal enemies even. Isn’t love supposed to be an affaire de coeur? Isn’t the rational mind supposed to be balancing the checkbook in the next room while the heart pursues its passion?

I picture my friend in a hip martini bar clutching a clipboard. He carefully approaches each possible “love recipient” with his Rational Assessment Rubric. On a scale of 1 to 10…Physically fit? 8. Clear skin and decent teeth? 7. Reasonably fashionable? 8. Correct eye color? 9.

Next, the home visit. Good floor plan? 8. Interesting decorative touches and finishes? 6. Acceptable lighting? 9. View? 9.

If the assessment is going well, a document inspection follows. Please provide bank and mutual fund statements for the past three years and any other relevant financial information that might help me make my decision. Hmmm, looks quite good. Yes! I’m in love!

After the initial test is passed, I wonder if the score is adjusted periodically. Uh oh, a little thickening at the waistline. Minus 2. Small inheritance from Aunt Edna. Plus 1. How low do the numbers have to fall before it becomes a rational imperative to fall out of love?

I may be mistaken but I thought love was supposed to be unconditional. I thought that to be loved was to be known and accepted, supported, trusted. I believed that it was as much about giving as receiving. Isn’t love supposed to be a sanctuary…a safe haven? This “rational” love feels about as safe as the time I walked on a tightrope drunk in the dark over molten lava (CU-Boulder, 1982 Spring Break). It’s something that I might be able to pull off for a minute or two…certainly not for a life time.

I wonder where my concept of love became so twisted. I think it may be traced back to my days spent in parochial school, memorizing Bible passages, learning that a function of the Holy Ghost is to remind us of what we’ve learned in case we should need it at some point. Maybe that’s why I keep waking up with 1 Corinthians 13 on my mind. Love is patient, love is kind….Love does not brag and is not arrogant….does not seek its own…is not provoked…does not take into account a wrong suffered. Love bears all things. Love believes all things. Love endures all things. Love never fails.

I imagine that many, if not most, relationships are based on mutual self-interest. I know that I’ve been a party to many such relationships myself. Indeed, a very rational assessment is made at the outset. Perhaps all along the way. Maybe every single day. And there’s nothing wrong with that if it works for both participants. I think we should call these relationships what they are … friendships, partnerships, pacts, contracts, arrangements. But I hope you’ll agree with me–we should reserve the word love for something more sublime.

The evolution debate ist tot

Posted on by
2

Giant footprints in limestoneWe’re going to see the dinosaur tracks in Pinon Canyon this weekend. We’ll hike along the Pergatoire River which runs through southeastern Colorado and retrace a quarter mile long trail left by a brontosaurus.
 
At issue for my companions is what to make of theologians who would like us to believe that the Earth is only as old as The Bible says, something like 6,000 years. I’d like to contemplate that idea from the perspective of standing in a footprint made 150 million years ago. Supposedly.
 
Is carbon-dating flawed? Are scientists misleading mankind? It only matters if you want to believe that the christian bible is literally true. If the bible represents truth in the context of man’s understanding of the natural world at the time, then our new scientific understandings are not really suspect at all.

This is why Nietzsche wrote after Darwin’s theory, that God is dead. Is a discredited bible the Word of God or Man?

Infallibility
So who’s doing the arguing? Is it the Word-of-God people who want to refuse any contradictory evidence, or the scientists who couldn’t care a wit if their findings confirm or do not confirm church dogma? Bible adherents have chosen to take their stand against “evolutionary theory.” Because it can’t stand. Because it would make God’s word wrong.

“Theory” the Biblists decry, is as unreliable as it sounds. The inherent uncertainty of the scientific term insinuates that theory is more like wobbly fact. In Biblist lingo, theory becomes diametrically opposed to, and is perhaps the diabolical opposite of, fact. Hence the “debate.” Notice no one is scheduling debates over the theory of gravity or Pythagoras.

Thus Creationist Biblists have been challenging all comers to debate evolution in the court of public comprehension. There have been of course, science popularizers who’ve undertaken to educate the Biblists, perhaps hoping to create some middle ground. Pop-scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould engaged church dogma adherents to expand their understanding of the natural world. Meanwhile, actual scientists are laboring away, at science, working from the concepts of evolution into the further reaches. If these scientists look up at all, at the awkward “debate” conducted in their name, they wonder who gave those guys name tags? Who appointed them as apologists for scientific discovery and imbued them with authority to arbitrate and integrate scientific findings with church lore?

A debate between real scientists and creationists would look like an argument between a pediatrician and a fashion designer about what color pee should come out of the baby. It’s arguing apples and orange bowls. A debate about evolution is really between philosophers and theologians, because scientists aren’t debating anything. And the Biblists are the schoolchildren arguing they don’t want to learn their lessons, in fact they want to rewrite their lessons, and they want to debate their right to do so with linguists.

In trying to pick their fight, Biblists like to accuse scientists of arrogance. This is a false portrait, and comes perhaps from scientists not wanting to debate their findings with non-scientists. Why should they? You don’t argue football with someone that doesn’t know football from basketball. A scientist’s task is not to argue. A scientist makes a building block and moves on to the next. Where would we be if scientists only ever argued the validity of the single block. Build, concede its limitations, and move on. How can we build a two story house if someone on the committee perserverates on the first story being too speculative? Build the second story, if the first turns out to be flawed, we’ll start anew. Mankind still does not fully understand electricity. That doesn’t mean we can’t make telephones and phonographs and semiconductors and go to the moon in the meantime.

You might consider an architect full of excessive hubris for building towers higher than you yourself would ascend comfortably. You don’t understand the engineering, so he can’t build the skyscraper?

Intelligent Design
The theory of intelligent design offers a related illustration. I don’t have any doubt that many scientists would like to see our understanding of nature explained by an intelligent design. The problem is that science is not yet there, in fact it’s been pointing elsewhere. For now, we have to say, man’s knowledge through science cannot explain an intelligent design. Religious nuts are there, but for unscientific reasons. Intelligent Design may be true, but you can’t build anything with it. Scientists may want to build a 200 story building, but they don’t have the necessary blocks. Intelligent Design believers may be already want to dwell there, but you can’t start at the 200th floor and build downward.

There are a number of signs that evolution in practice is not as it appears. The GAIA concept offers to my mind a likely clue that there is a larger design at work. The idea that the fabric of nature on our planet might be governed by a cohesive unity, directly challenges the theory of random mutation by individuals. Could such scientific building blocks as proving GAIA lead to validating the biblical notion of Intelligent Design? Maybe that’s a possibility. Could it lead us to understand that Adam of Eden fashioned Eve from his own rib? Well, if you like, maybe that too. Right now I’d have to tell you that Adam’s rib is not my area of expertise and I’m certainly not prepared to debate it.

Who’s afraid of the Christian Peacemaker Team?

Posted on by
2

Motley crew
Lock up your daughters, it’s the Christian Peacemaker Team delegation!
 
By now the story is out about our visit to Senator Allard’s office today, particularly the effort we encountered to thwart our visit.

I’ll recap. After holding our daily noon vigil for the four CPT hostages being held in Iraq, a delegation of vigil keepers went downtown to visit the offices of three local congress members as part of the national SHINE THE LIGHT campaign. We walked with three yard signs and another sign of similar size held aloft. One among us wore a black hood over his head, to remind onlookers of the Abu Ghraib captives.

After a pleasant walk down Tejon Street, we first visited Congressman Hefley’s office where we received a warm reception. They’d seen the TV news report the night before. They also confirmed having received our emailed press releases.

When we tried to find Senator Allard’s office, our reception was quite a different matter. We nearly didn’t make it to his office.

Senator Allard’s office is located in the Plaza of the Rockies, a mid-sized office building with a large atrium. The building is home to many financial service companies such as Morgan Stanley, RBC Dain Rauscher, Booz Allan and Hamilton, Stewart Title, and Vectra Bank among others.

Finding ourself on the second floor of the atrium, unable to get to the floor above, our group fanned out to find a stairwell or alternative elevator. We were no longer parading with our poster boards, carrying them instead under our arms. But our identity as war malcontents was probably apparent enough and we could tell that a couple of the occupants of those glass offices appeared to grab their phones on seeing us walk by.

After my own fruitless search for Suite 300, I returned to find our group being confronted by two men in suits. We were being asked to leave the building. This was private property they explained and we were not permitted to protest on their property.

We answered that we were not protesting, but were merely trying to reach Senator Allard’s office. Could they tell us which way to Suite 300? They would not, “he’s not there.” They insisted instead that we leave. Private property and all that.

We countered that Senator Allard’s office was a public space, and certainly the conveyance to his office must be considered public. They did not agree. When we asked with whom we were speaking, the first identified himself as “Larry,” the chief security officer, the other was the property manager.

Finally we offered to relinquish the offending signs and take them outside the building. I ran the signs down to Pat and Esther who were waiting outside the front door.

I got back in time to hear the property manager arguing “if you knew your bible, you’d know why we have to be in the Middle East!” I learned afterward that I had missed him accusing the leader of our delegation, CPT member Bill Durland, of being “Taliban.”

Eventually the two building representatives agreed to conduct us to the Senator’s office, but only on the condition that Peter remove his hood. Though again we made our case that the Abu Ghraib hood represented an important message we were trying to communicate, in the end Peter agreed to take it off. He would be able to put it back on in the Senator’s office.

In the Senator’s office we were greeted by his assistant who offered to talk with us. But she insisted that the security official remain in the room, and she insisted that Peter remove his hood.

There followed a polite exchange whereupon members of our group spoke from their hearts about the illegality of the war in Iraq, the immorality of torture and other crimes related to the taking of captives without just cause, etc. Senator Allard’s assistant pulled out an old chestnut that Allard is still using at fund raising speeches. Apparently 9-11 caused more casualties that our fighting in Iraq, and that if we hadn’t fought the war in Iraq, the war would have come to us here.

Throughout this discussion, police officers were arriving. The first two arrived at the heels of another Allard staffer. They walked in the door without saying a thing, walked through the reception area where we were having our exchange, and went to stand in the office just inside the reception area.

The odd thing was that no one was addressing these officers, they were merely shown the inside office where they could hear our discussion and interrupt presumably if they were needed. A third officer arrived shortly, and then a fourth. We could see them waiting unsupervisez in the other room. One of the police officers wore the typical tight black gloves and left them on.

When asked who had called for the police officers, Allard’s assistant repeatedly declared that she did not. Although she also did not question any of the officers as to what was the purpose of their visit, and why there came another and another. Instead she proffered that the police were merely a routine measure of building security.

In the end, our visit felt more fruitless than constructive. I don’t know what we would have expected to communicate to one of the few senators who voted against the anti-torture bill. Allard’s assistant defended her boss by telling us that his opposition to the anti-torture bill was because he wanted a stranger one. We interjected that simultaneously Allard had expressed his approval of President Bush’s signing exemption.

In the end we saw the soft underbelly of the beast. and should have taken greater advantage of it. The Neocons may be formidable adversaries, but their supporters, the underbelly, are about as soft as they come.

Senator Allard’s office help kept insisting that they welcomed our visit, yet they seemed quite in step with the actions taken on the part of building security, actions which were not welcoming in the least.

Had our confidence not been boosted by the knowledge that our lead negotiator was an ACLU lawyer, we might not have been persistent enough to reach Allard’s office.

The routine scrambling of police officers certainly surprised us. Afterward I longed to have questioned one of the police officers in the next room. What was the nature of the disturbance described to them? What trouble were they fearing might errupt from a christian(!) peacemaker(!) team visiting their senator’s office?

Not so historical Jesus

Posted on by
Reply

Seeing a preview for the upcoming release of DAVINCI CODE: THE MOVIE, I was reminded of the time a friend of mine was quite excited about the book. “Check it out” she said. She told me about the various conspiracies, most notably the subjugation of women. “Doesn’t it make you curious to do some research?”
 
“What kind of research?” I asked, baiting her a little.

“Look into the facts surrounding Jesus’ life she said. For example, what did the records show as opposed to what the bible says happened.”

I told her I was pretty sure there weren’t any records of Jesus’ life. But that idea sounded so improbable that I certainly had to confirm it.

Here it is. There is no mention of Jesus in any of the historical records of the time. What we know of Jesus comes to us exclusively from his own PR: a bible compiled over a long period of time by a church already a century old.

From a historian’s perspective, one can only say: “according to a text published by the Catholic Church in Rome, a person called Jesus the Christ of Nazareth once lived in the land currently occupied by Israel, etc.”

There are no Roman records of a person named Jesus, neither of his birth, nor of any property he may have owned, nor even of his crucifixion. There are no documents or narratives of a visit to Herod, or Pilate, nor of any exchange with a criminal named Barabbas.

Since it would be hard to believe that an entire Christian cult arose without some real personage as its catalyst, no one disputes that a person named Jesus did at some point exist. But there are no external corroborative accounts of his life.

None of the three wise men for example left a travelogue of their pilgrimage to Bethlehem. No Jewish high priest took note of an altercation between an angry young man and money-changers in a temple. Neither Herod Antipas nor Pontius Pilate, actual administrators to be sure whose lives and activities are well documented, reported to Rome of a young upstart among their Jewish subjects.

Nothing at all. If today’s Christians want to get technical, Jesus is a lesser proved theory than evolution.

Koran flushing

Posted on by
Reply

Sacreligious treatment of the Koran. Not THE Koran, nor A Koran, but someone’s OWN Koran. A bible-thumper might appreciate this distinction more than the average near-secular American.

Guantanamo interrogators weren’t flushing a Gideon Bible down the toilet, some vinyl-covered copy glimpsed only briefly in a hotel room drawer, nor even a Family Bible, a nicer copy kept on a lower shelf in the family den.

The Holy books destroyed at US facilities are PERSONAL COPIES, given to individuals at Confirmation or First Communion, carried around to daily or weekly meetings, with inscriptions from relatives and teachers and loved ones, with personal inscriptions, study points in the margins, journal entries, or family records.

These are what the US wardens were abusing before the tears of their owners. The political prisoners where often brought with not even the clothes on their backs, but they were allowed their Korans. Perhaps because our Afgan surrogates, the Moslems doing our bidding, would not conceive of depriving the captives of their Korans.

These are the Korans we are desecrating.