Friday, August 21. 2009
I take the view that the core tenets of all religions are essentially the same and should guide each individual, and as applicable to what should be governments’ very limited role in our personal lives should guide the role of governments.
The Seven Noahide Laws are found in the same Testament basic to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and are similar to tenets found in Eastern religions:
1. Belief in G-d
2. Respect for and praise of G-d
3. Respect for human life
4. Respect for the family
5. Respect for others’ rights and property
6. Creation of a judicial system
7. Respect for all creatures
To quote my religious guide to the importance of these basics:
Without these laws as a bedrock of government, a society will either have despotism, where individuals’ lives are compromised and possibly abused, or anarchy, where every person pursues his or her own needs without regard for the law.
There are varying views of the relationship of politics and religion. At one extreme, government forbids or represses or dictates the activities of one, a few or all religions. The ideology of the state, and avoidance of any challenges to its sole power, is paramount. We have too many real examples of this. At the other extreme, the dictates of a religion, or of a segment of a religion, dictates or is allowed to substitute for the usual role of government. Islamic Sharia courts and laws are one widespread example. Another is in Israel where the traditional Orthodox maternal lineage to be Jewish, and a traditional Orthodox conversion to be Jewish, is government policy. Although those following more relaxed standards are not persecuted or otherwise, they are still at a disadvantage in some important respects.
At both extremes, sometimes or often the reasonable differences or even the essential rights of individuals may be injured.
In the United States, we more than other nations have taken great care to walk the fine line. Still, in the past few decades, this fine line has been challenged by tensions expressed in two major issues, abortion and marriage, and now we can add health care.
When government requires that taxpayer funds pay for abortion or that private health insurance pay for abortion, and even moreso when government requires that medical practitioners perform abortions regardless of individuals’ conscience or religious scruples, government has crossed the line.
When government requires that the legal privileges and obligations of voluntary union between two consenting adults only be between a man and a woman, government has crossed the line. Civil unions are the role of the state. Sanctification as marriage is the role of religions.
Government has an accepted and important role to play in the protection and furtherance of public health, most particularly as regards pandemics but also in promoting better and more widespread health care. Experience in the United States, and elsewhere, demonstrates this is most accomplished when there is the freer choice and competition in the private sector, to the maximum degree possible, that best serves adaptivity, innovation and individual circumstances.
In the current health care debates, the overwhelming majority of Americans reject that government should take over control of health care. Unfortunately, primarily due to the strong arm tactics and language of its advocates both polarizing and enlarging opposition, we may for now also lose the opportunity to make some far smaller but important incremental improvements.
President Obama has now crossed another important line. His phone calls to garner support from religious leaders of several faiths who lean toward liberal political views is not objectionable in itself. (Neither is it objectionable for religious leaders to have political views, but they should refrain from imposing them on their flock or ignoring the contending justifiable moral, practical and factual considerations.) What is objectionable, far over the line, is that President Obama requested they preach from their pulpits support for his political position.
This is an important issue. It is a completely inappropriate and precedent-breaking overt effort by President Obama to use our religious leaders as his mouthpiece/propaganda "tools." If our religious leaders do, they are "fools." If we tolerate this, we are being badly used, such congregations’ majority political leanings toward liberal indeed being abused, for manipulation by President Obama. Then, are such congregations a religion or a political party? If the latter, it indicates one of the reasons why so many depart from organized religions in the US. Individuals in congregations, and those in leadership positions in congregations and our community, should speak out strongly to our religious leaders how truly inappropriate this is, as well as dangerous, to our communities of faith, to be a propaganda arm of any Washington administration, political party, or policy. President Obama's steering of sermons is far beyond anything that's ever been tried before, and should be recognized for what it is, blatant and disrespectful. At least, do our religious leaders have any self-respect or respect for us in their congregations? If not, they have forfeited respect, and should forfeit their pulpits.
Friday, August 14. 2009
A post of the above title, by Auster. Good fun about the cosmos, first causes, the vertical dimension of existence, etc.
I never had any problem hypothesizing a Big Mysterious Something, but many times I have had problems with the idea of a personal God who would be interested in me, much less love me. Still, I know that that is intellectualizing, and that God does not reach out to us mainly on an intellectual plane.
He talks to us everywhere, inside and outside. I just need to listen more. BD taught me that.
As Sippican might say, "There is no Second Congregational Church." No, there isn't. Not yet, anyway.
I had the pleasure of shaking hands with the Rev. Norman Koop on the steps of the First Congregational Church of Woodstock, on Sunday morning. I had heard many good things about him and his congregation (including the Dartmouth folks who cross the river to attend), and had listened to some of his sermons online.
You can listen to his some of his preaching at Sermon Audio.
Here is the church's Statement of Faith. Yes, it is what I call a "strong dose" church in what polls say is the least religious state in the USA.
I have no time for weak dose churches. I like that old-time religion: The living Jesus and the living Word: straight up, no ice. As a sinner, Christ is what I need.
Glad to have met ya, Reverend.
Tuesday, August 11. 2009
It would be nice to simply wake up one day and suddenly be a mature Christian, but in order to grow up in God, we will have to go through trials. There is no other way to grow strong spiritually than to go through trials.
1 Peter 5:10 says, And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. You may not like trials, but this verse says that when you are going through trials after you have suffered a little while, you will grow to be firmly rooted and grounded (strong, firm and steadfast) in God.
Similarly, James 1:12 says, Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him. Here again, you don't get the rewards (the crown of life) until you have persevered under trial and stood the test.
So, learn to be thankful in your trials, because in order to get your breakthrough, you need a trial to break through.
Therefore, don't be discouraged during times of suffering. Know that after you have suffered a little while, God himself will make you strong, firm, and steadfast.
Friday, August 7. 2009
From the review of physicist John Polkinghorne's new book at First Things:
As he notes in the preface, for fifty years such contextual theologies as feminist theology, liberation theology, or African theology, have been flourishing. Polkinghorne takes the novel step of treating science and religion as an important type of contextual theology in its own right, recognizing that science, no less than other aspects of modern thought and culture, can suggest insights and provide information that are vital for theological reflection. “Theology conducted in the context of science must be prepared to be candid about the evidence for its beliefs,” he says forthrightly, but science does not dominate the conversation: There are clear limits to its authority and competence that both believers and unbelievers need to realize.
The overall message Polkinghorne brings is a crucial one: Science cannot provide its own metaphysical interpretation. As he says with typical precision, “Physics constrains metaphysics, but it no more determines it than the foundations of a house determine the precise form of the building erected on them.”
Sunday, August 2. 2009
Quoted by our Pastor this morning, from a letter from a Christian martyr in Zimbabwe, quoted in Brennan Manning's (1996) The Signature of Jesus:
I'm part of the fellowship of the unashamed. I have the Holy Spirit's power. The die has been cast. I have stepped over the line. The decision has been made - I'm a disciple of his. I won't look back, let up, slow down, back away, or be still. My past is redeemed, my present makes sense, my future is secure. I'm finished and done with low living, sight walking, smooth knees and colorless dreams, tamed visions, worldly talking, cheap giving, and dwarfed goals.
I no longer need preeminance, prosperity, position, promotions, plaudits, or popularity. I don't have to be right, first, tops, recognized, praised, regarded, or rewarded. I now live by faith, lean in his presence, walk by patience, am uplifted by prayer, and I labor with power.
My face is set, my gait is fast, my goal is heaven, my road is narrow, my way rough, my companions are few, my Guide reliable, my mission clear. I will not flinch in the face of sacrifice, hesitate in the presence of the enemy, pander at the pool of popularity, or meander in the maze of mediocrity.
I won't give up, shut up, let up, until I have stayed up, stored up, prayed up, paid up, preached up for the cause of Christ. I am a disciple of Jesus. I must go til he comes, give til I drop, preach til all know, and work til he stops me.
Friday, July 10. 2009
 It's John Calvin's 500th Birthday today (1509-1564). He was indeed one of the shapers of the Western world.
Marvin Olasky offers Three Cheers for John Calvin.
Here's a Calvin quote via Marginal Rev:
Whatever be the kind of tribulation with which we are afflicted, we should always consider the end of it to be, that we may be trained to despise the present, and thereby stimulated to aspire to the future life. For since God well knows how strongly we are inclined by nature to a slavish love of this world, in order to prevent us from clinging too strongly to it, he employs the fittest reason for calling us back, and shaking off our lethargy.
Thursday, July 9. 2009
 268 years ago, as of yesterday, Jonathan Edwards preached his most famous sermon in Enfield, CT.
At that time, our readers know, CT was a Congregationalist theocracy, in effect, and the Yale-educated (especially in the sciences) Edwards was a well-known but back-woods preacher.
Scriptorium takes a look at Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
The prissy-mouthed portrait of Edwards does not capture what a fun-loving guy he really was (not kidding).
Wednesday, July 8. 2009
 It's the Codex Sinaiticus, a 1600 year-old Greek Bible.
The British Museum curator notes that it does raise some theological questions in its differences from modern versions.
The hand of God moves in mysterious ways, and, sometimes, we humans are His deeply flawed and inadequate agents - or wish to be.
Sunday, July 5. 2009
From a review of the book God is Back in The Washington Monthly:
Where once it was widely assumed that modernity and its handmaiden "secularization" would kill off religion, the reports of God’s death turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, Micklethwait and Wooldridge assure us, "the very things that were supposed to destroy religion—democracy and markets, technology and reason—are apparently combining to make it stronger." Europe was wrong, and America right. Irreligion in Europe is the anomaly, and the "hot religion" (namely Evangelical Protestantism) of the United States is the future. "American-style religion" is very much here to stay, and on the whole that is a good thing—especially for business.
Back? I never knew He left. Maybe He was just vacationing in my neighborhood, where we ignorant bumpkins cling to God and our guns instead of investing our limited capacities for faith in the arrogant, incompetent bozos in government - most of whom, today, could never do much of anything in real life (except for Sarah Palin, who knows how to make a living fishing, and Mitt, who understands finance).
But is God good for business? I thought God was all about God's kingdom - the invisible kingdom, and not man's. Read the whole piece.
Tuesday, June 23. 2009
From Dr. Bob's The Temperature of Hell (no, it's not about "climate change"):
In our therapeutic culture, where all is tolerated but the good, the assertion that there are consequences for our behavior, either temporal, or especially eternal, is a truly noxious notion. The idea of Hell is perceived as an anachronistic anathema, promoted cynically by clergy controlling the poor, ignorant fools who follow them. Even those with a nominal belief in a deity will attest, with a pretense more wishful than wise, that a God of love would never condemn those who reject Him to Hell. In some sense–surely not that which the proponents of such pop theology intend–this may well be true. It will be, for those who enter that dark, hopeless, and agonizing eternity, not something dictated from on high by a vengeful God gleeful at our torture. It will be our own choice, fully, to reject the mercy and grace which has been offered to us without cost by Him who gave everything to draw us toward an eternal relationship, filled with unspeakable joy and peace, with Him.
Saturday, June 6. 2009
Another quote from the John Rawls book review we linked this week:
What makes belief in inviolable or natural rights reasonable? It is not enough to argue that each individual possesses an inalienable inviolability because all are, as Rawls holds in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, free and equal persons. Or that our inalienable inviolability flows from our moral capacity to form and act on rational life plans. Neither our natural freedom and equality nor our capacity to form, choose, and act on rational life plans rules out that conquest and dominion over others represents the best use of our freedom.
When all is said and done, the mature Rawls’s epic intellectual labors do not illuminate this fundamental perplexity. Indeed, those labors obscure the perplexity, even as the difficulties are diminished — though they are far from overcome — by the young Rawls’s theological doctrine. Inasmuch as it conceives of man as in but not entirely of the natural world, and possessing a spiritual dimension or soul for which he is not responsible but which is of ultimate worth and allows him to transcend determination by nature, the young Rawls’s doctrine fortifies a liberalism whose guiding thought is that of an inalienable inviolability possessed by all individuals.
Such considerations provide more than ample reason for scholars to vigorously open or reopen the question of Rawlsian liberalism’s — and the larger liberal tradition’s — religious roots.
Thursday, June 4. 2009
I've gotten around a bit.
I've rubbed shoulders with all sorts of kooks. True believers of the believingest kind, without much truth discernible in the final recipe. Holy rollers; snakehandlers. A few animists. Dopers, Buddhists, straight-up Leninists soldiering on long after Lenin lost interest. Knights of Columbus. People that wouldn't eat meat on Friday all the way to Sikhs that would stab you with their little dagger if you lit a cigarette next to them. People that speak Klingon.
But in all my travels I've never encountered a bigger bunch of intellectual anti-matter apocalyptic paranoid delusional wharrgarbll cult nonsense than this item from ABC News. Think about that. If David Koresh and Ted Kaczinski got married and started sharing notes, they couldn't come up with a less reasonable worldview than one of the three major networks serving as a news outlet to the american continent. ABC must be hiring interns from The Onion, because this is listed under Science and Technology:
It's an idea that most of us would rather not face -- that within the next century, life as we know it could come to an end. Our civilization could crumble, leaving only traces of modern human existence behind. It seems outlandish, extreme -- even impossible. But according to cutting edge scientific research, it is a very real possibility. And unless we make drastic changes now, it could very well happen. Experts have a stark warning: that unless we change course, the "perfect storm" of population growth, dwindling resources and climate change has the potential to converge in the next century with catastrophic results.
Well, they got it partially correct. I indeed "would rather not face" these "ideas," in the same way I don't want to face the ideas being yelled at passing cars by men who sleep on park benches and wet themselves regularly.
So people with misspelled signs, unkempt beards, and who wash themselves in the bubbler in the public park are my go-to guys for such apocalyptica. Who are the "experts" that ABC News goes to for their volcano-maiden advice?
Continue reading "Got Apocalypse?"
Wednesday, June 3. 2009
From a fine review of a new book about God and Lou John Rawls:
 Persons flourish in community. A community is not an “aggregate of individuals,” but rather the special form of association through which individuals, in and through relations to others and to God, become persons. In becoming a person one recognizes that other human beings are, like oneself, created in God’s image. “The Imago Dei,” Rawls declares, is “that which in man makes him capable of entering into community by virtue of likeness to God, who is in Himself community, being the Triune God.”
Faith, sin, and grace, Rawls maintains, revolve around personality and community. Faith is “the inner state of a person who is properly integrated and related to community.” Sin is the destruction and repudiation of community. It receives expression in egotism, or pride, self-love, and vanity; egoism, or exclusive attention to the satisfaction of natural desire; and despair, or the nihilistic escape from the world. Grace is “the activity on God’s part which seeks to restore the person to community.” It overcomes sin and accomplishes conversion. Since ethics is bound up with community and personality, and community and personality are bound up with God, “there can be no separation between religion and ethics.”
Photo of John Rawls
Sunday, May 31. 2009
Another Taize chant: Veni Sancte Spiritus. I love this one.
Anchoress reminds us that
The Gifts of the Holy Spirit are Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel (Right Judgment), Fortitude (Courage), Knowledge, Piety (Reverence) and Fear of the Lord (Awe of God).
Good gifts indeed. Who does not hunger for these?
Sunday, May 24. 2009
Pentecost, marking the end of the Easter season, is next Sunday.
There isn't much Taize music on YouTube, but here is a bit of the Taize chant Bless The Lord, My Soul:
Tuesday, May 19. 2009
From Stanley Fish's God Talk, Part 2, in the NYT, a quote:
Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.) Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith.
Sunday, May 17. 2009
It is a wonderful day indeed when we stop working for God and begin working with God.
Anon.
Thursday, May 14. 2009
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world -- the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does -- comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.
1 John 2:15-17 (New International Version)
Friday, May 8. 2009
Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution. A quote:
Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day? Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval superstition?
Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a belief not logically related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary) — because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to whether or not the things produced have true value.
Sunday, May 3. 2009
The lowest level of Hell, according to Dante, is reserved for those who betray their benefactors.
The Circles of Hell. h/t, Thompson's Friday Ephemera.
Friday, May 1. 2009
MSNBC asked America, “Should the motto ‘In God We Trust’ be removed from U.S. currency?”
1,837,987 people voted “Yes”, but 12,300,371 voted “No”. Wow! If anyone has so much time on their hands that they actually watch MSNBC, I’d love to know how, with what attitude, and at what time of day they announce the result!
Saturday, April 18. 2009
A quote from Terry Mattingly's piece of the above title:
Consider, for example, the media storms surrounding discussions of Holy Communion and the sacramental status of Catholic politicians who disagree with church doctrines on abortion, marriage and other issues. In his book "Render Unto Caesar," Chaput argued that it's the "political duty" of Catholics to "know their faith and to think and act like faithful Catholics all the time" -- even those who work inside the Washington Beltway.
Alas, the journalists think they are writing about the rights of politicians, while some Catholic bishops want to discuss the salvation and, yes, damnation of souls. If journalists insist on describing this conflict in strictly political terms, he said, there is no way the public will ever understand what is happening.
Thursday, April 16. 2009
In an interview by Paul Bradshaw with Rick Warren, Rick said:
"People ask me, What is the purpose of life? And I respond: In a nutshell, life is preparation for eternity. We were not made to last forever, and God wants us to be with him in heaven. One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be the end of my body - but not the end of me. I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going to spend trillions of years in eternity.
This is the warm-up act - the dress rehearsal. God wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in eternity. We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life isn't going to make sense. Life is a series of problems: either you are in one now, you're just coming out of one, or you're getting ready to go into another one.
The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your comfort; God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in making your life happy. We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but that's not the goal of life. The goal is to grow in Christ-likeness.
This past year of my life has been the greatest year of my life, but also the toughest with my wife, Kay, getting cancer. I used to think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you go to the mountain, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore.
Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life. No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on. And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for.
You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems. If you focus on your problems, you're going into self-centeredness: my problems, my issues, my pain. But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others. We discovered quickly that in spite of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people, God was not going to heal Kay or to make it easy for her. It has been very difficult for her, and yet God has strengthened her character, given her a ministry of helping other people, given her a testimony, drawn her closer to Him and to people.
You have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life. Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me instantly very wealthy. It also brought a lot of notoriety that I never had to deal with before. I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for your own ego or for you to live a life of ease.
So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do with this money, this notoriety, this influence. He gave me two different passages that helped me decide what to do, ll Corintians 9 and Psalm 72. First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our life style one bit. We made no major purchases. Second, about midway through last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church. Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan to plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation. Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24 years since I had started the church, and paid it all back. It was liberating to me to serve God for free.
We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? Popularity? Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes?
When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say God, if I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love You better. God didn't put me on earth to fulfill a to-do list. He's more interested in what I am than what I do."
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