13. Just as religion has been twisted to support the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials and the like, science has been twisted to support atrocities like eugenics and genocide. It has been used to excuse the brutal racism displayed in the Tuskeegee and Guatemala syphilis studies. New Atheists like the late Christopher Hitchens draw causal link between religion and perversions such as the Crusades, while religious people like Ben Stein (in the film Expelled) draw a causal link between science and perversions such as the Holocaust. Both are woefully wrong. Neither science nor religion as a whole is responsible for the evil misapplication of its ideas.
14. Despite having been whole-heartedly against 2008's bailout of Chrysler and GM, I am finding it very hard to argue pragmatically that they were a bad move. GM has completely turned around and is taking advantage of its dominance in Asia, the fastest-growing car market in the world. Though the turn-around was largely to GM's credit, the government's decision to keep GM from going under saved millions of U.S. jobs from destruction. On the whole, TARP helped prevent a string of bank failures which could have led to a second Great Depression and the nationalization of banks across America — and most of it has been paid back. I have to hand it to ol' GW: if you set ideology aside, TARP was a resounding success. What's an Austrian economist to make of it?
15. French novelist Honore de Balzac said, "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." I think how true or false a person believes this quote to be really gets at the heart of their political beliefs. As a centrist, I struggle deeply with it.
16. I am so tired of people assuming Christians are confined to the 'Christian' media industry ('Christian' record labels, 'Christian' publishers, etc). Stephen Colbert is a Christian. So is John Grisham. There are Christians working at Pixar and Apple and Random House and thousands of other creative companies. Christians as a whole are not responsible for the artistic swamp that is the 'Christian' media industry.
17. In 2009, a web developer in Brooklyn decided to splice up Star Wars: A New Hope into 15-second segments and ask Star Wars fans to recreate them in their own backyards. He instructed them to submit their creations on his website, and where he would splice them together into a new, fan-film version of the original called Star Wars Uncut. The result was posted to the internet at the same time the SOPA and PIPA bills were being protested. If these bills had made it into law, projects like Star Wars Uncut would be impossible without permission from Lucas himself, because current copyright law forbids derivative works. I encourage you to take a look at Star Wars Uncut and consider if it is a re-creation of George Lucas' film that steals his ideas, or instead a completely new piece of art. (On this point, it is worth noting that the vast majority of YouTube's content is illegal due to copyright infringement, but is not taken down because YouTube only removes videos at copyright owners' request. This fact appears completely unknown to most YouTube video creators.)
18. I cannot think of an election in recent history in which the leading candidates from the two major political parties (Romney and Obama) were more loathed by voters, both in their own party and the opposition's. This is the ripest time for a sensible third party presidential candidate in decades. Would that we had one.
19. As my friend Nathan Elmore discussed recently, so much of the worship music in the current American Christian consciousness focuses on the guilt of sin and the atoning power of the cross rather than the call of redeemed Christians once their sin has been expunged. I think this is reflective of the evangelical obsession with sin and checklist lifestyles that are so easy to understand and live, at the expense of what I believe is the deeper call of the Christian life: to love your neighbor and your God. As a worship leader, I hope to root out more good music that focuses not just on life after the cross, but life after the resurrection.
Image: LA Wad
I must say #18 is a bit on the dramatic side. Perhaps it is the case that both of these candidates are moderates, leaving those who support them to quietly weigh prose and cons while radicals who hate them make the majority of the noise.
ReplyDeleteOr I may just have had a gut reaction to "I cannot think of an election...where ___ were more loathed..." This equation seems to be used every election to prove how a). Negative the ads are b). Divided the country is c). Terrible the candidates are.
On a positive note, Love #15
You may be right. I did some more research and it turns out both Ford and Carter had worse approval ratings than Obama going into their re-election campaigns. Of course they both lost. Obama also has the most polarized approval rating in 40 years (http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1178/polarized-partisan-gap-in-obama-approval-historic).
DeleteI do think the GOP circus is unprecedented. I'm pretty sure the first three primaries haven't gone to three separate candidates in at least the last 4 decades. Romney seems like the obvious choice to me and yet I am continually surprised by how much Republicans can't seem to stomach him.
You're right that you a/b/c points come up every election. But I would offer that the country has become much more polarized in recent decades http://www.people-press.org/2011/05/04/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/.
Glad you liked #15. I thought about also including Reagan's "We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one."
#13 I'm still not sure how you come to the conclusions you do about "casual" links between science and the Holocaust in Ben Stein's film. To what are you referring? The last part of the film? I know that the 2 hours I spent at the Holocaust Museum's exhibit on propaganda certainly challenged me that seemingly innocent and insignificant "scientific" beliefs of Germaqn populace regarding the value of life were eventually steps to terrible results, with even churches being fooled in the name of nationalism. Bonhoeffer's biography speaks of this as well. Of course this is not to say that we condemn science. The advances that have been made in protecting the unborn in recent years are being attributed to the images and facts that science now brings to the common person.
ReplyDelete#19 I do agree totally to # 19. Both Cal Thomas and surprisingly enough, Steve Brown, mentioned recently about the common and single theme of all major evangelical pastors now is the depth of sin and the power of grace. Yet as true as that is, it is not making a dent it seems in redeeming the culture. But then you can't truly love your neighbor without at some point having to tell them the truth, which is also the call of the God we seek to know better and love more deeply.
Exposing evil and bringing the light of Christ to shine in dark places...
but I am just going on here. Needs some dialogue.
Haha as you know we've had this conversation before, and I don't think we'll ever see eye-to-eye on it. I felt Ben Stein made a link between evolutionary theory and Nazi genocide in the second half of Expelled that was incorrect and unfortunate. But I understand and respect that you didn't see it that way.
DeleteSteve Brown is one of the folks who have totally changed my view on sin's place in the Christian faith; I even linked to him in #19. I definitely believe that sin, repentance, and atonement are vital components of our faith, but I also feel the worship music I have been exposed to focuses too much on them at the expense of other components. I hope to bring balance as a worship leader.
Thanks so much for commenting!!