The Quill Pig Chronicles

Ron versus the Rest

2012-01-28T13:06:00.000-08:00

Why this anarchist thinks a vote for Ron Paul, no anarchist he, is a vote for positive good and not a vote for the lesser of two evils:

	Barack Obama	Hillary Clinton	Newt Gingrich	Mitt Romney	Rick Santorum	Ron Paul
Is the Constitution such an arcane document that only an elite cadre can be trusted to interpret it?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Is the Constitution obsolete?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Is the US government entitled to summarily kill or incarcerate anyone it deems a threat to its purposes?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Does the need for safety from terrorists trump the "unalienable rights" spoken of by the Declaration of Independence, or constitutional rights?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Are US citizens somehow "exceptional," better than people from other countries?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot put in your body?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot do in your bedroom?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot do in your bathroom?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine how your children are educated?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot post or read on the Internet?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot pass on to your survivors when you die?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine whether abortion is legal or illegal in a given state?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine whom you hire or work for, or the terms of such employment?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what businesses will survive and which will fold?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Does what you receive in exchange for your labor belong first to the government and then, only after it takes what it wants, to you?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Can the US military be trusted always to do what is right?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should Americans be virtually strip searched and have their genitals touched at airports or anywhere the federal government deems it necessary to do so?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Does the Islamic world hate us for our virtue and freedoms?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Is the nature of things such that some people have to become poorer for others to become richer?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

Eighty percent of the people in this country say we're headed the wrong way. I say we're headed to go off a cliff that gets higher every day. Five of the six candidates with a shot at the presidency in November want to adjust the speed at which we are headed for the cliff. One wants us to change direction entirely.

That's a big difference.

So Ron Paul Is a Racist: So What?

2011-12-31T03:10:00.000-08:00

The Establishment propaganda mill is all a-twitter with accusations that Ron Paul is a racist. Having all my life considered racism a serious sin, a self-righteous Yankee considering it the province of benighted Southerners, I'm not eager to cast my lot with a racist, even if that particular Texan was born in Pittsburgh. Also, as an anarchist, I'm not totally satisfied with Ron Paul's small-government libertarianism. So why isn't this charge of racism, even if true, not enough to get me to tell the Ron Paul REVOLution to go to hell?

Racism is an integral part of fallen human nature.

The original sin was the desire to be "like God," the center of the universe. May I suggest that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," every one of us is the center of his own universe, and we all tend to regard those who are more like us, or who conform to our standards, as more worthy than those who don't? Racism is but one form of prejudice, and prejudice poisons us all.

Let me show you how it plays out in my life.

My morning commute to Philadelphia is less onerous on those days when a certain black lady allows me to walk with her from the train to her workplace. On occasion she'll say something like, "I coulda did that myself." Not the textbook English I was raised to speak, that, and a sure sign of inferiority, right?

Well, no: textbook English or not, when the conversational ball gets dropped, she is almost always the one who gets it rolling again by punching one of my buttons. And her workplace is a prestigious hospital where she's a nurse practitioner, entrusted with life-or-death matters, something I can't lay claim to. Ain't nothin' to look down on there.

Or take the Filipina who works in the cubicle next to me, who can brighten my day by asking for help with work-related matters or by recommending a song she likes. Those communiqués often come in writing, complete with the kinds of errors I see in my editing work. Poor thing, it's not her fault she's Filipina: she must not be able to get that Asian brain around the complexities of English. But again, the rest of the story is that she is still editing our clients' manuscripts while I rightly got yanked out of the editorial department long ago. (And, lest you miss the irony, Asians score higher than honkies on every "intelligence test" ever devised.)

So if you're perceptive, you've seen that not only do I have to consciously fight racial prejudice, I'm also regionalist, sexist, education-ist, and language-ist. And if you were to see those two ladies, you'd also call me appearance-ist: they are both quite attractive, and you might well ask me about them the question I asked in an earlier post: would their favor mean so much to me if they were dumpy white guys?

The isms that I'm subject to are common to all of us to some degree; it's part of the sinful human nature Jesus died to save us from. So if Ron Paul is a racist, he's simply human.

Some forms of racism are more virulent than others.

I haven't delved deeply into Ron Paul's racist screed, but the line that sticks in my memory is a comment about black muggers: "They do run fast, don't they?"

That was obviously not the most intelligent statement uttered by a human being, but let's see. Most of the people on the USA Olympic track team, the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association seem to be black. Does running play a part in these activities? Is this disproportionate representation attributable only to training, or could there have been some natural resource inherent in these people on which to build?

(And lest I be accused of accusing blacks of deficient mental capabilities, let me repeat Thomas Sowell's observation that football, basketball, and jazz, areas dominated by blacks, require the ability to enact split-second decisions, unlike classical music and chess, traditionally "white" activities, which allow for slower thought processes.)

How virulent is Dr. Paul's racism? Let's answer that by comparing it with that of someone no one in the public eye accuses of racism: Barack Obama.

Mr. Obama presides over a nation in which most illegal drug-related activity is carried out by whites, yet most prisoners incarcerated for drug-related "crimes" are black. Not only are blacks more often incarcerated, their sentences tend to be longer. If that isn't virulent racism, I don't know what is. Mr. Obama has had three years to change the situation but hasn't. And none of the "non-racist" Republican presidential candidates has even mentioned the problem.

But for thirty years the "racist" Ron Paul has been calling for an end to the War on Drugs and for the release of those imprisoned for drug-related violations, including, presumably, those fast-running blacks.

Verbal assault like Dr. Paul's comment is not nothing, but given a choice between being verbally slighted by the power brokers and being stuck in a cage for years, I'll take the former, and I assume most black convicts would too.

We already live in a nation known for racism.

"American exceptionalism," an idea I hadn't heard of until a year or so ago, is essentially Hitler's master race concept couched in nationalist, not racist, terms. It is the province primarily of the right—Rick Santorum actually dropped the term in a recent debate—but when Madeline Albright spoke in the 1990s of the US as "the indispensable nation," she was a leftist saying essentially the same thing: the US is the best country in the world, and its citizens are therefore entitled to do things the rest of the world's inferior citizens aren't, like invading other countries, changing their governments, killing innocent people, driving them from their homes, and whatever else they need to do to protect and advance their interests.

I have heard both Dennis Prager (an "American exceptionalist") and an ordained Presbyterian elder say in as many words that Uncle Sam's killing of innocents overseas is justified because he is there to make life better for the local population as a whole. He targets only the bad guys, and therefore he can be excused when he kills the innocent, even though he knows innocent people will die as a result of his actions. ("Hey, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.") This about a nation both these men rightly disparage when it comes to the abortion holocaust and pornography.

How a nation that is so sexually immoral and so violent that much of the population thinks no one but the government should own guns lest there be mass bloodshed can consider itself ordained of God to police the world and kill innocent people with impunity is simply beyond me.

The US's most beloved presidents have been racists. One more won't hurt.

Everyone knows that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Washington even signed a law that made hiding fugitive slaves a federal offense. They may have been good, kind masters—my black friend, somewhat to my surprise, once volunteered that her family had been given an inheritance by just such people—but the zeal they showed for the liberty of whites somehow did not apply to blacks. At least not their blacks. At least not until after they died.

Ah, but what about Lincoln, the Great Emancipator? Remember Dion's paean in the 1960s? "He freed a lot of people, but it seems good they die young." If anyone is beloved by both left and right, it's Lincoln.

Well, Lincoln was a racist. I have shamelessly copied and pasted the following quotes from here.

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.” — Abraham Lincoln (Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858; The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145–146.)

From Lincoln's First Inaugural Address:

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

Compare those to the words of the "racist" Ron Paul:

Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist.

If this be racism, make the most of it.

Can Orthodoxy Be Dead?

2011-12-10T23:50:00.000-08:00

Our Sunday school class has been going through Ezekiel's prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar, a horrific time in the history of God's people brought about by their apostasy and idolatry. As shocking as the apostasy and idolatry were, the true horror was that the people of Jerusalem were content with the status quo: "The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way" (Jer 5:31).

Leading up to the fall of Jerusalem, the people made no pretense of worshiping YHWH, instead openly worshiping Baal (Jer 2:8) and the Queen of Heaven (Jer 7:18). So of course, God's glory left the temple and headed east (Ez 9-10), by implication to the community of exiles in Babylon. Then "the guards of the city" went through Jerusalem, beginning at the sanctuary, and killed everyone who was not grieving over the apostasy in the city.

The problem in Jerusalem was open apostasy: no one named the name of YHWH, and those who did were persecuted. My question, though, is this: is it possible to hold to all the proper theological propositions and still be apostate?

I live at a time in US history in which over 80% of those polled think our nation is "going the wrong way." By any measure, it is financially bankrupt: the official national debt is higher than could ever be repaid, the currency is losing value by the day, and as businesses fail the unemployment rate is high and still rising. "Whatever is true, ... noble, ... right, ... pure, ... lovely, ... admirable ... excellent ... praiseworthy" is scorned; the only virtue is "pushing the envelope," the only right our government recognizes is the "right" to kill the unborn.

Yet the US evangelical church waves this nation's flag proudly.

"We" are also so afraid of "our" enemies that "we" strip-search wheelchair-bound nonagenarians lest they carry weapons of mass destruction onto airplanes, to say nothing of caging sellers of raw milk and growers of industrial hemp, and killing innocent people overseas by the hundreds of thousands, all with the hearty approval of the evangelical church.

Actually, "hearty apporval" is an understatement. Dr. Michael Milton, the new chancellor and CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, has gone so far as to call the decision to reduce military force overseas immoral.

Now if anyone is as orthodox as the day is long, it's RTS Charlotte. When I audited classes there in 1996, they allowed me to ask questions in class and grading my homework, examinations, and term papers, generosity auditors are usually not given. Nothing I saw while there would testify against their desire to be true to the Bible and sensitive to the Holy Spirit.

I have the same impression of World magazine. And my local church.

In contrast, I look in the mirror and see someone whose commitment to Christ is tepid. While those I disagree with over the war and "compassionate conservatism" seem to be fervent in their desire to know and carry out God's will, I find myself making excuses for my self-indulgence. To be honest, I not only find myself wondering if God loves me, I find myself wondering if there is a God at all and even not caring whether there is or not.

Now I want the gospel to be true—without it life has no meaning. But my wanting something to be true doesn't make it true, and, more immediately, it doesn't make it apply to me. So I write the following in the context of Paul's admonition, "If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall" (1 Cor 10:12): I find myself fleeing my own idols (v 14) too slowly.

But given what has come out over the years about the lies the US government has told to its subjects¹ and, more importantly, the love the US evangelical community has lavished on those lies (see 2 Thess 2:11), I think the question needs to be asked: can idolatry prosper in the soil of even fervent theological orthodoxy?

I find one answer in the second chapter of the Revelation.

The church at Ephesus worked beyond weariness to do good deeds, persevered through hardship, could not tolerate wickedness, and pursued theological orthodoxy. Yet despite all that, they had forsaken their first love. They could hate what God hated—the practices of the Nicolaitans, whoever they were—but they didn't love what God loved (Rev 2:1-6). (Sounds like me, except without the hard work and perseverance.)

My question to Dr. Milton and the rest of the visible evangelical community is this: If you had to choose between being a US citizen (which today, as Congress is passing a law that allows the government to cage anyone they please indefinitely without trial, means someone who goes along with everything the government considers necessary) and being a Christian, which would you choose? If a ratio of dead innocents overseas to those killed on 9/11 of somewhere between a hundred and a thousand to one isn't enough, how many would be enough for you to say that you need to choose between evangelizing them and blowing them to hell? How do you know that that point is not too late to change the situation? Or does it just not matter?

My local church gives three times as much money in taxes for the war effort alone as it does to missions, and given the number of seminary professors and former missionaries in the congregation, I would expect this ratio to be on the low side for evangelical churches as a whole. Its prayers for missions and the military reflect this ratio: the former are sporadic and general, the latter consistent and specific. Is God more than three times as concerned that we worship in freedom (i.e., comfort) as he is that the Islamic world hear the gospel?

For that matter, was it really God who sent Christian soldiers to help found the Republic of Iran, in which Islam is the state religion, and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan? In both nations, confessing Christians have paid a horrible price for their "enduring freedom," much greater than the price paid by US evangelicals, which of course the latter take as a call for even more killing, so that "we don't have to fight them over here."

How about fighting Islam over here?

The most fertile ground for Islam in the United States, save perhaps for the wombs of resident Muslim women, is the prison system, the evils of which I have decried here and here. Most of those incarcerated are innocent of any activity that was considered a crime even by Christians a hundred years ago, when the church was more influential than it is today.² Yet what prominent evangelical leaders are willing to come out and say, e.g., "The Bible nowhere gives me jurisdiction over what you grow in your garden, provided it stays in your garden, nor what you consume in the privacy of your own home, nor what you voluntarily exchange with your neighbors; therefore, in the name of Jesus, while I urge my fellow citizens to exercise the utmost caution and restraint in their use of potential intoxicants, I call on the US government to end the War on Drugs and free all those convicted solely of possession and sale of substances"?

If they are worried about the spread of Islam, why do they not take a look at the prisons? Is the ratio of Christian converts to Muslim converts "good enough for government work"? Or do we just love the US government, including its barbaric prison system, more than we love God?

Just as the glory of the Lord departed from the temple of Jerusalem because of the people's open apostasy and allowed them to be slaughtered by the Iraqis of their day, it would seem the Lord removed the lampstand of the church of Ephesus despite its hard work and perseverance and turned the people over to Islam (and, even scarier, the church of Philadelphia shared the Ephesians' fate).

In the past I have taken breaks from writing this blog and reading my favorite writers when I felt I needed to make sure my focus was on Christ and his kingdom and not on attacking the libertine state. Would it be unreasonable to ask the evangelical church in the US to take a month sometime to take Uncle Sam's flag out of the sanctuary and off the flag pole, take off the flag lapel pins, and pray exclusively for Christ's kingdom and its emissaries (including military members and chaplains, but only as they are ambassadors of the gospel)?

Germany was once the hotbed of the Reformation. Before my time, its strong central government was the hope of many Protestants³ for recovery from terrible oppression by the victors of a war they were convinced had been forced on them. When Germany went to war, it was to regain what it said was land unjustly taken from it and later to fight Communism. Today Germany is the economic engine of Europe, but it is not known for a vibrant church.

Is our future the carpet bombings and fire bombings and atomic blasts we have inflicted on others, followed by an age in which the Christian church is an irrelevency, ignored and tolerated at best? Do we avoid such a future best by being "patriotic Americans" exporting democracy by bomb blast, or by single-hearted devotion to Christ and his kingdom?

--------------

1. For starters, see this review of one book and mention of others that praise Franklin Roosevelt for lying the US into World War II.

2. I find it ironic that when it comes to killing and caging innocent people, conservative Republicans side against me with the Progressive Democrats Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

3. "The [Protestant] churches did not reject National Socialism on principle. The idea of a strong authority and a close bond between throne and altar, of the kind that existed in the empire between 1871 and 1918, was in keeping with Protestant tradition. Many ... [Protestants] had reservations about the democratic Weimar Republic and sympathized with political forces – such as the German National People's Party – that idealized the past." Wikipedia entry for the Confessing Church. A bulletin insert put out by Christian History magazine (alas no longer available on line), went even further, saying that evangelical churches put swastikas and pictures of Hitler on their pulpits and the Gestapo supported Christian missions.

On Enlisting

2011-11-06T16:36:00.000-08:00

Rex, a friend of a friend, is thinking of joining the Army. He's not just thinking about it—he's taking concrete steps, including being part of a high school-level ROTC program. I asked him through our connection if he'd be willing to allow me to urge him to reconsider his decision to enlist. He said yes, but the conversation hasn't taken place yet and probably won't. What follows is my guess at how it might have gone after the initial pleasantries.

Me: Why do you want to join the Army?

Rex: I want to serve my country.

Me: How is joining the Army a better way to serve your country than, say, doing what Steve Jobs did and offering a product or service that makes people's lives better?

Rex: Our country is at war, and I want to be part of defeating our enemies. Otherwise people won't be able to enjoy the things that Steve Jobs makes.

Me: Do you think there are no iPhones or iPads in Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan?

Rex: There might be a few.

Me: Are there only a few because those you consider our enemies forbid people to own them, or is it just that the people can't afford them?

Rex: Probably a bit of both.

Me: I agree with you. I'd say that the people in power in those places consider it their duty to run others' lives. They have no qualms about taking others' property or telling them what they can and cannot do in the privacy of their own homes. So they steal the money that people might otherwise use to buy iPads, and if the people buy iPads or other Internet devices anyway, they tell them what sites they can and cannot visit. Am I right that you don't want to live in that kind of society?

Rex: Yes.

Me: So that's at least part of why you want to join the Army—so you can do what you want with your life and not have to have others telling you what to do.

Rex: That's part of it. More than that I want to protect innocent people from being killed by terrorists. I don't want bad things done to innocent people.

Me: You want to be a good neighbor by protecting innocent people.

Rex: Yes.

Me: And you're willing to put your own life on the line to do that.

Rex: Yes.

Me: Why do we have to worry about terrorists? What's in it for them? Given a choice between marrying your girlfriend and getting blown up, either as a suicide bomber or a casualty in war, wouldn't you choose to marry your girlfriend?

Rex: Well, duh, I'd rather marry my girlfriend.

Me: So why would—

Rex: Because there aren't enough girls over there. Some men have four wives, and that means some men will never get married. And they've been propagandized, told lies that it's all our fault, or Israel's fault, or our fault because it's Israel's fault, and since there's no hope that they can have a better life, they just blow themselves up to kill as many of us as they can to get revenge on us.

Me: So there's no reasoning with them. The only thing we can do is blow them up.

Rex: Not everyone. Just the terrorists.

Me: How do you make sure it's only the terrorists who get killed?

Rex: You can't. There's always going to be collateral damage.

Me: How much collateral damage is acceptable? If you're given a command to fire a mortar, and you know there will be collateral damage, how do you determine whether fulfilling the objective is worth the amount of collateral damage you'll be inflicting?

Rex: It's not up to me to decide.

Me: You just follow orders.

Rex: Right.

Me: And if you find out afterward that you or your commanding officer underestimated the extent of the collateral damage, how do you decide whether obeying was the right thing to do?

Rex: I don't set the policies. I just carry them out.

Me: So you wouldn't let it bother your conscience.

Rex: That's right.

Me: So the only moral obligation you have is to carry out your orders to the letter. The actual suffering you inflict on innocent people is none of your concern.

Rex: I trust my commanders to order me to do what's right.

Me: Do you believe that any human being is perfect?

Rex: No.

Me: So it's possible that your commanders are fallible. They can make mistakes.

Rex: Everyone is entitled to an honest mistake.

Me: What would you do if you thought your commander was making an honest mistake that would needlessly cost the lives of innocent people?

Rex: I'd—

Me: And you couldn't convince him to change his mind.

Rex: I'd obey him.

Me: I understand that. If you disobey, they'd court martial you, even if it turned out you were right, right?

Rex: Right.

Me: And you'd be in doubly deep doo-doo if you turned out to be wrong.

Rex: Right.

Me: So you'd cover your ass by obeying him.

Rex: Right. But I don't think that would ever happen.

Me: You trust the military.

Rex: Right.

Me: All the way up to the top.

Rex: Right.

Me: Including the commander-in-chief.

Rex: Right.

Me: Did you vote for him?

Rex: Um, hello, I'm not old enough to vote.

Me: OK, did you want the current president to win?

Rex: No.

Me: Why not?

Rex: Because—

Me: You're not racist, are you?

Rex: No, of course not. I didn't like his policies.

Me: Which ones?

Rex: Well,—

Me: Scratch the question. Do you like his policies now?

Rex: He's OK.

Me: So really it didn't matter that the guy you didn't want to win won.

Rex: Right.

Me: And you like him enough that you're willing to have him be your commander-in-chief.

Rex: Right.

Me: Did you have doubts about his honesty during the campaign?

Rex: Some. I also thought he was incompetent.

Me: But he's more competent and honest than you thought.

Rex: Right. Besides, I won't take my commission until after the next election, so he probably won't be in office.

Me: And the guy who replaces him will be better.

Rex: I hope so.

Me: The same electorate as last time will elect someone better next time.

Rex: They've seen what a —

Me: This is your commander-in-chief you're talking about.

Rex: They'll do better next time.

Me: You might be right, but it's pretty much the same people voting, and I thought they thought they were doing better last time. Tell me: What would it take to convince you that your superiors were giving you orders that you would regret obeying?

Rex: I don't know. I would have to think it through at the time.

Me: What criteria would you use to decide?

Rex: Well, if it didn't feel right—

Me: Hasn't the army been teaching you to ignore your feelings?

Rex: OK, fine, I'd think it through.

Me: Would you have time to think it through?

Rex: If I did, I'd think it through. If I didn't, I'd obey. What's wrong with that?

Me: May I suggest that if you're on the battlefield you won't have time to develop the criteria you need to think it through, then think it through? That you need to think it through now, before you enlist?

Rex: Well, I've thought enough, and I'm convinced that joining the army is the right thing to do.

Me: You're convinced that you're fighting on the right side.

Rex: Yes.

Me: Uncle Sam is the good guy.

Rex: Yes.

Me: What do you think of the bailouts?

Rex: The banks were too big to fail. If the government hadn't intervened, too many people would have lost their jobs.

Me: People are still losing their jobs, right?

Rex: Right.

Me: So did the bailouts work?

Rex: They worked well enough.

Me: How many more jobs have to be lost before you would say that they didn't work well enough?

Rex: I don't know.

Me: But you still trust the president you didn't want to see win enough to go to, say, Uganda or Tanzania or Iran to kill women and children because he orders you to.

Rex: Like I said, I don't think he'll be in office when I'm commissioned.

Me: So you trust the same electorate that elected him to elect a better commander-in-chief next time.

Rex: Aren't you listening? It's not the same electorate. They'll know better next time.

Me: Will you still enlist if he gets re-elected?

Rex: Yes.

Me: He's not the best there could be, but he's good enough.

Rex: Yes.

Me: So it doesn't matter who's in the White House. If he tells you to go to Tanzania or Iran to kill women and children, you'll go.

Rex: I won't be going to kill women and children. I'll be going to fight terrorism.

Me: What reason is there to believe that innocent women and children won't be killed by the action you'll be part of?

Rex: Hey, stuff happens in war. The terrorists target innocent people. We don't target them.

Me: But you know they'll die.

Rex: Stuff happens.

Me: If the Chinese decided some guy was a threat to them and killed him while he was in the US, and your girlfriend were killed in the blast, and they knew when they fired that she would be killed, would you say, "That's OK; they didn't target her; stuff happens"?

Rex: No. They shouldn't be killing people on American soil.

Me: But if our government considers someone a threat, it's OK for US troops to kill him, even if he's in another country, and even if they know they will kill innocent people in the process.

Rex: Here's the difference: The Chinese government is bad. Our government is good.

Me: Do you believe that selling raw milk is evil?

Rex: No.

Me: Our government does. They are sending agents these days to jail people who sell raw milk.

Rex: Well, no government is perfect.

Me: What would the government have to do before you would be convinced that it is not good?

Rex: It would have to do bad things to innocent people.

Me: Jailing people for selling raw milk doesn't fit that definition?

Rex: No.

Me: How about arresting people for being Christian?

Rex: Maybe.

Me: Your girlfriend is very active in her church, so she might be one to go to jail if they start arresting Christians, and all you can say is "Maybe"?

Rex: Well, if she went to jail, that would convince me.

Me: Braveheart would be proud of you. Do you know what her church's stands on abortion and homosexuality are?

Rex: Yes.

Me: Do you know what our current president's stand—

Rex: He won't be president when I'm commissioned.

Me: And his replacement—

Rex: —will be better.

Me: And if he's re-elected,—

Rex: It won't matter. Look, I've had enough of this. Goodbye, sir.

Who Would Profit from Another Terrorist Attack?

2011-11-01T19:52:00.000-07:00

US citizens are being rendered destitute by the War on Terror, directly through the increase in debt and the consequent increase in taxes needed to pay the interest on that debt, and indirectly through "quantitative easing," the debasement of the currency that makes the accumulation of capital impossible. More importantly, our liberties are being revoked by agencies that consuder us guilty of terrorism until we are able to prove our innocence by passing searches that violate standards of decency considered sacrosanct all over the world until a decade ago.

When asked why they tolerate being so abused by their own government, most USians patiently explain that they are willing to give their great-grandchildren's inheritance to those who would literally strip them of their dignity so that no terrorist will attack them. Asked "Why would anyone want to attack you?" they wil rattle off the conventional wisdom—they hate us because we are good, they hate us because we're evil, they want Islam to take over the world, they want to screw beautiful virgins forever, etc.

But there is still another question to be asked: What would the jihadists gain from another attack? Or even better, who would benefit from another attack?

Before getting to the serious stuff, let's dispose of the virgins-in-paradise argument. I'm a guy, and I know how guys think. The old expression "A bird in hand is better than two in the bush" didn't come from nowhere. Not many guys who've got a chance at getting and keeping women in this life are going to give that prospect up for the words in a book.

How do I know? How hard is it for even the most devout Christian to "lend to anyone who asks without asking for return"? How many of us really forgive unconditionally? How many of us really "do not fear for [the LORD] is [our] God"? Or look at the divorce rate among Christians: do we really bear with each other's faults? We can sing as loudly as we want about leaning on the everlasting arms and standing on the promises of God, but actually doing it doesn't come easily. Unless the Holy Spirit is really a Muslim and has more power than the Christian version, suicide bombers are going to be few and far between enough that we've got other things to worry about.

Now polygamy in the Muslim world does present the real problem that there are simply not enough females to go around, which means that there is a significant bachelor herd for whom death might be preferable to life without a mate. I know of no possible solution to that problem but preemptively killing all Muslim males unlikely to marry, and I don't think God would honor that. But I would also like to suggest that killing women and (female) children as "collateral damage" is just as certainly no solution.

However, the question is moot: recruiting terrorists by appealing to the virgin argument has been spectacularly unsuccessful. The FBI has run half a dozen or more domestic sting operations designed to—well, designed primarily to keep USians afraid of terrorism, but ostensibly to catch those with terrorist leanings—and while the prospect of screwing virgins forever doesn't seem to get much traction, that being the reward for all Muslim men, anger against the killing of innocent people overseas does. If the best way to encourage the supply of potential terrorists is to keep killing innocent people in the Ummah, one would think that the best way to prevent terrorism would be to stop killing people overseas; but that alternative is, alas, off the table.

So, if a terrorist martyr doesn't increase his supply of virgins, what would he gain by a suicide mass murder?

To start the answer, what did the 9/11 suicide murderers accomplish? If they could look back at the fruit of their labors over the last decade, what benefits would they say they accrued to their cause?

Is the Ummah a better place because of the 9/11 attacks? Jihadists killed three thousand USians, true—if you believe the official version, which I don't, but let's go with it here—but a hundred times as many innocent Muslims have since died, more than that have been maimed, and millions have been displaced. One could argue that this is a short-term sacrifice that might pay off for Islamism in the long term, as evidenced by the bankruptcy now taking down every government in the West, but unless you're going to write off as totally irrational the community that gave us the number zero, algebra, the compass, the mattress, coffee, and the linguistic terms our seminary students to this day use to learn Hebrew grammar, you've got to predict that influential Muslims will seriously consider whether the same goal could be achieved with less spilling of innocent blood. By that measure, another attack would do the cause of jihad no good, and so one would expect the jihadists to try to destroy the US in some other way.

So if the cause of jihad would not benefit from another terror attack, who would? Answer: No one would benefit from another attack as much as the US government.

As Bob Dylan and Joe McDonald sang in the 1960s (to the disgust of the evangelical community, as I remember), there is plenty of good money to be made by the masters of war for supplying the army with the tools of the trade. In fact, in a twist worthy of Mel Brooks' producers, there is more money to be made from fighting wars than from winning them, a fact that cannot have escaped those intelligent enough to market guns and bombs, to say nothing of night-vision goggles, or for that matter the CEOs of fast-food companies that serve large military installations overseas. After World War II, government spending was cut 60%: soldiers and manufacturers alike could no longer rely on income the government had taxed away from people who had earned it; instead, they had to offer goods and services that private individuals would voluntarily part with their money to obtain, a significantly more difficult task. They learned their lesson well, and the mistake has not been repeated: the Vietnam war went on long after the government knew the effort was futile, US troops stayed in the Ummah after the cease-fire that ended Desert Storm, and, of course, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have promised their corporate sponsors that the war that presently stretches from Uganda to Afghanistan will not end in their lifetimes.

What of those called upon to fight, tired as they must be of being away from their families and the risk to life and limb?

To their credit, they are putting their money where their mouths are, giving more money to Ron Paul, who promises to get them out of the war zone forthwith, than to any other candidate, and twice as much as to all other Republican candidates combined.

But in the end, they are expendable. Why should the government waste money on combat pay for people might be killed, and whose deaths in great numbers could begin a backlash against the system? Far better to leave as many of them as possible at home or simply discharge them, have only enough boots on the ground to do what drones cannot do, and let the drones take the risks. Again, if a soldier dies, there are human consequences. If a drone is shot down, according to the Keynsian economics that guide the establishment, that is a good thing, because it brings about government spending that employs people to build a replacement. Drones in the end are cheaper than foot soldiers, and managing the needed production process can be extremely profitable for the corporations that manufacture them.

In short, the next terrorist attack will see an increase in drone warfare, with only as much increase in troop involvement needed to sell the program: fewer US military combat deaths, but an increase in money spent on whizbangs, a boon for the military-industrial complex.

It will also be a boon for those who believe in strong central and even global government. Such an attack will be followed by calls for more checkpoints, chatdowns, patdowns, strip scanners, and drones flying overhead. All will reduce our privacy as they augment the bank accounts of the corporate elite and the power position of the New World Order.

The implication of this for Christian mission is obvious. Unless the New World Order is indeed God's way of fulfilling the Great Commission, it is the reaction to the attack, not the attack itself, that will make fulfilling the Great Commission more difficult. Since that reaction will simply be an extension of the reaction we already see to past attacks, isn't it time we asked if the reactions to 9/11 that the evangelical community has tolerated and even celebrated might be, far from our legitimate means of self-defense, the Devil's way of obstructing the fulfillment of the Great Commission?

How Archy Handles Heinous Crime III: Default

2011-10-15T14:23:00.000-07:00

This week the US power establishment revealed a new tool for dealing with heinous crimes that initially had me shaking my head but eventually asking why this should be a surprise to anyone.

Any small-government conservative or libertarian will tell you that government is necessary to protect people and property: protection of people and property is government's primary responsibility, and government, and only government, can do it. But now one polity has walked away from this responsibility, and there's every reason to believe that others will soon follow.

It seems that the city of Topeka, Kansas, no longer has enough money to prosecute perpetrators of domestic violence. So the city fathers have came up with a great idea for solving the problem: they repealed the statutes outlawing domestic violence. No solution, no problem!

The "good news" is that domestic violence is illegal in that county, so perps can still be prosecuted under county statutes. But the bad news there is that the county doesn't have the money to prosecute them either.

I'm not a good lateral thinker, so I can only come up with two ways domestic violence will be handled in Topeka, absent the resources to prosecute: either those accused will be put in jail and wait forever for trial, or they will simply be released. In the former case, simple accusation will be the equivalent of conviction; if you don't like someone, you can come up with a believable accusation of domestic violence, and he might never get out of jail, depending on what the powers that be deem expedient. In the latter case, even the most obviously guilty perps will be set free to continue their depredations. Either way, it's not anarchy, but it certainly is chaos.

The irony, of course, is that while the prosecutors and judges won't prosecute domestic violence cases, they will be plenty busy prosecuting those whose activities, according to the Bible, are nobody's business but their own: druggies (including purveyors of raw milk?), prostitutes and their customers, and owners of "assault weapons," to say nothing of people who exceed posted speed limits on empty roads and creep through empty intersections without stopping at stop signs. And the schools, libraries, parks, counseling centers, and other distributors of "entitlements" will continue apace.

As the currency is inflated (by our current archy), people's buying power diminishes, which means they patronize fewer businesses, which in turn hire fewer employees, who then patronize fewer businesses, and the cycle continues. All this results in reduced tax revenues, which means that government has to cut back on its "services." The government of Topeka is not facing the need to redefine essential government functions alone.

The fundamental question for any society is, "Who gets what at what expense to whom?" In a free society, the answer is, "You can have anything you want and can persuade someone to give you voluntarily." The answer in any political system is, "You get what those in power consider expedient to give you, and you give them whatever they consider expedient to extract"; that is, might makes right, or at least it makes policy, and justice is incidental.

So which services get cut, as with which services are provided, is always a product of political expediency. If more voters benefit from schools than from prosecuting a perpetrators of violence, law enforcement will be cut and the money will go to the schools.

As the economy continues its collapse, the Topeka syndrome will spread, and with it government at all level becoming increasingly chaotic, showing itself to be Bastiat's "fiction by which everyone seeks to live at everyone else's expense" keeping itself in power by buying votes through promises to dispense entitlements, and less an agency decent people look to for the maintenance of order.

How Archy Deals with Heinous Crimes II: Summary Execution

2011-10-11T17:58:00.000-07:00

The recent killings of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki—I will use the government versions of both events here, since I want to hit Uncle Sam's best pitch and these narratives present him in the best possible light—show us that government by its very nature cannot act morally, should not be expected to, and has every incentive not to.

Having been overseas for twenty years until weeks before, I had only recently heard of Osama bin Laden on 9/11, but I had heard enough to be fully on board with the pastor of the church I attended the following Sunday when he said that if Osama bin Laden were to come to his office to hear about Jesus, he would wrestle him to the floor and call the authorities. (I think he said he would present the Gospel first and wrestle him to the floor afterwards no matter how Osama responded.) That is, "everyone knew" he was a "bad guy," and we all assumed that he was guilty of 9/11.

We didn't know, or at least I didn't, that he had been a CIA operative in the 1980s, though I should have, since there had been rumblings from feminists in the 1990s that the Taliban, who had been the "heroic mujahedin" we all got behind as they fought against the Soviets in the 1980s, were mistreating women, so I did "know" that the Taliban was up to no good. Taliban, Osama, let's kill them all, I thought. And we did.

That Osama and the Taliban were bad guys and in cahoots was front-page news. The back-page news was that after 9/11 the Taliban offered to hand Osama over to a neutral party for trial, but the Bush regime didn't agree to the deal. As I'll explain, a trial by a neutral party would have required a lot of work, but it could have saved countless lives ("We don't do body counts," at least not on gooks).

As I explain here and here, the archist view of a trial pits a defendant, someone either rich enough to afford a lawyer who can get him off whether he's innocent or not or someone who is stuck in jail and therefore unable to gather exculpatory evidence, against a state that pays the judge, the prosecutor, and the policemen whose testimony carries more weight than that of mere mundanes; the system has a vested interest in finding the defenddant guilty, certainly more than in rendering a just verdict based on truth as can best be established. If the Taliban are decent human beings, would they want to surrender a long-time comrade in arms to such a system? Surely their reluctance to do so is no proof that they are brutes.

The alternative would have been for the Taliban and the Bushies to sit down and draw up a list of people who could give both sides a fair hearing. Surely out of eight billion people on this planet there is someone who has a reputation for fairness, someone who would be strong enough to stand up to the bullying that both sides would engage in without becoming a bully in turn. Perhaps it would have been a Muslim leatherworker in Bosnia and his Orthodox wife. Or three Vietnamese Buddhist monks who had suffered under both the US puppet regime and the Communists. Or the Afghan woman whose picture was the most memorable National Geographic cover of all time? Or Vin Suprinowicz's Omani judge? How long would it have taken to find one person or a group of persons that both sides could trust?

This process would probably have taken months, but there's reason to believe that had justice, rather than victory, been the most important goal for even one side, the result would have been better than the senseless mayhem that came instead.

Am I the only one who thinks it's ironic that after all the billions of dollars that were spent invading Afghanistan, a financial hemorrhage that will not been stanched for the foreseeable future, it was a surgical operation costing a couple of million dollars at most that eventually took Osama out? If "we" had been willing to wait a while, this or a similar operation could have taken place without the billions of lost dollars, to say nothing of the thousands of deaths and millions of other casualties.

All this assumes that Osama was indeed guilty. What if he wasn't? Summary execution, the ethic of "shoot first and ask questions later," makes those questions irrelevant, doesn't it? Only agents of archy, who are almost universally granted impunity by their bosses, would consider this a good system.

Then there's the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki. At least one Muslim jihadist wonders if he was a CIA asset: “Al-Awlaki is not known for having participated in any ‘jihad’ whatsoever and this is what has to be highlighted. For he calls to it and hypes up his audiences with it, yet the question has to be asked: upon which battlefield has he fought?” That he was an incindiary speaker and an enemy of Uncle Sam seems to be well established. But wasn't anti-government speech precisely what the First Amendment is supposed to protect?

"Mission creep" is at work again. First it's OK to summarily kill someone in the act of killing another. Then it's OK to kill the guy certain people in the government say killed an innocent person. Then it's OK to kill the guy who was driving the getaway car. Then it's OK to kill the guy who bought the getaway car. Now it's OK to shoot the guy who convinced the third guy to buy the getaway car.

All this without trial.

We now have a KGB-style system in which anonymous government agents use evidence they share with no one to dispatch more anonymous agents to kill or imprison whomever they choose, all with impunity, all with no legislative or judicial supervision. All any of us needs to do is get on the hit list, and we're defenseless. Romans 13 says, "If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear," but remember that the author of those words had been stoned and scourged, and was eventually executed, by the very authorities he described.

Given archy, how could it be different? Jobs that involve the exercise of power with impunity will draw workers who enjoy exercising power with impunity. And self-preservation being a basic human characteristic, these workers once hired will be most interested in preserving their positions of power and privilege. Yesterday they were content with responding forcibly to those who either initiated force or whose threat to use force was credible. Now they are killing those whose words they find threatening.

(Yes, I realize the the legal definition of assault includes credible verbal threats. Verbal threats need to be taken seriously, but I would suggest that the way to take them seriously is to see if they are symptoms of a legitimate grievance, questions neither "law enforcement officers" nor government diplomats seem to be interested in asking.)

If you're happy with the way things are, archy is the way to bring about more of the same. If not, you need to question your basic assumptions, chief of which is the assumption that our interests are served by an elite that can initiate force with impunity.

This Is My Country

2011-10-10T17:23:00.001-07:00

I'm part of a men's group that is going through an excellent video series, "Men's Fraternity: The Quest for Authentic Manhood." Years before I posted my lament that so few men are involved in church activities, Robert Lewis, a pastor in Arkansas, was running a program to help men plan to grow up. His point is that we need to understand what social forces have shaped us and our view of manhood, how the people and events in our lives have further shaped us, and who we really are, in what unique ways God has made us. Then we need to take what we've learned to plan our futures as best we can.

This is an excellent series, and I highly recommend it to any man, period. If nothing else, it's a good opportunity to get to know other men and talk about things other than sports and trivia. Nothing that follows should be taken as denigrating the value of the series, but Brother Robert unthinkingly gave approving voice to an attitude that is killing the church in our nation.

When describing "noble moments" that shaped him, Brother Robert told how every Veterans Day his father would place flags on the graves of fallen soldiers. He knew who all the veterans were, and (I think) he would place flags on their graves whether they died in combat or otherwise.

So far so good: those who are convinced that our nation owes its very existence to the sacrifices of our military personnel do well to honor the dead as a testimony to the living.

It was the next line (as best I can reconstruct it) that prompted this post: "I went to college during the height of the Vietnam War, and even though there was a lot of antiwar sentiment, because of my father's example, I still had a lot of love for my country."

Notice the presumptions: Those who love their country support its wars; those who oppose any war do not love their country. Though most evangelicals seem to believe these presumptions, their truth is open to question.

Let's begin with the Vietnam war itself. It began in the 1950s when Vietnamese nationalists rebelled against their French colonial rulers. The US refused to aid the Vietnamese, instead aiding the French until the French pulled out. The US then propped up a puppet government in the name of fighting communism.

In 1964 the US government reported that a US military vessel had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. Using the precedents of the Maine and the Lusitania, vested interests were able to get Congress and the media behind an undeclared war that eventually killed almost sixty thousand US military personnel and a million Vietnamese.

Brother Robert was not alone in being convinced that the war was necessary to fight communism and that if Vietnam went communist, so would all of Southeast Asia, including Thailand and possibly India, all falling like dominoes. Again, this was not an unreasonable fear, but my point is that those who considered that fear unfounded could well have given evidence that they loved their country.

That communism is horrible is not open to question. But one might ask whether conscripting soldiers to fight in a "conflict"—the government never called it a war at the time—was the best way to fight communism. That so many Vietnamese were willing to die in the fight to drive the US out of Vietnam tells me that our government's efforts to make friends were not entirely successful. And while many of those in the antiwar movement did not come off as particularly noble or self-sacrificing people, one needs to judge the pro-war faction by the same standard. And in this case, they come up woefully short.

It turns out that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was not what the government told the people it was and that the Secretary of Defense "perpetuated the war long after he realized it was futile"—that is, the US government sent soldiers to kill and die after they knew the war could not be won: those US military personnel and Vietnamese who died from then on died for nothing. They were, quite simply, murdered by the US government. And after the US withdrew, only those countries the war had spread to, Cambodia and Laos, went communist.

So unless loving one's country includes cheering on a government that lies to its subjects and conscripts them to fight in futile wars, it is at least possible to love one's country while opposing its wars. Is this the love Jesus wants us to have for our neighbors?

What does it mean to love one's country?

Using Brother Robert's implied definition, one's love for one's country is best measured by one's agreement with government policy. By that definition I do not love my country.

But if my country is my family, my neighbors, and my church, then my love for my country can be measured by how well I serve those people. I love my country by being faithful to my wife and by raising my children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I love my country to the degree I put in an honest day's work and show appreciation for for my boss's honest efforts to make his clients happy. I love my country by paying the rent on time and treating my landlord's house well. I love my country being courteous to the staff and other customers in my local supermarket. I love my country by volunteering on various committees at church. I even love my country by turning the other cheek to my enemies and faithfully representing Jesus to them.

I don't have any conscience about not loving my country by Brother Robert's defintion, but it does bother me that I have fallen short of my own standards.

What is one's country? Who are our countrymen?

Brother Robert seems to define a country as a political unit and countrymen as the people subject to one government: to criticize a man's government is therefore to criticize the man himself, a good way to get the likes of Merle Haggard into a fighting mood.

By that definition of a country our current president is my countryman. But if the Bible is true, my true country is the kingdom of God, and he is not my countryman. He is a neighbor I am to love until I am taken home, but until he surrenders to Jesus, he is not my countryman.

Maybe Brother Robert was really using my definition of country. Maybe when he saw the antiwar protests, he realized that the government was fully as evil in its way as the fornicating dopers were in theirs and felt homesick for the kingdom of Jesus. The rest of his message is so good it might be best to assume so.

How Archy Handles Heinous Crimes I: The Plea Bargain

2011-10-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Several years ago, the police entered the office of a young professor at a reputable university and arrested him for an online crime. They took the professor away, booked him, and then offered him a deal: admit guilt and get off easy. The professor said to the few people to whom he was permitted to speak that this was crazy because he was innocent. His lawyer warned him: fight this and you could get life; admit guilt and you will get a suspended sentence. He took the deal. It was a trick. Now he languishes in jail, his life wrecked as far into the future as he can see.
. . . Trials in federal criminal cases are rare. Nine in ten cases are settled in pleas like the above case. Only 3 percent of the cases go to trial. Among those that go to trial, the defendant wins once in every 212 times.

Lew Rockwell, "The Police State Abolishes the Trial"

Even "small government" conservatives and libertarians agree with "big government" types that the state is needed to deal with heinous crime. They would like to see the state limited to dealing with crime, but they see no way to deal with crime apart from the state. I've taken a shot at trying to answer this challenge here, but I'd like to try again, this time by arguing that the state cannot be limited to a crime-fighting agency and that it can deal with crime only in ways that are inherently sinful.

First, the state cannot be limited to a crime-fighting outfit. No state in recorded history has ever limited itself to fighting crime; this is because the dynamics inherent in a state work against it ever doing so.

The first such dynamic is "mission creep." If government is needed to pursue, arrest, try, and punish criminals, any activity that helps it do so is therefore part of the job description. For example, if the powers that be are convinced that poverty leads to crime, fighting poverty becomes by definition part of the fight against crime. (And, right or wrong, those whose will becomes law are by definition the powers that be.) And if subsidizing a pharmaceutical corporation, or feeding school children three free meals a day, or building a stadium for a major league sports franchise will fight poverty, these activities also become the proper province of government. Which, of course, is where we are today.

By what criteria does anyone decide what other activities are and are not legitimate for governments to undertake? I can think of no criteria that would allow the creation of a state to "deal with heinous crime" that are not elastic enough to eventually subsidize hobbies for millionaires. And that assumes that those in power are not stretching the definition under the guise of "doing the job more effectively" to serve their own ends. Only the anarchist principle that bodies and property are sacred is stretch-proof.

This leads us to the second dynamic, the impunity of self-interested government agents. Self-interest is, of course, a universal human trait; this is why Jesus tells us that our ultimate interest is to be willing to give up the whole world and to look to the condition of our souls (Matt 16:26).

But government is by nature the organization in which (I would say the fiction by which) some people are able to do with impunity what others would be considered criminals for doing. These actions always begin with tax collection, but they eventually include intrusion into people's private lives and have gone so far in this country as to include caging people who sell raw milk. As I detail here, we all want to push the limits of actions permitted to us. This is "mission creep" with no pretense of benefit for anyone but government agents and their cronies.

There is also a theological reason that even a state devoted only to fighting crime is illegitimate: trying to limit government to fighting crime turns on its head Jesus' dictum that he who would be a faithful steward over much must first prove himself faithful over little things. People whose bodies and property are not secure live in chaos and cannot plan for the future, so protection of life and property is perhaps the most basic and important function performed by any society. Before government can be trusted to take care of such important things, it needs to prove itself faithful in the less-important things. (Like what? Delivering the mail? Educating children? Running recreational programs?) But "small government" types don't want the government messing in the small things, in part because they know that government ruins everything it touches.

So if government can't be trusted in the little things, it shouldn't be given charge over important things like keeping the peace. And if it shouldn't be given charge over the little things, it will never earn the right to steward the big things.

Let's assume for the moment that it is permissible to delegate peacekeeping to government and see how morally it acts. Given the impunity with which government agents can act, I guess that the quote that begins this post describes an occurrence that is more common than we know.

I would further suggest that even if government starts out as a legitimate peacekeeper, it can't be trusted to do so morally for long.

Even if cases like that in the quote are tolerably rare, the last sentence should give you pause: can it be that the government justly condemns over 99.5% of its accused? With all the unknowns that go into criminal investigations, can they really get it right that often? What sports team wins 99.5% of the time, season after season? What oncologist has a 99.5% cure rate? Or could it be that a prosecutor and judge who would pull a bait-and-switch on someone willing to cooperate with the system would bend the rules even further against someone who fought the charges?

If we go ahead and assume that this case was an exception, and that plea bargaining is otherwise done in good faith, how good is that faith?

Let's forget for now that the Bible nowhere commands or authorizes prison as a response to criminal behavior and assume that God prescribes thirty years in jail for the "online crime" the criminal in the example committed. By offering a lesser sentence isn't the system committing an offense against God and an injustice against whoever is supposed to benefit from the convict's incarceration? By what authority is clemency even offered? And if the system is exceeding its authority by offering clemency, how could anarchy do worse than offending God and committing injustice against innocent people? (Remember: the plea bargain takes into account only the accused's willingness to work with the system, not the nature of the crime or the accused's character.)

If clemency is a sin, then, in order to make the plea bargain just the system can pile on charges to be bargained away, as we know happens. This "online crime," for example, could have transmission across state lines, or use of a motor vehicle, or whatever a creative prosecutor can come up with, each with additional penalties, piled on it; then if the accused takes the plea bargain, he gets the thirty years God prescribes. So far so good. How, though, does anyone with a conscience make his living accusing people of crimes he knows they're innocent of or for the same crime more than once? Isn't that a form of lying, even if the hope is that by piling on false charges he can force the accused to agree to the plea bargain and only serve the time God prescribes for the true charges? Isn't that a classic case of using the end to justify the means?

And, of course, our accused might obey his human nature to fight for his survival. If he does, it's 99.5% sure that he will be sentenced to more than God's prescribed thirty years. Again here, God is offended by the government's excess zeal (cf. Num 20:8-11): in this case, the convict is treated unjustly. (And, of course, if he is innocent of any of the charges against him, he suffers as an innocent man.) Again: how could anarchy possibly be worse?

If offering plea bargains is inherently immoral, then not offering plea bargains should fix the problem. But then we come up against the problem plea bargains were instituted to solve: spurious defenses.
Why should someone of whose guilt the evidence leaves no reasonable doubt be put on trial? Isn't that a waste of time and money? But who is to decide whether the evidence leaves enough doubt to make a trial worthwhile? Wouldn't the process to decide whether the evidence requires a trial be itself in effect a trial? If a trial is necessary, rather than putting the evidence on trial, wouldn't it make more sense to put the accused on trial? Now we're back where we started.

It would seem that some trial is inevitable. But even if a trial isn't inevitable, what does an "obviously guilty" accused have to lose by calling for a trial? It delays whatever penalty he is likely to receive, and there is the off-chance that he'll be acquitted. And if he's convicted, he can appeal almost indefinitely, thus tying up the system and limiting its ability to deal with cases where the accused's guilt is not as readily established. There is injustice either way.

Anarchy avoids all three unsolvable problems of government peacekeeping. Any agency that would stay in business keeping the peace would first have to convince prospective customers that it could do so by earning their trust in smaller matters, perhaps through some form of health or property insurance. People who wanted to defend themselves would be free to do so, benefiting from their own good decisions and suffering for the bad ones. Only those agencies who were able to convince their customers over the long term that they were able to protect those customers' interests would stay in business.

Instead of trials where the practically omnipotent state squares off against a hapless defendant (who might, of course, be guilty of some violence; the salient point here is that he is in no position to defend himself), the heuristic process would take place in an arbitration session, where the protection agency would be trying to keep its good reputation for treating well not only its customers but the other agencies it interacts with. The accused also would be concerned about his reputation: if his protection agency terminates his contract because protecting him is no longer profitable, he will have a harder time replacing it than fulfilling its stipulations for further coverage. The same also goes for the plaintiff, the accused's victim.

The agents of erstwhile protection agencies would thus serve their long-term self-interest by serving, not dominating, their customers. No system is perfect, so the mentality that says, "I can get away with X, so I'll see if I can get away with X + 1" will never disappear completely, but in anarchy it will only work in the short term, never in the long term, as it does so commonly in government systems.

And the "mission creep" of any agency will be limited to those areas in which it is able to prove competence to the satisfaction of its customers: they may be able to do X quite well, but if they fail at X + 1, it will either close that operation or risk losing their advantage in X.

As the old song says, "If ya wanna be gre-e-e-eat in God's kingdom, learn to be the servant of all." State agents don't serve, so the state cannot do a great job of dealing with heinous crime. Anarchism is simply the servant principle applied to all areas of life.

Never Forget!

2011-09-11T09:55:00.000-07:00

Never forget that all public statements by "jihadists," from Osama bin Laden to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to the shoe bomber to the Times Square Bomber have indicated that their target is the US government, not innocent civilians.

Never forget that today's "jihadists" are Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters," creatures of the CIA and Charlie Wilson's War, and that Saddam Hussein “gassed the Kurds” with materiel given by the US for the war he waged against Iran.

Never forget that the 150,000 “weapons inspector” Rush Limbaugh couldn’t wait to send into Iraq never found any weapons of mass destruction, and the most expensive and intrusive intelligence apparatus in the history of the world has never found them.

Never forget that the 9/11 attacks were against the US corporate-government alliance, not against Joe Sixpack. The Twin Towers were government entities, as are the Pentagon, the White House, and the Capitol.

Never forget that the innocent who died on 9/11 were the same kind of collateral damage to the jihadists that as that produced by the US in the carpet bombings of Germany and the firebombings and nuclear bombings of Japan, Iraq in the 1990s, and in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya since 9/11.

Never forget that the toll of innocents killed by the US military after 9/11 has been between ten and a hundred (or more) that on 9/11, and the victims of the internecine fighting made possible by the invasion are an order of magnitude even greater.

Never forget that in the land of the free it is illegal to possess more than $10,000 in cash and in the home of the brave toddlers and ninety-somethings in wheelchairs are frisked for fear they would carry bombs onto airplanes.

Never forget the lies told about Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman.

Never forget to “follow the money”: the beneficiaries of the post-9/11 regime were those who in the late 1990s were calling for “a new Pearl Harbor” that would enable them to carry out their plans for the new world order.

Never forget that Osama never boasted about 9/11; in fact, he condemned it. Yet he was tried in the media, not a court of law, and executed in an operation that the US government originally lied about.

Never forget that money that could have been used to create jobs and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure has been sent overseas to finance these invasions.

Never forget that a "magician's" most important tactic is to divert his audience's attention from what is really going on to superfluity.

Never forget that Jesus said we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and pray for those who mistreat us. This means ragheads and sand niggers.

And, Mr. Quill Pig, it also means Republicans and Democrats, liberals and even conservatives.

About Those Libertarian Islands

2011-08-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

"America: Love it or leave it!"

As I've said before, I would love to live in America; my problem is that unless America is dirt, the US isn't America. But of course, those who take offense at my rants against their government mean simply, "The way things are is good enough for me. If you don't like it, shut up, and if you don't like that, go somewhere else."

That's fair enough, I suppose, but seriously, where would I go? Uncle Sam has his armed forces in 150 or more countries and would speedily deploy them anywhere else he cared to, with a clear conscience and essentially (for the moment, anyway) no financial constraints. Can I really expect to get away from him anywhere on this planet?

"Would you really want to go anywhere Uncle Sam isn't? Isn't everywhere else worse?"

That's an overly broad question. With enough money and depending on your definition of living well, one can live well anywhere on earth, probably even including hellholes like Myanmar and Burkina Faso. If living well can mean having Kim Jong-Il as your best friend and fancy booze at dinner, it's probably not impossible to live well even in North Korea. But that's not America.

Of places that are now reasonably well off and are likely to survive Uncle Sam's death throes—which, for better or, more likely, worse, are now imminent—Mexico and Argentina are two places I know of to which those with the resources to expatriate have done so with no lowering of their standard of living. There's something to be said for moving from a situation that you know will get worse to one that's not as good but likely stable.

For those not afraid of risk, it may well be that what today are much less free and so poorer countries will be better places to live after the collapse of the US. Foreign aid has often been described as money taxed from the poor and middle-class in the US and given to the rich overseas, and one might be forgiven for thinking that after Uncle Sam gets his come-uppance those who are now oppressing their subjects at our expense will receive in this life some of what their wickedness deserves, and that their victims today might even pity those in the US tomorrow.

Meantime, however, one is moving from a tolerable but worsening situation to a bad situation that might or might not improve. And, as those who bought one of the islands ruled by the king of Nauru only to be evicted by the Royal Nauru Navy found out, even tin-pot dictators can overwhelm a small colony, and they will do so even if the colonists ask only to be left alone.

Some of those unable or unwilling to expatriate, like the New Hampshire Free State Project, have been banding together with like-minded people with the goal of forming an electoral majority and seceding to some degree. I see two problems here: One is that the more a place is one in which many people can actually make any kind of a living, the harder it will be to garner the electoral majority to effect worthwhile change. Another is that, as anyone from Georgia or the Shenandoah Valley could have told you until recently, Uncle Sam doesn't take kindly to people excusing themselves from his rule, as shown by his deification of the president responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of those who wanted only that.

It's safe to say that if the most desolate ward in the poorest county in the least important state in the union voted to secede, Uncle Sam would be there in full force to burn their women and children, as he did the Branch Davidians.

So if there's no place to go and no place to stay, what do you do?

Some entrepreneurial types have decided to go someplace of which it could be said that "there's no there there" and build one: man-made islands in international waters. Will it succeed? I don't know. But we can make some reasonable guesses.

The most important questions are the basic ones: Can the islands endure the tides and weather? How will the residents meet their survival needs?

I would expect that the people who are investing enough money to build the islands have done so only after extensive feasibility studies. These aren't telemarketers who have sold their used cars and widescreen TVs and gone out in rowboats; they are successful businessmen, successful because they are good at risk assessment and contingency planning, among the other rare skills needed to run a profitable business over the long term. (Or they are crooks, in which case they are doomed.) They would most likely harvest a lot of marine flora and fauna, but if they have the money to build the islands, they might well have the means to import land-based food. How or what they will trade with the world at large to maintain their standard of living, I don't know. My guess is that the islands will be a sort of Galt's Gulch to which the denizens repair when they can get away from their remunerative activities.

The biggest problem they will face will be piracy, and the worst pirates will be government. The more successful the venture is, the more likely Uncle Sam is to go over it with a fine-toothed comb for the sole purpose of finding some way to shut it down, especially if there is reason to believe the residents are hiding taxable income. If the reesidents need to do business to survive, Uncle Sam will be there to take what he can, even if they do no direct business with US entities. Renouncing US citizenship is not as simple as saying, "I renounce you" three times, and if the residents have ever been US citizens, they will have the IRS on their case for the rest of their lives.

The Feds produce thousands of small-print pages of regulations every year, and no one can stay abreast of them. I find it entirely reasonable to suppose that some obscure passage on a page only ten people in the world have ever read could be used to send the US Navy off to wreak havoc on the islands.

And, of course, there are garden-variety pirates, many of whom have heavily armed warships manned with skilled marksmen and hand-to-hand fighters.

Freedom isn't free, and these pioneers will have to work hard at building the facilities, building a cooperative community, and defending their turf if they are to have any freedom at all. Indeed, they may not ever be able enjoy what freedom they can forge; their lot may be to build a legacy that they can pass on to those who come after them.

Suddenly what at first blush sounds like a bunch of dreamers running off to fornicate and inebriate takes on a different hue, doesn't it?

And who will come after them? And what about the poor?

The first group will be wealthy, pioneering entrepreneurs, and the poor and the faint of heart will be left behind. But as it was with automobiles, air conditioners, air travel, and video cameras, as the first mistakes are made and learned from, the cost of entry goes down, and the number and proportion of the population able to get on board increases. Soon someone will find a way of making a profit by bringing the poor on board, and they too will benefit.

You may be thinking of Dubai and Kathmandu, where unscrupulous agents deceive poor laborers into leaving home for a workplace where not only are the conditions abominable but the laborers are in debt for travel expenses and unable to return home. The same could happen on these islands, but if the pioneers made their money through repeat business, I would expect them to guard the reputation of the islands as a good place to work and to do business. Libertarians consider contracts sacred, so if the islands are truly libertarian, recruiters would be expected to deliver what they have promised.

Where does the gospel fit in?

Christian libertarians are rare, so there will be few ambassadors for Jesus there at first. There will probably be some substance abuse and promiscuity for a while, but life will be difficult, and those without strong moral fibre will not last. As time goes on, if the island society fulfills the libertarian ideal of people and their property truly being safe from violence and fraud, Christians from all economic classes will be taking their families to the islands. And if they live up to libertarian standards, which should be natural fruit of the new nature in Christ, they will be welcome there and have ample opportunity to spread the gospel.

So I wish Peter Thiel and his friends well. I will probably not live long enough to be part of even the difficult years, but perhaps my grandchildren will inherit their parents' entrepreneurial spirit, ride a later wave to the islands, and cultivate fruit there that will last.

Lemonade Freedom Day

2011-08-22T03:46:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, folks who are rightly outraged that government agents nationwide are shutting down children's lemonade stands took their protests to the streets—actually, to public parks, an important detail—and opened lemonade stands, expecting to draw fire from armed government agents. The group in Washington, DC, was not disappointed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=04MNf1YdNxI
(Thanks to The International Libertarian)

The morality here isn't as simple as I would like. I would like to say that these poor, innocent lemonade sellers were bullied by government thugs—and they were—and leave it at that. But the sellers were on government ("public") property, and the government's armed agents were within their rights to remove trespassers, people who were engaging in non-approved activity on property they were hired to protect. And one could point out that the protestors were probably (the audio isn't clear) asked politely to desist before they were arrested. Having made their point, they could have packed up and gone home.

That said, however, I'm still on the vendors' side.

Common sense and decency on the part of the police would have dictated that they interpret the situation as an acted-out parable, much like Ezekiel symbolizing the seige of Jerusalem by cooking over a dung fire (Ez 4). What public danger would have ensued from the police saying, "Let them have their tantrum. They'll get tired eventually and leave"? Did they really think that if they didn't kill this nit the Capitol grounds would be infested with outlaw lemonade stands?

If the police would not have arrested someone carrying a sign that said, "Stop arresting lemonade and raw milk vendors," by what logic did they arrest these protestors? And now that they have arrested the lemonade protestors, will people who carry signs or put bumper stickers on their cars be next in the clink?

People not involved in the protest were buying lemonade, and no one we know of was objecting to the demonstration as disturbing the peace. (The video was obviously slanted in favor of the protest, so we cannot know for sure that no Mundanes objected to the it.) This was peaceful activity by any reasonable definition (and so not Uncle Sam's). If Mundanes had been objecting, there could have been reason for police intervention, but absent significant protest from onlookers, what reason was there for the police to intervene?

Most importantly, the protest was over the shutdown by government agents of vendors of lemonade (and, I assume, such things as raw milk) on private property. If Mundanes cannot sell lemonade and raw milk on their own property, where could this protest have taken place legally? Remember, selling lemonade is an activity that, unlike, say, beating people with baseball bats or dancing nude and having sex around a giant phallic symbol, most people in most places at most times would consider innocent. If innocent activity cannot be tolerated in public, what kind of activity can?

Judging by this video, in today's police state, peaceful activity is less to be tolerated than the abduction of peaceful people.

The TSA Guy on the Train

2011-07-30T12:09:00.001-07:00

Let as many bondservants as are under the yoke count their own masters as worthy of all honor so that the name of God and His doctrine may not be blasphemed. And those who have believing masters, let them not despise them because they are brethren, but rather serve them because those who are benefited are believers and beloved. (1 Tim 6:1-2)

My wife was remarking to me the other day that there's just something about the way a Christian carries himself that is different from the way nonbelievers do. The context was what people choose to talk about and how they express themselves, but she also said that some people even without speaking seem to give evidence that the Holy Spirit is guiding them. I would have to say that if she's not right, she's not far from it.

One would expect that those who have a right relationship with their maker would give evidence of that, even unconsciously. When I hitchhiked across the country in December of 1972, I was picked up just outside Kansas City in the middle of the night by a carful of random college-agers, and during the course of the conversation, I let it slip that I was a Christian, at which point a couple of them in chorus said, "We knew there was something different about you." They sounded as though they thought that was a good thing, so maybe they were Christians (though other things said during the trip didn't leave me thinking they were), but the evidence supporting the thesis is even stronger if they weren't.

My wife's words came home to me in a less pleasant way recently when I had to work late into the evening a couple of times.

On the first of those evenings, I sat on the train in my seat of choice, the end seat that faces forward, looking at the rearward-facing passengers in the rear half of the car. Two rows ahead of me was a fellow, a thirty-something, perhaps Hispanic, in a TSA uniform that looked like he had just gotten it out of the box.

My view of TSA people has been colored by the horror stories and viral videos of infants, Congressmen, oldsters, and beauty queens considering themselves molested and worse by the TSA. My "favorite" is the attractive twenty-something woman who did not want her one-year-old's bottled breast milk irradiated and, when she refused to have it confiscated, was forced to stand for an hour in a glass cage guarded by a marginally female couch potato who did literally nothing the whole time but casually survey her surroundings and fold and unfold her arms. (Reality check: would I have been so offended if the guard had been foxy and the prisoner unattractive?)

Every line of work attracts a different personality: engineering and art and teaching and lumbering and sailing each tend to attract people with not only the requisite skill but consistent personality types. While the guard in the video is precisely what I would expect of a TSA agent, this fellow isn't. His hair was meticulously brushed, and even his facial expression as he read said that he takes everything in life seriously. I would guess that if his daily duties include groping people, he doesn't engage in it for fun; I would expect him to be serious, as respectful as the poster-boy Boy Scout, and minimally intrusive. Nor would he be a pushover in a discussion of the morality of Uncle Sam's undertakings and the part he personally plays in them.

I heard it said of a man I know from church as a generous gentleman with a hearty sense of humor that he becomes a completely different person once he dons his policeman's uniform. The same is likely true of Officer Newshirt: He would likely tolerate no deviation from the obsequiousness we mundanes are now required to render our masters.

Had he been in anything but a TSA uniform, I would have wanted to get to know him. Even as things are, I'm sure he has a story to tell.

So I was not overly surprised to see him on the trip home two days later reading a hardback study Bible.

The morning of the first day I saw him, I had read the passage I quote at the top of this post and realized that I have a lot to learn about counting the reputation of the kingdom of God more important than my own freedom. I find it frightening to think that God values his own reputation more than he cares whether those he has appointed to positions of authority "do justice, love mercy, [or] walk humbly with [their] God," even if those people are Christians. Where Ayn Rand and others say that we are only as oppressed as we allow ourselves to be and advise the oppressed to be as uncooperative as possible, Jesus tells us to treat our oppressors with respect, not only fulfilling their unjust demands but going beyond what they ask:

If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. (Matt 5:40-42)

(I don't measure up. How about you?)

Yet for all the deference we must show such people, they are people "whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron" (1 Tim 4:2), as described by C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. ("The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment")

US Christians may hate politicians—or say they do—but they love the armed agents who carry out those politicians' desires, as shown by the special days churches hold to honor the military and the police. By contrast I've never heard of one prominent evangelical uttering a syllable of thanks to those who predicted that the fall of Vietnam would not be the first stage of the fall of Southeast Asia, or that the war in Iraq would be a quagmire, nor to those who predicted that the Community Reinvestment Act would inflate a bubble that would eventually take down most of the US economy. And so, while I have yet to hear of a church holding a TSA Appreciation Day, I expect Officer Newshirt gets plenty of attaboys when he goes to church.

What response would an evangelical pastor get if he preached an exegetical sermon that followed all the established rules of hermeneutics and homiletics and concluded with the admonition that young adults to stay out of the military, police, and TSA, that it was unwise to indenture oneself to ungodly leaders who pass ungodly laws? My guess is that he would be looking for a job within a month.

Are the ungodly laws passed by our ungodly politicians still "good enough for government work" that a Christian will not run afoul of God by enforcing them? For that matter, have there ever been any laws passed in the US that Christians should not have enforced? Are any on the books now? If so, how long can a Christian remain in government employ without enforcing them?

What scares me most about my view of Officer Newshirt is that I hate him. He is my brother in Christ, yet I not only hate everything he stands so proudly for, I hate him for standing proudly for them. I can understand why an unbeliever who can't procure other employment or who simply enjoys bossing people around would work for the TSA, but I can't see how someone who reads his Bible and shows every sign of seeking to be guided by the Holy Spirit would take such a job. But there we are, and God wants me to be more concerned with my attitude toward Officer Newshirt than about the depredations that his colleagues, and possibly he himself, commit.

Someday there will be no conflict between obeying God and obeying his ordained authorities. Meanwhile, those of us who suffer under official depredations must learn to treat those who carry them out with respect. And the hardest ones to respect may be our fellow Christians.

Anarchist and Not Ashamed

2011-07-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

Do not let what you know is good be spoken of as evil. (Rom 14:16)

"Don't tell me you're an anarchist." "So you ARE an anarchist after all, not just a Libertarian."¹

Two good friends—and I mean good friends, both because they are people who seek to "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with [their] God" and because they have been especially forebearing with me—have taken me to task for my anarchist views.

My first response is that any word ending with ist or ism is dangerous until it is specifically defined, and this is especially true of anarchist.

The first self-proclaimed anarchists—[firstname] Kropotkin, [firstname] Bakunin, and their later apologists like Murray Bookchin—rejected the idea of private property, envisioning a sort of participatory democracy in which everyone owned everything, a model I find both indistinguishable from the communist ideal and subject to the same inevitable devolution into oligarchy. Note that this definition has to do with the result they pursue.

My definition of anarchist has to do with the process by which the ends are pursued: an anarchist society is one in which there are no archons, people with privileges and rights denied others. In the resulting society some people will wield more influence than others, and sometimes those who live lawfully will have to use force, even lethal force, against miscreants, but the sine qua non of my definition of anarchism is that no one, "from Pharaoh who sits on the throne to the servant girl grinding grain," has the right to violate the bodies or property of innocent people for any reason.

Let me also hasten to add that the kingdom of God is Jesus Christ, not any ism, certainly not either anarchism or "American exceptionalism." But we need a term to describe the way basically decent human beings, Christians and otherwise, treat their neighbors, and anarchism as I define it fills that bill.

That said, what's so shameful about anarchism? Why do my Christian friends use the term as an insult?

The usual answer is that without an archon, society would devolve into chaos: "Look at the book of Judges! 'There was no king over Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes'!"

Let's say for the sake of discussion that Israel did meet my definition of anarchy: Was that anarchy the root cause of the chaos of those days? Did anarchy exacerbate the chaos? Or was it simply one of its symptoms?

Until one of my vast readership commissions me to write a book-length response to those questions, I'll have to make do with repeating my argument from the biblical evidence: Anarchy is simply the term for what happens when people love their neighbors as themselves and treat others as they would have those others treat them. There was no privileged class: the whole community was the agent of even the execution of murderers, the first activity I can think of that would call for the creation of a privileged elite.

The chaos, on the other hand, was the result of the rejection of the Lord and his rule. When Israel tried to end the chaos by establishing archy (the monarchy), the Lord himself stated that that action was evidence of rebellion, not godliness. And in the end, the monarchy was able only to postpone, not prevent, the demise of Israelite society.

I should also point out that the chaos of those days was widespread, but it was not total: the society was still cohesive enough that it could establish the monarchy and did not cease to exist until Shalmaneser and Nebuchadnezzar—archons par excellence—destroyed it.

So while it is true that the one anarchic society the world has ever seen devolved into chaos, it does not necessarily follow that the only possible outcome to anarchy is chaos: the cause of Israel's demise was archism, not anarchism.²

Nor is anarchism the only known source of chaos. I have mentioned Nebuchadnezzar and Shalmaneser. Need I remind any Christian of Jewish extraction that those who abducted Abraham's wife in Egypt and Gerar, enslaved their ancestors and treated them cruelly in Egypt, destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD, conducted murderous pogroms against them in Russia, ratified the Treaty of Versailles that set the stage for the Holocaust, conducted the Holocaust, and prohibited those fleeing the Holocaust from entering "the land of the free," this "nation of immigrants," were archons, not anarchists?

Even those of us from the uncircumcision should note that the worst persecution of Christians is in archistic societies like North Korea and China and (other) third-world oligarchies, to say nothing of Muslim nations that make no secret of their archistic belief that non-Muslims are at best second-class citizens (as are Muslims who wish to change their religion).

Both of my friends would accuse anarchism of denying the truth of Romans 13:1-7, and I don't blame them; this is a serious charge, and I can't claim innocence. However, I would suggest that the reason they so ardently fly Uncle Sam's flag is that in the history of the world only one government has come anywhere close to matching the description of archy given in Romans 13, and that was the government of the United States, the philosophical basis of which was the anarchist tenet that "all men are created equal" and therefore have "unalienable rights" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness [which, if not property, is what?]."³

"But people are depraved, and we need overwhelming force to deal with human depravity."

Are all people depraved, or only those who don't become archons? Do depraved people never become archons? If you fear a depraved person who doesn't have overwhelming force—that is, when you would have to band together with others in order to defend yourself against them—how can it be that you are better off if that same depraved person becomes an archon with overwhelming force over you? How do you go about making sure no depraved person becomes an archon?⁴

What has become Uncle Sam's flag has flown over the murder and enslavement of weaker, innocent people, from African abductees to the first inhabitants of this continent. The major political parties today stands for endless imperial wars, the transfer of unheard-of amounts of wealth from the weak to the politically connected, and the eradication of privacy, all violations of the first tenets of basic human decency responsible parents teach their children. Yet Christians proudly wear flag lapel pins, identify themselves with the major parties, and vebally spit at anarchists.

Dear Jesus, where have I gone wrong?

***

¹The capitalized L is in the original. While I am a past member of the Libertarian Party, I have allowed my membership to lapse because "the party of priniciple" has abandoned too many libertarian principles. So I am a small-l libertarian in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, not a capital-L Libertarian Party member.

²I'm inviting theologically astute friends to shoot down my assertions in these two paragraphs.

³I would say this was close to true for whites and free blacks and perhaps even most "Indians" from 1783 until 1861. My friends would likely be more generous.

⁴I would welcome discussion on this topic as well.

Taking Things a Step Further

2011-07-04T08:57:00.001-07:00

I dread going to church on the Sundays near the patriotic holidays of Memorial Day and Independence Day.

I admit to being a "glass is half empty" kind of guy, so I tend to focus on the shortcomings of my society. But I don't consider that a virtue. I can't even make the excuse that when you have a headache, nothing is enjoyable. The level of opporession, corruption, and economic distress is much lower here than in most of the world, and my taking the ease of our situation for granted is sin, pure and simple.

But it is also true that our society is not as free, just, or wealthy—to say nothing of optimistic—as it was in the Carter years. We now wave our flags much more vigorously than we did in those days—"Carter for President" bumper stickers, even the first time, were green and yellow, not red, white, and blue—but we have much less to celebrate.

So when the patriotic holidays come around, I wonder what the hoopla is about. Why aren't these people mourning? I go to church with my guard up, which means I work so hard at not noticing the Old Glory lapel pins and neckties that they're all I notice.

But God has seen to it that despite myself I hear the sermons my pastor has preached on the two patriotic Sundays this year, and they have been good, biblical, and centered on the gospel.

In the Memorial Day sermon we learned of three characteristics of godly government: godly laws, godly leaders, and Jesus Christ at its center. (I don't know that the list was meant to be exhaustive.) Yesterday the topic was the first three of the Ten Commandments, and we were reminded that there is but one God, that we are not to worship anything before him, and that we are not to make our own images, tangible or otherwise, of him.

I feel like he could have filled the glass fuller, pounded the nail in farther, or whatever, but maybe the plan was to stick to preaching and not meddle. Well, I'm a-gonna meddle.

I liked his definition of godly government as godly men passing godly laws to the glory of Jesus Christ. But I would like to suggest that the men who run our government are not godly men, the laws they pass are not godly, and the glory of God as revealed in Jesus Christ is the farthest thing from their minds. This is true at the local and state levels, but nowhere more so than at the federal level. I think the burden of proof is on those who would claim that Uncle Sam has any claim to godliness. And if we know that our "leaders" are ungodly, should we not assume that any law they pass will be ungodly unless they can prove to us that it's not?

Why instead has there been no major public debate between Christians about such major legislation as Social Security, the War on Drugs, the existence of public schools, or the invasion of Libya? Are these things so obviously biblical that only someone as obtuse as I can't see it?

If Uncle Sam is ungodly, why do those who claim to put God first-and-only wear Uncle Sam's paraphernalia to church? Is their message to foreigners there "We may be equal in Christ, but I'm still better than you because I'm an American"? Or are they putting Democrats and libertarians in their places by claiming to be more authentically "American"?

If I were to stand as an usher wearing a lapel pin advertising a nudist resort, or even one with an anarchist circle-A, I would expect to be asked to take it off, the idea being that "even a hint of sexual immorality" (generous cleavages apparently don't count) and partisan politics (i.e., anything outside the range between Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney), respectively, are not fitting anywhere in the church building: they would offend people, and worse, communicate wrong ideas about what we stand for.

I would suggest that juxtaposing, let alone intertwining, Uncle Sam's flag with the cross of Christ is similarly offensive and causes miscommunication.

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. (2 Cor 6:14-16)

We've all seen Uncle Sam's flag on adult book stores and other places known for ungodliness. If nothing else, most Christians I know are being ruled by people they didn't vote for and often voted against. What does the flag they fly signify, then? If not "I don't care whether I am ruled by godly men making godly laws or not, I'm a partisan of this government," then what? As a fan of Seattle sports teams, I can understand a "win or lose, I'm a fan" mentality for some things, but when millions of mortal lives, to say nothing of billions of souls, are at stake, it seems out of place when the subject is government.

I think that's because Uncle Sam is the true "American Idol," which leads me to the second glass.

An idol is anything apart from God that we worship. One example given in the sermon of an idol was power. (I'm having to paraphrase here:) "We all know of politicians and economic leaders who have ruined their lives by abusing power." No argument with that. However, I find it more relevant that these same leaders have ruined the lives of millions of innocent people by exercising their power in ways too many Christians find legitimate.

The 9/11 attack is one reason Christian workers are finding it harder to get to and stay on the field, even as "tentmakers," but another is the fallout from the Community Reinvestment Act, perhaps the biggest cause of the housing bubble that drew so many people's money into investments that became worthless when the bubble burst. This is simply one of hundreds of laws passed by "politicians and economic leaders" who did so not because the Bible and the Holy Spirit told them to, but because they had the power to do so and considered doing so expedient. And they received no resistance from evangelicals because the latter could see no biblical reason to oppose them.

We see this still going on in the programs I mention earlier. Not only does one rarely hear evangelicals oppose these pillars of the welfare state on theological grounds, the question of what biblical basis there is for them is usually considered irrelevant or offensive. But shouldn't there be some kind of public debate about these things?

The thinking seems to be, "I'm a Christian. I'm a decent person. The state feeds me, educates me, heals me, protects me, and provides for my retirement. The state is therefore good, and any suffering caused by the state is collateral damage." This isn't far from saying that the state is God's way of providing for my pleasure.

We heard in the sermon that pleasure is an idol. My inability to tear myself away from a TV when there's a baseball game on tells me that's true, and we do need to show this idol for the vain hope it is, beginning with our own worship of it. But have we nothing to say to those who look to Uncle Sam or other agencies to provide the pleasures that ensnare us? How many Christians have spoken publicly against tax funding for baseball stadiums? Isn't the Seattle Mariners T-shirt I'm wearing as I type a statement that the tax funding by the Washington state legislature of bonds voted down by the citizens of Seattle is somehow OK in my ethical system? What message does it communicate to those who voted against the bond issues?

Finally, we get to the question of the image of God. It is true, as was said in the sermon, God cannot be likened to animals or even people; he is who he is, and there is no thing or being like him. And we need to keep God's reputation at the forefront of everything we do as his ambassadors.

But man was created in the image of God. When ungodly men pass ungodly laws that direct people to mistreat the image of God in man, doesn't going along with such laws violate the image of God as much as immolating a baby in the statue of a fish? When those ungodly men call such mistreatment "collateral damage," a term that calls to mind rubble, not corpses, shouldn't those who believe that man is the image of God recoil in horror and do all we should to end the killing?

If we want to see the knowledge of the glory of the Lord fill the earth in our day, we need to have no idols. No Seattle Mariners. No nudist resorts. No anarchism. No Uncle Sam. Our citizenship is in heaven, whatever advantage we might be able to take of our local legal system. Our only fellow-citizens are those who belong to Christ. Everyone else, like our fellow-citizens, is our neighbor, whom we are to love as ourselves.

Only then can the glass become filled.

Why Allah Will Laugh Jehovah out of Afghanistan

2011-07-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires with good reason: the Afghans have not been conquered since Genghis Khan, though they have been invaded by imperial armies far richer and in some sense more powerful than they. In our own day, Afghanistan has outlived the British and Soviet empires, and Uncle Sam's attempt to subdue it has bled our economy and killed scores of innocent people with no benefit to anyone except the "masters of war, [those] who build the big guns."

Perhaps this invincibility is the provision of Allah; he has certainly ceded nothing—and most certainly not the moral high ground—in this present conflict against the saints of Jehovah, who pride themselves in being "more than conquerors." But despite the title of this post, I would like to think that there is no god but the Father of Jesus, who has built into his creation a foundational principle that the Afghans* are using but Uncle Sam has forgotten, and God is using them the way he used the Recabites in Jeremiah's day (Jer 35), to shame those who call themselves his people and exhort them to repentance.

The principle is this: things start small and spread. We see this in Jesus' parables of the mustard seed and the yeast (Matt 25:21), and in his statement that those who are faithful in little things will be faithful in big (Matt 25:21-23). We see it in Paul's admonition that we change our lives through changing our minds (Rom 12), not by submitting to outward regulations (Col 2:23). We see it in the history of the church, which began with a village woodworker and twelve undistinguished followers and has gone worldwide. We see it in the ant, who does his work without a commander (Pro 6:6-8). And, on the down side, we see it in our lives when we allow ourselves small sins; they eventually metastasize into big sins.

Afghan society is based on loyalty to family and tribe. The Pashtun are the best-known example of this—"I fight my brother; my brother and I fight my cousins; my brother, my cousins, and I fight the world"—those who are not on government payrolls (and probably many who are) are far more loyal to each other than to whoever is in the palaces in Kabul or Islamabad. And though—or should I say because—they are constantly fighting each other,* they also have strong networks below the surface. And those who survive the fights are by definition the best fighters. Who can defeat people like this?

As we saw in a similar situation in Vietnam, it certainly won't be a bunch of mercenaries who are members of an ungodly top-down system.

Yes, I said mercenaries: it is not uncommon for people to join the military in peacetime because they want a steady job, or the training for a peacetime vocation. These are generally not people who pride themselves in being vicious fighters; fighting is not in their blood, as it were. There is always the risk that war will break out, of course, but it's a risk such people are willing to take: they're in the army for personal gain, the trademark of the mercenary.

Then there are those who join hoping there will be a war; this is the mentality of the soldier of fortune—the mercenary.

Those like Pat Tillman, who join only because they are convinced that they are protecting their loved ones, are the most honorable of the bunch, but I would guess they are the exception to the rule. (And again, these are not generally people for whom fighting is a way of life.) Both sides of the War to Prevent Southern Secession, and all sides in the World Wars, relied on conscription—slavery at its worst— to build their armies.

Conscription, as is all slavery, is almost by definition top-down: the underling's duty is not to think, but to obey; thinking is the job of the commander (hence the title).* When the drill instructor says, "First I'm gonna break you, then I'm gonna make you," he means he's going to teach you that you have no mind apart from the will of the whole as expressed by your commander. Today Uncle Sam's army is "all volunteer," but the structure and mentality is still top-down.

The two World Wars were fought entirely between conscripts in top-down militaries, and the object, at least the second time, was complete subjugation of the other side. Today Uncle Sam is sending mostly unsuited mercenaries across the ocean to fight bottom-up volunteer networks on their home turf. Worse, the object is to prolong the fighting, not to vanquish the foe.

That's right. Christians soldiers are going off to a war in which the war itself is more valuable to its beneficiaries than victory.

Twenty years after World War II ended, Time magazine wrote that the ideas of John Maynard Keynes "have been so widely accepted that they constitute both the new orthodoxy in the universities and the touchstone of economic management in Washington." Keynesianism essentially takes Randolph Bourne's denunciation of war, that it is "the health of the state," and turns it into a paean: Keynes believed that war is good, at least for the economy. Why were "we" unable to win in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? According to Keynesianism, the government spending necessary for war is a boon to the economy, so wars that never end will guarantee the prosperity of the nation.

Think of the narrative we were all taught in school: The stock market crash of 1929 came out of nowhere, or was a product of a laissez-faire economy. Herbert Hoover did nothing about it, and by 1932 things were so bad that only government intervention would save it. Indeed, they were so bad that only the government spending needed for World War II eventually saved it; we need to thank God (or the gods, or the fates, or Mother Nature, or our lucky stars) that the helm was taken by the likes of Franklin Roosevelt. Others have shown this narrative to be fiction; my point here is that it is almost universally believed in the US today, even by evangelicals.

So we have Christian mercenaries, some sincerely believing that they are defending their loved ones by occupying Muslim lands, fighting a war their true commanders have no intention of ending, not even with victory. As Frédéric Bastiat argued years before Keynes,

"Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed;" and we must assent to a maxim which will make the hair of protectionists stand on end—To break, to spoil, to waste, is not to encourage national labour; or, more briefly, "destruction is not profit."

That is, World War II made the US poorer, not richer, though it did profit the "masters of war." The same is true of today's wars: Our unemployment rate continues to rise along with the national debt. Our only manufacturing jobs are in government-subsidized industries. Uncle Sam is borrowing money to pay off his present obligations, not to invest in the future, and there isn't enough money in the world to pay off his future obligations.

As the paraphrase of Margaret Thatcher puts is, "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." And once Uncle socialist Sam runs out of other people's money, the troops will have to come home.

This blog is about being good neighbors: When the soldiers leave, will the Afghans mourn the loss of good neighbors who happened to be Christians? Or will they be singing some version of "Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead"?

I suspect they will be shouting exultantly, "Allahu akbar!" God have mercy on us.

*As will be made explicit in what follows, I use "Afghans" for the sake of brevity and clarity; there are, I would expect, few residents of Afghanistan who consider themselves Afghans. Afghanistan is a European construct, its borders a relic of the colonial era.

*Because the Islamic world has never embraced the idea of the fundamental equality of human beings and the corollary sanctity of life, property, and contract, Richard Maybury has coined the name Chaostan to describe it. The name has even gone mainstream.

*I don't know, but I would guess that a wise commander would welcome and even encourage independent thinking by his subordinates, but this goes against the natural human tendency to dominate others. And even the most permissive commander, if he's to live up to his title, will permit independent thinking only within specified perameters.

Why Not Vote Republican?

2011-07-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

A good friend writes:

Please do not allow Obama in for a 2nd term[;] all hell will break loose with him in a free 4 yr term [one in which he doesn't have to run again],

My friend and I agree that Barack Obama is our mortal enemy and that all hell will break loose if he's not stopped. Where we disagree, of course, is over whether all hell will break loose if a Republican is elected.

But the proposition is reasonable, right? If the prison cafeteria offers rotten fruit with maggots and rotten fruit without maggots, why not choose from the maggot-free pile?

My answer is that, as we who voted for Reagan learned, such a vote is, in effect (i.e., consequences in time and space) less a vote against maggots than an endorsement of rotten fruit. "See? They took the fruit. That means they liked it."

It's not the areas of disagreement between Obama and his likely opponents that scare me; it's where they agree. So I can agree with my friend that Barack Obama is the enemy of everything good. But I would add that the Republicans are also.

Three friends from church over the last few years have died of cancer after spending kilobucks, maybe a megabuck, on conventional treatment and suffering horribly. If I were to develop a malady that I thought could be treated, or at least my suffering alleviated, by marijuana, every Republican but one would send armed agents to put me in a cage for growing, buying, processing, or using marijuana. If I were to resist forcibly, they would kill me. They are my mortal enemies.

So my questions are these, dear Christian conservative:

What would it take to convince you that Barack Obama is your mortal enemy?

If he is already your mortal enemy, what would it take for you to consider his armed agents (FBI, DEA, TSA, military, police) your mortal enemies?

If either of your answers to the first two questions were to take place, what could you do about it?

Please respond below, anonymously if you wish.

9/11 and the Great Commission

2011-06-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

The other day I had a chat with Guy Short, a missionary to Saristan, an exotic country that many people in the US associate with peace, love, and flowers. He surprised me by telling me that before he went to Saristan, he had been working in Islamistan, which everyone I know associates with hostility to the gospel. That he had been working in Islamistan was surprising enough, but what really got my interest up was why he left what seems to me to be a crucial place to be spreading the gospel.

He said that the move to Saristan had been prompted by 9/11.

How was it, I asked him, that 9/11 had forced them to leave Islamistan? Was it 9/11 per se, or the US response to 9/11? He thought a moment and asked, "When did the US invade Afghanistan?"

"November of 2001."

"That was when we had to leave."

The very month I learned to sing "Osama Got Run Over by a Reindeer" and get behind George W. Bush's expropriation of my unborn grandchildren's money to go find Osama, the policy I was supporting brought to an end the work Jesus had called Guy and his wife Sheila to do in a hotbed of Islam. And as it turned out, of course, it was not "the mastermind behind 9/11," but celebrants at Afghan wedding parties, who were blown literally to hell in those days.

So I am partly responsible for making it impossible for Christian missionaries in Islamistan to continue the work they had prayed about and planned for years—and that was shortly after I'd completed almost two decades as a missionary myself. Was catching Osama really more important than getting the gospel to Islamistanis?

In the course our conversation, Guy told me that it was not uncommon for Christians in Saristan to be killed by Hindu fundamentalists—not the quick death of beheading, mind you, but the slow, agonizing death of bludgeoning. Even more common were arson and pillage. (So much for peace, love, and flowers.)

Why would anyone do such horrible things?

The most memorable reason Guy gave for the fundamentalists' hostility is that they regard Christianity as a foreign religion. Now while foreign is a fairly benign term for residents of this nation of immigrants, it would be a loaded term for an Indian, as you'll soon realize if you read George Orwell's Burmese Days or Kipling's poem "Gunga Din." To Indians under colonialism, foreign meant suppression, oppression, theft, murder, lies, and hypocrisy. So even if in God's eyes "foreign religion" is a vain excuse for violence, its lack of legitimacy is probably of little comfort to our brethren who suffer at the hands of those who use it.

And those who believe it are by no means our inferiors.

We have seen in our own history that the home of "American exceptionalism" is also guilty of mistreating innocents vaguely associated with foreign tyranny. Think of the boycotts of Germans during the wars against Germany, to say nothing of the incarceration of the Nisei during the war on Japan. For that matter, look at the suspicion with which US evangelicals view Muslim fellow citizens today. How would they treat them if Saudi Arabia invaded Canada, or even Mexico? Are Hindu fundamentalists really Untermensch, as our first natural thoughts would tell us, or are they rational human beings doing what they think they need to do to prevent colonial savagery from repeating itself?

The Internet is an open book. Do no Hindu fundamentalists read statements from the US government that "the American way of life" depends on armed force to keep certain populous Asian nations from buying "our" oil from the Middle East and North Africa? Do none of them know the saying that blood is thicker than water? Can they not apply it here to mean that US evangelicals would gladly bomb Saristani Christians to heaven to preserve their own self-interests? (Abraham Lincoln is enshrined in a self-labeled temple for leading a war where pro-US Christians killed fellow Christians whose only desire was to secede from a union they considered oppressive.)

Most importantly, have none of them seen pictures of the cross of Christ intertwined with the US flag? We now know that the soldiers who fought—many of them valiantly, even heroically, and almost all of them sacrificially—in the wars of the twentieth century did so on the basis of lies by the government. The government has not admitted that it lied, and the evangelical community has not admitted that it was fooled. Can violent fundamentalists be blamed for thinking that Christians stand by their government—nay, kill for it with no pangs of conscience—whether that government is right or wrong in any sense of the word? Are they unaware that no one in the US "supports the troops" more heartily than those who would spread Christianity in Saristan?

Why would those people want to become Christians? Why would they want to tolerate any of their neighbors, let alone their family members, becoming Christians? "Nits grow up to be lice."

I'm not excited about being bludgeoned to death for my faith. I can still remember when Crazy Granges backed me into a corner in shop class in ninth grade and merely pretended he was going to hit me: I was bawling in seconds. And as some immigrants and wannabes have reminded me, Uncle Sam's depredations are nothing compared to the run of the rest of the world's mill.

So I suppose I should be glad that brave guys and gals in Colorado are flying drones into various provinces of Burqastan and blowing ragheads to hell. Maybe they really are keeping me safe from those who would bludgeon me for believing that the creator of the universe spent thirty years crapping in our outhouses before becoming the necessary and sufficient sacrifice for my sins.

But even if that's true—and that's a big if—how many innocents do they kill before I should say I don't care what "they" do to me, my first priority is giving them the gospel? That, as John Fischer put it so long ago, "the resurrection power works best in graveyards"? That if it takes persecution to get the church in the US off the slide into decadence and back on track to bringing the gospel to the world, so be it?

What does Jesus gain when we wave Uncle Sam's flag? Would we be disobeying God if we removed it from our sanctuaries, houses, cars, and places of business? If not, why don't we?

Or is it no big deal that someone like me, who should have known better, supported a policy that led to Christian workers being forced out of "the fields that are white unto harvest"? Is there no definitive word from God regarding the wisdom of Christian youth joining a military whose actions bring persecution on our brethren for whom life is rough even in good times?

Or maybe other things are more important than the Great Commission.

When God Really Does Order Genocide

2011-05-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

How would you like to kill some women and children?

I don't mean just a few. I mean all of them, every one you see, from where you stand to the horizon in every direction and beyond. And you'll kill them from no more than four feet away.

She may be drop-dead gorgeous, but the only thing you're to stick in her is your sword. Or she's a toddler, squealing in terror as she sees you decapitate her mother—she's next. And you can nail that suckling child and his mother with one thrust.

Are you having fun yet?

And don't forget: in order to kill them, you first have to kill the men of the town who are defending them. Ragheads don't care about women, of course, but they sure as hell care about themselves and their property, and there's no more valuable property than a woman, so between their instinct for self-preservation and their jealousy over their property, they will fight as fiercely as they can.

Then you get to dispose of the bodies. And no "accidentally" letting the women's clothing fall off.

How about it? You up for it?

This was precisely the invitation the Israelites received when they left Egypt. They were to kill the "Amorites," all the occupants of Canaan. No one was to be spared.

I believe that the Bible is the word of God, so I have to believe that God did indeed command the Israelites to kill the Amorites. I also believe that God is incapable of evil, so that command must have been moral when he issued it. I will admit to harboring the thought that the omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, and righteous creator of the universe and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ ought to have been able to think of a better way to take the Israelites into their homeland, but the Bible says what it says: the God who does not change ordered genocide. Like it or find another religion.

Can we use the invasion of Canaan to justify Christian participation in Uncle Sam's wars today? Does the death of innocent people then justify "collateral damage" today?

The warfare Uncle Sam's army is waging today is nothing like warfare then. The invaders of Canaan were hand to hand with their enemies; an arrow, a sword, a spear, or a stone could have come out of nowhere and killed any one of them. God had promised them victory, but he didn't promise that none of them would be killed. And indeed, some of them were killed, and not just those who died from Joshua's error at the first battle of Ai.

It's one thing for us to sit in our comfortable houses and read the accounts of the conquest in the past tense. It would have been quite another thing, even after forty years of manna, a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, and the Jordan drying up at the height of the flood season, to face all those men in a fight to the death. Then, on top of that, they had to kill all those innocent women and children. Frankly, the thought sickens me; God called such squeamishness at the time rebellion.

I don't think obeying the call to invade would have been so difficult for the Islraelites if they had had Predator drones, rockets, bunker-buster bombs, mortars, and the like. I can see them clearing the land, including the areas they never did conquer, and saying, "Jeez, we've still got some whizbangs left over. Are you sure you don't want us to do some more?" Madeleine Albright was being merely human when she lamented that the Clinton administration had nothing to use the world's most powerful military on.*

Power corrupts, military power no less than any other. As the price of anything goes down, the demand rises. Our rulers have no doubt gotten us into wars, and soldiers have been willing to fight, because the politicians and higher officers wage these wars from safely behind the lines; gone are the days when kings, or even generals, led their armies in battle.

I think we need to be very sure we're not putting words in God's mouth when we use the invasion of Canaan to justify our present wars.

We must also reconsider our dim view of the conquest of Canaan. While the conquest was infinitely easier on the Israelites than it was on the Canaanites, I can't imagine the veterans of that war enjoyed remminiscing later about killing infants or made trophies of the corpses of the men. It was a horrible time, and "when the land had rest," I'm sure the warriors did all they could to see that they would never have to pick up their weapons again.

*What she might have meant was that the money being spent on the military was being wasted and should be diverted to education or other "entitlements," there being no enemies strong enough to justify the size of the military at the time, but the subsequent "humanitarian" invasions of Somalia and Bosnia make that less likely.

World Magazine Delivers

2011-05-16T14:40:00.000-07:00

I thumb through the copies of World magazine in the mailboxes at my church as I wait for the early service to finish and Sunday school to begin so I can find out what my conservative brethren are up to. These are people who read their Bibles, pray, and tell the world unashamedly that they know Jesus, are his representatives, and therefore can speak for him.

There's always something to be learned from these sessions, but I should have realized I was in trouble yesterday when I saw the picture that was originally purveyed as President Obama and his staff following the assassination of Osama bin Laden "as it happened." While that photo and caption was front-page news on May 2, by the end of the week the back pages had told those who cared to listen that that photo had been staged; those folks were at least twenty minutes behind real time. The firefight they were supposedly watching didn't happen, Osama didn't hide behind his wife or have a gun, etc. Apparently Mr. Obama is a rat when it comes to domestic issues—World consistenty (and rightly) excoriates him for his evil policies on health care, education, and Social Security—but absolutely trustworthy when it comes to killing foreigners.

But I kept on thumbing, and I found a page that listed a couple of dozen instances of al-Qaeda terrorism: hundreds of murders, maybe a thousand or two, and that's even apart from 9/11. Yup, those al-Qaedistas are no good; they have a lot of innocent blood on their hands.

But though George W. Bush and Barack Obama each have the blood of more innocent people on their hands than al-Qaeda, the Jesus of World mag is OK with that. Al-Qaeda "targets" innocent people, like the spies in the embassies in Dar Es-Salaam and Nairobi and the generals in the Pentagon, to say nothing of the profiteers from the military-industrial complex in the Twin Towers. But those hundreds of thousands of people killed by Clinton, Bush, and Obama are simply "collateral damage": "we" knew they would die as the result of "our" actions, but "our" target was someone else (who got away for ten years), so "we" are not responsible for their deaths.

Of course, World also didn't mention that al-Qaeda was created by the CIA to run the Russians out of Afghanistan in the 1980s, nor that they are currently "our" allies in Libya. This was a time to celebrate the death of bin Laden, not to question the wisdom of our now-vindicated commander in chief.

Then I got to the cartoon page, where I found a connect-the-dots picture of Osama, the message of which was that had it not been for waterboarding, "we" wouldn't have caught him. That the great majority of those waterboarded were innocent of any wrongdoing and had no useful information to give is apparently of no interest to Jesus. Again, it's just collateral damage. "Stuff happens."

A few pages away was a review of a book that states that "some wars are worth fighting." I learned that an operation in Fallujah had turned up torture chambers used by the "insurgents." No reason for those chambers was given, but it's not hard to guess.

"Insurgents," as you know, are those who forcibly resist "liberation" by the US military. Those who object to "our" presence are either supposed to shut up, ask "us" nicely to leave (and shut up when "we" don't), or put on uniforms that say, "Patriotic Front against Imperialist Invaders" and stand out in the open so "we" can shoot them from helicopters. Operating an undergroud resistance was OK for the French against the Germans—they were on "our" side, don't forget—but it's not OK for "our" Iraqi "enemies."

I suspect those torture chambers were the scene primarily of revenge that escalated into gratuitous butchery. I will grant that Muslims and Communists can indeed be excessively vengeful. We saw after the war ended in Vietnam that those Communists who had lost family and friends to US bombs (and their sympathizers) took horrible vengeance on those who had collaborated with the imperialists. They also stuck it to those who hadn't collaborated but weren't sufficiently "patriotic" just for good measure. Human nature being what it is, I expect that those who ran the torture chambers in Fallujah had similar reasons for what they did.

But human nature is what it is, and Uncle Sam is no different. Tired of murder and plunder by Uncle Sam and his proxies (the Shah, Mubarak, Saddam, and Gaddhafi, for starters) in the Muslim world, Islamists took the fight to the US (the bombings of the World Trade Center and the embassies in the 1990s). Two wrongs don't make a right, and those killings were evil. But the US response has been to take the fight yet again to the Muslim world, killing tens if not hundreds of innocent civilians for every US victim of al-Qaeda.

I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, where six million people were executed without trial. Christians in Germany feared for their lives, having been starved by the US and Britain after the Great War, and afraid that the Soviets, who had killed a dozen or so million of their own subjects and enslaved survivors in an atheist hellhole of lies, murder, and plunder, would take them out as well. No doubt Jews who had been victims of pogroms under the Czar had sympathized with the Bolsheviks, so it was understandable that Christians would view all Jews as possible enemies. And because they couldn't tell who was innocent and who was guilty, they allowed the "collateral damage" to occur.

How much of that genocide can be traceable to legitimate fear and how much to the corruption endemic to the human soul I don't know. It is obvious that German Christians let their government get away with behavior they would never tolerate from foreigners, or even from their own children in their church nurseries. And US Christians are following that same path.

A friend came in on me while I was gagging on the cartoons. Hoping this was a "teachable moment," I began explaining that I really thought killing Osama was a bad idea, if for no other reason than we could have gotten all sorts of useful information from him.

My comments were swept aside with, "Hey, I'm OK with assassinating that guy."

Jesus, we hardly knew ye.

UPDATE: My friend from the last paragraph tells me he was just being facetious. I guess I take these things too seriously.

Why We Need the War on Drugs

2011-05-14T16:19:00.001-07:00

If there are three good reasons for something, it's a good thing, right? "By the testimony of two or three witnesses shall all things be established."

I think I’ve come up with three good reasons for the war on drugs, three ways we benefit from it. Maybe this means I’ll have stop being so negative about it.

All three reasons for the war on drugs boil down to one word: jobs. With manufacturing gone overseas and real estate and the stock market flat for the foreseeable future, we need jobs, and the war on drugs is just the medicine we need.

The first jobs the war on drugs provides are in the pharmaceutical corporations. Our bodies and marijuana were so made for each other that Dr. Joseph Mercola can write, “Your body also has naturally occurring endocannabinoids similar to THC [the active ingredient of marijuana] that stimulate your cannabinoid receptors and produce a variety of important physiologic processes. So your body is actually hard-wired to respond to cannabinoids.” But if people were to grow marijuana and make their own oils to deal with such things as cancer, they would buy fewer manufactured drugs, Big Pharma would sell less, and laborers—and who knows, maybe even managers—would lose their jobs.

Since it’s more important that workers in the pharmaceutical industry have paychecks so they can buy food and the other necessities of life than it is that goods and services be produced (let alone that those in the pharmaceutical industry produce them), we simply can’t afford to allow diseased people to use alternative medications.

Besides, you and I know that only goofballs take herbal medicines, so there is something to be said for the line that alternative medicines are illegal to protect people from themselves—and most of all to protect the children. But it’s really jobs that keep us from returning to the days when the response to kooky ideas like herbal medicine was, “Hey, give it a try. It’s a free country.”

The second set of jobs we need to preserve are in the military-intelligence-industrial complex. Without the CIA and the military going all over the world to do things don’t know about and decent people wouldn’t approve of if they knew, we would never be safe from those who hate us. Heck, without these brave folks, those who hate us might not even hate us, and we can’t have that: we need enemies so we can provide jobs not only for the Pentagon and the CIA, but also for the industries that supply them.

Folks used to think that all it would take to rein in the spooks and troops would be for Congress to cut off their funding. But that’s just not true: the CIA has a symbiotic relationship with a worldwide network of drug smugglers; they give the smugglers a monopolies by killing or imprisoning the competition, and the smugglers give them cuts from their handsome profits. If Congress cuts off “defense” funding, our “defenders” can still do things that make people who don’t otherwise matter hate us and keep the job bonanza running.

The third set of jobs is in the prison industry. Building and maintaining “correctional facilities” is a perfect way to revive a local economy: construction, maintenance, and day-to-day operations require people who in turn need grocers, schools, and electronics shops. Of course, guards, administrators, and janitors can’t be paid for doing nothing, so we need to find ways of filling the cells. There aren’t enough murderers, rapists, burglars, and other violent criminals to fill the cages, but druggies can occupy the space just as well. As a bonus, we can hire more policemen and dogs to sniff everyone and everything everywhere to find the evil weed. And if anything escapes their notice, that problem is nothing more technology can’t solve: infrared and ultraviolet goggles and unmanned aircraft are just the first things I can name off the top of my head that need hundreds of well-paid workers to produce and maintain. They may not be good for preventing rapes, but they can surely find marijuana growing in a basement.

Drugs that require acres of disclaimers in fine print, wars against foreigners who otherwise wouldn’t hate us, and prisons for people who pose no threat to anyone except possibly themselves. This is the stuff of prosperity. And it’s all brought to us by the war on drugs.

This is such a good idea that I can’t for the life of me figure why the Bible never recommends it. It must be that the Bible is just an old book that was perhaps OK in its day but has nothing to say to advanced creatures like us in the complexities of modern times.

Lords of the Earth

2011-05-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

One of the books that inspired me before we went to Papua New Guinea (and later made me realize how easy we had it compared to true pioneer missionaries) was Don Richardson's Lords of the Earth, the story of how a stone-age tribe in western New Guinea's was first contact with the gospel. The book's timeline began months or years before contact with a scene designed to make Western Christians gag at the tribesmen's barbarity and appreciate the sacrifice and risk of those heroic missionaries who went to evangelize them.

Male Yawi, who considered themselves the lords of the whole earth, hence the book's title, were clad only in penis gourds, and their greeting was to click the gourd with their fingernail and say, "I like your feces."

But, as Dr. Seuss would say, that's not all—oh no, that is not all. They tossed a young girl over a cataract for some minor religious offense, and they summarily executed a prisoner of war—considering it an act of mercy, mind you—by crushing the man's head with a stone. Oh, how those nasty Yawi needed the Gospel!

Well, let's move to thirty years or so after the events Richardson describes, when Mother Teresa was the featured speaker at a prayer breakfast in Washington DC. I haven't been able to confirm any of this, but my conservative source at the time told me that when she had her full rhetorical momentum up, she looked that low-life skunk Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, in the eye and said, "When a society kills its own children [referring to abortion, the one freedom Mr. Clinton ever defended], there is nothing left of it worth saving." Take that, you leftist sicko!

Well, as we know, once Bubba was out of the White House, there was suddenly a whole lot worth saving. Mr. Clinton's successor didn't deny the abortionist crowd a dime of federal tax money, let alone do anything to make it possible for states, counties, or municipalities to make the practice illegal, but by God, when the Twin Towers went down, he could do no wrong, and nothing—no budget constraints, no constitutional rights of US citizens at home, not even human decency—could stand in the way of "bringing Osama bin Laden to justice."

Well, ding dong, the witch is dead. He's gone where the goblins go, below. Yo-ho! "Some people deserve a headshot, he was one of them."

I've already compared 9/11 to Uncle Sam's subsequent predations and so Osama to our current president. Let me also remind you that Lincoln killed a hundred times that many people he considered citizens of the nation over which he presided, Roosevelt killed far more innocent civilians by carpet-bombing Germany, and Truman killed far more by nuking Japan, and Nixon and Johnson killed more in Vietnam (for what Robert McNamara, the architect of that war confessed was a lie), all much more than died on 9/11. When it comes to killing innocent people, Osama, even if guilty of 9/11, was a piker. We name bridges and high schools after people with far more innocent blood on their hands.

I learned recently that the birth defect rate in Fallujah is now 80 percent. It's so bad that the Iraqi health ministry has told the people to stop having children. If they don't have children, who will take care of them in their old age? Not a problem! The cancer rate in Fallujah is like it was in the areas that were downwind from Chernobyl. They'll die before they get old.

If that isn't genocide, what is?

And remember, our brave men and women leveled Fallujah, a city the size of double-A baseball towns in the US, because a few people mutilated the corpses of mercenary soldiers in Uncle Sam's employ. They didn't torture living beings; they mistreated corpses, dead tissue. Which cities in the US should be leveled in retaliation for US soldiers' mistreatment of Afghan corpses?

Well, Osama was still worthy of death, right?

Was he even guilty of 9/11? I wrote in the above-linked post that he didn't act like one would expect the mastermind of 9/11 to act. Over the last decade we've gotten blurry pictures, and cassette and video tapes (in the age of camera phones and Skype?) that government experts—employees of the same government that couldn't predict the dot-com bubble, couldn't predict 9/11, couldn't predict the housing bubble, and isn't predicting a college loan bubble, and meanwhile has wiped out the savings of thrifty subjects to bail out the richest people the world has ever seen—tell us "could very well be" Osama. But where was his Lord Haw-Haw or Tokyo Rose? Where was his cult of personality? Again, compared to the Clintons, the Bushes, and Obama, he was a piker.

And, of course, now that he has no opportunity to face his accusers, we will never know what he knew about 9/11 beforehand. He joins the six million Jews tried in the media and summarily executed by Hitler. Just another Untermann.

Who has benefited from 9/11? Did the Iraqis? Did Saddam? Did the Afghans? Did the Taliban? For that matter, did al-Qaeda? Again, read the fatwa. What were his gripes? Did 9/11 get the US out of the Middle East? Did it get the US to stop killing innocents there? Did he get anything he wanted? So if he was so wrong about the consequences, how could he have been smart enough to pull it off? (Best answer if he's guilty: the world's most expensive, intrusive, and vicious intelligence and military machine is also totally incompetent.)

If he was such a "mastermind" that he could hit three of US fascism's most important buildings, is it reasonable to ask what he thought the US government's reaction would be? Did he expect Uncle Sam to say, "Oh, golly, this is nasty. Let's cut and run"? Or is it more likely that he would remember that the same Madeleine Albright who told the world that it was "worth it" to kill half a million civilians in a vain attempt to get them to rise up against Saddam had also asked, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about, if we can't use it?"

And isn't it even more likely that the neoconservatives, like the Project for a New American Century, Keynesians who believe that war is good for the economy, as proven by World War II, which got the US out of the Great Depression, and who were saying for years before 9/11 that all that was needed to bring about the new world order they envisioned was "another Pearl Harbor," had at least a hand in the affair? They have certainly benefited, and they seem to be the only ones; literally everyone else, from formerly oppressed but now dead Iraqis and Afghans to US taxpayers, is footing the bill, with no end in sight.

There are plenty of fingerprints on 9/11, but I wouldn't bet they're Osama's.

One of my coworkers, a twenty-something, a literature major no less, paid a fellow musician a compliment the other day by saying, "He's the shit." All she's missing to be a good Yawi is a penis gourd. (Actually, I'm being unfair. She is the only one of my coworkers who has spoken out against the wars. But like a good Yawi, she uses feces as a compliment.)

We US citizens are now the lords of the earth. Our last enemy has now been vanquished. (The fans at the Phillies game last night erupted into chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the news.) We can engage in genocide with no one to stop us. We can now execute people without anything more than a trial by the media. And you, dear reader, could be next.

Uncle Sam, I like your feces—not.

"Power Corrupts"?

2011-04-24T00:08:00.000-07:00

If you had asked me a year ago if I agreed with the popular saying "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," I would have said no: the Bible teaches that all of us, from Pharaoh on his throne to the slave girl at her hand mill, are born corrupt; the thoughts of our hearts are only evil continually, and our hearts are so evil that we can't even know how evil they are (Gen 6:5; 8:21; Jer 17:9); what power does is remove the barriers to the exercise of that corruption.

That much is true, but there is more to it. I've become convinced that earthly power, especially the politial power spoken of in the aphorism, is like the power of the Holy Spirit: it enables us to conform our lives to the desires of our hearts.

Sanctification, the process by which God makes us holy and fit for his use, is the reversal of corruption. The biblical view of sanctification is that there are two sides to it, what a layman might call the legal and the practical. When I became a Christian, God declared me not only justified and righteous—that is, legally forgiven of my sins and a citizen of heaven—but also sanctified, delivered from the domination of my sins. My standing before God in all respects is that of Jesus Christ.

Since then, of course, I have sinned. I have even committed sins since becoming a Christian that I had not committed before becoming a Christian. But "God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction" (Gal 6:7-8). One thing that keeps me in the Christian camp when I have such deep and passionate disagreements with what I see Christians doing is seeing for myself that while forgiveness is indeed easier to get than permission, it comes with maintenance costs that make permission preferable.

And this is where the second, practical, aspect of sanctification comes in: God works with us to get us to hate our sin, at least at a basic level because we see that it is not profitable, but later and more importantly because it grieves God and keeps sinners who need the grace of Christ from turning to Christ. As he works in our hearts, we become practically what we are legally: like Christ, soul mates with Christ.

If the effects of political power on the human heart are not plain to you from looking at the history of our nation, maybe an analogy will help. This analogy will concern influence, not power, but the dynamics are the same. (Before doing so, let me remind those readers who do not equate extramarital sex with corruption that the common "barnyard" terms for such are also used to mean "to mistreat" and suggest that the synonymity is grounded in fact.)

Think of a teenage boy on a date. For the first few minutes, all he wants out of life is to hold his girl's hand. But after a few minutes of that, he wants to put his arm around her. But after a few minutes of that he wants to kiss her.

Of course, he may have asked her out in the first place because he wanted to kiss her. So so far, there's been no change in his attitude. But what happens after they've been kissing for a while? Even if other activities hadn't been on the to-do list before he asked her out, they will certainly be on it then. And the likelihood of his attempting to engage in them will be directly related to his perceived chances of success, and for each milestone successfully passed another goal will present itself.

It is this desire, which was not there previously, that I consider corruption brought on by successful influence. Put another way, we will do whatever we can get away with, if we think we'll benefit from it.

So what?

The impetus for this post came from an exchange with a Christian brother who writes, "How does the world’s only super power hide [by being like the Swiss]? ... I don't think a superpower can prevent itself from being attacked by staying home."

If Christians believe that power corrupts, is it not reasonable for them to ask if "the world's only super power" has a problem with corruption?

I would suggest that like that teenage boy, "we" are doing things today that weren't on the to-do list years ago: "just following orders," torturing innocents, imprisoning without trial, groping children at airports, bombing civilians, starting colonial wars to control natural resources, and saddling the unborn with debt. Why? Because, also like that boy, we've been getting away with doing these things in smaller doses for so long we consider it our right to do more. And most importantly, who's going to stop the world's only superpower?

"We" are becoming practically what "we" are legally: rebels against God and enemies of all that's good.

At least the teenage boy in the analogy is not using force. If his girl says no, that's that; he can get out of the car, lift up the back end until his hormones return to default levels, and get on with life. And if she decides that a guy who would even want to exceed the limits she has set is not for her, she can end the relationship.

Not so those who want to end their relationship with Uncle Sam.

If we as Christians have little sympathy for the teenage boy, how much less sympathy should we have for Uncle Sam? And if we don't want our sons to emulate that boy, how much less should we want them to be Uncle Sam's agents?

Smoking in the Boys' Room

2011-03-30T01:39:00.001-07:00

At 4 AM on the first Tuesday in September of 1969, I woke up in my grandmother's house in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and, three hours or so later, began my junior year of high school in Annandale, Virginia, in a building I had only stepped inside previously, surrounded by teachers and students I had never met. My father dropped me off on his way to his first day at his new job at the Pentagon, and he would pick me up after work to take me to the room we were renting for six weeks until our house became available.

I stood outside the locked door of my homeroom looking at the other students, mostly the girls. One particularly beautiful brunette, who danced even when she walked, took my breath away—and made me glad I was carrying a binder. (As it turns out, I met her first ex-husband on the other side of the world more than a decade later.) Another cute number had nice, firm-looking, sticky-out breasts, the pocket on the front of one of which sported a cigarette package. (Does that hurt, or do the cigarettes get bent?) In fact, it looked like everyone who had shirt pockets, male or female, had cigarette packs in them. Except for me. Wasn't I the virtuous one!

In those good old days, I could go through the entire school routine with only one potty break, and I quickly learned to take that in the gym after PE. Even though selling cigarettes to minors was illegal, the boys' room across from the school office was always thick with smoke, and the others in the building weren't much better. At some point before I graduated, the administration got around to forcing the smokers outdoors, but smoking and smokers were as much a part of high school as shapely girls.

My parents smoked when I was young. I remember many weekend drives with the windows rolled up against Seattle's signature rain, the car filled with smoke. I blamed the migraine headaches that usually ended with reverse parastolsis on my parents' smoking, and I'm sure it didn't do me any good, but I still get those headaches, so that wasn't the culprit. And I was dumbfounded to learn that one of my heroes, Jacques Anquetil, who had owned the Tour de France a few years before, smoked. But I developed a healthy dislike for smoking and, being a descendant of Adam who grasps at any reason to consider myself "like God," considered smokers an inferior breed, especially when they threw butts out the window or dropped them on the ground.

Well, I wouldn't expect to see smoke in the bathrooms at Annandale High School today, nor butts on the ground outside the door to the bus stop. Tobacco taxes make cigarettes prohibitively expensive, and merchants who sell tobacco to minors face draconian consequences. There is simply very little opportunity for kids to smoke anymore.

But our society has embraced a "solution" that solves nothing.

A Clockwork Orange, a movie shunned by evangelicals because of sexuality and violence, deals (at least peripherally) with the question of forced morality. A violent young man is given the opportunity to be programmed to do good, or at least to be sickened by evil. When he asks the prison chaplain whether he should undergo this treatment, the chaplain replies that one cannot be moral without choice and the treatment will not make him good. And at the end of the movie, the young man is "cured"—of wanting to be virtuous.

Our government at all levels is frantically expunging all evil substances, whether tobacco, marijuana, alcohol, saturated and trans fats, or vitamin supplements, from daily life. You can be fined and probably jailed for not buckling your car seat belt. Many people, even evangelicals, want to see the Internet, the freest communication forum the world has ever seen, regulated. All this in the name of making the world a better place and our neighbors better people.

But there will be smokers and nonsmokers, chaste and otherwise, in both heaven and hell. I can't say we do anyone any good by taking away a person's choices in personal matters.

Smoking is stupid—unless you enjoy it, I guess—but I think I'd rather be with people who have chosen to smoke (at least at times when they're either not smoking or downwind from me) than with people who are glad that they aren't given the choice. Someone who knows how to choose is by definition able to choose between life and death, the blessing or the curse, heaven or hell, Jesus or idols. One who prefers not to choose will choose anyway, and wrongly.

It May Be Immoral, but We've Still Gotta Do It

2011-03-11T01:28:00.001-08:00

Why not say—as we are being slanderously reported as saying and as some claim that we say—"Let us do evil that good may result"? Their condemnation is deserved. (Rom 3:8)

In our rebellion against God we tend to ask why bad things happen to good people, as though anyone but God were truly good (Mark 10:18). Maybe we should be asking why it is that good people do bad things. Me, for instance: I've earned a certain amount of respect from my peers, so I have some good traits (my wife even likes me), so I have to ask why I have done so many creepy things.

But I'm not alone. How is it that people who are to an impartial observer honest, generous, and sincerely concerned with the glory of God and the good of their neighbors can say in one sentence that a given action is immoral and in the next say it has to be done? I don't know for sure if people do this in other areas, but I have certainly seen it in regards to government policy, and I consider it a natural by-product of the idea that the institution of government makes some people immune to the personal responsibility the governed have to live under.

Here are highly redacted (and so probably slanted) reconstructions of exchanges I have had recently:

They: I hate it when people blame the US for everything.

I: US sanctions single-handedly killed 500,000 Iraqi civilians in the 1990s.

They: Did not!

I: Did too! When Madeleine Albright was asked about those deaths on 60 Minutes, she didn't deny responsibilty; she said, "It was a tough decision, but we think it was worth it." She would know what was going on. Those civilians died because we had no-fly zones and prevented the importation of medicines and equipment for Saddam to rebuild the infrastructure we destroyed in Desert Storm.

They: That's not our fault. We told Saddam he could sell his oil and help his people. He sold the oil on the black market and kept the money.

I: We also gave him the materiel he used to kill his own subjects before Desert Storm.

They: That's not our fault. We gave it to him to use against Iran.

Note their principle here: We gave him the materiel to do X, so we're not responsible for the deaths he caused when he used it to do Y. In other words, even though we knew he was a thug, we provided the opportunity for him to kill those we wanted killed, but when he used that materiel to kill people we're all of a sudden indignant that he killed (I remember no kerfluffle about it at the time), we're not responsible for the evil he did.

I: We should never have gone into Iraq.

They: Correct, but that's a moot point. We did go in. And now we need to stay or the people there will kill each other.

So we're not responsible for Saddam's evil even though we gave him the wherewithal to commit it and didn't complain when he did do it. But if we leave Iraq, the people will kill each other even if we don't give them any materiel, and somehow we'll be responsible, so it's just humanitarian concern that keeps us there, even though it was immoral for us to go there to begin with. It seems to me if we're responsible if we leave, we'd have been responsible for what Saddam did with the goodies we gave him; if we're not responsible for one, we're not responsible for the other.

Certainly nothing about withdrawing the military would prevent brigades of unarmed Christians from going there to stand between the warring factions and offering to arbitrate. They'd probably have to be Chinese, North Korean, African, or from south of the Rio Grande—we're too broke from the wars to send out more missionaries, and US citizens would have a rather large credibility problem there—but I'd jump at the chance to join them.

They: It's wrong for the government to run up debts and expect our children and grandchildren to pay them.

I: Like Social Security?

They: Yes.

I: Was Social Security ever moral?

They: No.

I: If we did away with Social Security and Medicare, . . .

They: That would be wrong. People depend on those programs.

I: If someone became dependent on a Mafia don and we put the don out of business, would we be doing wrong to the people who depended on him?

They: That's different. What Mafia dons do is illegal.

I: But you said that Social Security is immoral.

They: Yes, but it was legal.

There you have it. If government does it, even if it's immoral, it's OK to keep it going because it's legal. And even if the injustice against the innocent increases every day we continue the immorality, we can't stop—we dare not face God for having stopped—committing the immorality because the people who benefit from the injustice might suffer.

I know my heart is deceitful above all things and so desperately wicked that I can't know it, and I've done worse things than believing the ideas espoused by my sparring partners, but is this really God's truth? Am I really nuts to think that continuing to kill innocent people overseas and rob innocent people at home hurts our chances of being believed when we present the gospel?

(Actually, supporting the status quo probably does improve our chances of being believed by others who support it. Maybe Moses David Berg's Children of God were on to something when they were engaging in "evangelistic" sex.)

I can identify with at least the title of Bach's famous chorale "Komm, Süsser Tod [Come, Sweet Death]." If I'm right in thinking that one component of a believable gospel witness is leaving our targets alone to live their lives in peace and that coercion should only be used in response to violence, and then only as much as necessary to prevent its recurrence (including the death penalty for murder), then I'm ready to leave a world in which most people consider it their holy duty to force innocent people to suffer injustice. And if I'm wrong, I see no way in this world I'll be convinced of the truth; I might as well go Home and take my medicine.

Does the Bible Condone Slavery?

2011-03-05T06:12:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows the Bible condones slavery, right? The passages that tell slaves to obey their masters and the lack of a call for slavery's abolition are all the proof any reasonable person needs that the Bible is a work of fiction or worse and those who take it at face value are enemies of all that's good. Furthermore, our advanced society doesn't tolerate slavery in any form.

I disagree on both counts.

I would like to argue that the Bible doesn't as much condone slavery as assume that slavery is an unavoidable condition. But even if it were avoidable, by any definition slavery, even if not so called, is alive and well in the US today.

I find no clearer definition of slavery than the Bible's: "A man is a slave to whatever has mastered him" (2 Pet 2:19). Even a man legally "free" can be a slave to such cruel masters as drugs, money, bad habits, or temper; in short, selfish desires. Or one can be a slave of a good master: the apostle Paul opened many of his epistles by calling himself a slave of Christ (e.g., Rom 1:1; 1 Cor 1:1), one who had a job to do (1 Cor 9:16) with love, concern, and self-denial (1 Thes 2:7; 2 Cor 11:27). So there is no option to not be a slave; you are a slave to whatever makes you do what you do. The only question is to whom or what you are enslaved.

The first slaves mentioned in the Bible were slaves of King Abimelek of Philistia (Gen 20:14). We know nothing about them except that they were given to Abraham as compensation for Abimelek's abduction of Abraham's wife. We can assume that they or their forebears were taken captive in some form of war and treated harshly as slaves: we have no reason to believe that a man who would abduct a sojourner's wife would have been a gentle master. So we can assume that their transfer to Abraham's (extended) family was a form of liberation, a shadow of the greater worldwide liberation to be accomplished by the Messiah, Abraham's greater son.

Did Abraham treat his slaves well? God told Abraham to live a blameless life (Gen 17:1), and one's love for God is shown at least in part by one's work for others' benefit (1 John 4:20). So one would infer that he did, at least in general.

But we know of one occasion when he didn't, when he impregnated a slave named Hagar. He was certainly an old man at that point, and the implication is that she was young, but nothing in the record rules out the possibility that she was favorable to having her status improved by bearing her sheik's firstborn. Indeed, once a mother, she considered her position enviable and secure enough that she could ridicule Abraham's barren wife (Gen 16:4).

But let's assume the worst: he essentially raped a helpless young girl. Does the biblical record chuckle at this? Look at Abraham's later life: he is alienated from his wife (Gen 16:5), he eventually has to send that firstborn son, whom he loves dearly, away (Gen 17:18; 21:11), and Ishmael's descendants were ants in the pants of Abraham's other son Isaac's descendants throughout the Old Testament (and are to this day). This is hardly an endorsement of Abraham's action.

So much for an anecdote. How does biblical law deal with slavery?

The first laws about slaves concern not abductees but debt slaves (Ex 21:1-6, 16). Slaves were to be bought, not captured (except in defensive wars); in fact, when the Bible speaks about the abduction that was the basis of the slave system most people think of when they hear the word slavery, it makes it a capital crime (Ex 21:16). The most coercive circumstances I can find under which people were to be enslaved is if they were guilty of theft or negligence and they were unable to compensate their victims (Ex 22:1).

Violent or irresponsible people need to be restrained somehow. The Bible nowhere prescribes prisons (which are certainly an example of a master-slave relationship), but it does prescribe what we recognize as slavery as a way for violent people to recompense those they have violated and learn habits that will enable them to fit back into society. It is only in this sense that the Bible indeed condones slavery, but this is not what most people mean when they say that the Bible condones slavery.

How are masters to treat their slaves? "Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven" (Col 4:1). That is, they are to love their neighbors as themselves (Le 19:18), something no one who sells his slave's family down the river can claim to be doing.

But wouldn't love for a neighbor demand that a master free his slaves?

I say earlier that a person is always enslaved to something. If this is so, setting a slave "free" may not be the best thing for that slave. The black spiritual "Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child" dates from Reconstruction, after the slaves had been "freed," not from the period of slavery; its message is simple: some people considered themselves worse off under Reconstruction than they had been under slavery. The Bible understands that what is called freedom is not always such in fact, and it makes provision for slaves—not, be it noted, their masters—to make their enslavement permanent (Ex 21:6).

So people can be slaves without being such legally, and some people's best option is to be legally enslaved. Again, the Bible is right to say that slavery is not a matter of legal standing but an inescapable condition.

Now we take up the question of slavery in today's society. Supposedly Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves almost 150 years ago, but by the biblical definition of slavery, he did no such thing. (Nor did he do so according to the usual definition: the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the slaves in those states that had rebelled; the slaves in the states still in the Union were slaves until after the war ended and they were freed by a separate law.)

But surely legal slavery has been abolished? Wrong again. A legal slave is one to whom the law gives the legal right to the fruits of his labor and his personal decisions to another. I have already mentioned parenthetically that our present prison system is slavery.

But by that definition even Lincoln himself was a slave master. What is it but enslavement for him to force his subjects to become soldiers, to face possible death from enemy fire or certain death from "their side's" firing squad, or a jail sentence? Or to force them to accept devalued currency at face value as "legal tender"? Or to destroy the facilities of newspapers in the Union and jail the editors?

And his legacy continues today. What is the expropriation of the fruits of people's labor inherent in taxation and forced participation in medical and retirement schemes if not slavery? What is the war on drugs and nutritional supplements and "non-foods" and the jailing and fining of those who violate government editcs if not slavery? Or "rendition," "enhanced interrogation," or even "detainment"?

We may not have "slavery," but we do have slavery.

The Bible considers us rebels against a God who loves us, wants the best for us, and has sacrificed what he loves most to reestablish a relationship with us (e.g., Is 53:6; Rom 3:11-12; John 3:16). We can expect rebels to be repulsed by their lord's words, and indeed the Bible when correctly understood is hard enough for every Christian I know to swallow without choking on, so I can understand why people disdain and ridicule it. But I would hope that a dose of the truth would defuse some of that disdain and ridicule.

"People Wanna Be Free"?

2011-02-27T03:32:00.000-08:00

All the world over, so easy to see
People everywhere just wanna be free
Listen, please listen, that's the way it should be
Peace in the valley, people got to be free.

I've been asked a few times over the last few weeks what I think of the situation in Egypt. Of course, I hope that the people in Egypt, Tunisia, the US, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and others will be better off in a year than they are now, but I don't think they will be. While the sentiments expressed by the Young Rascals in 1968 sound as wonderful now as they did when I was in junior high school, they just don't match reality.

What do people in the US mean when they say they want freedom?

Come on, you say, they mean that they want to be able to do what they want to do. You know: get a job, go to school, watch TV, go on vacation, say what they want, etc.

But, I reply, they also want to educate their children, go to the doctor, be provided for when they're unemployed, and retire at other people's expense. So they want to be free themselves, but they want others to be less free.

Ah, yes, you say, but we accept our responsibility to pay into the system even when we're not benefiting.

Fair enough, but is that really freedom? You are participating willingly, but what about those who would like the freedom to opt out of the system? Suddenly freedom isn't such a good thing, and indeed, those of us who would like to opt out of the system are few, far between, and either ignored or outright disparaged.

So what kind of freedom are the demonstrators in the Middle East calling for? They say they hate the dictators who restrict their rights, torture innocent people, and grow rich on the system of cronyism paid for by US taxpayers, and who can blame them? But what would they replace it with?

Conservative pundits decry the rise of "Islamofascism," and most of these demonstrators are indeed Muslims. Are they also fascists? Before I hazard a guess, I'd like to ask if the pot is calling the kettle black.

Textbook fascism is a social structure in which "private" businesses are an arm of the state. As Mussolini put it, "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." (Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, as it were.)

We're told that World War II was a war against fascism, yet if Rosie the Riveter worked for Boeing or Douglass, she was part of a system every bit as fascist as Hitler's Volkswagen, and so today are those who work for war materiel contractors like Boeing and Raytheon, the mercenary "contractors" of Xe (née Blackwater), and employees of government-run businesses like General Motors; so are those who work for KFC and Cinnabon at military bases overseas, and so are those who run "private-sector" prisons and charter schools. Even "private" colleges that accept students who receive loans and grants from the government can do so only as long as they accept federal restrictions on their policies; that is, they are "private" entities executing the will of the government, the embodiment of the textbook definition of fascism.

Yet most people consider it bad manners for me to talk this way. Fascism is nasty—unless it's our fascism. Then it's "freedom."

So my guess is that the demonstrators in the Middle East, like people in the US and most people in most times and most places, do not want to be free; they want a fascist state. What they want is much like what they have, but they want to join the net winners of the zero-sum game. They want to be free themselves, but they want restrictions on their neighbors.

This seems to be the natural human condition. You can probably scratch any libertarian, me included, hard enough and find a fascist.

And, as the saying goes, the leash has a slave at each end, so no, I don't think today's tyrannies will be replaced by free societies.

True freedom is Jesus, and he tells us that our worst enemies are ourselves: our hearts are so incurably deceitful that we cannot know our own evil (Je 17:9). Governments are vicious, and he tells us to avoid being like them (Lk 22:25-26), but only we can ruin our lives (Pr 19:3). He came to set us free (Jn 8:36), but that freedom is based on and can only follow repentance and a right relationship with God (Mt 4:17).

But back to the original question, if even the Black Regiment, the Protestant clergymen who played such an influential role in the American revolution, brought forth a polity in which not only were there slaves, but those in the "free" states were legally bound to return fugitive slaves to their masters, what can we expect of adherents to a religion as inherently political as Islam? Not much, I'd say: unless the person of Jesus, the Prince of Peace and true "author of liberty" is welcome in the new Middle East, the new boss will be the same as the old boss.

Though I'm open to being pleasantly surprised.

Christian Heroes of the Holocaust

2011-02-08T01:40:00.000-08:00

My crisis of faith was deepened years ago when I read that in the years leading up to World War II Germans of my theological stripe, far from opposing Hitler, were some of his most zealous supporters. These were literate, pious people, and there's every reason to believe they read their Bibles, prayed, and heard Bible-based preaching. I still find myself asking, Why couldn't they see what was coming? Why didn't the Holy Spirit speak to them?

At least as disturbing was learning that Nazi government organizations supported Christian missions. Couldn't those in charge of the missions organizations see that the money they were receiving had been coerced from people and had not been gathered from cheerful givers (2 Co 9:7)?

Of course, I have the benefit of hindsight; if Hitler could say of the death camp system once it was fait accompli that the world would never believe such was possible, I need to cut my brethren in Christ some slack if they could not have anticipated it. But that same hindsight should enable me to look at the present and ask questions about the direction my brethren are traveling in today. While people can be forgiven for not believing the unbelievable, it's a different story when they refuse to see themselves falling into a pattern that is all too familiar. One should also look at those who bucked the tide at the time and see what it was that kept them from joining so many others in doing evil.

I saw a video the other day that showed both how easy it is to fall into horrific behavior and the courage of those who resisted doing so. Weapons of the Spirit, made in the 1990s, tells the story of Le Chambon sur Lignon, a Huguenot village in southern France, where thousands of Jews found refuge during the Holocaust. As far as I can tell, this is a documentary made by a Jew giving credit where credit is due; for that reason it is more important than it could have been had it been made by an evangelical (Pr 25:2).

One theme that runs through through the video is that character is developed over time; the Hollywood fantasy of the do-nothing who becomes a hero at the right time because he intensely wants to is just that—a fantasy. Rather, we are in a crisis what we've been all along. It was because David had been fighting bears and lions for years that Goliath was just another wild beast to be slain, and in the same way, Jewish refugees were nothing out of the ordinary to the people of Le Chambon because they had been taking in strangers for centuries. Of course, this disturbs me because I don't see enough of that hospitality and habitual righteousness in my own life.

Nor was the opposition of the Germans or the Vichy French government to what the Chambonais were doing anything new: when the nineteenth-century Enjolras sings in Les Misérables "the blood of the martyrs will water the fields of France," those fields had already been watered with Huguenot blood centuries before. The French had never liked the Huguenots, nor had they liked the Jews, and their participation in the Holocaust was simply an extension of who they already were, as was the resistance of the Huguenots.

I was also disturbed by the parallels I see between France and today's US. When northern France fell to the Germans, southern France was under nominally French control. It was the French who had originally built the internment camp facilities, though for refugees from the Spanish Civil war; it was the French who helped spread propaganda about the "Jewish threat"; it was French police, not German soldiers, who rounded up Jews off the street and put them in the camps; and it was the French who took them from the camps and put them on the trains to the death camps in Germany. Perhaps they felt they had no choice and were going along to get along, but I'm more inclined to think many believed the propaganda and served from their hearts.

In our own society, we have the Muslim threat, we have a military that cavalierly kills innocent people, we have the National Guard already experienced in running US citizens out of their homes and confiscating weapons, and we have refugee camps built by FEMA ready for occupants. And just as the French probably had no particular love for the occupying Germans, US conservatives have no love for the Obama administration, but they still support his wars foreign and domestic (e.g., the war on drugs). How far would they have to stretch to support the interment of Muslims or free-marketers? For that matter, how far would liberals or centrists have to stretch? If the equivalent of the Reichstag fire^* were to light the fires of US patriotism (as many believe happened on 9/11), our society would be more like what it is today than it is already: blindly following the government to war against innocent people.

What side is the church in the US on? Is she used to standing for righteousness and against oppression? Is she used to defending innocent members of despised groups from persecution? Is she willing to have her blood shed that she might not shed the blood of the innocent? Does she view anyone who doesn't know Christ as a possible future brother or sister who needs to be won over by love and grace?

If you would like to see an inspiring story of Christian brethren who put themselves at mortal risk to stand against the tide, yet never considered themselves heroes or martyrs, I heartily recommend Weapons of the Spirit, which is available from www.chambon.org. It's a few bucks and ninety minutes well spent, and you might think of nonbelieving neighbors who would also be interested.

^*The Reichstag fire was set not by Jews, but by the Nazis, and by blaming it on the Jews the Nazis were able to gain the support of Josef Sechspackung for what he was assured were "temporary" violations of human rights.

Joy in the House of Mourning

2011-02-05T20:05:00.000-08:00

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart. (Ec 7:2)

As excited as I was about the possibilities for the halftime show at tomorrow's Super Bowl, there's no way it could ever match the funeral I went to today for sheer joy.

Kim Ohanian's earthly life ended a few days ago, and hundreds of people came to our church today, not to "pay their respects" or "say goodbye," but to celebrate a life given to Jesus and transformed into triumph. Kim had given her time to our church's preschool program, and former students and their parents attended, as did many members of the church she had been active in before coming to ours and probably many whose connections with Kim I have no idea of. In the almost ten years we have been at our church, I have never seen so many people in the building at one time.

The result was an hour and a half of music, testimony, and preaching that surely brought smiles to the entire heavenly host. As my wife put it, no one could have left that service without understanding what life in Christ was all about. Even my cooling heart warmed a bit.

Her husband John gave an eloquent remembrance of the priority she had placed on the Christian mission, whether as an English teacher in Korea, as a mother and stepmother to his children, or as a member of our church's missions committee. His son and daughter spoke well of her taking over as their mother figure. My daughter and a good friend sang a duet about heaven—appropriately enough stating that we have no idea what to expect—that drew the first applause I have ever heard of occurring at a funeral.

But what brought out the tissues, at least where I was, watching the video feed to the overflow crowd in the gym, was Kim's teenage daughter Joy describing her Mama. As she listed what she remembered her mother doing for her, I asked how well I had done each with my own children. Did I encourage and model daily time in Scripture and prayer? Did I spend countless hours talking about their spiritual condition? Was the mission of the church my first priority? Is it now?

If I had needed a list of worthwhile things to do with one's time, that was it.

Apart from two of the dozens of slides in the slideshow on the screen in the gym during the after-service luncheon, there was no indication of what government Kim was subject to. I don't know if she listened to Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or read Murray Rothbard or voted Democrat. But if I hadn't known from working with her on the missions committee that she loved Jesus and wanted people—family, friends, and strangers alike—to know him, I would have had it massaged into me today.

I needed to hear it all. I have been wondering for some time whether the Bible is, for better or worse, a work of fiction. And as any three random posts on this blog will evidence, I look at the way the Christian church—and I mean sincere people who read the Bible and pray and can be generous and otherwise good neighbors—has fallen into the idolatry of nationalism and wonder "whether there be any Holy Ghost."

But today God blew on the coals by showing me someone who took what he gave her and used it for his glory alone, and I could look around at hundreds of people and see the effect she had had on their lives.

More than I did yesterday I want to do the same.

Presidential Humor

2011-01-29T09:59:00.000-08:00

What can I add to this?

The one person in the world who can order the death of thousands of innocent people through the mediation of Predator drones jokes about killing his own subjects if they step out of line.

President Obama jokes about killing the Jonas Brothers

This man has indeed ordered the killing of American citizens without trial. But now we can joke about it. Ha, ha, ha.

And now this knee-slapper about airport patdowns during the State of the Union address:

President Obama jokes about airport patdowns

If this man were the president of any country where the inner power circle was people of color or speakers of a language unrelated to English, he would be called a monster. But because his backdrop is Old Glory, only the lunatic fringe howls at his barbarism.

I work in an office populated by two dozen people as hostile to evangelical Christianity as any two dozen randomly chosen people in our nation (though I should hasten to add that they treat Christians and all persons with respect), yet the first comment I heard the first time the subject of airport patdowns was raised was, "What will this do to people who have been abused?" But the conversation died soon thereafter. Hey, if the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize can joke about patdowns, they must be funny, right? People who have been abused be damned!

Have Christians in the US gotten offended at the idea of women and children being "felt up" (as stated in my office) before they can fly? If they have, I haven't heard anything. I know at least one of the guys who started WeWontFly.com, and they're not evangelicals, but they do stand "for basic human dignity" and back up that stance with their time, their money, and their willingness to have Whoopi Goldberg castigate them on worldwide TV. But the evangelical church stands by President Obama, whom they had a boatload of biblical reasons to deny their vote, and, I would say, against the basic dignity of those they say are created in the image of the God they worship.

Worse, they merrily send their children off to kill and die for this monster. If my church is typical, their prayers are, "Dear Lord, bless your missionaries, many of whom serve under difficult circumstances. And for those who have answered your call to serve in the armed forces, we ask that you will bring them home safely. May they serve with honor. We pray that you would put a hedge of protection around Abel Baker, Charlie Daniels, Edward Foss, and George Hardy." Do you see the difference? The prayers for the missionaries are cryptic and general; for the soldiers they are lengthy and specific. "Where your treasure [including time] is, there will your heart be also."

Yet no matter whom I mention this to, the reaction is that I am attacking those who do the praying. "How dare you criticize the prayers of a brother?" But it seems to me that when this has been an almost-weekly occurrence (well, many weeks there are no prayers for the missionaries at all) for almost eight years, we're not talking about personal foibles here; we're talking about the official policy of the church: an official, unverbalized claim that Jesus stands behind or goes ahead of Uncle Sam's army and that the death of innocent people by the thousands is simply collateral damage—in the words of Madeleine Albright, "a tough choice, but . . . worth it."

So Jesus is saying through his church that it's OK to kill innocent people and let God sort them out. (As one with more than my share of foibles, I have to note that it seems that perverts go skinny dipping with women and children; good Christians drop bombs on them.)

Jesus, we hardly knew ye.

A Green Shoot

2011-01-15T08:51:00.001-08:00

I can't remember the last time I wasn't tired. Part of it is age; nothing works as well as it used to, and the system that performs maintenance on my body while I sleep is going downhill along with my skin, muscle tone, digestion, vision, hearing, short-term memory, and everything else. The idea of living forever doesn't have any appeal to me whatever, and I'd even bypass drinking from the fountain of eternal youth, given the sins of mine.

And, to tell the truth, the promise of heaven doesn't thrill me much, either. Though Jesus says that those who are faithful to him will hear him say, "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your lord," meaning that his happiness will guarantee mine, the Bible doesn't really give us any glimpses of heaven that make me feel like I'd belong there or even want to.

So we're left with looking at life on earth, or some aspects of it, as a foretaste of what God has in store for those who love him. I write this blog because I see much room for improvement in that earthly picture, at least the part involving the church in the US. And I find myself wondering if there really is a Holy Spirit: if God is a thinking, speaking, feeling, acting being, why is the church in the US, with all its Bibles, sermons online, and prayer meetings, on the wrong side of so many issues? Or if the church is right, why won't he tell me what I'm doing wrong so I can repent? Has he given up on me and sent me lies because I don't want to believe the truth?

Well, I think I've seen a green shoot in the desert.

This morning we sent off our contribution to Samaritan Ministries, a Christian health-care co-op we've been a part of for more than a decade. Actually, we sent the money to a fellow "subscriber," someone who made their financial need brought on by medical treatment. They told Samaritan of their need, and Samaritan passed their name on to us so we could send them a predetermined amount of money and pray for them. We do this every month, and the understanding is that if we have medical needs we'd like prayer and help paying for, we can make our needs known. I had a hernia repaired last month, and depending on what I owe after my employment-based insurance pays, I may submit a request.

Samaritan started out when health-care costs were merely unreasonable. Now that government coercion has made health care almost unaffordable,voluntary organizations like Samaritan are more important than ever in enabling us to have somewhere to turn when medical costs overwhelm us.

During the runup to ObamaCare, Senator Christopher Dodd put out a call for those interested in commenting on the subject to contribute to an online forum. Samaritan told us about it, and so I put in my two cents' worth a couple of times. One contributor referred to us "subscribers" as "minions" and huffed that he would never qualify as a member, hence Samaritan was somehow immoral, and if ObamaCare destroyed it, so much the better. I suggested to him that if he wanted to set up a similar organization for atheists Samaritan would be happy to help him get it running. I later asked someone at Samaritan if I'd gone overboard and was assured that I hadn't.

If being part of the church means being part of Samaritan Ministries, a group that helps people every day and would willingly help more, all in the name of Christ, count me in, my doubts be damned.

If that weren't enough of a green shoot, the people we sent money to today are in Mexico. Perhaps they are US citizens down there as missionaries or retirees, but the names are thoroughly Spanish. I'd prefer to believe that they are simply José y María Paquete de Seis (not their real names!), a brother and sister in Christ, who heard about Samaritan and wanted to get in on a good thing.

Kings and kingdoms will all pass away (and so will democracies and republics), but there's something about the name of Jesus.

The Red, White, and Blue at the Rose Bowl

2011-01-08T16:32:00.000-08:00

I only caught parts of a few bowl games this season. Though I say "only," I consider watching any sports unless under duress proof that I am not totally sanctified. This year's intake was more than in the past, and like any addict, I find that the more I take in the less I enjoy. On the other hand, having an excuse (if not, alas, this time, the opportunity) to rub my wife's feet during the game goes a long way to making the experience worthwhile, even if I find my inability not to watch the third replay of an incomplete pass and the fourth showing of a commercial I didn't like the first time reprehensible.

If you really hate me, buy me a wide-screen TV and a hundred channels of cable to go with it. You'll never hear from me again. I will literally amuse myself to death, and sports will likely be the most healthy part of my suicide diet.

But just as the best action is not without sin, neither is a serious waste of time without some gain.

Did you catch the Rose Bowl? I don't mean the game, I mean the stadium. You had to be looking for it, because the cameras never focused on it, and I can't find any pictures online to back this up, but if you can find a recording of the game, look for shots of the front entrance to the stadium and the facade on the press box. You'll see a red, white, and blue theme, not really a flag, but certainly reminiscent of it, and four words, which I think included strength and integrity, maybe duty, honor, and justice. As I say, it was backdrop, and I didn't think to write the words down. While these words can apply to football, I don't think that was the point. I think it was about the military.

My guess is prompted by something else I noticed. The referee, and probably all the officials, were wearing prominent American* flags on their chests (to the left, under the heart). Now there have been nickel-sized American flags on the backs of college and professional football helmets for years, and Major League Baseball jerseys all have on one sleeve American flags the size of those worn by the astronauts, and referees' shirts probably did also. These are somewhat unobtrusive, and if their purpose is ungodly, they are effective by being insidious; the equivalent in the sexual realm would be, oh I don't know, the beginnings of a cleavage or butt crack. But there was nothing insidious about the flag on the Rose Bowl referee's shirt; it was meant to be prominent, like a "cleavage" that includes everything above the nipples.

So what's wrong with displaying the flag? you ask.

I reply, Flags are political. What do sports have to do with politics? Isn't this supposed to be a fun time when we gather as a community to celebrate young men who have been training for years as individuals and as teams as they get together to enjoy the pleasure of competition and sportsmanship?

At which you guffaw, and rightly so.

Bowl games, and really all intercollegiate sports, are where we have tax-supported institutions (and even the "private" ones are tax supported through government loans to students) fielding teams to play games in tax-financed facilities that are broadcast over government-controlled media. But the purpose is indeed to build community. What kind of community are these events intended to build?

Here's where the flag comes in, because it is the symbol of that community. This is why all sporting events begin with a salute to the flag: this is the time for those in attendance to state the purpose of the gathering. The flag stands for what the gathering is all about, a symbol for the cement that holds the community together.

What does the American flag stand for? Not what did it stand for ten, a hundred, or two hundred years ago, but what does it stand for now? If nothing else, the flag at a sporting event stands for the government's right to take money from people under threat ultimately of death to finance sporting events. You got a problem with that?

But that's not all. When the Blue Angels or Thunderbirds fly over the stadium, the message is that the government has the right to send soldiers where it wills so they can do what soldiers do best, and that's creating a demand for orphanages and hospitals, not filling it. And when there is a moment of silence for "those who have made the ultimate sacrifice," the message is that real heroes go where the ruling class tells them to go, and they fight, kill, and sometimes, tragically, die.

Are these people the real heroes?

Years ago documents were declassified that showed that Uncle Sam lied to the public to build support for the war in Vietnam. The architect of that war, Robert McNamara, said the same thing before he died within the last year. Yet this is never mentioned during the solemn moments at athletic events.

During the war years, there were at least three men who suffered greatly because their overt opposition to the war was not well received by the public: Daniel Ellsburg, and Fathers Philip and Daniel Berrigan. And, of course, many young men had to choose between leaving their native land for Canada or either serving in a war that they considered immoral or going to prison. Why are these men are never honored? Is it more heroic to march off unquestioningly to participate in a "theater" that involves the killing of innocent people, or is it more heroic to call a lie a lie and suffer rather than go along with it?

I've written about last year's Super Bowl halftime show, how intentionally or otherwise it looked to me like a deliberate poke in the eye of the warfare state. Poke or no poke, that state has become more intrusive and abusive over the last year, but the same company that sponsored last year's show is sponsoring this year's and their featured artists, the Black Eyed Peas, have a song out that pulls no punches in its opposition to Uncle Sam's wars.

Will they dare perform it? If they do, will anyone whose mind might be changed be listening? The song for which I know the Peas is downright crude, and if they perform that song before they perform "Where Is the Love," the Sarah Palin crowd will have turned off, if they had even begun to watch out of curiosity. (What we're known for definitely affects how our message is received.) But the main stream of viewers, for whom "My Humps" is frivolous at worst and the wars are far away, might well be paying attention, and some might even change their minds.

How ironic that a music group that makes its money mocking godly sexuality joins the distinguished ranks of the Berrigans, Daniel Ellsburg, and Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, while the bride of the creator of the universe stands with those who lie to bring on death and destruction. When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?

UPDATE: On second examination, "Where Is the Love" is not as anti-Uncle Sam's wars as I'd first thought. That should make some people happy.

*I use the word "American" here simply because I expect people to know what I mean, not because I think that Old Glory represents America in any meaningful sense. For what a truly American flag would represent, see my post on America.

The Julian Assange Rape Case

2010-12-26T23:02:00.001-08:00

This is a follow-on to my discussion of anarchy and heinous crimes. Rape is certainly a heinous crime, and as I have expressed support for Julian Assange in the past, I think I need to do what I can to show that I do not condone either rape or fornication. And, of course, there is the question of the relationship between the rape charges and the leaks that put Mr. Assange's name in the public eye.

While I would not want my daughters to date the likes of Julian Assange, I would not hesitate to have him as an overnight house guest. From what I can tell about the situation, he is no stranger to casual sex, but if it is true that the women he is accused of raping were seen with him afterwards in cordial settings, I have a hard time believing he actually forced himself on them. If he didn't force himself on them, he is still sexually immoral, but not all sexual immorality is rape. I have no fear that the females in my family would engage in consensual sex with him, nor do I fear that he would rape any of them.

I believe that a woman has the right to say no to sex at any time. The bedroom scene from A Man and a Woman comes to mind: they're in bed naked (this was the early 1960s, so we only saw their heads and his bare shoulders, but I think the inference is reasonable) and he's on top of her and she says no. That's her right, or more properly, once she says no, he has no right to proceed with intercourse.

Again, I don't think the guys I want my daughters with need anything from them they can't get from six feet away until they've committed their lives to them, and a woman who is willingly naked in bed with a man she's not married to has already given away far too much, but I don't regard "temporary insanity due to arousal" as a legitimate reason for a man to force himself on an unwilling woman. So even if Mr. Assange climbed into bed with reasonable basis for assuming that those women were OK with him having unprotected intercourse with them, if they said at the last split second that they wanted him to use a condom or the deal was off and he went ahead unsheathed, then he has committed rape.

Let's assume the worst, that the understanding when these women went to bed with him was that he would use a condom but he forced himself on them. Now what?

As Gary North has written, the primary concern for those dealing with crimes should be the welfare of past and likely future victims of crimes. The best solution will, of course, exact restitution from the perpetrator to his victims, which include the victim of the crime itself and those involved in resolving the situation. The paragon of such a situation is the resolution of a theft by the thief paying back what he stole to the victim, plus compensation for the victim's lost time at work, damage to property, etc., as well as payment to those who tracked down the perpetrator, heard the trial, and supervised the payment of restitution.

Rape, and especially date rape, is unlike theft in that one does not damage a tangible object in the same way as one does when one, say, steals a car, sells it in pieces, and spends the money, so it is difficult to assign a monetary or other physical value to the damage. (If the victim becomes pregnant or sustains cuts, rips, or bruises, these are clearly matters of paternity and battery and should be treated as such.) But clearly the woman has been violated: how does one measure the extent of the violation?

This question cannot be answered by any government court. There are so many variables that writing, let alone passing, a law that would cover all of them would be all but impossible. To take one reasonable example: if the man says at dinner that he doesn't like condoms but the woman, unbeknownst to the man, is distracted at the moment by a passing thought and the statement doesn't register, and she is the one who offers the wine after they get to her apartment, and it isn't until after fifteen minutes of foreplay that she remembers to ask him to put on the condom, but by then he has assumed that her lack of reaction at dinner means that their sex is to be unprotected and .... How can any legislature write that down or any jury sort it out? (Good grief—who would want to?)

So how does such a victim get justice? For that matter, how does the perpetrator get justice by not being treated the same as someone who climbs in the window and rapes total strangers?

Again, only anarchism provides the answer. The victim and the perpetrator agree on an arbitrator (an individual or a group), whose decision will be final. Such an arbitrator would be known to both parties and trusted because of his ability to ask the right questions and make fair decisions. Refusal by either party to engage in arbitration or to abide by the terms of the settlement would result in that party being considered an outlaw and therefore liable to attack with impunity by the other.

As such a system came into being, people would band together with those of like minds, so both parties would likely have what Stefan Molyneux calls dispute resolution organizations (DROs) to arrange the arbitration, and the "trial" would more likely be a discussion between the organizations the parties belonged to, with the parties called on to provide their views of the facts of the case. The victim's DRO would be working to see that its customer was compensated for her hardships and would likely also provide suggestions or directives for changes in her lifestyle so she not be victimized again in the future. The perpetrator's DRO, after compensating the victim, would definitely protect its other customers by making sure that the perpetrator did not repeat his misdeed, perhaps even to the point of declaring him an outlaw and canceling his membership in the organization, thus leaving him open to execution by the victim's DRO.

To be brief, I don't know what the result of this trial under anarchism would be, but a greater mind than mine—and I'm sorry, but I don't know whose it was—has said that when the process is good, the result will be also. The means is an end in itself. Just means will yield just ends. Otherwise we are left with doing evil in the hopes that good will result, which violates a clear teaching of scripture (Ro 3:8).

The elephant in the room of the Assange case is, of course, that the women did not come forward with their accusations until after Mr. Assange was wanted by Uncle Sam for the Wikileaks. Are the women really acting on their own, or are they Uncle Sam's agents, willing or otherwise? Is this part of a plot to land Mr. Assange in the same kind of torture cell that Bradley Manning now occupies?

I don't know, but my guess is that if Mr. Assange is sent to Sweden to face rape charges, he will be incarcerated there, and once incarcerated he will be extradited to the US and tortured. I could be wrong—one could say that the British are more likely to extradite him than the Swedes—but I see the British role—and I believe the whole thing is a stage play—as that of the neutral party keeping the factions from coming to blows, at least for now. I expect them eventually to hand him over to the US directly, or if not, to the Swedes.

How much more believable the whole thing would be if an independent arbitrator, agreed to by both parties in the rape case, were to hear the arguments on both sides and render a decision. Mr. Assange could stay in Britain, the women could stay in Sweden, the hearings could take place using encrypted video conferencing software, and once the decision came down, we would find out for sure what the parties were made of by their willingness to abide by it.

As it is, the rape case is inextricable from the leaks case, and in the latter we have a small organization facing the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. And while that empire has found itself unable in the past to defeat small organizations like the Viet Cong, al-Qaeda, and numerous drug cartels, it has certainly managed to spill a lot of innocent blood in its futile attempts to do so. This does not bode well for anyone's future.

When it comes to bloodshed, nobody does it better than the state. If you want the antithesis of bloodshed, look to the antithesis of the state.

Wikileaks II

2010-12-19T14:27:00.000-08:00

(This is a response to the last comment by Anonymous to my previous post.)

I have attempted to answer your questions, but either you don't agree with my answers, which is your choice, or, if you think the substance of my answer was the Hillary Clinton comment, I'm not making clear the difference between a substantial answer and an attempt at comic relief.

So let me try again: all humans have the right to go to hell. Period. Anything more than that is grace. God has allowed us life at all by grace. He has made rules for our benefit: don't kill (i.e., violate people's bodies), steal (i.e., violate their property), commit adultery (i.e., violate their trust), or bear false witness (i.e., violate their reputations). To the degree that people do that, they will enjoy justice, peace, and prosperity according to their willingness to serve their neighbors.

The only time God allows us to suspend these prohibitions is when a person has violated them, and then only to the degree that we either force the perpetrator to make restitution or execute the perpetrator of a crime for which restitution is impossible.

Let me expand on a point I made in a response to your earlier comment and go through just one action our government has undertaken that as far as I'm concerned negates its claims to godly authority and therefore to secrecy or confidence of any kind.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Uncle Sam told us peons that if Vietnam went communist all Southeast Asia would follow and we would be either doomed or involved in an even worse war than the one we were fighting in Vietnam. A few years ago, government documents were declassified that showed that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which Congress passed in 1968 in lieu of a constitutional declaration of war, was based on a lie: the incident that it was supposed to be a response to had never happened. Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, before his death this year said the same thing.

So sixty thousand US soldiers, many of whom were drafted—sent over there under threat of imprisonment if they refused to go—died violent deaths, many more were maimed, a million Vietnamese died, more were maimed and made homeless, and the land was so devastated that decades later defoliants kept crops from growing and people were being killed by leftover land mines. All this because Uncle Sam lied and people believed him. And, of course, Vietnam went communist, but the worst regime in Southeast Asia today is not communist, it's Myanmar, and we are not threatened by any children of the Viet Cong, ideological or otherwise. Daniel Ellsburg knew the situation and released the Pentagon Papers in 1970, but no one paid any attention. Had there been a Bradley Manning in the Pentagon in 1968 and people had believed him, almost all that carnage could have been avoided.

As for the present wars, media giant Dan Rather has made a rather startling admission that is probably not front-page news in the mainstream press (part of which I count Fox News): "There was a fear in every newsroom in America . . . a fear of losing your job . . . the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise." It would appear that the government and its lapdog media are lying to us today and Bradley Manning has done us a favor of allowing us to see just what lies Uncle Sam is telling us now so we can tell him we won't take it anymore.

I place the blame for most of our society's problems on our government's violations of our rights and list them in my original post. I could have added to the list the existence of nuclear and biological weapons of mass murder: what biblical justification is there for taking people's money and using it to pay scientists to develop weapons that cannot help but violate the principles of just war every time they are used? If you're going to justify the development of the weapons in the first place, you have to factor in the inevitability of those weapons eventually falling into the hands of people you don't like, and, as you say, that's not a pleasant thought.

I also answered the question about North Korea: our government has no business interfering in those negotiations. If you are so convinced that North Korean soldiers shouldn't march into South Korea's killing machines, in the name of Jesus take your own money, go there, stand in front of them, and tell them to turn around and go home. You wouldn't have a hard time convincing me to go with you. But I'm not convinced that you have the right to vote money out of my pocket to send soldiers over there, and if they choose to march and die by the millions, that's their problem, not mine.

Finally, it's not the government that's keeping VX gas away from the public. As I said, it looks to me like anyone with the prerequisite knowledge of chemistry and enough motivation could make it given information available on the Web. That goes also for primitive nuclear bombs. The important thing is the motivation. Bill Gates doesn't have the motivation to pay someone to build a nuke. And, as the incidents with the underwear bomber, the Fort Dix wannabe bombers, the Times Square wannabe bomber, the Michigan wannabe bombers, and the Portland Christmas tree wannabe bomber have all shown, what motivates them to attempt bombings is US-government-sponsored murder in Muslim lands. (All these guys but the Times Square guy were recruited by US government agents who lit their fires by talking about US actions overseas, not our wealth, freedom, or degeneracy at home; the other acted on his own, but for the same reason.)

Have I answered the question yet? Maybe you need to rephrase the question.

Wikileaks

2010-12-17T18:23:00.001-08:00

From a correspondent:

The [Wikileaks] have undermined the relationship between our nation and other nations, and now they aren't willing to send us confidential documents, including negotiations. Aren't we conducting sensitive negotiations in the North Korean part of the world right now? Is the Pentagon allowed to keep things secret from the people such as how to construct nuclear weaponry? VX gas? if they didn't keep secrets, we would have many more biological weapons on the streets.

You've asked a reasonable set of questions. They deserve a principled set of answers. I'll state my principles first and then apply them.

First, Christians are to do everything for the glory of God. Only God, his word, his church, and his people are eternal. Anything that gets in the way of the God's kingdom is expendable. We know we are serving his kingdom when we obey his word; there is no other test.

Second, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. This means treating them the way we want to be treated. At the base, that means that we don't do to them what we don't want done to us: we leave their bodies and property alone; we don't violate them directly, by proxy, or by deceit. Again, we know we are serving our neighbors when we are obeying the word of God and not doing to them anything we would not want them to do to us.

I don't need to tell you that North Korea does not live by these principles, but I may need to remind you that Uncle Sam also violates them: he takes your tax money and uses it to facilitate abortions; he touches the genitals and other private parts of men, women, and young children at airports; he has taken the capital that businessmen who could otherwise have hired a certain intelligent graduate of an exclusive Christian college and given it to some of the richest people the world has ever known, first through loan guarantees and then through bailouts; he has destroyed the doctor–patient relationship that was the mainstay of community health through fascist and now socialized medicine, as well as the cohesion of the family through Social Security and "public" schools. He has arrogated to himself the right to determine what you may and may not (under penalty of jail) put in your body or look at or read. He tortures people accused—not convicted—of crimes. He reads your e-mail, and he keeps track of every Web site you visit, everywhere you go, and every purchase you make.

(To the last of which you no doubt say, "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear." To which I say, if Uncle Sam has done nothing wrong, he has nothing to fear from Bradley Manning.)

Does he do this for the glory of God? Or is it more likely that he's looking out for himself and those in his inner circle? Do we not agree that to ask that question is to answer it?

So why is he negotiating with North Korea? What business is it of ours what North Korea does? Is Uncle Sam about to bring the kingdom of God to North Korea?

It's a little-known fact that when US soldiers first went to Korea in 1945—years before what we think of as the Korean War—they were resisted forcibly by South Koreans. Needless to say, those Koreans didn't live to tell their side of the story.

And that was over 50 years ago. Why are US soldiers still there? South Korea has a world-class economy; North Korea is a well-armed pauper. Why don't we leave the Koreans to sort out their differences? "South Korea might go communist." So what? Vietnam went communist, but that didn't stop me from having a Vietnamese guest for dinner a while back or wearing shoes made in Vietnam today.

What good would it do North Korea to bomb us? If they come here under the banner of "what's yours is yours; let's make a deal," they would be as welcome as immigrants were a century or so ago (and, as anti-immigration politicians who get caught hiring illegals demonstrate, still are today), and they wouldn't have to hide in a fortress to keep from being IED'd by "insurgents."

Why would they invade if there were, as Yamamoto put it, "an armed American behind every blade of grass"? "Ah, but Americans aren't all armed." Could that have anything to do with Uncle Sam's ban on private citizens owning heavy arms?

"But if we could own combat weapons, America would become a war zone." Only if America is the dirt under our feet: America is the idea that people have the right to life, liberty, and property, and Americans don't use weapons offensively. If the US were to become a war zone, it's because the church hasn't done its job to convince people that God's ways are best, even for nonbelievers. And Uncle Sam certainly isn't putting that word out.

Uncle Sam is not doing what the Torah says he should be doing—forcing those who violate others' bodies and property to make restitution to their victimvs, and executing those for whose crimes restitution is impossible (and yes, I'm leaving aside for the moment my claim that the Torah does not allow for what we know as a state)—and he is doing a lot of things he shouldn't be doing. In fact, if we knew more of what he's doing but keeping secret from us, we might be motivated enough to tell the emperor he has no clothes and laugh so hard at his nakedness that he beats a retreat. If only we had someone with access to his secrets....

As for the building of nuclear weapons and development of VX gas, use of both of those weapons systems necessarily violates the just war theory requirement that noncombatants not be targeted. If A fears B and so acts in such a way that may or may not stop B but will certainly kill C, who is otherwise not involved, he is a murderer. I assume you didn't vote for Obama, so this should make my point: If the Iranians were to fear Obama and so engage in a pre-emptive that cost you your eyesight, wouldn't you cry out for God to hold them morally accountable? That's what Uncle Sam has done to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, at least 70 percent of those who have gone through the hell of Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.

If Germany had had a Bradley Manning in 1938, there might not have been an Auschwitz. For that matter, if there had been a Bradley Manning in Wilson's White House in 1917, the US might not have gotten involved in the War to End All Wars, and there might not have been a Hitler to begin with.

As Crovelli put it, if the system from Manning's immediate superiors to the White House is involved in murder and cover-up, where should he have gone with the information he had? Isn't the biblical course of action to bring these things to light (Pr 24:12; Ep 5:12-14)?

What is Uncle Sam using all those secrets to protect us from?

Communism? With Obama in the White House and the GOP preaching Obamunism Lite, what do we lose if we lose that we haven't already lost?

Are you afraid you'll have to wear a burqa? I like grokking cleavages at least as much as the next guy, but I'm not proud to say it. Maybe burqas would make life easier for me. I'm not a woman, but I think I'd prefer wearing a burqa to being felt up at the airport. Oh, I forgot: they feel up women in burqas, too.

Bankruptcy? Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt alone will cost as much as the entire federal budget before long.

Back to principles: Are we spreading the kingdom of God by supporting Uncle Sam's activities? Or are we spreading the predations of a government run amok? Does Uncle Sam treat our neighbors the way we would want to be treated?

I say no, yes, and no. If you disagree, rejoice! You're in the majority (Mt 7:13). I just hope that when your heroes get their way they don't decide I'm more valuable to them alive than dead, because I think that when that day comes the living will envy the dead (Re 9:6). I gather that Bradley Manning already does.

On Changing My Name

2010-12-12T02:32:00.000-08:00

I got called a name the other day by a very intelligent, decent human being. I don't take personal offense at it, but it has reminded me that the labels people wear can cause confusion; we can't know what people stand for just by looking at what they call themselves.

In this case, a coworker was expressing frustration at the resistance he was getting to his efforts to promote recycling in the office. After living for almost two decades in a village where we could drink from the streams, I'm appalled to live where the water is polluted. And even Penn and Teller admit that some recycling (notably aluminum cans) is effective, so I wanted to help my coworker's case for a cleaner environment by laying blame for the sheer volume of unnecessary trash our society produces at the door of the perverse incentives that result from government subsidies for trash disposal. I noted that the trash collection system we're subject to is fascist—i.e., government sweetheart deals for private corporations—denounced it, and encouraged my coworker to keep at his efforts.

Well, my coworker lost no time in distancing himself from "Henry's right-wing agenda." To which I replied, "Since when is someone who opposes censorship, corporate welfare, and imperialist war right wing?" (How could I not have included the war on drugs?) His reply was that libertarians are the "most rightwing of social democrats."

So I was treated to a self-confessing anti-establishment left winger distancing himself from my denunciation of "right wing" fascism! Why? Because he didn't like my "implication that government services promote sloth." So he would prefer a fascist system (or perhaps a socialist system, with government employees picking up the trash), the fight against the negative results of which he has found somewhat frustrating, to a free market that eliminates the incentives to produce needless trash.

My point isn't to belittle my coworker, who, as I said, is intelligent and trying hard to do what is right. Rather, I'm noting that I wear a label that people don't understand. Eric Peters has addressed the issue of left, right, and libertarian quite well, but I wonder if it isn't time for people like me to find a new label.

LewRockwell.com has come up with "anarcho-capitalist," a term coined by Murray Rothbard, but both anarchism and capitalism are so misunderstood that combining them can only compound the problem. My coworker could be forgiven for thinking our fascist trash system is capitalist, given that so many "capitalists" have no trouble receiving corporate welfare. And the original anarchists, those of the Bakunin stripe, did not believe in private property. So as much as I like what Rockwell and friends mean by it, I don't find the term helpful.

I've come up with the term neighborist, but I don't expect it to go anywhere. It certainly describes the view Rothbardians—I suspect that Rothbard, as was Martin Luther, would be appalled to have his name attached to a movement—hold: all people are equal, bodies and property are not to be violated, and no one has the right to do to others anything those others cannot do in return. It follows that we don't acknowledge the legitimacy of the state, the fiction that gives some people privileges that others don't have. We don't divide our fellow human beings into "fellow citizens" and "aliens"; all are our neighbors (some better than others), and we get what we need and want from them through voluntary exchange, whether it be money, friendship, sex, or potato chips.

If you're asking, "What's wrong with just calling yourself a Christian?" go to the head of the class. This blog isn't about libertarianism or any other ism; it's about obeying Jesus and extending his reign over at least part of a world that is becoming more hellish by the day.

Unfortunately, if you ask most people today what a Christian is, few will answer that a Christian believes that God made all people, that people have rebelled against God, that God somehow became a man in a backwoods village and died to pay for the sins of those rebels, and that he now sends his people to invite their neighbors to leave their living deaths and come to eternal life. I suspect that most believe that we stand for racism, corporate welfare, and imperialist war. Oh, and we hate booze almost as much as we hate sex.

I have heard that a deserter was once brought to Alexander the Great (Thug). Upon learning that the deserter's name was also Alexander, the thug snapped, "Either change your behavior or change your name."

I can't find any good names change mine to.

A Prayer for Julian Assange and Bradley Manning

2010-12-07T07:39:00.000-08:00

Almighty and ever-living God, from whom no acts or thoughts are hidden, I ask you to bless Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

I realize that Julian Assange is unrepentant about his violation of your marriage covenant. But I have also violated that standard by nature and by choice, and as I trust in your forgiveness and power to give me an obedient heart, I ask that you bless him in the same way. I ask that somewhere in the system that imprisons Mssrs. Assange and Manning there be someone who knows you, someone who can talk to them about the weighty earthly matters for which they have sacrificed their freedom, someone who can lead them to consider the eternal consequences of rebellion against you and turn to Jesus, the only source of forgiveness for their rebellion.

Your holy word says that your people have nothing to fear from the truth, that the truth of Christ's sinless life, atoning death, and life-giving resurrection will make us free from sin and death. Yet our experience tells us that freedom also comes from the unchanging everyday truths of mathematics, physics, and biology that have enabled so many to live far beyond subsistence level.

Mssrs. Assange and Manning have given their freedom to promote the truth. These truths are inconvenient for those in power, and so our rulers have mustered raw power and influence to imprison the truth bearers. Those whose actions have killed thousands of innocent people have used the possibility that some of their friends might be endangered when the truth comes out as an excuse to further add to their evil by imprisoning those who have brought to light shameful deeds done in secret.

All truth is your truth. All truth points to your existence, your purity, your mercy, your sovereignty, and the goodness of your law. Thank you for those who have revealed the truth about our rulers. May your people, who have trusted those rulers in ways that rival their devotion to you, no longer put their trust in the authorities and powers of this dark world and instead resolve to serve you and your kingdom wholeheartedly as your ambassadors to a world dead in trespasses and sins.

May I also throw off the sins that entangle me and prove my faith by my deeds.

May Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, who are suffering so much because they have brought cold water to your people, become disciples and so receive a disciple's reward.

For the sake of Christ and his kingdom, amen.

Could Jesus Forsake the Church in the US?

2010-11-26T06:28:00.000-08:00

Could Jesus ever decide that the church in the US is so corrupt that he no longer claims it? You tell me.

I will forsake my house,
abandon my inheritance;
I will give the one I love
into the hands of her enemies.
My inheritance has become to me
like a lion in the forest.
She roars at me;
therefore I hate her. (Je 12:7-8)

Ah, but that was in the Old Testament. This is now, right?

I don't think so.

Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. (Re 2:5)

If it happened in Ephesus, and even to Philadelphia (Re 3:7-13), why can't it happen here? Please put your answers in the comment boxes below.

How Does Anarchy Deal with Heinous Crimes?

2010-11-25T06:53:00.000-08:00

Personally, I think you are too lenient on child molesters - I would put them to death! I do not believe you can have reasonable [conversation] (if such a thing is even warranted) with the parent of a child who was molested.

My skeptical friend takes exception to my statement that under an anarchic system we would expect people accused of heinous crimes to be treated according to the Golden Rule wherever possible and that the primary concern of any system dealing with crime would be looking after the welfare of the victim and the welfare of likely future victims, rather than inflicting suffering on the perpetrator.

My first task in dealing with his desire to see child molesters executed is to define the terms. What is a child? What is molestation?

As I mentioned last time, If his definition of molestation includes the unwelcome touching of the genitals of a prepubescent, we have exactly that taking place in our airports—not by anarchists, but by agents of the state, which grants them impunity. (If there's a good contrast between anarchy, the lack of a class of people with special privileges, and chaos, the absence of moral order, this is it.)

Who is a child? Is a fifteen-year-old who pays her own rent and buys her own food and clothes a child? Is a twenty-two-year-old with Down's syndrome an adult?

These are questions any faceless ("justice" is blind, remember) government justice system needs to answer if it is to carry out its duties consistently. And, as with everything else government does, the actual standards will be those determined to be expedient by the politically powerful; any resemblance to biblical justice will be coincidental. And I see nothing in the Bible that legitimates statutory rape laws: forcible rape, definitely, but statutory rape, no. My guess is that God figures that parents who don't teach their daughters chastity deserve what they get if their daughters allow themselves to be seduced.

Related to this is the question of equality under the law for perpetrators. Before the Industrial Revolution, sixteen-year-old females were commonly married, not infrequently to much older men.* And if such couples married, one can assume that extramarital affairs were not unheard of and were dealt with as was any other sexual misconduct.

My point is not to legitimate extramarital sex, only to point out that if a sixteen-year-old female has consensual extramarital sex with a nineteen-year-old male, while that is a tragedy, it is not considered a crime; the male is not even arraigned in juvenile court. Yet a twenty-two-year-old male would be sent to jail on child molestation charges for doing exactly the same thing to exactly the same person. (Maybe my friend would solve this problem by working to see the younger male arraigned.) This is morally no different from meting out differing punishments to people of different races or economic levels, or whose surnames come at different places in the alphabet.

All this changes under an anarchic system. The primary concern of the victim's dispute resolution organization (DRO, to use Stefan Molyneux's term) would be the victim, not the perpetrator. No matter what else happened, the DRO (depending on what kind of account the victim's family had) would likely provide counseling, therapy, and whatever else was needed to restore the victim to physical and emotional health. (Try getting that from any state system!)

If the abuse came from a customer of the same DRO, but one outside the immediate family, the DRO would likely greatly modify or terminate the terms under which it would protect the perpetrator. If the DRO terminated his protection and no other DRO would take him on, the family of the victim could then do as they pleased (subject, of course, to their contract with the DRO) with him with no fear of reprisal. It would thus behoove the perpetrator to mollify the family if possible, but if the only way the family could get closure was to kill the perpetrator, then, if no DRO were willing to shield the perpetrator, it would be him (and whatever other outlaws he could get on his side) against them.

This has several advantages over the present system. Most important is the concern for the victim. Under our present system, as Charles Colson has pointed out, the state considers itself the primary victim of any misconduct, and any concern shown for the victim is coincidental. That is why rape victims especially are known to feel as though they have to relive the horror under interrogation by state agents both before and during trial. Also, whether the suspect is convicted or not, it is the victim who pays for medical and psychological treatment, as well as any work missed due to trauma. And finally, all government officials involved have the incentive to grandstand, or to please voters or lobbyists, rather than to administer justice.

Under an anarchic system, the interpersonal relationships of all concerned enable people to talk about issues freely and force them to take responsibility for the final result: it's one thing to have your granddaughter's molester killed by a faceless bureaucracy; it's another thing entirely when you're the one who does the job yourself.

How Does Anarchy Avoid Corruption?

2010-11-20T10:32:00.000-08:00

When a friend with whom I share a considerable amount of discontent with our present social systems asked me how I envision police and military working under anarchy, I referred him to an article I wrote years ago adapting the ideas of Stefan Molyneux to a Christian audience. My friend responded at some length:

I don't think your system would work[,] and [it] would eventually become corrupt, as is the present system, which was designed initially to protect the innocent. Incentives do not always prevent crimes, especially [those committed by] criminals who prefer to return to prision. Personally, I think you are too lenient on child molesters - I would put them to death! I do not believe you can have reasonable [conversation] (if such a thing is even warranted) with the parent of a child who was molested.

He has essentially raised two important questions: What would keep anarchy from becoming corrupt? and What should be done with perpetrators of heinous crimes? To keep the size of this post manageable, I will deal with only the first question here and the second in another.

"Incentives do not always prevent crimes." My friend is implying that unless anarchy were to be perfect, it would not be preferable to the status quo, and because I can't promise perfection, he can shake the dust off his feet. But hang on. We have a state system, and it's far from perfect, as he acknowledges. We agree that it was better (the slavery system excepted) two hundred years ago. But it wasn't perfect. There were still crimes committed. So no state can guarantee that crimes will not be permitted.

Today we live in the first nation in history that has targeted civilians with atomic weapons and chemical weapons. Even more surprising, ours is the only nation in history to pass laws making its entire population subject to groping of genitals and female breasts by government agents. My friend would like to see child molesters executed; to that I say, if touching the genitals of a prepubescent is molestation, it is the agents of the state, not anarchists, who should be the objects of his wrath. To disparage anarchism because of potential abuses in the face of such real abuses by "the greatest nation on God's green earth" is breathtaking, to say the least.

So we're back to the question of what system will do a better job of dealing with the human tendency to violate others' bodies and property to further selfish interests. And to deal with that, we need to discuss incentives.

I would agree that incentives do not always prevent crimes. In fact, they can even motivate crime, as my friend claims when he says, "...especially criminals who prefer to return to prision." My friend has proven my point. Humans make almost all important decisions in response to incentives, doing what they think, rightly or wrongly, will be in their own interests. If a prisoner prefers to return to prison rather than to be free, he has—you got it—an incentive to commit crimes.

But let's be biblical. Did Jesus believe in incentives? Ja, you betcha!

"What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?" (Lk 9:5). Jesus is appealing to naked self-interest here. Far from telling us not to live for the bottom line, he's implicitly acknowledging that we can't help but live for the bottom line. He's telling us here that the bottom line is further down than we think it is.

"His master replied, 'Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!'" (Mt 25:21). "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full" (Jn 10:10). If the promise of a happy, full life as a reward for faithful obedience isn't an incentive, what is it? Was Jesus disinterestedly stating a fact, or was he using incentives to motivate rational, self-interested people to channel their desires into a conscious effort to love God wholeheartedly and their neighbors sacrificially as themselves?

"But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness." Why? What's in it for me? "All these things will be given to you as well" (Mt 6:33). Ah, now that's incentive!

I'm afraid this argument puts me at odds with these sentiments expressed decades ago by Keith Green (whose spiritual kneecaps I can reach if I stretch):

And when I'm doing well
Help me to never seek a crown
For my reward is giving glory to you.

Brother Keith's words are like those of one proud of his humility. If Jesus believed in incentives, we should too.

So if we can't avoid incentives any more than we can avoid eating or breathing or sleeping, then somewhere in the discussion we need to compare the incentives inherent in an elitist state with those that would exist under anarchy. And let's begin with the Bible.

The first king of Israel was not Saul son of Kish and father of David's friend Jonathan. It was someone we would today call a neoconservative, a fellow named Abimelech (Jg 9:6). Not content with the separation of powers and the checks and balances of his day, he promoted what Dubya's legal advisor John Yoo called the "unitary executive"—and, of course, who better for the job than him?

On the day of his accession, his half-brother Jotham told a parable, the point of which was that people who want to live productive lives have better things to do than to go into government, and those who do go into government will make life miserable for the productive members of society (Jg 9:7-20). Why is that? Because the power that is government provides incentives for its agents to indulgence their natural desires to fulfill the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (Dt 17:16-20; 1 Sa 8:11-17). And the more powerful the government, the more opportunity for self-indulgence it provides and the less able the populus is to resist it. It follows that the less powerful the government is, the less incentive there is to become part of it and the more incentive there is to continue to produce the oil, wine, and fruit that cheer both God and man. If the most powerful government official in the nation were the town librarian, how fierce would the competition be for the job? The reason politics is such a dirty business is that the stakes are so high: the winners live off the labors of the losers. So everyone wants to be net beneficiaries of government largess and avoid being net taxpayers.

If no one has power over anyone else, how do we get what we need and want from other people? The only avenue open is service. Yes, people would still be sinners under an anarchic system, but the vast majority of them would find that their self-interest is served best through serving their neighbors. Think of your favorite friends and trading partners (merchants, customers, employers, employees) today: are they all Christians? Would you want to insult them by saying that if it weren't for the presence of the police they would rather get what they're after by plunder than by being good neighbors? For that matter, is the threat of jail what keeps you in line?

What does this have to do with Jesus? Well, it seems to me that a greater proportion of the population of the US is going to hell than ever before. How does the view of government espoused by Christians affect that?

Let's take school textbooks as an example. The morality of government schools rests on the idea that people have the right to vote money out of others' pockets to pay for their own children's education: might makes right. Might also makes right regarding the choice of textbooks: whether the biology books teach "creationism" or "evolution" is decided by political power, not by right or wrong: obviously, both sides think they're right and resent the idea of their tax money going to fund books that teach against their version of the truth. So when Christians stand up for their "right" to have their tax money go to books they agree with, they are ipso facto taking others' money for purposes those others disapprove of.
This situation is repeated whenever Christians seek to keep from having their tax money go to purposes they find objectionable, whether erotic art or abortion (or in my case mass murder overseas). Is it any surprise that those who have to fight Christians so that their tax money goes to what they want don't want to listen to the gospel?

The more anarchistic the society, by definition the smaller the government, and the more we Christians are able to say, "What's yours is yours; I won't take it away from you (though maybe I can interest you in a trade). But I do have a message I think you ought to listen to, and I'll leave you free to decide whether or not to accept it." What is not good neighborly about that?

If the Great Commission is about building the kingdom of God rather than preserving or extending the might of our rulers, the more we act like servants and less like wannabe masters, the more likely we are to be the salt and light we are called to be, and the more likely (in human terms) we are to get a hearing.

Is corruption inevitable? Yes. If it can happen to Israel, it can happen to anyone. What was the root cause of the breakdown? The people had rejected God as king over them (1 Sa 8:7); as Cotton Mather said about Massachusetts, "Religion brought forth prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother." What was the result? The people wanted a state, and God punished them by giving them one. And far from rescuing Israel from the corruption of anarchism, their state delivered them into the hands of their enemies. Only godliness can keep people from tyranny, and one important component of godliness is that we not trust government (Ps 146:3).

Anarchy on the Highway on Guy Fawkes Day

2010-11-18T03:44:00.000-08:00

My wife and I celebrated Guy Fawkes Day by droving down to Chattanooga after spending the night in Winchester, Virginia. We got on the road just before sunup and were on our way. She had a very important appointment outside Chattanooga, and there was no way we were going to get there in time driving the posted speed limit.

I was surprised at how many cars there were on the road, but even more surprising was that we were all doing about eighty, the usual almost ten miles an hour over the speed limit. I wasn't the fastest car on the road, so those who passed us must have been doing over eighty. When I lived in Virginia during high school, the drivers' manual said that exceeding eighty was considered reckless driving, but I wouldn't have considered anybody there reckless. We were simply making very good time.

It was an anarchist's dream: no police, just hundreds of people who all wanted to get where they were going as fast as they could. I've been in similar situations where there were jerks, people weaving in and out of traffic, going way too fast, but this was a good day. Had there been no posted speed limit, I'm not sure how much faster we would have driven. Gasoline consumption increases exponentially with speed after a certain point, as does wear on the car, so I think I was about at my personal limit, but others might have gone faster. To them I say, "More power to ya, Buddy. Just don't hit anything."

On the return trip, almost as soon as we got into Virginia, even though there was much less traffic on the road, we saw state troopers pulling drivers over right and left. I didn't see how fast the cars were traveling before they were pulled over, but even if they were doing eighty (the speed limit in southern Virginia is sixty-five), I can't imagine that they would have been a hazard to anyone.

But, I hear the angels say, the law is the law, and we must obey it, even if it seems silly. And they might be right. But what if obeying the law is more dangerous than breaking it?

You've seen it happen, I'm sure: On a divided highway with two lanes going your way, two cars are driving side-by-side, neither passing the other. You've been driving faster than they, so you've come up behind the guy in the left lane, hoping he'll either speed up and pass or slow down and let you by. But he does neither.

So you back off, because you are a careful driver and know that you need at least two seconds between you and the car in front of you. Long about this time someone comes up behind you, dips into the right lane, then comes between you and the car in front of you. Then another car comes and does the same thing to him, and before you know it, you're ten cars behind the car you were originally tailing. And unless you're more spiritual than I am—not that that's particularly difficult—you're pretty hot under the collar. Right away, that's danger, and the passing on the right is a hazard per se. (I've even seen people pass such blockades on the shoulder.)

Now, if John Law is sitting by the side of the road with his radar gun, he's not going to catch blockading. He'll either be content because everyone is obeying the speed limit or unhappy that he has to wait longer to fulfill his ticket quota. Patrolmen in private life may be the nicest people you'll ever meet, but in that capacity they're worse than useless.

Then there are the times when the vehicle in front of you is driving erratically, and you need to go well over the speed limit for a few seconds to get by him quickly. (My driver ed class said this was OK when passing on a two-lane road so you could spend less time in the oncoming lane, but that was forty years ago and may not be relevant.) If that's when you hit the radar zone, what can the cop think but that you've been speeding all along?

Am I the only one who thinks that this ticketing of speeders is arbitrary (and thus unjust) at best and malicious at worst? Yes, God has ordained the powers that be, but can't he do any better than this?

If safety, not tickets, were the true object of highway patrol work, wouldn't it make more sense for the patrolmen to be on the road, driving exactly the speed limit (instead of five or, more often, ten miles per hour faster, as I see most doing, without lights or sirens), sporting a believable threat to ticket anyone who passes them? I saw that happen once driving west from Chicago; one cop car with at least a hundred vehicles stacked up behind him. I wasn't in a hurry, so I didn't mind, but if I had been, my resentment would have been against the folks who set the speed limit, not against the guy in the car. How different that would be from the way I felt about the guys pulling over drivers on an almost empty road in Virginia that day.

Need I also mention that this system wouldn't require a guy with a six-figure salary (if you factor in pension and other bennies) to drive a six-figure muscle car to implement? A high schooler in a Smart Car with a camera could do the job (provided he had the requisite character) for twice what he'd make at McDonalds for a quarter the cost of deploying a highway patrolman. And that's only if we decide speed control is needed, which I think remains to be proven.

Even better, of course, would be if the roads were privately owned. There would need to be some kind of police activity, to be sure, but the patrolmen then would be like bouncers in a bar; their message would be, "We want to keep you as a customer, but we also want to keep our other customers happy." The idea of treating a rude driver like a criminal would be far from the ethos of the private highway, though not nealy as far away as using traffic tickets to top off municipal coffers.

I know, "We live in a fallen world, and your system wouldn't be perfect." Would there be jerks in an anarchic system? Yes. Would innocent people die in accidents? Yes.

Does that all happen now? Yes. Does ticketing a small fraction of violators, most of whom pose no real hazard, make up for the failure of the system to protect lives and promote justice? No.

Christian Nudists? (Part 2)

2010-11-15T14:10:00.000-08:00

(Part 1 is here.)

––Hey, you're back. Did you enjoy your trip?

––Sure did.

––How was the flight?

––Fine. Why?

––Did you have to go through one of those new naked-body scanners?

––No, I just went through the metal detector. But the plate in my thigh set it off, so I had to go through the wand routine, as usual.

––What would you have done if they'd told you to go through the strip searcher?

––I'd have gone through. What's the big deal? They're protecting us from terrorists. Better to have to go through the imaging than have a bomb blow up the plane.

––Even if it's a woman manning the screen?

––Yes.

––Would you want your daughter to be that woman?

––I want my daughter to aim for better jobs than staring at a screen all day.

––Good boy. But how about if she did it part-time, you know, nights and weekends, while she's on her way to the corner office?

––I can't imagine she'd get much of a thrill looking at naked men. Women aren't affected that way, you know. That's why they can work in places men can't, like nurseries and children's hospitals and senior centers.

––And there are no exceptions to that?

––There might be.

––And you don't mind taking the chance that you're giving some chick a thrill?

––Nope. She'd have to be pretty desperate to get a thrill from looking at me!

––Wouldn't that make you an accessory to her . . . should I say . . . perversion? Or how about taking it off for a gay man? Is that OK?

––That's a chance I'm willing to take.

––Isn't contributing to the delinquency of a minor an offense?

––Yes.

––But helping an adult satisfy his perversions isn't.

––Pfft. Besides, the pictures aren't that clear.

––The pictures are clear enough to show whether your trouser cobra still has his hood. Do you think there's no one being paid big bucks to make sure that the pictures will get clearer as time goes by?

––They probably will, but so what? The faces get pixelated out.

––Do you think nobody knows how to turn off the pixelation?

––So what? The images can't be stored.

––Yes, they can.

––Anyway, so what?

––How about your wife? Do you want her virtually naked for some guy?

––Well, you have to do what you have to do to fly these days.

––What if it were determined that the scanners pose a bigger health hazard than we know now? How dangerous would they have to be before you said we shouldn't have them?

––I don't know. I'd leave that to the government to determine.

––Right. Romans 13 says they always do what's right. So it's right to put the scanners in because they're not harmful, but if they're found to be harmful, it will be right to take them out, but it still won't have been wrong to have put them in in the first place. Government can never sin.

––Some governments can.

––But not Uncle Sam.

––You're just ungrateful.

––OK, let's say they decide to take them out for some reason. You've said the strip searches are necessary. How do they do the strip searches without the scanners? Do we have to literally go naked to fly then?

––Like I said, it's the government's responsibility to do what it has to do to make flying safe. If they had to do real body searches, we can be reasonably sure they would divide the passengers up by sex to inspect them.

––You wouldn't mind having a gay man inspect you?

––How would I know he's gay?

––Silly me, I forgot; the HR guys can't ask about that. OK, but if you were in charge, what would you do with a woman flying with an eight-year-old boy? Does she go in with the men, or does he go in with the women?

––That would be for the government to determine.

––And government never gets it wrong. OK, so it's OK for some guy to give your wife the choice of being naked for him or not flying?

––They wouldn't put male inspectors in the female line.

––Male inspectors see female passengers on the scanners and pat down their boobs and crotches today.

––Well, doctors see and touch naked women all the time. It's no big deal to them.

––Does your wife like having male doctors see her naked?

––Not particularly.

––The last time we got near this subject, you said that you think nudist colonies are immoral.

––Oh, good grief, not this again.

––Yes, this again. You're saying it's OK for men to see women naked when the women would prefer not to be naked, but it's not OK for them to see women who don't mind being seen naked. You don't mind having a strange man force your wife and daughter to be naked for him, but to keep them from being forced to wear a burqa you're willing to kill innocent people overseas. Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

––When it's necessary, nakedness is OK. When it's not necessary, it's not OK. What's so hard about that?

––Is it really necessary? If there were no searches at all, how many terrorists would be on the planes?

––Well, one's too many.

––Granted, but what proportion of the flying public is terrorist? More than half?

––No, of course not.

––Ninety percent?

––Maybe one in a million. But that's still too many.

––Granted again, but if it's one in a million, that means that the search is not necessary for 99.999999% of those being stripped, right? So they're being forced to go naked when it's not necessary, which you just said is immoral.

––Oh, come on. we don't know who that one in a million is, so we have to search everyone.

––If you had a check for a million dollars in your hand yesterday but couldn't find it today, would you search in a million places you were reasonably sure you'd never been to?

––You're being illogical. If I had been in a million places since I was given the check, I could conceivably search in any or all of them; the only limit would be time. Or if I'd been with a bunch of strangers, I'd want to search all of them.

––But if you'd been with your friends, would you search them, too?

––Of course not.

––Do you know who your friends are?

––Of course.

––But wouldn't one of your friends be more likely to steal the check, knowing you wouldn't search them?

––Maybe I would have to search my friends.

––If you did that, would you end up with fewer friends?

––Maybe.

––But that's a chance you'd be willing to take for a million dollars.

––No, not really. But when human life is concerned, you can't be too careful.

––I see. The "collateral damage" overseas isn't human.

––You know what I mean.

––I'm afraid I do. Anyway, so why doesn't the government know who its friends are? Why does it search everyone?

––How would they know who is and isn't their friend otherwise?

––I don't know, but if they're as wonderful as you think they are, can't they be trusted to come up with a way?

––I don't know. Maybe.

––Would asking them to come up with an alternative be better than having your wife strip-searched?

––I don't know. Do you?

––Absolutely.

––I wouldn't want to take the chance.

––If they're going to assume everyone's their enemy, that means no one can ever be considered innocent, because innocence is the absence of guilt, and proving a negative is impossible.

––So see, you can't get away from the scanners.

––I was thinking it would be good for our government to learn how to make friends.

––What have you been smoking?

––Well, I have to wonder why, if they're convinced everyone, including us, is a potential enemy, they make such a big deal about protecting us. If we're their enemies, wouldn't they treat us like enemies? Come to think of it, isn't that the way they are treating us? Maybe we really are their enemies. Or we would be if we knew the truth. Maybe they really are our enemies.

––You should be grateful to live in a free country.

––Having my wife and daughter strip-searched is freedom? And you have trouble with nudist colonies! Do you have trouble with locker rooms, or Boy Scouts skinny dipping?

––I'm not excited about them. What are you getting at?

––When you were a kid did you ever check out the plumbing on the other guys in the locker room?

––Of course.

––On the sly, of course.

––Of course.

––Was that wrong?

––I think it was just curiosity.

––Have you ever snuck a peak at a guy's pecker in a locker room as an adult?

––None of your business.

––Right. I'm a nosy puppy. Please forgive me. But let's say you've got a bunch of Boy Scouts on a hike, they go skinny dipping, and one of them pulls out his cell phone and takes a picture, and for some reason no one objects. How are we doing? Would that be OK?

––I'm not sure.

––Fair enough. After he takes the picture, he shows the picture to the guys who are standing there. If taking the picture were OK, has he crossed a line into immorality by showing it to the guys whose picture he just took?

––I don't think so.

––And if they all check out each other's third legs in the picture, has the guy that showed the picture done something immoral?

––Why would they do that?

––Because they're a bunch of twelve-year-old guys! Weren't you ever twelve years old?

––Keep going.

––Or say it was a camera. OK?

––OK.

––He doesn't delete the picture. After the hike, he shows it to a bunch of guys who weren't there when the picture was taken. Is that OK?

––Well, now you're getting into questionable territory.

––The guys in the picture volunteered to be in the picture. They trust the guy who owns the camera and don't force him to delete the picture. The whole point of the picture was to publicize their privy members. They were looking each other over in person, and they looked each other over when they looked at the picture. The guy shows the picture to a guy, knowing full well this guy is going to look at the picture for exactly the same reasons the picture was taken in the first place. So where's the line?

––Next you'll be telling me it would be OK to show the picture to a girl.

––Well, didn't you say girls don't get affected by seeing naked men? So that should be OK, right, especially if the guys in the picture don't want girls to see them naked?

––Now come on, I didn't mean that.

––Sorry, I couldn't resist. But let's say a bunch of girls go skinny dipping and take pictures of each other. Is that the same rules as it was for the boys?

––I see where you're headed. If it's OK for them to show the pictures to each other, it's OK to show it to other girls, then it's OK to show it to the boys, then it's OK for them all to take their clothes off, and you're back to your question about nudist colonies.

––Nothing gets past you!

––I can't go along with your reasoning. I think the whole thing is an affront to God.

––But what goes on at the airports is not an affront to God.

––Listen, God is working his purposes out through all his ordained leaders in our government. This isn't something we need to be concerned about.

––You're absolutely right. He is working his purposes out—just like he was working them out in Germany in the '30s and '40s.

Boots on the Ground

2010-11-13T11:01:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, my dad was in the Air Force reserves. One weekend a month he would get out the nifty shoe shining contraption we stored in a cabinet with the pet food in the laundry room, hang it on the bracket screwed into the cabinet, get out his military dress shoes, slip one over a sort of rounded triangle at the front, move the heel holder back along the track behind the triangle, secure it by tightening a wing nut, and spend a few minutes brushing on polish and buffing the shoe with a soft cloth. I don't know if he had the shiniest shoes in the office—Did I tell you he flew a desk? All the leaves on my branch of the family fly desks. Maybe the new Whitney coat of arms should have a desk on it.—but no one seeing him would say he was on his way to fly an airplane, or even fix one, let alone headed for a combat zone.

A few times a year Mom and I would go to visit him on Sunday afternoons. We'd get there just about quitting time, and occasionally I was invited into the office. I even got to shake hands with Steve Bramwell, who, during the University of Washington Huskies' glory days, once ran an opening kickoff ninety-something yards for a touchdown.

Everyone there dressed like Dad: they had on pressed uniforms, maybe even neckties (I'm not sure—it's been a while). I seem to remember that the guys I saw actually walking around the planes had on uniforms, but they were work clothes. I didn't look to see if their shoes were shined, but I would expect they weren't permitted to wear shabby shoes.

So I was somewhat surprised when I visited my son awhile back to see that even though he too now flies a desk, he goes to work in camouflage fatigues. Maybe what he wears is ersatz camouflage, stuff he wouldn't wear if he were actually in a war zone, but it looks like it's made out of rip-resistant fabric. It certainly doesn't look like what one would wear to any other office job.

What really makes me think he's only a helmet and a weapon short of battle dress is his footwear. He wears beige boots, what Dad used to call boondockers, except made out of God knows what instead of black leather. He needs boots to fly a desk?

Maybe that's the Army, I thought. Wrong.

I've recently run into a member of our church who's in the Air Force a couple of times at evening church activities, a guy so gifted in logistics that making a pilot of him would be a waste, and he's dressed exactly the same way: camouflage and boots. A pencil jockey for the Air Force needs camouflage and boots to do his job?

When I saw my father in his work uniform, I would think, "This is not a war zone. They don't dress like this in war zones. There is no war going on. [The Vietnamese would have disagreed with me somewhat on that one.] We are at peace." It was like getting a smile from an intelligent guy with two hundred pounds of solid muscle he's not afraid to use.

I don't think we're supposed to view "our" military that way anymore. When our rulers talk about moving people—make that personnel; I'm not sure they're thought of as people—to a war zone, they talk about "putting boots on the ground." Well, the boots are on the ground here in the good old USA.

And lest we think those in charge don't mean business, we should remember the words of President Dubya, who said that the military was in Iraq to give Iraqis the "same freedoms Americans enjoy." New Orleaneans found out what that meant after Hurricane Katrina, when the same military—and some of the same soldiers, I would guess—that had kicked down doors and confiscated weapons in Baghdad kicked down doors and confiscated weapons in New Orleans. The main difference I can see is that the Iraqis were permitted to stay in their homes and face the dangers if they so chose, but the New Orleaneans weren't.

Seeing "our courageous men and women" walking around in battle dress lite makes me feel secure, all right—as secure as a Dutchman after the Blitzkrieg.

The Toughest Nut?

2010-10-29T01:59:00.000-07:00

One of the arguments Christians apologists like to trot out is that we have a system of morality that we can depend on, handed down from God himself in the Bible. Where atheists are "infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming" (Ep 4:14), we can look to the Bible for definitive pronouncements about everything needed for faith and practice. While the Bible is not clear about everything, it is clear about everything that's important.

It is this certainty that has inspired the martyrs over the centuries, and it is the basis on which those stand who believe that "thy kingdom come" will be fulfilled in some degree through the church before the return of Christ, as exemplified by this passage from an article handed me by a friend:

The gospel tells us that all enemies of Christ will be subdued before the Lord returns—with the one exception of death. That enemy will be destroyed by the Lord Himself. All the other enemies—famine, disease, pestilence, war—will be destroyed through the agency of the faithful proclamation of the gospel, adorned by the Church living it out. (Douglas Wilson)

Unfortunately, either war is not an important subject, unclearly addressed as it is by the Bible, or the Bible does not address all important subjects clearly:

But we have good reason for believing that war will be one of the toughest nuts to crack. It well may be that it is the next to last enemy to be destroyed.

I suspect my friend directed me to Brother Doug's article because it contains this:

Winston Churchill defined a fanatic as one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. The ideologue is similar—he demands submission from everyone to the dictates of the abstraction that holds his loyalty by the back of the neck. This is why, without any sense of irony, the advocate of pacifism can find himself arguing, in the most bloodthirsty way, for the engines of war to get warmed up.

I consider myself more a wimp than a pacifist, but anyone who opposes the present wars is tossed in the pacifist pile, so I guess that's why I was given the article. And since the war is a topic that I find myself addressing often and my opinions are not likely to change soon, I'll concede that I'm a fanatic. I'm not sure "do for your neighbor what you would have him do for you" and "what's yours is yours, what's mine is mine; keep your hands to yourself and tell the truth, and it doesn't matter who you are, we ought to be able to get along" is an ideology, but my friend and Brother Doug might think so. So if I'm a fanatical pacifist ideologue, make of it what you will.

The article's conclusion is reasonable, or at least I think I can agree with it, even the first clause:

I am no pacifist, and so I believe that there are wars that are just in principle, and in which Christians might participate with a clean conscience. I hold this position as one who believes that every just war ought to be aimed, in principle, at the glorious elimination of war that the prophets have wonderfully anticipated for us. If we hold our convictions about war in this way, refusing the ideological lure, we may not see wars abolished as quickly as we might like. But if we reject ideology, we will at least not be breeding additional and unnecessary wars in the meantime.

Now war is an abstraction: while there are no doubt some who find rapacity more rewarding after a good hard battle where even their own side takes casualties, most prefer to show up with overwhelming force, skip the battle, and take the women and the loot. You don't need the Bible to convince most people that war in the abstract isn't a good thing.

This war, however, is no abstraction. It has visible, tangible, measurable effects on millions of people. If nothing else, the money we send to Washington to keep the army over there is money we're not sending to missionaries, who are feeling the pincers of inflation and reduced giving.

So I find rather scary a theme that runs through the article, as encapsulated in the penultimate paragraph:

As a Christian pastor and biblical constitutionalist, I opposed the war in Iraq on constitutional grounds. The president is not authorized by the Constitution to go to war with another sovereign nation and replace its government. Congress has the responsibility to declare war. This conviction of mine is a political opinion, one which I would never dream of invoking in the discipline of God’s people. And godlier men than I believe that the war is perfectly justified, both constitutionally and scripturally. I write this, not as a max nix [sic] relativist, but as someone who believes that the diamonds of some absolute truths are not lying on the surface of the ground. For those, we will have to dig some deep mines. But as the historian Christopher Dawson once put it, the Christian church lives in the light of eternity, so we can afford to be patient.

Christians living in the US can certainly afford to be patient: Uncle Sam isn't dropping bombs on us from unmanned aircraft (yet). Will Brother Doug be as patient when he's dodging bombs? And what will he be able to do about it then if he should decide that Christians shouldn't be part of the imperial army? More importantly, if he does decide that this war is wrong, what will he tell his sheep who have assumed so far that it is OK to be part of it?

Since the Bible apparently isn't clear about how we are to think about the war, let alone what we are to think of it, Brother Doug is left with the Constitution for guidance. But he admits that he can't agree with "godlier men" than he what the Constitution says, so even that's no help.

(Then there's the question of whether a document that is de facto being ignored can be appealed to at all. Worse, as Gary North and Lysander Spooner have written, the ratification of the Constitution was of questionable morality, and its nature as morally binding would be suspect even if it were lawfully and morally instituted.)

So, having eliminated all authoritative backing for any pronouncement he might make about the war, he is left with saying nothing and calling it patience. But I have a problem with the selective nature of his patience:

If an abortionist sought membership in our church, we would refuse him unless he repented. If a homosexual couple sought membership, we would refuse them. If a pornographer wanted to join, we would say no. But would we allow a conscientious objector in? Yes. Would we allow a colonel in the Marines to join? Absolutely. Does this mean that I believe “it is all relative” and that when it comes to issues of war and peace, each Christian can just choose for himself? No. But it is a recognition that the prophetic vision recognizes that when men come to “study war no more,” and the lion lies down with the lamb, and men turn their ingenuity to the task of making the finest plowshares out of the finest spears, we are then at the culmination of the gospel age. The elimination of war is not irrelevant to Christian worldview thinking, but is rather the capstone of that kind of thinking in history.

(Notice that Brother Doug is talking about church membership, not about attendance. He and I both, I think, desire passionately to offer the good news to abortionists, homosexuals, pornographers, conscientious objectors, and Marine colonels as much as to anyone else, and to love them as people no more self-interested and sinful and no less desirous of doing the right thing than we are.)

So the church can be definitive about the killing of the unborn, but not about killing those already born, about sexual sins, but not about the taking of innocent life on a massive scale. Brother Doug might be right, but what does that say about the authority of the Bible?

I'm no church historian, but I understand that in Tertullian's day one had to choose between being a Roman soldier and a church member:

The case is different, if the faith comes subsequent(ly) to any (who are) already occupied in military service, as (was, for instance, the case) with those whom John admitted to baptism, and with the most believing centurions whom Christ approves and whom Peter instructs: all the same, when faith has been accepted and signed, either the service must be left at once, as has been done by many, or else recourse must be had to all sorts of cavilling, lest anything be committed against God – (any, that is, of the things) which are not allowed (to Christians) outside the army, or lastly that which the faith of (Christian) civilians has fairly determined upon must be endured for God. For military service will not promise impunity for sins or immunity from martyrdom. The Christian is nowhere anything else (than a Christian).

When the need to choose disappeared I don't know, but surely it was gone by the time Constantine made Christianity the official religion of his empire: "Hot dog! Now we can really make disciples!"

Brother Doug describes himself as a "biblical constitutionalist" and his opposition as being on "constitutional grounds." I hope the label means he reads the Constitution through the lens of the Bible and not the other way around, but to say that his opposition is constitutional rather than biblical is breathtaking. Does the Bible not give him anything to say about this particular war?

"No, Mr. Quill Pig, it doesn't. And if you look in Romans 13, you'll see that the state has been given the power of the sword."

Commenting on Romans 13, the Westminster Confession says that the civil magistrate is bound to enforce "wholesome laws"; he is not free to act as he chooses. If, by Brother Doug's own admission, this particular war is unconstitutional, prosecuting it is a lawless act, and Christians are not to participate in lawless acts, because "all sin is lawlessness" (1 Jn 3:4). I think he would do well to call a meeting of his church elders, lay out his case, invite those "godlier men" than he to lay out their cases, and ask the elders to take a stand about the moral nature of this war, calling on his denominational leaders to follow suit. Again, we're not talking about the color of the carpet in the sanctuary or even whether a drum set should accompany the music team: we're talking about whether or not God is calling Christians to disrupt the lives of millions of people who are on their way to a Christless eternity.

My congregation and denomination have endorsed this war from the get-go without even so much as a discussion or an explanation. We pray more on Sunday mornings for the soldiers who fight for Uncle Sam than we do for our missionaries, and we send more money to Washington to support the war than we do to our missionaries. Yet the topic has never been discussed officially. It's as though we don't dare raise the subject lest the discussion become heated. My church claims to carefully avoid taking stands on political issues, but nothing is more political than war, and not to raise the issue is to side de facto with the warmakers and then to pretend as though which side the church is on is not important.

I'd rather be excommunicated by a church that decided—after deep, lengthy, and passionate discussion—that to oppose this war is tantamount to abetting the murder of Americans than to see God's people refuse to discuss the issue (Re 3:15).

Does the Bible not talk about matters of life and death to millions of people? If it doesn't, can one not be forgiven for asking, "God is good, but what's he good for"? I know atheists who have no desire to hear the gospel precisely because Christians who will wax tearful over the evils of intrauterine devices can't bring themselves to call bombing women and children in a country with which we are supposedly allied evil. They would answer in Stalin's famous words: "When one person dies, it's a tragedy. When a million people die, it's a statistic." And we know Jesus doesn't care about statistics.

Erwin Lutzer's Is God on America's Side?

2010-10-23T20:14:00.001-07:00

Erwin W. Lutzer. Is God on America's Side? Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2008. 103 pages.

Most Christians in the US seem unable to separate the cross of Christ from the "American" flag. I would suspect that most Muslims can't either. For the former, the identification of the Christian God and their native land is a source of pride and joy. The latter, especially those who have lost family members, their health, or their homes to US imperialism, could be forgiven for deciding that if the Christian God is like Uncle Sam, no decent person would be a Christian. Unfortunately, it's even worse than that: they cut themselves off from the God whose forgiveness they need if they are to have eternal life because they identify that God with Uncle Sam's depredations.

So this book by Erwin Lutzer, pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, a bastion of respectable US evangelicalism, is a must-read for Christians who consider themselves patriotic Americans. While I have predictable quibbles with Is God on America's Side?—the societal sins he calls Christians to fight are gambling and prostitution, but imperialism is never mentioned—his message is just what the doctor ordered for his audience, mainstream evangelicals. Once we get evangelicals to question "American exceptionalism," the idea that the US is somehow God's chosen nation in a sense that Finland or Papua New Guinea could never be, they might be open to questioning the morality of Uncle Sam's out-of-bounds actions that they currently accept.

Lutzer begins by enumerating and discussing seven biblical principles:

God can both bless and curse a nation.

God judges nations based on the amount of light and opportunity they are given.

God sometimes uses exceedingly evil nations to judge those that are less evil.

When God judges a nation, the righteous suffer with the wicked.

God's judgments take various forms.

In judgment, God's target is often His people, not just the pagans among them.

God sometimes reverses intended judgments.

He then turns the title's question on its head by quoting Abraham Lincoln, "America's most admired president": "The important question is whether I am on God's side, for God is always right." (I quibble over the invocation of the president who was Hitler's favorite precisely because of his racism and imperialism, but again, invoking him would soften Lutzer's audience's defenses against the book's main message.) From there he discusses at length the crucial (pun intended) difference between building a political entity and building the kingdom of God.

He expresses this difference aptly: "Our job is not to save America but to save Americans by living the Gospel." Our nation is literally going to hell—read the obituaries and see where most of those named are headed—and its military is literally blowing women and children to hell, claiming such is necessary for its defense. Lutzer proposes that the church can survive and even thrive under adverse conditions; our job as Christians is to be faithful to God, working for justice and showing mercy and compassion.

So where would he have us go from here?

First, we must choose the right battle.

Where a general who loses on the battlefield can only give good advice about how to cope with the new situation, we need to be dispensers of the good news of Christ's victory over our enemies: the world (including the messianic state—that's me, not Lutzer), the flesh, and the devil.

Second, we must use the right weapons. [Yes, Moody's copyeditor should have checked to see that italics in this list were used consistently.]

The weapons he names are "helpless dependence on God's Word" and "the integrity of our lifestyle." We can never get enough Bible teaching, either on our own or from those whom God has called to study it. I am convicted of looking down on my neoconservative brethren for eschewing Bible reading for the teachings of the Mormon Glenn Beck and Fox News, the neoconservative arm of Fox porn, while I am myself not able to get enough of atheists like Stefan Molyneux and Latin Rite Catholics like Thomas Woods. More convicting still, the inconvenient biblical truth Lutzer discusses at length is that Jesus calls us not only to suffer but to suffer specifically for his name's sake.
Lutzer pulls no punches: he fully expects Christians to become a persecuted minority, but he makes it plain that we are not to have the "poor me" attitude that goes along with it: we are to rejoice that we are being counted worthy to suffer for Jesus' name and work hard depite our suffering to win people to Christ. (If I can't abide people lolligagging in the left lane on the expressway, how will I tolerate being caged or waterboarded?)

That is, when it is essentially illegal to be a Christian, we are to obey God rather than men. I don't know that Lutzer would translate that into breaking the fugitive slave laws, let alone breaking today's drug laws to provide marijuana to people dying of cancer so they don't have to endure either the excruciating pain of the disease or the expense, nausea, and impaired mental state that go along with morphine use—and if he did, saying so might alienate his audience—but he's at least giving the lie to the idea that the cross and Old Glory are inseperable, and that's a giant step in today's US evangelicalism.

The final chapter is titled "Winning Even When We Lose." Whether Uncle Sam survives or not, the church of Jesus Christ will keep going. She grows under adversity, and she is growing fastest in the nations that persecute her and in other places we comfortable saints wouldn't voluntarily live. And her best days in North America may still be ahead of us; but if they are, they will be accompanied by severe persecution.

Lutzer points out that the churches Jesus addressed in the seven letters of Revelation have all disappeared, as has the Christianesque culture of North Africa and the Europe of the Reformation. The same thing can happen here. And the likelihood of it happening here increases as Christians claim that God is on America's side rather than asking if they and their society are on God's side. May his warning be heard by many.

"Would You Go All the Way?"

2010-10-22T03:52:00.000-07:00

Would you go all the way for the USA?
Would you go all the way for the USO?
Would you go all the way for the USA?
Lift up your dress if the answer is no.

Frank Zappa's raunchy lyrics from the 1960s aren't so "far out, man," anymore. Now if you want to fly, you've got to take it all off for the TSA. Some prudes and geezers object, of course, but we can always expect some people to resist progress.

It's also usually true that if people knew what would happen at the end of the road, they might have been less complacent during the early stages of the journey. Honorable men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoeller supported Hitler initially, only to find that their trust had been misplaced; Bonhoeffer's repentance cost him his life.

If people had known how graphic the images from the virtual strip-search scanners would be, they might have resisted early on. I certainly wanted to know what was happening, but during the run-up, the only pictures available were this, which looks pretty innocuous. Even this and this aren't so bad (especially when your attention is drawn to the hidden weapons). One could understandably ask, what's the big deal?

But of course, as one can expect from a police state, they weren't giving us the real picture, and only after the TSA had begun installing the devices at airports was it possible know for sure what we would look like "on camera." Leave it to disgruntled pilots, who probably thought they were going to be exempt from the indignities, to squeal once their ox got gored. Check it out here. And while the resolution isn't magazine quality and the image is black and white, one can expect the resolution to improve over time and color to be introduced, "for security purposes only," of course.

Do you think people who don't want such pictures taken of them are unreasonable?

My boss, who is a Jewish atheist, doesn't mind the situation. He doesn't even mind having his wife go through. (She's a looker, so maybe it's his way of boasting.) He says the machines are faster than the old scanners (how having to stop and pose is faster than walking through a metal detector is beyond me), and besides, the guys manning the screens "get inured" to what they see.

I see his point: I found out in my early teens that I lost interest in my friend's physician father's four-foot stack of Playboy magazines about the third time through, though that was before they could publish full frontal nudity; otherwise I would likely have needed another pass or two.

The inurement argument doesn't hold water. I read an article by a gynecologist in Reader's Digest decades ago, and he stated matter-of-factly that he isn't above noting (in ways only he can read?) that a certain patient has "nice breasts." I've asked two physician friends how they dealt with seeing naked women, and they admitted that they don't cease to be guys. As I said, my friend's father, who was a physician, kept a stack of Playboys, and indeed the first Playboy I ever saw belonged to my physician uncle. We lived in a village in Papua New Guinea for almost two decades, and I was never unaware of what women were and weren't wearing shirts, and yes, I had my preferences. Most unmarried women with developed breasts would wear shirts until they delivered their first baby, probably because they were aware that young, firm breasts can distract males from what's important in life. You can't tell me the occasional looker wouldn't be a perk to the guy watching the screens.

What does all this have to do with Jesus? I frankly don't know. I could go on about how the rise of the messianic state in the US has been accompanied by a decline in morals, but this post is long enough already.

But I do know that any Christian who hasn't spoken out against strip-search scanners but disparages nude beaches will immediately lose his credibility with me.

Paul White, Frank Peretti, and George Washington

2010-10-19T14:34:00.000-07:00

I learned a lot from the books I read to my kids when they were young. One that hit close to home was a comic adaptation of a story by Paul White, who apparently was a missionary in Africa. We had other comics of his stories, all set in Africa, but this one always made me uneasy.

It was about a young man who found a leopard cub and decided it would make a neat pet. Some old geezer in the fillage told him he should kill the cub, but the cub was cute and playful, and the young man was sure he could keep it under control. The old man left the young man with this warning: "You have to make sure that that that leopard never smells blood, because once he does, he will only be satisfied with fresh meat."

You've guessed the rest. The young man gets a small cut while playing with the leopard—How could he have expected things to turn out otherwise?—and the leopard smells the blood and kills the young man and others.

Even I could see what the author was getting at: I'm not above indulging in a little questionable behavior that I think I've got under control. And when the leopard smells the blood, having to admit that I should have known better–ha! did know better—is a living death.

Reading that book to my kids was about a weekly experience. Another story that has stayed with me, even though I only read it once, was Frank Peretti's The Oath. The theme was the same as the comic, except this time the young man was a modern village in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and the leopard was an invisible dragon. Here a whole community had adopted this cute little dragon, but the more they loved it and fed it, the bigger it grew, the bigger its appetite became, and the nastier its reactions became when gratification was delayed. The dragon was eventually slain, but not before a lot of innocent people died.

And, of course, there's the Veggie Tale about Junior Asparagus and the giant fib, which turned into a monster that almost destroyed the town.

Why do we need so many stories with the same theme? I'd say it's because we don't learn. We all want to be an exception to that rule (except me, of course).

There once was a people called Israel who had a special relationship with God. For reasons of his own, God gave them a rich and fertile land to live in. Little by little the Israelites started cutting theological and moral corners. Paul White and Frank Peretti would no doubt say they had started nursing beasts as pets, but the pets grew up and became masters. Before long things were so bad that they decided they needed something God warned them against: "a king like all the other nations have." After all, this king would be "the anointed of the Lord," so how could that be bad?

Well, it was bad. All but one of those kings shed innocent blood, and the problem the Israelites had asked for a king to solve, utter defeat at the hands of their enemies, came anyway. How could things have gone differently?

You know what's coming, right? The newly independent colonists decided that the confederation of small, sovereign, independent states they had pledged their sacred honor to fight for wasn't good enough: they needed a stronger central government. (Or at least that's the story told by the "Federalist" victors.) Yes, a central government, with only those powers "delegated" to it by the states, that's the ticket! Of course, that federal government would have the power to determine whether which powers had been delegated, but what's the harm in that?

As Elmer Peterson has said, "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

The more power and privilege government offers to its agents, the more people who desire power and privilege will seek to work for the government, and the more powerful and expensive it will become. The leopard will grow up, and eventually he'll smell blood. It's best to kill the beast when he's small.

George Washington was a Federalist, part of the scam that now afflicts us as badly as anything King George ever wrought on the colonies. But he could talk convincingly, and here's a pearl we anti-Federalists wish he had taken to heart: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

Do we want this or that government to master us, or are we willing to settle only for the easy and light yoke of the Spirit of God?

Response to a Correspondent

2010-10-14T16:07:00.000-07:00

A friend writes:

Take away a system of force that punishes wickedness and wickedness will increase.

Men will do what is right in their own eyes. In a context of great evil God instituted the death penalty for murder. That institution was a civil action against private murdering citizens. If Henry murders the 7/11 cashier for some spending money, we are not going to ask [mutual friends] to stop over with a bag of stones for a neighborhood stoning. We are calling the cops, who will arrest you and stick you in a holding cage until we have a speedy trial with twelve good men. Then we are going to execute you properly with something other than stones.

Of course as a post-millennialist who believes in the power of God to save, we will also preach the gospel alongside of having the sword of the state to punish the wicked. Salt and light are part of a well ordered cosmos. So is a State with servants who are ministers of God. If Paul called first century Christians to submit to a pre-Christian, Non-biblical State, why do you keep imagining a stateless society when we live in a world that is way better as far as the presence of Christians in American society? Some of these Christians are good people who want to see government held accountable. Why not work to call the State to repentance ? Is the State beyond the power of redemption? I thought the church was tasked with calling all to repentance including Caesar.

My response:

Thanks for writing.

Given a choice between being shot by a firing squad and stoned, I think I’d rather be shot. Hanging and the electric chair might be worse than stoning. Anyway, I like to think that I’ve got better reasons for not killing the 7-11 cashier than fear of execution. Unfortunately, as I said in a recent post, the state might someday decide (in a moment of utter paranoia) that the Quill Pig Chronicles give “material support” to terrorists and execute its version of justice on me. If they just shot me, that wouldn’t be so bad. Unfortunately, they might decide I’m of more value to them alive than dead, and that would be tough to go through, even if they didn’t waterboard me. . . . .

The church is indeed tasked to call all to repentance, including Caesar. but what incentive does the state have to repent? How can an abstraction repent? What incentives do state agents have to repent?

"We live in a world that is way better as far as the presence of Christians in American society," do we? I started this blog because I think US conservative Christians are no longer salt and light. They are as zealous to defend their place on the tax-subsidized nipple as atheist liberals, and at least as prone to busybodyness and callous to wanton violence. Ask them how they defend their libertinism (see below) and they'll go straight to Romans 13. As you know, one has to read between the lines considerably before one comes up with even the Westminster Confession's take on Romans 13. Maybe when I get to heaven God will say, "I agreed more with Ron Paul and [my correspondent] than with you; anarchy would never work," but I would need a lot of help getting my mind around it. Meanwhile, I try to be a good neighbor as best I understand the Bible's take on that, and it seems to me an easy way to do that is not to act like I'm government agent.

By ascribing legitimacy to the state, you are removing at least one check on its wickedness, and its wickedness has increased in every situation. Read Colson’s book if you don’t believe my blog post that he chronicles in great detail (considering the size of his book) how this happened. Where he and I disagree is that he somehow thinks that that increase in wickedness was not inevitable given the nature of the state and given human nature.

Statism is indeed libertinism. When the FDA approves a drug that ends up damaging people, no bureaucrats lose their jobs, whereas in a private property system, the endorsing agency would be out of business immediately (remember Chi-Chi’s?). When the drug cops break down the wrong door, shoot the family dog, and make the homeowners get out of bed naked and stand around while the room is searched, said homeowners will be lucky to get a verbal apology; nobody will lose their job, and they'll still be stuck with the repair bill for the door. If that isn't libertinism, I don't know what is.

Jesus said that he who is faithful in little will be given charge over much. The state—at least the one we live under—can’t even be trusted to treat biblically innocent pot growers justly (I forgot: you don't think pot growers are innocent; OK, how about ghetto girls who braid hair or out-of-work carpenters who ply their trades without licenses?), and it certainly doesn’t treat either thieves or their victims justly. What makes you think it would treat murderers justly?

I’m surprised that a man who spends as much time in the Bible as you do would prefer to begin with the death penalty and work down and not with, say, embezzlement and work up (smaller to larger); that you prefer a top-down, coercive system when Romans 12:1-2 seems to indicate that God works from the inside out and the Mosaic system (apart from the giving of the law itself, for obvious reasons) from the bottom up. (Where the Catholics seem to think that the saints have God’s ear in a way that mere mundanes don’t, Paul asked the nobodies to pray for him, like he, The Apostle to the Gentiles, needed their prayers more than they needed his, though he did indeed pray for them.)

Men will indeed do what is right in their own eyes; furthermore, they will do what they think is to their advantage. When Jesus told us that there was no profit in gaining the world and losing our souls, he was acknowledging that people go for the bottom line, but he was saying that the bottom line is further down than we think it is.

The refrain of the book of Judges is indeed that people do what is right in their own eyes. Like the people of those days, you think that the solution is a king—though a godly king, like that described in Dt 17. Forgive me for repeating myself: the job of king was too big for a man who was head and shoulders over everyone else in Israel, for a man after God’s own heart, and for the wisest man who ever lived. (So who besides Jesus can ever fill the bill? How is Jesus present and ruling today? Isn't it mostly in the hearts of those who obey him?) Israel got his king, and he fell to his enemies for exactly the same reasons he fell to his enemies in the book of Judges. The problem was not the lack of a state; it was the lack of devotion to God.

There are only two religions in the world: God (the grace of Christ) and power (mammon, Baal, Molech, Allah, the Force, democracy). When George Washington said that government is force, he was putting it in the second category. And he would know, having exercised it as such. Thomas Paine said that government was a necessary evil, but as an atheist he would have no trouble saying that evil was necessary. Romans 6 forbids me to say that.

We live in an age when people who call themselves Americans almost literally worship at least one politician and certainly ascribe godlike powers to the state. How can we call people to faith in God when we ascribe legitimacy to his biggest rival? That evil needs to be opposed, sometimes with force, is not in question: you read the article I recommended to you, right? The author is not opposed to the use of force in certain situations. The question is, under what circumstances is it just? How does the line get drawn? What reason do we have to suppose that an irresistible state will draw that line more justly than an egalitarian contract system?

Note the question marks. Your questions are worth answering, so I'm grateful for the time you have taken. But your assertions leave me with questions, which you are welcome to answer; or ask more questions, if you prefer. Thank you again for writing.

Charles Colson's Justice that Restores

2010-10-09T05:54:00.000-07:00

Wise people don't take Charles Colson lightly. He became one of the most powerful people in the world during the Nixon years because he is intelligent, articulate, and sincere. While he is indeed a convicted criminal, he went to jail because of bad decisions sincerely made, and since his release he has shown that his repentance during his prison years was sincere; I would guess that he has spent at least as much time in prison as a free man as he did as a prisoner, and he has done so to spread the gospel. His Justice That Restores is a thin volume, but it's a small bowl of very hearty soup.

Colson and I share the belief that the criminal "justice" system is as fertile ground as there can be for sowing the seeds of the gospel. Crime hurts its victims, of course, and our system, in which victims have literally no chance for compensation, is simply barbaric. It also, at best, leaves perpetrators of crime in their twisted moral and spiritual state; in some cases it twists them even further. So far, so good. But this additional twisting is done by policies based on presuppositions that Colson and most evangelicals share with the system; I will suggest here that they are not biblical.

Colson's audience for this book seems to be nonbelievers: he doesn't quote the Bible until page 46, and he carefully avoids religious jargon. So effective was his packaging that early on I found myself rolling my eyes and expecting another "Christian" argument based on "natural law" rather than the Bible. But he was arguing deductively, describing first what doesn't work, then what is needed, and finally how the Bible prescribes a system that meets that need, first for individuals through the gospel and then for society through restorative justice, which he defines as

one that holds individuals responsible for their actions (that is, fallen individuals have a moral duty) under an objective rule of law (which we believe is rooted in revelation) but always in the context of community and always with the chance of transformation of the individual and the healing of fractured relationships and of the moral order. (p. 115)

The first part of the book is a litany of failed state-based solutions that offers at least prima facie evidence that the more the state is involved in the process, the worse the result is. He follows the evolution of criminal justice theory from the days of common law (not, unfortunately, biblical law), in which crime was considered offense against individuals, to today's unjust situation in which crime is almost exclusively thought of as transgression against the state. He also traces the erosion of belief in the authority of the Bible, then of belief in natural law (by which he specifically means the laws the apostle Paul says are "written on the heart" [Ro 1]), and finally of belief in the existence of absolute truth in any form. Today expediency alone limits political (and sometimes raw) power: both crime and the state's response are whatever those in power determine they should be. Again, so far, so good.

The problem comes with his proposed solutions:

The remedy for this crisis goes far beyond building more prisons. (p. 10)

A solution that goes beond something generally includes it. So his proposed solution involves building more prisons even though the US already incarcerates more people and a higher percentage of the poplulation than any other nation. If he is truly speaking for God here, US citizens, far from being the last great hope for the human race, are depraved at a greater rate than elsewhere. (And if he's right, instead of being sent overseas to bomb women and children in the name of spreading democracy, they should simply be put in cages. That would be good news for the Southwest Asians.) It also seems bizarre in light of the admissions he makes of the obvious:

Prisons ... merely incapacititate, not rehabilitate. (p. 53)

Prisons are filled with many people who are not dangerous to society. (p. 128)

[Victims feel like they are] simply used as the tool of the prosecutors for the state. (p. 138)

[The prison environment is] by its very nature oppressive and often debilitating. (p. 153)

His solution of building more prisons is, according to that last quote, an attempt to solve the problems caused by institutions that are oppressive by nature by building more institutions that are oppressive by nature. The Bible says we are not to do evil hoping that good will come of it (Ro 6:1). Surely we can do better than that.

I would suggest that Colson is crippled by his legitimization of the state.

As Walter Block and Hans-Hermann Hoppe have written at length, the idea of the stateless society is simply unthinkable for most people: they have never been taught to question the legitimacy of some people, "government," being able to do with impunity what would be criminal were their subjects to do it, and Colson is no exception. Yet by removing this single presupposition from his argument, he would open himself up to a truly biblical solution to the problem he nails so well. He himself gives examples of detention facilities that exemplify the restorative justice he is promoting, and one trait they share is that none of them are run by government (though they are associated to varying degrees with government-run institutions).

Let me give some examples of how his presuppositions hinder the broader point he's making.

He argues that victims of crime were deprived of justice as never before when crime came to be seen as an offense against the state rather than against the direct victims. How could this not have happened when government agents see themselves as superior to their subjects? What incentive do they have to consider themselves defenders of the individual victim rather than as the primary victim? For example, what incentive does a police officer have to see that a guy mugged for $500 receives restitution when the officer has to put his life in danger to catch the thief? What incentive does the judge or sheriff or county treasurer have have when the cost to catch, cage, and try the thief is greater than what he stole in the first place? What incentive is there for prison wardens and their superiors to decrease the prison population when they can argue for pay raises as the prison population rises?

Delegitimize the state and these problems disappear. To be sure, the problem of what to do with dangerous miscreants remains, but the incentive for building ever more cages to be presided over by ever more highly paid bureaucrats is replaced by incentives to see victims compensated and as few miscreants as possible incarcerated. The delivery of justice becomes like the delivery of potato chips: long-term prosperity goes to those who can deliver the most bang for the buck.

Is this solution biblical? Most evangelicals' knee-jerk reaction is to say no on the basis of Romans 13. Yet their proposed "biblical" solutions are rife with the perverse incentives I just named, and the outworking of those incentives is precisely the barbaric system we have today. So how about if we start somewhere besides Romans 13? How about beginning with the case laws of Exodus 21-23? or Deuteronomy 17:17-20? or Luke 22:25-26?

While it is true that the case laws were given in a context much different from ours, human nature hasn't changed since then, so we can at least hypothesize that if it worked then, it would work now. Certainly if it were moral then, it would be moral now. The objection is often raised that today's industrial society is much more complex than Moses' refugee camp and the agrarian period of the judges, but Jesus tells us that those who are faithful in small matters can be trusted in large matters (Mt 25:21). By that logic what works for three people will work for thirty, three hundred million, or three billion. The burden of proof is on those who claim that a system that was given by God would not work today. Certainly the system they have built is not working, though there are many beneficiaries who owe their positions of power to the new system and so would be reluctant to see it abolished.

Colson also gets in trouble when he praises the first policemen for starting soup kitchens (p. 117). While as a conservative he would be slow to praise the modern welfare state (and perhaps almost as slow to praise the totalitarian police state), here he praises its roots. Unless those soup kitchens started by the police departments were funded entirely by private donations—in which case why did the police need to start them at all?—the money for them was taken under threat of death from those who had earned it through serving their neighbors. How biblical is that?

He also praises the "broken window theory" (117-118), the idea that the fight against theft and murder begins with fighting vagrancy, neglect, and vandalism. This idea rests on two repugnant assumptions, first that the government should own parks, etc. ("public spaces"), and second that how private property owners maintain their property is the government's concern. As to the first, again, the government cannot own what it doesn't alienate from private owners, taking from those who produce and serve and giving to those who don't. The second conflates the idea of public and private; it's the basis of zoning laws, laws that prohibit restaurant owners from allowing their patrons to smoke and from serving food that their patrons would like to eat, and laws regulating how much water you can use in your shower.

In each of these cases, what determines the actual policy that obtains is not justice; rather, it is political expediency, what the politically powerful believe they can get away with. And when everything is the state's business, our lives are run by the politically powerful; in other words, we are slaves.

The private property solutions to the "broken window" is simple and biblical. Without "public spaces" there would be no place for vagrants to congregate; they would need permission from the owners of the space they wanted to occupy: no permission, no vagrants. And while broken windows on private property are indeed ugly, there are ways to deal with it apart from what amounts to confiscation by the government: such poor stewards can be bought out or tolerated.

If we really want restorative justice, our first step has to be the repudiation of the state. Until people regard each other as moral equals forbidden to violate others' bodies and property—that is, they repudiate the foundational principle of the state—and treat miscreants with an eye to restitution, reconciliation, and restoration, there is no incentive to change the barbaric system we live under, we will see the growth of both the criminal class and a self-righteous kleptocracy supposedly dedicated to protecting us from it, and, most importantly, the church will decline in numbers and influence. Repudiate the state and we will find ourselves shaking off our complacency and praying like our very survival depends on God and working like it depends on us.

The state won't go away unless we offer something better to replace it. But we have no incentive to build that something as long as we ascribe legitimacy to its most powerful enemy.

Christian Nudists?

2010-10-06T03:48:00.000-07:00

——OK if I ask you a question?

——Sure.

——Should Christians join nudist colonies?

——You're kidding, right?

——No. Seriously, what do you think?

——What do you think I think? Of course not.

——Why not?

——Christians shouldn't join organizations that aren't biblical.

——And what's not biblical about nudism? Or better, how does nudism violate biblical standards?

——People are naked around people who aren't their spouses, that's how. It's an invitation to lust and sexual immorality.

——Doctors see women who aren't their wives in their offices, but up until recently that was considered OK. If a doctor can see another man's wife naked, why can't other people? Assuming no one's being coerced or fooled into participating, of course.

——Well, a doctor's office is different.

——Why? Does a doctor cease to be a guy simply because he's got a license?

——No, but he's there for a purpose, to help the patient. He's not there to look at her.

——Well, if he doesn't look at her, how is he going to help her?

——Don't be ridiculous. You know what I mean.

——You're right, I do, but I'm not sure you do. How is it that a guy who has a natural tendency toward lust is somehow given a pass on that lust just because the woman is paying him?

——Be reasonable, would you? His purpose there is to help her, not to ogle her. And besides, he sees naked women so often that it probably doesn't affect him.

——Granted, but nudist colonies are all about affirming each other for who they are and enjoying the sun and wind while you swim, hike, or whatever. One could argue that a nudist would see nakedness so often it wouldn't affect him either.

——Oh, come on. Nudism is all about sex.

——Some is, yes. But there are also incompetent and lusty doctors, so that doesn't help your case. Isn't it reasonable to think that just as you can't paint all doctors with the lust brush, you can't paint all nudists with the sex brush? Some nudist colonies go out of the way to be family friendly, sort of like Disneyland with a different dress code. Staring, sexual comments, and sexual activity are no more welcome there than at Starbuck's.

——Yeah, but do they live up to their PR? Think of the damage that can be done when things go wrong, Think of the children! Isn't there a horrible risk of kids being abused?

——Kids have been abused by clergy and youth pastors and school teachers. Does that mean they shouldn't go to church or school? If you for some reason decided to go to a nudist resort with your fifteen-year-old daughter, wouldn't you be on the lookout for predators the same way you look out for bears when you go camping or carry safety equipment when you go mountain climbing? Is mountain climbing unbiblical because some people get hurt?

——Of course not. But come on: children shouldn't be looking at naked adults at all.

——Were you ever curious about anatomy when you were little?

——Yes.

——Do you think that curiosity was legitimate?

——I'm not sure. It was natural, I guess, but I can't say that God meant for it to be satisfied outside of marriage.

——Did you satisfy your curiosity?

——Well, yes, but I probably shouldn't have.

——How?

——The same way you probably did: Playboy and National Geographic. But I wasn't a Christian then. I didn't know we should wait until marriage to satisfy that curiosity.

——Should only married men go to medical school?

——Come on! That's different!

——OK. Did you see any difference between Playboy and National Geographic? Would you say they are equally evil?

——I think both of them were using nudity to boost sales.

——Good point. Did you feel guilty looking at the pictures?

——The Playboys, yes. I never told my parents about them. But my folks kept National Geographic on a shelf in the den, so I could go in there anytime and look. I wouldn't look at the topless pictures if others were in the room. I guess I was sneaking peeks there, too, so maybe that was just as much a sin as the Playboys. They also had books of paintings, and I would look at the nudes there, too, but never when others were looking. It was all just as sinful.

——So you felt guilty about satisfying a curiosity that you're not sure was legitimate.

——Right.

——But you can't say for sure it wasn't legitimate either.

——Right.

——Do you think you would have avoided the National Geographics and the art books if you had been a Christian? And if your parents had been Christians and not had either National Geographics or art books at home, would you have successfully avoided them at libraries and friends' houses?

——I don't know. I don't think we're supposed to know about those things until the proper time. But come on, the Bible doesn't say anything good about nakedness.

——That's true. Most people don't enjoy being naked around other people. Isaiah probably didn't go around naked, or however naked he was, for the fun of it. I wouldn't expect most nudists would want to go nude around clothed people. So nakedness is a biblical symbol for deprivation and humiliation.

——And so anyone who enjoys going naked is taking pleasure in something the Bible says we should abhor. They're "glorying in their shame." We're supposed to be working to build the kingdom of God, not spending our time and money on idleness and pleasure.

——You've hit the nail on the head, though that could apply equally to going to baseball games. But let's go back to the magazines for a sec. Is there any difference between posing for Playboy and having your picture taken by a National Geographic photographer?

——Well, the women in Playboy are trying to look sexy, and they succeed most of the time. The women in National Geographic were just going about their business. National Geographic was actually more cynical than Playboy. They were using nudity to boost sales and pretending they were advancing knowledge about other cultures, . . .

——Sort of like a doctor who uses helping beautiful women as an excuse to see them naked.

——. . . and they didn't even pay the people they took pictures of, like Playboy did. I'm not sure the women in National Geographic understood that they were giving red-blooded American boys a thrill, but National Geographic knew the score. And I suspect the reason the women in those cultures don't go topless in public places anymore is that they don't want to be exploited.

——Or maybe they think it's sexier to wear clothes.

——How's that?

——Why do you suppose some women's blouses have darts?

——To accentuate the breasts.

——Have you ever grokked a good cleavage in a church narthex?

——Well, they are there, but I look away.

——Good boy. Have you ever used the tiny writing on a tight T-shirt as an excuse to check out a nice set of knockers?

——Yes, in unguarded moments.

——Ever read the writing on the butt of a girl's sweatpants more than once?

——Yes, I've even done that. But I'm not proud of it.

——Am I completely off base saying that a skimpy bikini doesn't so much cover boobs and pubes as much as call attention to them? Or is that OK because they're covered?

——Well, they shouldn't be wearing clothes like that.

——I agree, but should I never attend a church where girls with nice cleavages show them off? Should I complain to the church elders and have them appoint a dress code patrol?

——Maybe that would be a good idea. For sure those girls need a good talking to.

——Do you think the six-year-old boys in those topless villages of yesteryear walked around with hard-ons all day, . . .

——Probably not.

——. . . or do you think boobs were just part of the landscape?

——They saw it all the time, and maybe there's not much sexy about a woman's breasts when as often as not they are being used to nurse babies.

——So boobs don't have to be sexy.

——I guess not.

——And so in a nudist colony . . .

——Look, are you trying to make a nudist out of me?

——No, not at all. I just wanted to see what arguments you'd marshal against it.

——Why?

——Because I think that any argument against nudist colonies also applies to the military and the police force. You have said that nudist colonies are about activities that go against the Bible; OK, putting thieves in jail goes against the Bible's command that they are to make restitution to their victims, so anyone who participates in the jailing of thieves is acting unbiblically, but no church I'm aware of says people shouldn't join the police force. You said that children get hurt when nudism goes wrong; OK, the Bible says nothing about making criminals of people who grow things in their gardens, so jailing pot growers is unbiblical. How long would a policeman be on the force if he refused to go after pot growers? You've said that nudists don't live up to their own PR; have Medicare, Social Security, or the government education system, let alone the wars of the last fifty years, lived up to the PR? You said that doctors and others might see bodies so often that they become numb to the sexual attraction others feel; could it be that soldiers and police officers become numb to treating people unjustly? You've said that you're not sure that natural curiosity about people's bodies is legitimate; does the natural desire to avoid persecution justify the killing of innocent people who happen to be near those we think . . . Hey, where are you going?

——I've heard quite enough, thank you. Good day.

Part 1 is here.

First They Came for the Leftists

2010-10-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Soviet Union has always been like some sort of Neverland to me; the stories of deprivation, persecution, and oppression were so horrible I frankly couldn't believe they could be true. I heard about the secret police, the propaganda, the jailings of dissidents, and the persecution of Christians, but because I hadn't seen these things with my own eyes and the respectable media didn't talk about them, I couldn't really put it on a par with my daily experience.

It was like reading about demon possession in the Bible: I've never seen it, so yeah, OK, maybe it was true then, but is it as true today? Is it more relevant to me than the baseball game I'm listening to? I could only conclude that if persecution and demon possession did indeed happen they only happened far away and to people I'd never see. I couldn't really justify spending time or effort worrying about such things.

My view of Bible translation was similar: it was a safe profession. We only worked in socially stable places, like our village in Papua New Guinea, where the nasty murders had all happened in the old days. True, on occasion the unattractive and socially marginal mysteriously disappeared, but we were assured that they were witches and the world was better off without them. We didn't see the mutilated bodies, so we forgot about the deceased in less time than it takes to tell.

This worldview carried over into real life, as it were. I remember talking with a fellow translator, a brilliant woman no one would ever confuse with a soldier, a lady of impeccable character, who had spent two summers in Sudan. Oh, how nice—Africa! The languages there have such interesting features!

But much of her conversation had to do with the time she had spent in villages when they were being bombed by the government, and I was simply unable to take in what she was saying. She might as well have told me she had been kinaped by leprechauns for all I could grasp what she was saying—though of course I nodded and smiled and certainly would never have accused her, even to myself, of telling falsehoods. Her words were simply so much mental overload.

I have a hard time believing that Muslims are as nasty as they are portrayed to be. When my son was at university, he said he was making friends with guys from Pakistan. Oh, how nice! Getting to know people from other cultures is such a good way to spread the Gospel! I had heard that Christians are second-class citizens in Muslim countries, and Christian churches in Pakistan and Indonesia get burned occasionsally, but that's there and this is here; in the USA, Muslims play by the rules, right? Didn't National Geographic's story on Beirut include a photo of two Saudis at a rooftop restaurant drinking beer (faces and other identifying features carefully shielded from the camera)? And aren't the Muslim men we meet with a few times a year at our Meetings for Better Understanding obviously human and humane? When I visited my Muslim friend's home, didn't he have going on his big screen a movie he said he'd get in trouble for viewing if he were at home in Bangladesh? Muslim nastiness is far away; it happens to other people.

And Hindus. They may burn churches in India, but here they're OK, right? You know, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and all that? A Hindu woman of my acquaintance has come to Christ in the last few years, but I have a hard time believing her when she says she really is in mortal danger from her husband and doesn't dare tell him about her conversion, even though she is amazingly consistent in her stories.

All this to say I'm having a hard time believing what I'm passing on here. In short, there's pretty good evidence that people like me who vocally oppose the wars in Southwest Asia and attempt to persuade others to join the opposition aren't going to be walking around free all that much longer. I really don't know how long it will be before I am in prison.

A little background: Whenever a government is at war, its success depends on its ability to rally the citizenry to fight. Those who do the grunting, freezing, sweating, living with permanent injuries, dying, and killing know that the men who declare today's wars stay at home, eat catered meals, sleep with their wives, and make speeches. So they need to be convinced that the alternative to suffering on the battlefield is even worse and that those who are maimed or killed in these battles are heroes. Every war is a battle between good ("us") and evil ("them"), and anyone who shows any sympathy to the enemy has to be cast as supporting evil. As Hermann Göring said on the eve of the Nuremburg trials,

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

A man who knows what he's fighting for needs no propaganda to inspire him, and he will not be affected by negative propaganda; the situation is the reverse for the man who doesn't know what he's fighting for. So the less clear the objective of the war, as in the case of the wars the US has fought in my lifetime ("And it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for? / Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, / Next stop is Vietnam"), the more important propaganda is. The morale of the fighting forces is crucial and must be maintained at all costs, and negative publicity of any kind damages a government's war effort even more than setbacks on the battlefield. There is, unsurprisingly, no incentive for the government to tell the truth, either to the enemy or to the domestic public: "All's fair in love and war," right? and this is doubly true when the interests of the ruling class are at stake.

We in the US tend to think of propaganda as a tool of those governments we're glad we don't live under, but it's as much a part of our history as are the wars it promoted.

After South Carolina seceded, Lincoln shut down newspapers in the North—that's the N-O-R-T-H—that argued against the war he so wanted and jailed the editors and owners. Wilson did the same to promote his war, and FDR did the same with his. Why? Because if they printed the truth (let alone lies—this is war, after all), people would not support the wars. It was that simple.

In our own day, the heroism of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman were front-page news; the good treatment the former received at the hands of her captors and the needless destruction of an Iraqi hospital by her putative rescuers weren't, nor was the revelation that the latter had turned against the war and was killed by "friendly fire."

Journalists need access to the action if they are going to report what's going on. I wasn't alive for Edward R. Murrow's live reports from the European theater (an appropriate term if ever there was one) during FDR's war, but I understand they were not to be missed by patriotic Americans. If he had been asking German prisoners why they were fighting or reporting on the abuse of civilians by US troops (or the sexual immorality—the title of the movie What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? says it all), would he have had the same access to the action and the airwaves? And without access, there's nothing to report, which means no sales and no revenue.

The present solution to the access problem is that jounalists have access to spokespeople. Who needs Edward R. Murrow when you can have Norman Schwartzkopf? Reporters go to briefings, pad every sentence in the prepared remarks with some variant of "he said," and presto! they have their story. Or they can be embedded with combat units—as long as they don't report what Corporal White said about wishing he could get a piece of local ass or show the aftermath of the mortar blast that killed one "suspected insurgent" and half a dozen women and children.

Notice the establishment's complaints about Bradley Manning's release of the video of a US helicopter crew killing innocent people in what seems to be the honest (if far too hastily assumed) belief that they were terrorists. People interested in justice would speak to the issues raised by the video: How warranted was the belief that the photographer was carrying a weapon? Did the crewmen follow standard operating procedures and rules of engagement? What consequences did they face afterward? What steps is the Pentagon taking to see that such killing of innocents not happen in the future?

Instead, the talk was all about how the video would demoralize the homeland, endanger US troops, and raise anger among Iraqis: it was bad propaganda.

Well, folks, the establishment isn't taking what little opposition there is to these wars lying down. They are now following in Lincoln's steps and attacking antiwar types. I've never heard of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and anyone who reads this blog knows I have no sympathy for socialism beyond the words they use to describe their goals ("peace," "justice," "prosperity," "the common good," etc.—I would guess we don't even define those words the same way). So as I write to a somewhat conservative audience, I anticipate a response to the effect of, "I'm not going to worry if the Feds go after a bunch of pinkos or reds. Perilous times require drastic measures."

To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, today the pinkos, tomorrow (or the next day, or the next) the libertarians, and sometime down the road anyone who dares call governemnt rapine what it is. Who knows? Someday Christian churches might provide such a contrast to the evil around them that people will perceive Christians as enough of a threat that to start hauling them off to jail. Who will speak up for them then? "The prudent man keeps quiet in such times, for the times are evil" (Am 5:13).

For now, though, notice how our government is misusing language here by alleging that the FRSO is providing "material support for terrorism." Those who speak against the war are providing "material support" to terrorists? Since when are words material? Material things are tangible; they're made of atoms. Since when is a word made of atoms? Yet on the basis of this verbal travesty, our rulers will criminalize and jail their opponents.

Then again, as I've just explained, the war effort depends crucially on propaganda. Our rulers can't just say, "These people are telling the truth, and if the voters see we're running a racket, we'll be in trouble." They need to respond or they'll lose their fan base. And to the degree that the war really is effective against terrorists, I suppose they can claim that the truth helps terrorists. But I would also argue that this war is an ungodly waste of life and property, and a more godly way would be more respectful of both. But "there's plenty of money to be made / by supplying the army with the tools of the trade," so such suggestions would fall on deaf ears, even if offered by someone with better credentials.

Maybe I'm such a poor writer that this blog, with this readership in single digits on a good day, will never get me in trouble. But when the Roman empire was in trouble, it didn't matter who you were or how vocal your opposition to the government's evil: you had to take the pledge of allegiance ("Caesar is lord") or die. How long before I, along with you, dear reader, have to pledge to support the troops or face draconian (Re 12:9) measures?

Some Christians in the days of the Roman empire were willing to call Caesar lord and toss in the incense, figuring that God knew their hearts and, for that matter, so did the soldiers administering the pledge: everyone knew the emperor was an ordinary, if extraordinarily powerful, mortal, and everyone was just going along to get along. But others, the ones we remember and call heroes today, thinking that their words would affect their standing before God (Mt 12:37), refused to go along with the community and paid, often with their lives.

I've lost good friends because of this blog; I suspect that for them the day I'm arrested will be a day of celebration (Jn 16:2, 20). I'm not betting the farm that my church, which prays regularly for God's protection of the unbelievers in the US military, will pray for their brother in Christ once I'm in prison; I would guess that if they do, they will be praying that I see the error of my ways and start supporting the troops.

"Let him who puts his armor on not boast like him who takes it off" (1 Kg 20:11). I don't know for sure what I'll do when it's time to either live a lie or "live" in prison or die. but it's pretty clear that the day is coming when I'll have to choose, and courage is not exactly my middle name. But if I really love the Lord, my day of crisis will be a day of celebration (2 Ti 3:8) for me, too.

Shooting the Perp's PR Man

2010-09-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

I believe in scouting out the enemy when convenient, so I'm on the list for e-mailings from Change.org, President Obama's clearinghouse for political activism. I can't remember any time I have agreed with any of their suggestions ("Demand that private security corporations raise professional standards for security officers to keep America safe"), but one this week got me going enough to forego a possibly remunerative assignment to comment here: "Sign the petition demanding that Craigslist fight human [sex] trafficking on all of its sites."

Obviously human trafficking in any form is immoral, a violation of people's bodies and property, so I'm no friend of Craigslist's trafficking customers. However, going after Craigslist is precisely the wrong way to fight the problem. If the authorities were really serious about saving present and future victims of trafficking, instead of forcing Craigslist to shut down their "adult services" sites, they would send undercover agents to answer suspicious ads, gather the evidence needed to get a warrant, and arrest, prosecute, and execute the traffickers (Ex 21:16). That they go after Craigslist apparently without going after the traffickers is yet more proof that the various wars they whip up hysteria over are about protecting and expanding their power, not protecting us Mundanes.

Government policy regarding the sex industry is completely off any biblical base.

While the only sexual expression that truly pleases God is that between a man and a woman in a monogamous marriage, the Bible doesn't criminalize all suboptimal activities: Polygamy carries no stated penalty, and all women in plural marriages are always called wives. Further, while the Old Testament would have used the word harlotry to describe what we in the sixties called dating, only in the case of the daughter of a priest was there any civil sanction called for. Homosexual actvities call for the death penalty in the Old Testament, but in today's US, homosexuals are joined only by abortionists in the glow of politically correct rights. Meanwhile, prositutes (and their customers) are subject to arrest and jailing.

Given the nature of men and women—the typical woman will not consent to sex without a good reason, while the typical man needs only an opportunity—there is a certain quid pro quo in all heterosexual activity. Wise women put out only for their husbands (who, if they are wise, make their wives' happiness their number one priority); others will settle for dinner and a movie, others just for the thrill, and others for cash. I would guess that the Fantines who are reduced to reluctant prostitution ("Don't they know they're making love to one already dead?") outnumber the Xaviera Hollanders who consider it the ultimate profession about a hundred to one. I see no justice, let alone Christian discipleship or even compassion, in putting such women in cages and later releasing them to the same destitution that reduced them to prostitution in the first place. But this is a minority view.

If we were to go for a government solution to the sex trade, we could straighten out the system without increasing government spending: the money and manpower we spend on the unbiblical war on drugs could be used instead to fight sex kidnapping, a biblical mandate we are ignoring. Think about it.

We spend billions of dollars every year searching for and jailing marijuana growers. This includes aircraft and land vehicles equipped with equipment that can distinguish marijuana from surrounding vegetation. The porno-scanners coming to an airport near you are also coming to your street to strip you as you walk on the sidewalk and to see everything that goes on in your house; it doesn't take a cynic to hypothesize that these devices' "anti-terrorism" functions will be augmented with add-ons for the drug warriors and that the data gathered and stored might contain tidbits of, shall we say, nonprofessional interest to those with access to it (and their friends, and their friends' friends). All this comes at a high price to both our wallets and our privacy. And again, there is no biblical justification for the war on drugs, and the terrorism we face is a response to our government's evil, not to our freedoms.

So, one would think that a people who revere the Bible and are filled with the Holy Spirit and speak of their zeal to defend freedom would latch on to the idea of abandoning an unbiblical pursuit that helps no one and taking up beneficial activities the Bible supports. But one could be wrong.

When Helping Hurts

2010-09-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

The deacons' Sunday school class at my church has been studying Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert's When Helping Hurts: How to Help People without Hurting Them and Yourself. This is an important issue for me because I'm convinced that just as biblical faith is more than intellectual assent to a body of doctrines—"faith without deeds is dead"—true Christian witness goes beyond the verbal presentation of the gospel: Christians are "created in Christ Jesus for good works."

Yet as the phenomenon of "rice Christians" evidentiates, the "help" well-intentioned Christians give their neighbors often actually harms them. So how can we really help people the way we're convinced God wants us to? While this book is aimed at white, middle-class, North American Christians who would work with the starving poor, the principles Corbett and Fikkert proposes are equally appropriate for working with a millionaire estranged from his spouse.

The authors attribute the failure of antipoverty programs to three things: a "material definition of poverty," god-complexes among those who would help, and feelings of inferiority experienced by the materially poor, and they place the blame in precisely the right place: the fall of Adam.

God created people to be in relationship four ways: with God, with themselves, with other people, and with the rest of creation. When Adam went his own way, he broke his relationship with God. Because of that, he was ashamed of who he was, so he tried to hide from God and, it would seem, from his wife, as evidenced by his blame-casting when he was confronted by God. And God has stated that the adversarial relationship we have with the nonhuman creation is a direct result of the fall (Gn 3:18-19; Ro 8:21-22).

While the scarcity of material goods is the first thing fallen humans think of as the result of the fall, the most important result is separation from God and consequently from ourselves, our human neighbors, and the rest of creation. In turn, we tend to think of poverty as the lack of material resources instead of the rupture of the relationships that God originally intended for us to have; this misconception is what Corbett and Fikkert call the "material definition of poverty," the first ingredient in failed efforts to alleviate poverty.

Yet when poor people themselves are asked what they suffer from, the lack of money per se is not at the top of the list; instead, "poor people typically talk in terms of shame, inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation, fear, hopelessness, depression, social isolation and voicelessness." So "helping" someone who suffers from humiliation by giving them money is going to compound their suffering, probably without dealing with the real problem, what made him needy in the first place.

The second ingredient in failed pverty-alleviation programs is god-complexes among those who would help. As Adam wanted to "be like God," those who are materially well off have a hard time avoiding the tendency to consider their wealth the product of their own merit and to view the materially poor as somehow inferior; even those who don't want to play "blame the victim" can still view themselves as messiahs helping the helpless when in fact they are trampling on people who could solve the problems themselves if they could see how to make the best use of their present resources.

One of the biggest problems in many poverty-alleviation efforts is that their design and implementation exacerbates the poverty of being of the economically rich—their god-complexes—and the poverty of being of the economically poor—their feelings of inferiority and shame.

If poverty is the result of broken relationships, what should poverty alleviation aim for? The answer the book presents is that true poverty alleviation is

working to reconcile the four foundational relationships so that people can fulfill their callings of glorifying God by working and supporting themselves and their families with the fruit of that work.

This is accomplished through different strategies that depend on the situation of the one being helped. Relief is for those who need immediate help because they have no other way to forestall serious consequences: for example, someone whose house has just been flooded needs shelter and dry clothes, and for a while will need food. Rehabilitation helps those whose bad decisions have brought them to their situations to make better decisions in the future: one should not build houses in flood plains. Development helps people to use the resources they already have more effectively: the flood victim will need help rearranging his life if he is to buy a new home.

It follows from this that treating someone who needs rehabilitation as though he needs relief harms both giver and receiver. As a sign outside a local convenience store used to say, "The more you give change [to the panhandlers they were trying to get rid of], the more things stay the same."

The solutions proposed in the book aren't a few quick 'n easy steps. One small group that sought to improve housing in a poor section of Baltimore did literally nothing but live in the neighborhood and meet their neighbors for years before beginning actual work on houses. During this get-acquainted time, their approach to their neighbors was not the messianic "How can we help you?" of the relief worker. Rather, they could see that what was needed was rehabilitation and development, so they (presumably—the authors don't say so) modeled responsible living and looked for resources within the community that could be channeled into improved housing.

Indeed, a theme that ran through the book was that those who really want to help need to realize that God has been working with those he wants us to help both directly and through other people. Before we do anything to help the poor (except, obviously, those in dire need of immediate relief), we need to be in relationship with them so we can hear what they think their problems are, what their strengths are, and what goals they have set. We also need to listen to those God has placed in the local context, private and (yes, I am holding my nose) "public." It's a win-win situation: if those already there are our friends, they're our friends; if they're our enemies, we have a chance to make them our friends (Pr 16:7). Anyone who has actually been somewhere we're new to knows something about that situation that we don't, and we can make friends with them as well as increase the effectiveness of our help for the poor by honoring them for the time they have spent there.

(Speaking of those we're not sure we'd like to work with, I've always wondered what Jesus talked about at those meals with tax collectors and prostitutes. Could it be that he was nonjudgmentally letting them describe experiences he had never had? "I've never done what you do. Tell me what it's like to be you.")

This "What can you do?" rather than "How can we help you?" mentality is completely antithetical to the way I've always looked at loving my less-fortunate neighbors. Yet it fits with my experience: when I was between jobs and really had no idea what to do next, a couple from church offered to counsel me. They wanted me to get the full benefit of the sessions, so I had to pay for it—it is more blessed to give than to receive—but I was glad to part with my money after the first session because my first homework was to answer exactly the right question, though in different forms: What jobs have you done that you enjoyed? What jobs have you felt you did well? We eventually got around to the usual battery of tests that I had taken to no benefit a few years before, but I had a much better attitude about them than I would have had otherwise because I was taking them in a context of a conversation that was based on my strengths, not on my weaknesses.

The deacons' class decided that this book was well worth reading. But during our final session, we found ourselves scratching our heads and wondering how to put all this into practice. We couldn't imagine going around the church's solidly working-class neighborhood asking people what their strengths are. We all live in pretty comfortable neighborhoods. Does God want us to "go about looking for monsters to destroy"?

We eventually stumbled upon an idea that we would have thought of right away if we had asked ourselves what our own successes looked like. Someone remembered that we had helped a man who had been referred to us by his landlord, who happened to own the bar the man frequented. The deacons had asked some questions around and had eventually given him an airplane ticket to Florida so he could work for his brother, who had promised over the phone to give him a job.

We decided to check to make sure the man was still working, then thank the bar owner for the referral, tell him he is welcome to refer such people to us in the future, and ask him if he would be willing to spread the word to other bar owners he knows. (Being Presbyterians, we thought the best way to celebrate the success of the program was with a sizable tab and tip at his establishment.) We'll see how that goes, but at least we had planned a first step by the end of the class.

Corbett and Fikkert are somewhat sympathetic to tax-funded "help" for the poor, so I would be remiss if I didn't point out how "public compassion" goes against the main tenets of this otherwise excellent book.

If the primary form of poverty is a broken relationship with God, for that reason government help is useless because governments cannot evangelize. Hezekiah tried it and it didn't work (2Ch 30:1-11). While much is made of Paul's appeal to Caesar for justice (Ac 25:11), that sword had two edges: "This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar" (Ac 26:32); and, of course, it was government that killed John the Baptist, Jesus himself, James, Stephen, Peter, and eventually Paul. I know of no state church that exists today that really preaches the gospel. Some Christians defend "public" schools because they had this or that teacher or administrator who led them to Christ, but I would argue that the gospel was communicated despite the system, not because of it. In Papua New Guinea the government schools have a specifically Christian "religious instruction" component, but no one would accuse the average graduate of having a meaningful understanding, let alone reverence for, the Bible. My experience is the same with the handful of Kenyans I have met who have gone through that government's religious instruction programs. I don't see how government poverty-alleviation programs could ever include a gospel component that really restored people's relationships to God.

If god-complexes plague erstwhile helpers and keep them from truly helping, and if power and privilege are the essence of godhood, for that reason governments, which embody power and privilege, cannot help anyone. The essence of government is the idea that some people are more equal than others and therefore have rights and privileges that others don't have, so they can therefore justly use their powers to deprive people of the fruits of their labors (taxation) and go on to deprive them of privacy and freedom (substance prohibition, conscription, hiring quotas, permit systems, etc.). Success at alleviating poverty would provide incentive to increase the god-complex inherent in government, and government agencies would more likely blame failure on those less-than-gods they were trying to help than take the blame themselves.

If what affects the poor more than material lack is feelings of inferiority, for that reason government cannot alleviate poverty. The more inferior the populace feels, the more power accrues to the government: if the taxpayer cannot resist, taxes rise, which enables the system to grow; similarly, the more helpless the recipients feel, the more justified the government is perceived in raising taxes and expanding its "helping" functions. The incentives inherent to a system of government "compassion" are totally perverse: as the problem to be solved becomes worse, the tax-paid "helpers" gain power and prestige (and remuneration and job security) and more "aid" becomes available to those who "need" it.

If the primary means of poverty alleviation is the restoration of relationships with creation, for that reason government cannot alleviate poverty. Not only is the primary incentive to continue the program and pay those who run it, but the underlying assumption is that the "helpers" who run it are by virtue of being government employees superior to the "helpees" whom they "help." The "helpees" therefore are cast as inferior from the get-go, which prevents them from ever entering into relationship with their "helpers" as equals.

If we really want to help our neighbors—all together now—we need to get government out of the business and use our own resources for the glory of God. When Helping Hurts argues this point better than the authors knew.

The Peace of Jerusalem

2010-08-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

Brother Peterson shares Christ with more strangers in a week than I do in a year. He stands at the entrance to the Market East railway station every afternoon during peak hours with hand-lettered signs calling on passersby to repent of their sins and come to Christ. At least once a week I see him talking with someone who has stopped by, and judging by the body language, they are nonbelievers who are trying to figure out what this crazy old guy is all about.

Brother Peterson is old, probably in his mid-sixties, he hobbles with a cane, he's missing a few teeth, and he is unlettered, but he's not crazy. And he genuinely loves the Lord. His face has somewhat of a basset hound sadness to it, and the first few times I saw him, I avoided him, thinking, "What a horrible advertisement for the gospel." But God convicted me, and one day I decided to break the ice by offering to buy him a smoothie from the nearby fruit stand. He turned the smoothie down, but we got to talking about the Lord, and the basset hound turned into a beagle in an instant. His eyes lit up, and he was very chatty. I don't spend enough time at Market East for it to depress me much, but in four years I've spent probably as much time there as he did his first month on duty, and I have grown to appreciate how hard it is for him to smile: there isn't much there to cheer one longing for heaven. That man is a soldier of the cross.

I was early arriving today, and Brother Peterson didn't have anyone on the line, so I stopped to say hi. After the initial pleasantries, he said, "Brother, I want you to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. We need to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the apple of God's eye, and those Iranians . . . ."

Great God who lives in heaven above, Lord of glory, Lord of love, what has gotten into this man? Who is the apple of God's eye? Is it a nation of people who reject the Christ who is truly the apple of God's eye, or is it those who have given their lives to Christ?

Not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham's children. On the contrary, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." In other words, it is not the natural children who are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring. (Ro 9:6-8)

Who are the children of the promise? Is it not Christ's brothers?

Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother. For it is written,
"Rejoice, barren woman who does not bear;
Break forth and shout, you who are not in labor;
For more are the children of the desolate
Than of the one who has a husband."
And you brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. (Gal 4:25-28)

It is only the heavenly Jerusalem that really counts today; it is only those who have surrendered to Jesus Christ who are headed for an afterlife worth looking forward to. It is only those who love the one whom God loves above all else who have the possibility of pleasing God in this life.

I'm not writing this to beat up on Brother Peterson. I sang his praises because he is an exemplary Christian. Unfortunately, he is not alone in having his priorities out of order. I don't know if the ones who have bewitched him and others (Ga 3:1) are the media mouthpieces of the American-Israeli Politcal Action Committee or the spiritual heirs of C. I. Scofield, but someone has done great damage to the cause of Christ and to men of goodwill like Brother Peterson by promoting the idea that one can please God apart from Christ.

He went on to talk about how the United States is crumbling before our eyes and we need to pray that God will keep it from total destruction. Again, I had to shake my head. Our nation is literally going to hell; every year a smaller proportion of our fellow citizens who leave this life are headed for glory. I like to think that a massive turning to Christ would stay God's hand of judgment against our wicked society, but it didn't happen in Jeremiah's day, so I'm not counting on it now. But whether or not God's hand is stayed, these are individuals no different from me who are facing an eternity of suffering. Yes, they will receive justice; but God calls us to urge them to receive grace and mercy (2Co 5:20). I like good neighbors and want to live in a prosperous society, but not if it means people who have lived as good neighbors die without Christ. And if it's true that the bigger they are the harder they fall, and Uncle Sam is getting bigger every day, I say the sooner he meets his doom the less bad things will be.

Brother Peterson is in the convinving business, not the listening business, so I didn't waste too much of my breath discussing the matter with him. And as I left, he called, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!"

I replied, "I'll be praying that they come to Christ. Beyond that, nothing matters." I hope I'm not missing something, because more people than I would have planned on heard it. Imagine that: me preaching the gospel at a train station!

"We're from the Government, and We're Here to Help You"

2010-08-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

That wasn't quite what they said. What they said was, "Hands off your computers." There were about twenty of them in flak vests, most with sidearms. They just walked in the front door of my workplace this morning, and just like that, all productive labor ceased.

Oh, they were friendly enough. No "sorry for the inconvenience," but one can be grateful for no drawn weapons, no shouted orders, and no patdowns or strip searches. The atmosphere was essentially, do what we ask and there won't be any trouble—exactly what a robber or rapist would want to communicate. We were pretty free to walk around and chat, and even go home. (I took the option to leave and am writing this on the train home. But before I could leave, they inspected my laptop.) They asked us for identification, addresses, and what we do at work, and they videoed and photographed the whole office and were going through all books and anything else that might contain the information they were looking for. We were properly obsequious (except for RMP-M, a petite lady who had the balls to say out loud what we were all thinking and didn't suffer for it), so there were no "incidents."

But let's run some numbers.

There are about twenty of us in the office. Given my salary and bennies, plus other costs the company has that they amortize into employee costs, I'm guessing I have to produce about $35 per hour for the company to break even. I'm far from the sharpest knife in the drawer, but we've got a lot of new hires, so my rate is probably near the middle for the office. So, for every hour we can't work, the company loses $700, $5600 for the day. That's my company's costs.

I would guess that the agents' salaries and bennies are well over twice mine, but let's call it twice mine, $70 per hour. That's $1400 per hour for the crew that came in. They estimated a six-hour on-site investigation, but government projects are always estimated low and delivered high, so I'll call it eight hours there; and the analysis stage of any operation is always more time consuming than the data-gathering stage, but let's assume they realize quickly that we're innocent and they only match the data-gathering time. So, $1400 x 8 x 2 = $22,400. The money Uncle Sam has spent on the investigation of this office alone is worth the price of a nice new family-sized car. One can safely assume that the investigation will target other people, so a total cost of $100,000 is probably not unreasonable.

Now what wickedness, you ask, was my workplace involved in?

According to the piece of paper the head of the Criminal Investigation Department (I guess; the caps only said "CID") of the FBI, the Treasury Department, and the IRS (they were all represented, at least on the clothing) waved at our office manager, they were investigating "a whole laundry list of violations" having to do with a nonprofit organization with which someone in our company has had some connection. I had heard about the connection when I first began working there in 2006, but I heard no specifics then or and have heard nothing since. It is the sort of organization of which only Ayn Rand would disapprove (though she would not think of forcibly disbanding it). There are some people you can tell are crooked almost when you meet them, but the person involved has had ample opportunity to reveal streaks of unscrupulousness or dishonesty and so far has not. In fact, another worker said that the same matters were under investigation before I started working there and the investigation came to nothing. So, to put it kindly, it would appear that someone has too much time on his hands.

In my rants about jury duty, I pointed out that in my case the system pulled a dozen not-rich people away from their jobs to settle a dispute between two wealthy people (which, after one day of trial, they settled out of court; I almost forgot the dozens of people who lost a day of work but were not selected to be on the jury). Today an innocent man lost $5600 and at least two of his clients didn't take delivery of goods they needed to serve their customers, other business owners will likely each lose more, and US taxpayers will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. For what?

I don't know the dollar amount at stake in the nonprofit organization. Maybe it was thousands of dollars, maybe it was millions. I don't know who the plaintiff is or what he thinks he lost. But the men and women who barged into our workplace today were all federal agents, so I'm guessing that the problem was i's not dotted and t's not crossed. Maybe the nonprofit forgot to pay some fees; more likely they forgot to follow some procedure that would have been grossly inconvenient for them, of little benefit to the government, and of no benefit to anyone not a net receiver of tax revenue. I can't believe that the monetary loss to the federal government amounted to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it is spending to investigate the matter.

I have a coworker from Kenya, one of those awful, nasty, third-world countries US citizens pride themselves on not being part of. She has been at government-run boarding schools that dictate when you get up, what you wear, what and when you can eat, when you can pee, when you can go to bed, what you can learn, and I forget what else. Her family has at times literally had to drop everything and run into the woods to escape gangs of marauding bandits. She half-whispered to me before I left, "I've never seen anything like this."

The numbers I ran are pretty good evidence that the issue is not the money. That this matter has lain dormant for more than four years tells me no one is suffering any great injustice. I think the issue is power.

Adam ate the fruit because he wanted to be "like God." That is the essence of rebellion against the God who is there: the desire for power, autonomy, and the pleasures that we think will follow them. Uncle Sam is nothing if not a personification of rebellion against God, and he's out to eliminate his rivals. The obsequiousness in our office was proof that we got the message of who's really whose servant in Uncle Sam's dominion.

Whatever "our brave men and women" are fighting for in Southwesta Asia, it isn't freedom—not ours, anyway. And the sooner we divorce the Cross from Old Glory, the more chance we have that our grandchildren will not be trapped in the police state we see growing before our eyes.

USPS Muslim Stamp

2010-08-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me an e-mail today that is essentially the text found here. I wrote a response before checking to see whether the information was a hoax. Apparently it is. However, the passion behind the e-mail calls for a response, so I'm offering one here.

***

America is the idea that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Wake up, Americans! The Post Office is simply the little toenail on your worst enemy, the “powers and principalities” that have Uncle Sam on strings. Our government is no more American than Sweden’s or Burkina Faso’s.

Remember the thousands of Muslims tortured by the US-CIA-installed Shah of Iran? You can bet the Muslims do!

Remember the thousands of Muslims gassed by then-US ally Saddam Hussein in Kurdistan and killed in his US-funded war against Iran? You can bet the Muslims do!

Remember the thousands of women oppressed under the US-funded Taliban in Afghanistan? You can bet the Muslims do!

Remember the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by the Bush-Clinton sanctions on Iraq after Desert Storm? You can bet the Muslims do!

Remember the thousands of Muslim women and children killed by shock and awe and predator drones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen, what General McChrystal called the “amazing number of people who meant us no harm”? You can bet the Muslims do!

Remember the money Uncle Sam gives Planned Parenthood! Do you think perhaps that callous disregard for life could extend to his foreign policy?

Remember the bankster bailouts that your grandchildren will never finish paying for! Do you think the business interests that profit from our wars really care about the Kingdom of God?

If nothing else, remember who “our President” is! If he’s willing to play fast and loose with the truth about his domestic programs, what makes you think he’s telling the truth when he says our foreign wars are all about protecting us little guys?

End the Federal Reserve! End the federal government! Better still, get rid of the idea that some people have rights (like taxation, censorship, regulation, and war) that others don’t have.

We are all children of Adam through Noah. A Christian’s citizenship is in heaven, never (according to the NT) in the country that collects his taxes (except when such is expedient, Acts 16:37). Otherwise we are our neighbor’s neighbor, not our brother’s keeper, and charged only with being an ambassador for Christ to persuade men (2 Corinthians 5:11, 20-21).

No one’s sin nature goes away when he gets a government job. He simply finds himself in a position to exploit his fellow men with impunity. Not all tax-feeders are evil, but those who aren’t can probably testify that they could get away with less good and more evil than they do; that is, the system provides perverse incentives. We need to get rid of the system. See Deuteronomy 17:16-20.

The greatest nation that ever was has devolved into tyranny and debt beyond repayment. It’s time to scrap it and start over. The Torah would be a good place to start.

On Judging Other Nations

2010-07-28T03:47:00.001-07:00

Andy's comment on the previous post: "Is it fair for God to use a nation like Babylon to punish other nations, then punish Babylon for doing exactly what God directed them to do?"

My cynical answer is, if God says it's fair, it's fair. It's God's universe and he makes the rules. He can make them, and he can break them.

I can even back the first two sentences up with Scripture: All have sinned and the wages of sin is death. We deserve to die and go to hell, and anything better than that is God's grace to the undeserving.

I don't think Andy claims that God appeared to Nebuchadnezzar and told him to invade Judah; rather, through that relationship between God's total sovereignty and man's total free will and responsibility—a relationship that believers consider beyond human comprehension and unbelievers consider simply irrational and thus impossible—God worked his sovereign will through Nebuchadnezzar's will to bring judgment on Judah. So how can God condemn Babylon for doing what he wanted them to do?

I don't know. Paul addresses the question and Job deals with it through the bulk of his book, and the answer is the same both times: "You didn't make the universe, you don't know how it works, and you can't do anything about it, so shut up" (Job 38–41; Ro 9).

I do think we need to question our assumption that God is using the US to judge other nations' wickedness. He never called Israel to judge the wickedness of its neighbors. Ammon was clearly the aggressor in 1 Samuel 12; other than that, I can't think of any time Israel's military went outside its borders. (Philistia was within the borders God described to Joshua.) The closest they got to a preemptive strike against potential aggressors was Jonah's mission to Nineveh, and need I point out that that was not a government operation?

As Andy mentions, Uncle Sam's reason for invading Iraq and Afgbhanistan was imperialist theft. That Uncle Sam is God's agent of judgment against those nations is a reasonable proposition, But the fate of Babylon, an imperialist power that was also God's agent of judgment, against Judah, should give us pause: do we want to suffer the same fate? If not, is there anything we can do about it? What privilege is it to be used as God's agent of judgment if God's just going to punish me for it? I wouldn't mind being God's agent of judgment against pretty girls who dress provocatively, but I can't imagine that a thousand years from now I'd be glad I did so. Somewhere in this deceitful, wicked heart I wouldn't even want to live in a universe in which I would be.

If my church is typical, US Christians spend over three times as much in taxes to "punish" Iraq alone than they give in support for all missionaries. If this situation were simply a matter of an evil government ruling over a helpless people, that would be no cause for concern. What bothers me is that US Christians want to spend more money doing who-cares-what in Iraq than they do on fulfilling the Great Commission: I have lost a lot of friends simply by pointing out Uncle Sam's evils and questioning the wisdom of identifying with him. If they want to share Babylon's fate, that's their choice. Unfortunately, I don't have enough money to get out of Babylon, so I'll have to share it with them.

This blog is an attempt to convince Christians to remember that their only citizenship described as such is in heaven (Php 3:20) and to make the Great Commission, through simple good neighborliness if nothing else, their first priority. As April Glaspie told Saddam, "We have no opinion about your [nationalist or imperialist] conflicts"; we don't see that anyone is on the side of justice. We can do better.