Never Forget!

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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"?

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

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

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.