Salt

Pope just another Hezbolla Lackey

Well, Benedict, the German, still has it in for the Jews.
/sarc

"I take the occasion to reaffirm the right of Lebanese to the wholeness and sovereignty of the country, the right of the Israelis to live in peace in their state and the right of the Palestinians to have a free and sovereign country," the pope said.

The pontiff expressed special closeness to the "defenseless civilian populations, unjustly hit in a conflict in which there are only victims."

As Alexandra and others insinuate, when civilians look like soldiers, they are fair game.  The murder of children is just a Hezbollah ploy.   If the Israelis kill a few children, its still Hezbollah's fault:   merely a PR game.  And then we are asked to have as much outrage about Israeli civilians as Lebanese.  Well, I do.  I have an equal amount for each individual - at this point more than 400 for the Lebanese, many of whom are civilians, and for the 50 Israelis, most of whom are military - who have been killed.  I admit, to say, "well, because a rocket came from that house, those children are fair game" is to show a loss of a moral compass.   

In the end, the alliances are pretty complicated.  We're supporting a bunch of Shia in Iraq who were trained in Iran; Hamas, which once cast out of the West Bank, became connected to Hezbollah and the Iranians, in spite of their initial differences.  And even now, those al-Quaeda leaders who were busy murdering Shia in Iraq are showing sympathy for the "Lebanese" [they can't quite support... the Shia].  Israel has played right into Iran's hands, doing what noone else could do:  unite people who hate each other against it by bombing civilians.

If the US and Israel had decided to treat Hamas like an elected government; if they had offered Fateh realistic carrots for creating viable institutions within the West Bank; if they had built the concrete fence on the internationally recognized borders rather than by taking Palestinian farms; if they had discussed with the Palestinians how they would leave Gaza; if the administration had not supported Hussein against Iran; if we had not supported Bin Laden against the Soviet Union; and if we had at one point supported democracy in Iran, perhaps things might have been a bit different.  Openly negotiating directly with Iran and Syria would not infringe Israeli sovereignty.  It might lead to a temporary peace - and a temporary existing peace now is better than an imaginary peace in the future.  These are merely formal decisions that open up the possibility for peace with justice and mutual respect.

As it is, Israel just confirms to the Arab world its callousness towards Arab life; that as neighbors, they are dangerous and jittery ones.  But worse, for Israel, a small guerrilla force has demonstrated the limits of the Israeli military.  Israel is shown to the world to be mean, and weak.  Sadly. 

and finally, Jonathan Cook reminds us what happened:

Murray Bookchin, RIP

Murray Bookchin helped me articulate, in my younger days, my libertarian, anti-marxist, social sensibilities.   As a tutor in college [I tutored Eric Fromm, Milton Friedman and the anarchist tradition], Bookchin helped me think deeply about how humans actively create and destroy their environments.  He was, as Brian Tokar notes, "the Last Utopian."   

Although I have personally moved towards a Keynesian understanding of economics, and fluctuate between Burke and Marx [Burke understood the person; Marx understood conflict] in their understanding of culture, Bookchin tried to articulate a coherent form of egalitarian libertarian communalism that challenged the totalitarian and deterministic edge of Marxism.   In the end, I found his discussions of wisdom a bit dissatisfying, finding Christ along the way.   I also ended up taking a softer view of hierarchies, reclaiming my inheritance as an Episcopalian (although I think the Episcopal church potentially has the best balance between hierarchy and freedom).

Much of his prose is a bit turgid, but he resisted the mystification and idealization of ecology, while still affirming local networks, and free associations.  He was relentless in his critique of bourgeois environmentalism.    He had the humility to rethink and reconsider his positions, instinctively resisting  both the dogmatic impulses and the frivilous fads the often engulf left thinking.  Even seven years ago he gave up "anarchism." 

Disowning Conservative Politics is Costly

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”....

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”

Read it All.

Interview with Joan Roughgarden

Charles Darwin and Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden have three things in common: a fascination with barnacles, a passionate desire to understand evolution, and a knack for controversy. While writing Evolution's Rainbow a few years ago, Roughgarden concluded that the astonishing diversity of sexual types and interactions meant that Darwin's theory of sexual selection (based on competitive males and choosy females) was not just wrong, but unfixable. She wants to replace it with social selection, in which a wide variety of social interactions, say, same-sex bonding and group membership, determine an animal's reproductive success and therefore shape bodies and behaviours. Her cooperation-based theory would, she argues, explain not just the peacock's tail, but the female spotted hyena's clitoral penis, the bonobo's use of sex for bartering and bonding, and the side-blotched lizard's five sexual types. Not surprisingly, most biologists are unwilling to jettison sexual selection. Some see her critique as a political statement reflecting her experience of metamorphosing from John to Joan in her early 50s. But many others take her ideas seriously, even if they strongly disagree. Roughgarden, a practising Christian, has now ventured into the face-off between evolution and religion. Robert Adler talked to her at her San Francisco flat.

Lawrence Krauss: Don't Pit Science Against Religion

THE popular debate about intelligent design has, I am happy to say, discredited fundamentalists who want to censor science for religious reasons. It has also exposed pseudo-scientific organisations such as the Discovery Institute for what they are. Nevertheless, in pitching misguided evangelicals against the scientific community, it has had one negative effect: it has encouraged scientists to counter-attack by criticising religious faith in general.

Such attacks are nothing new. One of the more outspoken scientific opponents of religion, physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin, has said: "There are good people, and bad people. Good people do good things, and bad people do bad things. When good people do bad things, it is religion." It was a brilliant sound bite, but one of Weinberg's less vituperative statements is more instructive: "Science does not make it impossible to believe in God. It just makes it possible to not believe in God." His point is that before the advent of modern science, all natural phenomena were viewed as miraculous, for want of any better explanation.

Harding Points us to Polanyi

Leander Harding directs us to Polanyi, although after reading the article I continue to wonder if the reasserters truly understand the reappraising position.  Why not Paul Feyerabend?  Levinas?  Charles Peirce?  Rauschenbusch?  Are Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher, truly nihilisitic?  Isn't Zizek dealing with these sorts of questions?  And has anyone read Bernard William's article "The Truth in Relativism"?  Sadly, no.  I, for one, gave up on post-modern thought several years ago because I think the issues are still about Marx, Smith and Keynes.  And to some extent, Melanie Klein.

Harding demonstrates, alas, that there are few people who have philosophical skill in the reasserting camp but, perhaps, it is because there are so few among the reappraisers, who do not use the slow steady logic necessary to render the various controversies comprehensible.

William Wallace on the Middle East

The road to a peaceful Jerusalem does not run through Baghdad, as American neo-conservatives argued in 2001-03 – nor through Tehran or Damascus which, according to hawks in the US and Israel, should be under attack. It runs through Washington. The rhetoric of the war on terror has locked the US into a self-declared “long war”, based on a distorted analysis of the region furthest from North America, in which Israel risks becoming the western front line in a war against radical Islam.

Chickens and Ducks, getting it on

Another story to drive conservatives [aka reasserters] batty.  [Via]

One reason reasserters [those Christians who insist that genital sex is peculiarly holy] have to rely on scripture rather than nature, is that nature just isn't cooperating.

Dutch Nuns are always funny.  Dutch nuns on bikes chasing criminals - hilarious.

Evangelicals enjoying the mideast disaster, ready for the end of the world. [via]

Romance, Attraction and its irrelevance to Christianity

The other day I was watching a Bollywood film.  It was delightful, if sentimental:  beautiful blind girl diva falls in love with a handsome tourist guide rogue.  It’s the idealized story about men and women. 

Reasserters - those who elevate the 1st century view about the primary utility of genital sex – make a few assumptions about romance and attraction, I think.  I’d like to examine a few.

A theology that emphasizes genital difference or prioritizes it as crucial to human nature is not distinctively Christian.  Paganism places fertility, fecundity, and gendered sexuality as central to the human, and earthly, experience.  Isis and Osiris, Sati and Shiva, Hera and Zeus – not to mention those of Babylonian origin – all demonstrate that genital difference is easily divinized.

Attraction and desire are not necessarily holy.  If anything, Christians should steer clear of elevating the experience of attraction as being particularly holy. Romance, however, is easily elevated in the culture, and can be found in the way straight people spend on weddings.  But a Christian marriage, if it is to be accurate, admits that “attraction” cannot be the crucial part of a marriage.   Important?  Perhaps.  But not all important things are distinctively Christian. 

Of course, once we argue that attraction is not crucial to marriage, we further undermine the genitalization of sexuality, because the reason why we intuitively know that particular men and women “fit” is because they are, largely, attracted to each other.  Otherwise we would say that any man could marry any woman and it would be holy.   Such a belief would be wrong because it undermines the particularity by which God is involved in any relationship. 

What should we judge a “Christian” relationship on?  Not attraction.  Attraction is great:  it is stimulating, electrifying, enlivening.  But we judge the relationship based on the ability of a couple to live into a promise – to embody a covenant analogous to the relationship we have with God.

What makes a Christian marriage different than other kinds of relationships may be that it is fundamentally based on friendship.  But it cannot be romance.  Romance you can get without Christ, and without God.   

Power Outage

I had gone dancing at a neat little club in the city.  It was the last time I would be going out on a Tuesday, and this was a fairly early club [about 8:30pm].  The place is more intimate than the copa, and with a soft wooden floor and good dancers.   

The power was out when I returned.  I don't mind losing power for 24 hours or so - it is even a little pleasant to light candles and enjoy the darkness.   I noted that there was power next door, but I just went to bed, trusting in the powers of the electric company.  That might not be wise.  And the consequences of having no power are pretty clear!

When I awoke I went to the front door to get the financial times and 1/3rd of my 100 year old tree was on my front porch, taking a couple different power lines with it.  Apparently, lots of trees had been falling in the area, and ConEd is fixing it tree by tree.  I don't expect to have power until Sunday.  It could be worse.   

I could be Palestinian - no power and people telling me I didn't deserve it.  I did get quoted in the local paper but, I hope people didn't take me seriously.

Wednesday night I saw my Unitarian colleage at a bar that hosts Irish music every Wednesday night.  She'd lost power both in the church and at home.   I can understand, of course, God punishing Unitarians, but Episcopalians?  He really had it in for the local Catholics:  their large boy's school lost an entire roof!