Three different approaches to Lent

There are at least three different ways to approach Lent. More, really, if one considers different degrees of each, but this will do for starters.

First there's what one might call the Rambo Protestant approach. "There is no such thing as Lent. Lent is a papish addition, a teaching of man, and no one should ever so much as think about it or have anything to do with it."

Then there's what we might call the strongly traditional Catholic/Eastern Orthodox approach: "Lent exists for the purpose of mortifying our fleshly nature and participating in Jesus' suffering. We Christians should all fast, preferably sticking to a vegan diet or at least abstaining from meat, except on Sundays if you want to be a wimp. Married couples should abstain from intercourse and from all sexual thoughts about each other (or anyone else, obviously, but that goes without saying). You should give something else up too, not something you need to give up anyway, but something totally innocent that you enjoy, just to toughen up spiritually. You should try to suffer in some way so as to share in Jesus' sufferings. Remember: Lent isn't about self-improvement. Lenten disciplines aren't like New Year's resolutions. It's all much more serious and stern than that. You will be improved by observing Lenten discipline, but that isn't why you should do it."

Then there's the modernized Catholic or doing-Lent-because-it's-kind-of-cool-and-useful Protestant approach: "Lent is an opportunity for self-improvement. You have liberty in Christ as to how you use it, but it's a good opportunity to engage in better self-discipline, to put your spiritual house in order, to draw nearer to the Lord as you prepare for Easter. To that end, giving something up may prove useful, especially if it's something that you've become obsessive about and need to break free of, which can happen with things that are intrinsically innocent. But if you do this, it's between you and the Lord. There aren't pre-set rules about it, and you shouldn't be blabbing about it anyway, because Jesus said not to tell people when you fast."

Readers won't be terribly surprised to learn that I'm inclined toward Approach #3, wimpy, modern, and feel-good though it may sound. I fully realize that it is quite different from Approach #2, and I would not pretend otherwise. For that reason, I think it's rather confusing to talk about "giving up" things one shouldn't be doing anyway, like "giving up bitterness and anger for Lent." Let's get real. Whatever else giving stuff up for Lent has been traditionally, that ain't it. However, I do think Lent can provide a good opportunity to abandon bitterness and anger. So, aside from "giving up" anything, what I would like to do during Lent this year is to be thankful. Gratitude is incompatible with so many bad things. It's like a spiritual cleanser.

Today I'm thankful for so many things, including the beautiful sunshine and blue sky and the snow that looks like diamonds.

Like it or not (you don't have to watch it if you don't want to), here's Veggie Tales to remind us: A thankful heart is a happy heart.

And furthermore...

As a fair number of people know who don't happen to live in my own town (because people who live in my own town never know what I'm actually doing, one of those strange things), I've been rather busy this past week blogging and being interviewed about some statistical strangeness published by the Guttmacher Institute concerning Catholic women's use of contraception.

In the many blog comments that I've read and responded to on this, what I've been perhaps most appalled by and had the least time to talk about is the sheer insanity of the entitlement mindset. My group blog colleague Tony put one aspect of this well, here:

Until a few years ago, lots and lots of employers didn't cover it, and no state mandated it. Now you want to call employer paid coverage "normative access". Just like THAT? What had been only a few years ago a voluntary feature of some employers becomes "normative"...why? Because lots of liberals don't want to have to pay for it out of their pocket. Now that's a compelling reason to violate the consciences of others.

[snip]

It appalls me to see this happen. Liberals rag on conservatives for wanting to preserve customs (usually, good, wholesome, worthwhile, highly integrated customs) because those customs stand in the way of some (usually minority) group's new libertine behavior. They laugh off the whole idea of custom, of tradition, having a bearing on what we ought to do today. But along comes some almost-brand-new practice that they have conned a bare majority into accepting in the last few years, and all of a sudden they LIKE arguments based on "normative" standards, i.e. based on "what people have been doing, and so expect to do". This is Orwellian, or rather Satanic, since he is the father of lies. It is almost too putrid to even speak about without gagging on it.

Commentator Untenured said this in another thread:

It is absurd for the liberals to claim that the Church is trying to "force" or "impose" its morality on people simply because it won't pay for people's pills and rubbers. And I have heard a lot of otherwise intelligent people make this claim. They are either a)deliberately and intentionally using the word "force" in an Orwellian manner so as to gain a rhetorical advantage or b)they are using the word "force" in a loosened Marxist sense that has been drained of all content and is of no moral significance. Either way, the underlying argument is absurd. The government is the one deploying all of the "force" here, and yet we are asked to believe that the Church is "forcing" people not to use contraception simply by not paying for it. Using this same "reasoning", the government is "forcing" poor people to abstain from alcohol because food stamps don't purchase liquor.

I replied thus:

Untenured, I tell you in all solemnity, the insanity of people's whole economic and entitlement approach to this is very nearly as frightening, if not more frightening, in its own way than the religious liberty issue. And indeed, the two are related. When something out of the blue becomes "health care" and then from there becomes an entitlement for full subsidy by the private sector, we really are moving into an extremely strange and politicized version of a communistic society. I say that knowing that it will get ridicule from the word-monitors. "She said a cognate of 'communism'! She's crazy!" Heck, around here I have even been called out for using "socialism" to refer to the notion that all the wealth of a country is the common stock of "the people," so long as that is not accompanied by the explicit assertion that the state should own all the means of production!

But indeed it is true that what we have here is a kind of selective and coercive Marxism. Arbitrarily, a politicized list of goods and services are treated as entitlements and, as the comments in these threads show, as though they have _always_ been entitlements, rather than having been newly minted entitlements in just the past year. From there the step to, "You are coercing me if you don't pay for this for me so that it is free-to-me" is but a small step.

In discussing this further, let's think about one of the most fundamental insights of free market economics: Nothing is free. There is no such thing as a free lunch. And things cannot simply be made free by magic.

I have a lovely illustrated book of fairy tales. In one of the stories a young man is given a rose by a fairy. All he has to do is shake the rose to get as much gold as he needs.

The leftist (and, I'm afraid, some social conservatives') approach to economics is, similarly, a magical thinking approach. In the world of someone who doesn't get the basic No Free Lunch principle, things can simply be made free by declaration, by fiat, and, most importantly, by good will. The only reason that things aren't free is because someone is being permitted to make a profit off of them, and profit is not necessary, so it's always a kind of great favor that the government is doing anyone by not declaring that he has to provide some goods or services for free. However, if something is really imporant, this benevolent permission can be withdrawn and the manufacturer or seller can be ordered to provide some specified thing for free.

Muddle-headed but well-meaning people usually start out on the road to economic magical thinking by looking at something and saying, "It shouldn't cost that much. It should cost less." They really don't know what they mean. Nor do they have anything specific in mind. It isn't that they are looking at the gas taxes that are making their gas more expensive and suggesting that government lower gas taxes. It isn't that they know for a fact that the store owner who puts that price on it is using precisely the difference between what the item "should" cost and what it does cost to drink himself to death. It's just a feeling.

Then, sometimes, they move to, "Why can't that be provided for free?" "That kind of thing should be free."

Usually, the kind of thing about which they say that is something very important, or something they view as very important, such as (legitimate) health care.

It can seem rather insulting to point out to these people that it is not free to manufacture drugs, that doctors have to live and eat too and should not be forced to engage in slave labor, working for free, any more than anyone else should, that medical supplies of all kinds are costly, that the education doctors have received involves other people and resources that do not come out of nowhere, and so on and so forth. Somehow if one points this out, one never gets very far.

Now, if we really tried to apply Rose of Gold economics consistently across the board, we would drive ourselves to economic hell in a handbasket extremely quickly (instead of only medium fast, as we are currently doing). No one actually says, "Well, heck! Everyone needs food, water, clothing, housing, and means of transportation as well as health care. Let's just declare all of it free! All important goods and services in America will now be free."

At some level they retain enough of a bare edge of common sense to know that that would be walking into a propeller. So instead we just cost-shift. We say that the means of living should be free to the poor--which means everyone else has to pay for them for "the poor" or that the cost is shifted down to the future by way of deficit spending.

Or we just try to make certain things free, things that seem really important to us. That means that other goods and services become more expensive so that manufacturers and providers of the "free" items can stay in business. (Also, by the way, making things appear to be free tends to lead to shortages.) Selecting the goods and services on which to exercise the make-believe of "free" can get extremely arbitrary, and that brings us to the Obama administration. Contraception is some kind of holy thing to these leftist extremists. So they declare it free. Free! Free! Free! They even (cough cough) tell us that by this application of the Rose of Gold economic principle, they will save us all money. (Because the existence of people costs money. So the fewer people, the more cost savings to everyone. Isn't that brilliant?) Having once declared it to be free, they work themselves up into a positive lather at anyone who dares to resist this mandate. The mandate itself is now holy, free contraception for all women is an entitlement, and anyone who opposes it is forcing, yes forcing, women not to use contraception.

The ludicrousness of this should be obvious. People do not purchase gasoline or orange juice for me. The world at large does not subsidize the repair of my car for me. I have to purchase those myself, with money which I acquire because I or my bacon-bringing husband have exchanged our own talents for the money with which to purchase gasoline and bacon. No one thinks that the whole surrounding world (or perhaps, especially, my husband's employer, since employers seem somehow to have a special subsidizing responsibility in the eyes of the left) is "coercing" us not to use gasoline or orange juice or not to have our car repaired because they do not purchse them for us and encourage us in the illusion that gasoline, orange juice, and car repair are free.

So the focus on contraceptive products and services is quite arbitrary and could not be extended indefinitely to other goods and services, even other goods and services that most people agree are quite legitimate, that most people use, that many, many people would even say that they need. In fact, the more widespread the use of some item or service, the more economically ruinous it would become to try to apply the Rose of Gold magic to it, because it would burden the rest of the economy tremendously to cost-shift the actual cost of a widely used good or service.

Try to talk this kind of sense to a leftist up in arms that some employers are resisting the Obama mandate, and you will get ab-so-lute-ly nowhere. Try to ask him how it can possibly be that Sally's birth control pills must be free, are an entitlement to her, and that Catholic organizations are thus doing something evil and coercive not to cooperate in buying them for her, and you will not get a sensible answer. You will only get endless repetitions of the same ridiculous claims about theocracy and "forcing everyone to follow the dictates of the Catholic Church" and other nonsense. You simply cannot reason with people.

Part of what has happened is this: The TANSTAAFL principle has been denied for decades and decades in American education, to the point that no one gets it. Even many conservatives, especially many trad-conservatives who don't like to be thought libertarians or libertarian-sympathetic don't get it. So many on both the left and the right accept the pernicious, corrosive, reality-denying principle that if we just really care about something and really recognize its importance and really have good will, we can make it free. In other words, they accept Rose of Gold economics.

Enter the culture wars. The left has its own priorities. It has its own things that it thinks we should really care about, really recognize the importance of, and really show good will by waving the Rose of Gold over. And things that fall into that category are entitlements, you see. And if they are entitlements then you are not a person of good will if you refuse to wave the Rose of Gold over them. You are a bad person. In fact, by withholding the Golden Magic, you are engaging in something like an act of aggression. Hence, you must be punished and squelched out of existence.

Even leftists are not really likely to move us directly to full-bore Communism. So they will just go about arbitrarily engaging in their economic magical thinking, selective Marxism and economic idiocy, on an ad hoc basis for those things that they think are needed exercises in left-wing good will.

The paleo- and distributist and anti-free market social right won't like this, because they won't agree with the socio-sexual goals of the left. I don't say that that is illegitimate. Moral issues certainly come into play here. It would be worse for a leftist regime to make, say, abortions free (or "free") than for it to make orange juice "free." I do say, however, that they should recognize the economic insanity, the reality denial, in the Rose of Gold economics that is at work here.

And they should also recognize that the entitlement mindset encouraged by Rose of Gold economics is a threat to the religious liberty they hold dear.

Nothing is free. Recognize that now, and recalibrate, and try to get a lot of other people to recalibrate, or prepare to have your conscience bulldozed in the name of the entitlement du jour.

The food Nazis are coming

Okay, this is pretty wild and creepy, and I have little more profound than that to say about it.

Public schools now have official Lunch Inspectors. The Lunch Inspector evidently goes around peeking into kids' lunch boxes. If he (or, I wouldn't be surprised, she) decides the lunch isn't "healthy" enough, the child is forced not to eat it, is given a "replacement lunch" instead, and the parents are charged a fee (in this case, $1.25) for the "replacement lunch."

Say, what???

In the story, this meant that a perfectly good turkey sandwich was probably wasted, because it would have sat in the child's lunchbox all day long and then been sent home. Nobody is likely to want to eat it at that point.

The Orwellian nature of this is scary. A turkey sandwich, banana, and apple juice? I'm going to scream. Big Brother is watching your child's turkey sandwich. Oh, I know, maybe the Inspector sniffed the sandwich and decided it wasn't lean, or was honey roasted, or something "unhealthy" like that.

I can sort of understand if Johnny comes to school every day with nothing but cookies for lunch, you pull aside Johnny's mom and have a confab. In an extreme case like that, some gentle discussion would be in order.

But it's beyond that: They have a set of USDA guidelines, detailed, that every lunch must satisfy before the child will be allowed to eat it. This is positively Germanic. Everyone's lunch standardized.

And aren't liberals the ones who are supposed to be concerned about The Poor? So, here they wasted these people's food and added insult to injury (or perhaps injury to insult) by charging them $1.25 they weren't expecting to have to spend. I can tell you one thing: When I was a kid my mother would have had an absolute fit. You Do Not Waste Food. Money Doesn't Grow on Trees. And other bits of working-class wisdom for which these liberal Nanny-Nazis apparently have no time.

Just take your kid out of the public schools. Do it now. Aside from the zillions of other things that could be said on that subject, think of the way this is teaching them to accept totalitarian busybody oversight of every move they make and every bite they take. Setting them up to be good little citizens of the All-Seeing, All-knowing, All-controlling state. Brrrr. What happened to America?

Another example of why I read and cite this blogger

Herewith, an example of why I read View from the Right:

Partner means, or used to mean, two people engaged together in some shared enterprise, or who are friends and are doing things together as a team. But now "partner" has become the quasi official term for two unmarried people--whether homosexual or heterosexual--who live together. And for the truly politically correct, "partner" is even the obligatory term for married persons, since it would "privilege" heterosexual married couples for them to be referred to as "husband" and "wife" while homosexual couples and unmarried heterosexual couples are deprived of those honored titles. Therefore, in the name of equality, husband and wife must be called partner and partner. And with the spread of homosexual "marriage," this change is working itself into the law as well, as I have pointed out many times.

In any case, since the default meaning of "partner"--without a qualifying adjective such as "business" partner--is now two people living together in a sexual relationship, if a man now refers to another man as his partner, people will automatically take that to mean that they are a homosexual couple. The perfectly normal word partner has thus been made radioactive for normal (i.e. non-liberal) people. Even the old-fashioned American idiom of addressing someone in a friendly way as "partner,"--as in, "Hey, partner, how's it going?"--will not be used any more.

I first heard "partner" used in the homosexual sense on a C-SPAN program in the '90s. Brian Lamb was interviewing some author about his book. The guest referred to someone by name, and Lamb asked, "Who is that?", and the guest said complacently, "My partner." I thought, "Partner in what? Are they co-authors? Do they have a business together?" Then it dawned on me what he meant.

Like the takeover and ruin of the perfectly good word "gay" by the meaning "homosexual," the perfectly good word "partner" has been taken over and ruined by the meaning "sexual partner."

I wish I had written that myself. That is the sort of thing a conservative blogger should write. It's part of living in the degenerate present world that we do not accept things like this disgusting revision of the meaning of the word "partner." A conservative is supposed, among other things, to love the English language and to be revolted by its ruination by the liberal agenda.

And in fact, every time I hear the word "partner" used in this way I feel a sense of sickness. If possible, I feel it even more now that open live-in heterosexual relationships are becoming accepted for political figures, so that public figures whom one might otherwise assume to be husband and wife turn out to be "partner and partner." Indeed, as Auster says, it devalues marriage.

In fact, this is one good example of the way that homosexual relationships have undermined heterosexual marriage. That bears thinking about.

However, I get bored, depressed, cynical, bitter, and tired, and I don't always think to say these things. Yes, I detest that use of "partner," but I never wrote a blog post about it before. If I'd thought of doing so, I probably would have said to myself, "Oh, heavens, there are so many things one could write about. Where does one start? And it would depress me to write that." But Auster did so, and that relief of having someone else say it for you is part of the value of Auster's trenchant Internet commentary. Surprisingly, a post like this is not depressing but rather uplifting. It shows that there are others out there who also detest the way that liberalism has defiled the English language. That's even exciting.

Good post.

A nifty biblical play on words

In the course of studying messianic prophecy, I recently came upon 2 Samuel 7:14. It's alluded to as a prophecy of Jesus Christ in Hebrews 1:5. (In Acts 3:24, the Apostles refer to all the prophets from Samuel onward as having testified to the later coming of Jesus, and I was trying to figure out what they could have in mind from Samuel.) So I read the chapter in Samuel for the first time in a long time. It begins with David's desire to build a house for God--a temple. David considers it unworthy that he dwells in a house made of cedar wood while the worship of God is still conducted in the tabernacle--a house made of curtains.

But the prophet Nathan tells David, from the Lord, that this is not to be and that David's son (clearly meaning Solomon) will build a temple for God.

What's literarily exciting is the way that the entire chapter plays with the word "house." Verse 11 says, "Also the LORD telleth thee that he will make thee an house," followed by prophecies that are partly of Solomon and partly of the continuation of David's line and the establishment of the kingship in David's lineage forever. (Hence the excuse for the author of Hebrews to take a portion of vs. 14 to be fulfilled in Jesus Christ, despite the fact that its first fulfillment is clearly intended to be in Solomon.)

When David replies, he goes in and sits "before the Lord" (in the tabernacle, perhaps?) and says, "Who am I, O Lord God? And what is my house, that thou hast brought me hitherto?" (vs. 18) David's entire prayer is a kind of poem. Here is a further excerpt:

And now, O Lord God, the word that thou hast spoken concerning thy servant, and concerning his house, establish it for ever, and do as thou hast said. And let thy name be magnified for ever, saying, The Lord of hosts is the God over Israel, and let the house of thy servant David be established before thee. For thou, O Lord of hosts, God of Israel, hast revealed to thy servant, saying, I will build thee an house. Therefore hath thy servant found in his heart to pray this prayer unto thee. (vss. 25-27)

So David tells God that he wants to build God a house, and God tells David, "No, I'm the one doing the building around here. I will build you a house," using "house" in the sense of "lineage" or "descendants." And David, the poet, is awed and delighted by God's promises and by God's use of wordplay in making those promises and turns around and makes a masterpiece of a prayer to praise God.

It's important for us Gentiles to realize how intensely Jewish all of this is. The Jewish delight in wordplay in the Old Testament is very strong. (Another example is the fact that "Samuel" means "God hears" and that when God speaks to the boy Samuel in the night in the tabernacle, the old priest Eli tells Samuel to say to God, "Speak, Lord, for your servant hears." God heard--which includes responded to--Samuel's mother and sent her a son. Her son must, in turn, hear the Lord.)

This is relevant to the whole notion of fulfillment and prophecy. It's very easy for us literal-minded Anglo-Saxons to feel slightly frustrated at such concepts as layers of meaning, double fulfillments, and the like. And impatience with highly, shall we say, creative Scriptural interpretations, interpretations that have an excessive ratio of imagination to justification, is understandable. But at the same time, part of understanding the meaning of Scripture, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, is understanding that symbolism, typology, and even what one might call puns, including historical puns, are part of the meaning. I may have more to say about this another time, as I've had an interesting discussion of the matter of Biblical prophecy and "reading the Old Testament in light of the New Testament" with a Facebook friend lately. For the nonce, just enjoy 2 Samuel 7.

A reply to a question

A reader has attempted to post an entirely off-topic question in a recent post. The question concerns probability theory and the resurrection. After some consideration, I've decided to recast the question a bit more clearly and answer it here rather than either ignoring it or publishing it in a thread where it does not belong. (Had the reader left an e-mail address, I might have replied that way, but he didn't.)

The reader's question, reworded by me, runs approximately like this:

It seems to the reader that the prior probability of the resurrection is an exception to the law of total probability. The reader asserts that P(R|~G) = 0. He also correctly points out that, on the assumption that P(R|~G) = 0, we should calculate P(R) = P(G) x P(R|G). The problem, the reader claims, is that multiplying the prior probability of God's existence by the probability that the resurrection takes place given God's existence appears to produce a probabilistic error. The reader produces a modus ponens argument:

p1= If God doesn't exist, then the resurrection is impossible.(The reader takes this to be analytically true.)

p2= God doesn't exist.

c= Therefore, the resurrection is impossible.

If premise 1 is analytic, one must deny premise 2 to deny the conclusion. But, says the reader, premise 2 need only be more plausible than not to be assertable. That would seem to mean that if P(G)<50%, the probability of the resurrection is 0, which, however, is not what we would get if we calculated the prior probability of the resurrection as we should using the law of total probability--that is P(R) = P(G) x P(R|G).

I'm going to waive the question of whether it is analytically true that the resurrection is impossible if God doesn't exist, because that either is simply a definitional matter (e.g., if you define "the resurrection" as an act of God) or involves a near-zero probability of a naturalistic resurrection.

The error in the reader's reasoning arises from his putting the wrong kind of weight--specifically, probabilistic weight--on the claim that one is justified in asserting that God doesn't exist if the probability of God's existence is less than .5. Even supposing that we grant that, that has no weight whatsoever for calculating the prior probability of the resurrection. You cannot go from, "'God does not exist' can be asserted justifiably if it is more probable than not" to "We should do our calculations of the probability of other propositions based on treating the probability of God's existence as 0 whenever the probability of God's existence is less than .5."

In essence, the above argument is a completely confused attempt to combine deductive and probabilistic reasoning. There would be no probabilistic inconsistency if the atheist were to say, viewing the prior probabilities, that probably the resurrection could not happen, or something like that. But that would have to be carefully spelled out by adding the word "probably" after "therefore" in the conclusion. (Compare "If John [defined by some definite description] doesn't exist, it is impossible for John to speak to me. John [defined by that definite description] doesn't exist. Therefore, it is impossible for John to speak to me.) The prior probability of R just is what it is. Nothing magical happens if the prior probability of G is below .5. Whatever the prior probability of G might be, you just plug that into the total probability calculation for the prior of R, and that's it. The modus ponens argument given simply doesn't tell us what the prior probability of R is.

Another way to put this is that you have already taken into account the assumption that the resurrection is impossible if God does not exist in the very act of reducing the prior probability of R to P(G) x P(R|G). Nothing more is required to take that assumption into account. The attempt to take it into account (somehow) more seriously by the modus ponens argument and the worry about what happens if the prior for G is less than .5 only darkens counsel.

The moral of the story: Don't mix apples and oranges, at least unless you're well-trained in the art of making apple-orange preserves. When you do probability, do probability. When you do deductive logic, do deductive logic. If you insist on mixing them, be verry, verry careful, or you could get yourself very, very confused.

Follow-up on Mearsheimer et. al.

This is a follow-up to the previous post. Subsequent to writing that post, I did more research on the British anti-semite whose book was lauded by allegedly respectable political scientist John Mearsheimer and who was defended (in the course of defending Mearsheimer) by philosopher Brian Leiter. I am indebted to this post by Pejman Yousefzadeh for links to this additional information. I put this information into the comments on my earlier post, but I think it deserves more attention than that is likely to get there.

One of the questions that arose in the course of Mearsheimer's and Leiter's defense of Mearsheimer's blurb was whether or not Atzmon, the author of the bizarre book that Mearsheimer blurbed, is either a Holocaust denier or Holocaust revisionist. Mearsheimer, in the course of doubling down and refusing to budge, stated unequivocally:

I cannot find evidence in his book or in his other writings that indicate he 'traffics in Holocaust denial.

Notice that this concerns other things Atzmon has written, not just the book Mearsheimer blurbed. Like Leiter, who blandly declared Atzmon (on the basis of extremely brief research) a "cosmopolitan" rather than an anti-semite, Mearsheimer declares him no Holocaust denier at all.

In the very first comment on Mearsheimer's post defending himself (and Atzmon), a reader attempted to provide more data. The reader provided a partial quotation and a link. I am here providing a longer quotation with a different link to the same post. Here is Atzmon on the Holocaust (emphasis added).

It took me years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current form, doesn’t make any historical sense. Here is just one little anecdote to elaborate on:

If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich (Judenrein - free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into the Reich at the end of the war? I have been concerned with this simple question for more than a while.

[snip]

I am left puzzled here; if the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? Why didn’t the Jews wait for their Red liberators?

I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws.

If this is not "trafficking" in Holocaust denial, I'm not sure what would count. In my earlier post I pointed out that Atzmon plays the post-modernist and says that he "neither affirms nor denies" the Holocaust. That's bad enough. Oddly, the postmodern mask seems to have slipped here. He's talking about "historical sense" and saying in so many words that such Holocaust details as the desire of the Nazis to eradicate the Jews from the Reich and the existence of a death camp at Auschwitz do not make historical sense. Yet I have no evidence that Mearsheimer and Leiter have revised their opinion on the subject or on Mearsheimer's endorsement of Atzmon, despite the fact that this information was made available to Mearsheimer. If readers have evidence that either Mearsheimer or Leiter has done a 180 and repudiated Atzmon, do post that evidence in comments.

Well, and here's a nasty tempest in a nasty teapot

I very recently learned about a little brouhaha that's been going on for a while when someone sent me a link to this article . It's about someone I know of in quite another context--Philosopher Brian Leiter.

As near as I can get the facts, they go approximately and briefly like this: Brian Leiter is a colleague (that is, at the same university) and buddy of John Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame (or infamy). Mearsheimer wrote a positive blurb for an unpleasantly bizarre little book called The Wandering Who by a Brit named Gilad Atzmon. The book, inter alia (and there are plenty of alia), implies that we should not entirely reject the blood libel against Jews in the Middle Ages. The blood libel, of course, is the claim that Jews kill or killed Gentile children to mix their blood with matzos at Passover.

Mearsheimer was strongly criticized (one should hope so!) for writing the blurb but refused to back down from it. Leiter leaped to Mearsheimer's defense without, it appears, doing his homework very well. In the course of that defense of Mearsheimer he implied that Atzmon is not an anti-semite and that therefore the criticisms of Mearsheimer for endorsing Atzmon are hysterical right-wing smears. This defense of Mearsheimer and, in the course of it, defense of Atzmon, resulted in Leiter's being named by Alan Dershowitz in the above article as someone who is helping to make anti-semitism acceptable in the mainstream.

Got that?

Now, please remember, I just started looking into this very recently, with even less motivation than Leiter should have had for being very careful. I wanted to be fair though, so, though I didn't want to read the whole of The Wandering Who, I did find a couple of Gilad Atzmon's own defenses of his book, including what he calls his "deconstruction" of Alan Dershowitz's criticisms. See here and here.

And guess what? Atzmon really does endorse at least a provisional acceptance of the blood libel. He says,

Anyway, [Dershowitz is] certainly not impressed by my idea that children should be allowed to question “how the teacher could know that these accusations of Jews making Matza out of young Goyim’s blood were indeed empty or groundless” (185). I suppose that Dershowitz hasn’t heard about Israeli professor Ariel Toaff’s study of Jewish medieval blood libel. Toaff found that accusations of blood rituals levelled against Jews in the Middle Ages were not entirely without foundation, to say the least.

Sweet, huh?

This exceedingly telling "defense" by Atzmon appeared on November 9, and Leiter's defense of Mearsheimer for endorsing Atzmon's book appeared on September 26. So Leiter didn't have access, presumably, to Atzmon's own further gloss on the passage in his book. But what Atzmon says here makes it clear that those who took him to be, shall we say, trying to open minds about the truth of the blood libel by portraying Jewish educators as stifling free inquiry were understanding him completely correctly! (Atzmon's story was about how he as a child raised a question about whether the blood libel was justified and about how he was sent home as a punishment for being so bold as to step outside of usual Jewish thought. His point in telling the story, now, billing his childhood self as the persecuted hero of epistemic honesty, is not terribly obscure.)

Now, just to complicate matters a tiny tad, Atzmon turns out to be, or at least finds it convenient to present himself as, some sort of postmodern historical skeptic. He says,

Dershowitz sure has some chutzpah, since it’s actually he who didn’t read ‘The Wandering Who’. If he had, he would have seen that in the book and in all my writing I neither deny nor do I affirm any historical aspect of the Holocaust, gas chambers or the Judeocide in general. Instead, I insist that history cannot be sealed by laws. I also insist that intellectual curiosity and our knowledge of the past cannot be vetted or confined by anyone, let alone such morbid minds as that of Dershowitz himself.

and

I actually urge my readers to question every historical narrative and this obviously includes the Shoa and Jewish history.

This allows Atzmon to be a Holocaust-denier with (im)plausible deniability. He can encourage people to be skeptical about the occurrence of the Holocaust as an "historical narrative," but when he wants to defend himself, he can fall back (as he does in the interview Leiter read--see below) on talking like the Holocaust did happen. He can also point out that he's treating the Holocaust like he treats all history. Nifty, huh? It's amazing what postmodernism can do for all manner of nastiness, including anti-semitism.

When Leiter hastened to the defense of Mearsheimer, he didn't apparently check into the allegations about Atzmon in any detail whatsoever. He seems to have based his evaluation of Atzmon on an interview (a fawning interview published at Atzmon's own site) in which Atzmon maunders on about the Holocaust in pseudo-academic terminology that downplays the true nature of his views. (Whaddaya know, it doesn't look like the little matter of the blood libel comes up in that interview.) From this Leiter infers that Atzmon is probably not an anti-semite.

Now, how can I put this tactfully? That's careless. If I had a colleague accused of enthusiastically endorsing a disgusting piece of anti-semitic trash, with the specific accusation that the tract in question promotes the blood libel, I'd try to do a leetle more research than Prof. Leiter appears to have done before rushing off and publishing something on the Internet calling the criticisms of my colleague "right-wing smears."

But maybe that's just me.

Cyrus walks into the pages of the Bible

I owe a certain debt to Cyrus the Persian. I made his acquaintance fairly early, for he lived between the pages of a children's magazine, in a series entitled Tales from Herodotus, or something of that kind. There was a picture of him being brought up by the herdsman of King Astyages, dressed in a short tunic very like the garment worn by the young Theseus or Perseus in the illustrations to Kingsley's Heroes. He belonged quite definitely to “classical times”;... Cyrus was pigeon-holed in my mind with the Greeks and Romans.

So for a long time he remained. And then, one day, I realised with a shock as of sacrilege, that on that famous expedition he had marched clean out of Herodotus and slap into the Bible. Mene, mene, tekel upharsin--the palace wall had blazed with the exploits of Cyrus, and Belshazzar's feast had broken up in disorder under the stern and warning eye of the prophet Daniel.

But Daniel and Belshazzar did not live in “the classics” at all. They lived in Church, with Adam and Abraham and Elijah, and were dressed like Bible characters, especially Daniel. And here was God--not Zeus or Apollo or any of the Olympian crowd, but the fierce and dishevelled old gentleman from Mount Sinai--bursting into Greek history in a most uncharacteristicway, and taking an interest in events and people that seemed altogether outside His province. It was disconcerting.

[snip]

It is rather unfortunate that the "Higher Criticism" was first undertaken at a time when all textual criticism tended to be destructive...But the root of the trouble is to be found, I suspect (as usual), in the collapse of dogma. Christ, even for Christians, is not quite "really" real--not altogether human--and the taint of unreality has spread to His disciples and friends and to His biographers: they are not "real" writers, but just "Bible" writers. John and Matthew and Luke and Mark, some or all of them, disagree about the occasion on which a parable was told or an epigram uttered. One or all must be a liar or untrustworthy, because Christ (not being quite real) must have made every remark once and once only.

[snip]

"Altogether man, with a rational mind and human body--" It is just as well that from time to time Cyrus should march out of Herodotus into the Bible, for the synthesis of history and the confutation of heresy.

From "A Vote of Thanks to Cyrus," by Dorothy Sayers

Christmas Post: He looked through the lattice of our flesh and He spoke us fair

I don't suppose I really screamed. What had happened was that I had fallen asleep at last and drifted into nightmare. I was imprisoned in stone. I knew then what men suffered who are walled up alive....And when I had been still for a little while I found myself slowly edging forward. There was a crack in the stone....I went on scraping through and at last there was a glimmer of light. It came to my feet like a sword and I knew it had made the crack, a sword of fire splitting the stone. And then the walls drew back slightly on each side of me, as though the light pushed them. I had a sense of conflict, as though the darkness reeled and staggered, resisting the light in an anguish of evil strength....But the light, that seemed such a small beam in comparison with that infinity of blackness, kept the channel open and I fled down it. There was room now to run. I ran and ran and came out into the light.

I had escaped. I was so overwhelmed with thankfulness that I nearly fell. I sank down on the ground and sat back on my heels, as children do sometimes when they are saying their prayers and are tired. It was ground, not stone, it was a floor of trodden earth. The stone walls were still there but the light had hollowed them out into a cave and they no longer frightened me. There was a lantern in the cave and people were moving about, a man and woman caring for a girl who lay on a pile of hay. And for a newborn child. As I watched, the woman stooped and put Him into His mother's arms....It was like one of the nativity scenes that the old masters painted, only not tidy and pretty like those. The girl was exhausted, her clothes were crumpled, and the sweat on her face gleamed in the lantern light. The man was dusty and tired and not yet free of the anxiety that had been racking him for hours past. The woman was one of those kindly bodies who turn up from somewhere to lend a hand in times of human crises. She made soft clucking noises as she gave the baby to His mother, and the two women gave each other a long look of triumph before the girl bent over her baby. He was like all newborn babies. He looked old and wizened, and so frail that my heart nearly stopped in fear, as it always does when I see a newborn child. How could anything so weak survive? His thin wail echoed in the stony place and then was stifled as He sought His mother.

...I remembered the rocks of the wilderness and the multitude of sinners surging in, selfish and clamorous, sick and sweaty, clawing with their hot hands, giving Him no time so much as to eat. I remembered the mocking crowd about the cross and the thick darkness. I remembered the second cave, the dark and stifling tomb....And I remembered Saint Augustine saying, “He looked us through the lattice of our flesh and He spake us fair.”...He was not the weakness that He seemed, for He had a sword in His hand and all evil at last would go reeling back before it. He had entered the prison house of His own will. And so He was not trapped, nor was I. There was always the way of escape so long as it was to the heart of it, whatever it was, that one went to find Him.

Elizabeth Goudge, from The Scent of Water

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. Thanks be to God.

He is here

"Not for me the Hound of Heaven, but the never-ceasing silent appeal of Tabernacle, and the sense of starving hunger."

J.R.R. Tolkien, from a letter to his son Michael, November 1, 1963

The Hound of Heaven, I would add, may have many ways of catching His quarry, not least with hunger.

I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world....Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him....This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever. (John 6:51ff)

I don't talk theology nearly as often on this blog as I think about theology. And the doctrine of Holy Communion is such a fraught one, over which many a literal war has been fought.

I believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Not being Roman Catholic, I am not required to believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation, and not being an Aristotelian, I'm rather glad of that, because I don't. But the pure memorialist view does not, in my opinion, do justice either to Christ's words of institution or to Christ's teaching in John 6 or to the Apostle Paul's solemn warnings to the Corinthians about Eucharistic abuses and the grave consequences thereof. At a minimum, it seems to me that these Scriptures imply that Holy Communion is a source of real spiritual life and strength--and that not only from the act of meditation on Christ's passion and atonement, but objectively: spiritual food. Beyond that I cannot and do not go--I simply know no farther to go. But, as the Ark of the Covenant was a place where the Lord God met His people and was, in that sense, present, so in the Sacrament. Here God acts. Here God meets man, objectively, on holy ground, in a physical object.

And for that I am thankful. As creatures of flesh and blood, we crave the ability to give and receive tangibly and physically. The Book of Common Prayer says of the Sacrament that Christ has "ordained holy mysteries as pledges of his love." A side note, or maybe not such a side note: Edmund Spenser, when he portrays the lady Charity as married and surrounded by her babies, calls them "pledges" of her husband's love.

Here is the prayer of thanksgiving after receiving the Sacrament. It was, to add to the head-shaking, convoluted uniqueness of Anglican history, apparently written (rather than translated) by Thomas Cranmer, who died because he was unwilling to return to Rome and accept the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee for that thou dost vouchsafe to feed us, who have duly received these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; and dost assure us thereby of thy favor and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs, through hope, of thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of his most precious death and passion. And we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honor and glory, world without end. Amen.

He "assures us thereby of his favor and goodness towards us." By giving us these gifts and coming to us in them, by deigning thus to condescend to us, He continually assures us, week by week, of His favor and goodness towards us.

I am a Protestant and will never be anything else. I will never even be a high Anglican; indeed, I will no doubt always be so low as to be in danger of falling right out at the bottom. There are many times when I feel a distinct reaction against high churchmanship. What's a nice Baptist girl like me doing in a place like this? But the holy mysteries are not the sort of thing one can whip up in one's kitchen, and if (per improbable) they are to be found in the Welch's grape juice and the broken matzos passed in plates from hand to hand in the churches that teach that they are not there, this is more a matter for trembling and fear than a reason to return.

It is impossible to be insouciant about the use I am about to make of a Gospel music song. I would like to make the usual flippant remark about my on-going and ungrateful project of uniting low Protestantism, Southern Gospel, and liturgical Christianity, but it's not just so simple as that.

The following song is one I cannot listen to without thinking of the Holy Sacrament. Yet that is not what it is about, where "about" is taken accurately to refer to the intention of the author and, for that matter, the performers. Quite obviously, it is a work of evangelical, perhaps even Pentecostal, Christianity. The teaching intended is that Jesus is present wherever "two or three are gathered" and that we become especially aware of His presence when reminded of it in the gathering of believers. That is a good teaching, one worth hearing and remembering. But how can anyone who believes in the Real Presence (in any sense whatsoever) hear "Holy, holy," "holy manna," and "You can touch him" and not think of that other Presence?

"He is here, listen closely. Hear Him calling out your name. He is here, you can touch him. You will never be the same."

So, with apologies to Wes Hampton, to the Gaither Vocal band, and especially to Kirk Talley (the composer), I put my own entirely unjustified personal significance on this song and present it for what it is worth, if there should happen to be anyone among my readers who finds it useful, as a meditation before receiving Communion. "He is Here."

Gaither Vocal Band - He Is Here [Live] from emimusic on GodTube.

God closes the book--Sunday quotation

"Men choose one side or the other, making the best choice that they can with the knowledge that they have. Yet they know little and the turns and twists of war are incalculable. They may fight for a righteous cause and yet at the end of it all have become as evil as their enemies, or they may in error espouse an evil cause and in defense of it grow better men than they were before. And so the one war becomes each man's private war, fought out within his own nature. In the last resort that's what matters to him, Froniga. In the testing of the times did he win or lose his soul? That's his judgment."

His voice trailed away into a silence heavy with dread and sorrow...

"One life knows many judgments," she said. "They are like the chapters in a book. What if every chapter but the last is one of defeat? The last can redeem it all. And God knows the heart that in its weakness longs for Him. Patient still, He adds another chapter, and then another, and then in the hour of victory closes the book."

From Elizabeth Goudge, The White Witch

A couple quotables from LA

I've been neglecting this blog recently and realize it. Call it laziness. Call it Christmas rush. Call it busyness home schooling. Probably more the first and the third. In any event, I'm now shamelessly going to borrow from another blogger, because he's made a couple of zinger statements recently that I think deserve to be repeated.

First, Lawrence Auster on Afghanistan:

From last Friday’s New York Times, a horrifying story about a young Afghan woman named Gulnaz who was raped, bore a child by the rapist, and was imprisoned for “adultery,” i.e., for having been raped. Then, in response to a documentary movie that featured Gulnaz’s plight, the Afghan government of our ally Karzai pardoned her, but there was a catch. To be pardoned, she had to marry the man who raped her. Gulnaz doesn’t want to marry the man and she fears him, but she feels she has no choice, since there is no place for her in Afghan society unless she is married and part of a family. But she also feels that her prospective husband is likely to kill her because of the shame she has brought on him by publicizing her case. So she is putting down a condition too: in order for her to marry him, one of his sisters must marry one of her brothers. That way, the rapist will hesitate to harm her, because if he harms her, his sister would stand to be harmed by her husband.

Afghanistan is a sub-human hell on earth. We should have nothing to do with that goddamned country unless it is directly threatening us and our allies, in which case we go in, topple the regime that is threatening us, kill its leaders, and leave, promising to come back and wreak much worse havoc if they threaten us again.

My one quibble would be with the term "sub-human." The people who perpetuate such a culture are not sub-human, they are human, and there is nothing so good nor so bad that it cannot be done by man. Gives a whole new meaning to the "what a work is man" concept. As in, sometimes man is a piece of work. But as a foreign policy prescription, let's go over there, beat the unholy hell out of governments that are threatening us, get done, and come back has a lot to be said for it. I've thought it sensible for a long time. War is not the problem per se, when a country is a threat to us or to allies. Nation-building is the problem.

Second, Lawrence Auster on a judge's wrist-slap for a wilding in London:

So: Somali Muslims carry out a typical black wilding on a white woman pedestrian, an extremely aggravated attack in which they knocked the victim to the ground then repeatedly kicked her in the head and tore her hair from her scalp, while also repeatedly shouting anti-white statements, and they don’t go to jail (1) because they’re Muslim and therefore not responsible for their behavior under the influence of alcohol, no matter how aggravated, violent, and racially motivated the behavior may be, and (2) because the victim’s boyfriend used force (ineffectively) to defend her.

This is not an event in the life of Britain. This is the rotting of the stinking corpse that once was Britain. And there’s much rot in the corpse of a great nation, many, many victims yet to come, incalculable human misery, yet to come.

Brits have always been a bit soft on regrettable acts committed under the influence of alcohol, but this takes it to a whole new level. My perception from old British novels is that the softness took the form of avuncular chuckles over Oxford undergraduates committing pranks and minor vandalism or old men making fools of themselves at the club, not aggravated assault and battery.

Someday

A couple of years ago I put up a post about this hymn and its new incarnation by blind singer Ken Medema. At that time it was not available on-line; now it is, on Grooveshark.




Ken has written a beautiful new tune for Fanny Crosby's words, which are partly taken from St. Paul in I Corinthians 13: "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known."

You cannot stop lovers from making vows

It is not the fact that young lovers have no desire to swear on the Book. They are always at it. It is not the fact that every young love is born free of traditions about binding and promising, about bonds and signatures and seals. On the contrary, lovers wallow in the wildest pedantry and precision about these matters. They do the craziest things to make their love legal and irrevocable....[T]hey cut into rocks and oaks with their names and vows; they bury ridiculous things in ridiculous places to be a witness against them; they bond each other with rings, and inscribe each other in Bibles; if they are raving lunatics (which is not untenable), they are mad solely on this idea of binding and on nothing else. It is quite true that the tradition of their fathers and mothers is in favour of fidelity; but it is emphatically not true that the lovers merely follow it; they invent it anew.

From G.K. Chesterton, "The Superstition of Divorce"

In these days of confusion and great evil, in which marriage is under perhaps the severest attack it has yet sustained (an attack made possible by all the other attacks that have gone before and have weakened the foundations), we must hope and pray that Chesterton is right. For if he is right, then, though society be distorted and the minds of men darkened, the fundamental, life-affirming tradition in which a man and a woman take one another for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, will not die. It will be invented again by new generations of men and women, in whom the image of God has not been lost and upon whom the natural light yet shines.

May it be so.

Steven Curtis Chapman, "I Will Be Here"

Autumn's here

While the east coast is having snow, we're having cold, crisp autumn. Here was my post two years ago on autumn, travel, and coming home.

Here's what I noticed the other morning:

I had forgotten how new-fallen maple leaves look on frosted grass when the sun is just rising. The frost has taken all the color out of the grass. Covered by that furred rime, it is plain silver-grey, like a huge plush carpet. Against that background, the yellow leaves stand out--vivid, precise, and faintly unreal, as though they have not fallen naturally but have been displayed there, spread in a circle round the base of the tree, by a generous giant hand.

Unprincipled. And stupid.

I don't have time to write much about this, because I'm at work on a technical paper. But since I do occasionally write about Israeli issues at this blog I thought I couldn't let pass the shocking news that Israel has agreed to release over 1,000 terrorists in a deal with Hamas for the release of Gilad Shalit. Let's hope that he's at least "released" alive rather than dead.

This trade of terrorists for an imprisoned soldier is wrong. Carl in Jerusalem has some great things to say about it, and especially about the silly "what else could we do" line, here and here. He also links to a post by the father of one of the terrorists' victims, here.

On offering worldly inducements to Christianity

I'm blatantly using W4 as a jumping-off place for a post here, since I have been neglecting this personal blog lately. I hope that my esteemed blog colleague Jeff Culbreath, whose post and discussion prompted this, will not mind.

Jeff and I have been having a very interesting discussion of varying methods of evangelism and the ways these might divide along, on the one hand, Protestant-Catholic lines and, on the other hand, "individualist" vs. "group conversion" lines.

In the course of the discussion, Jeff said,

The indomitable warrior-monks who Christianized Europe, South America, the
Philippines and elsewhere were aiming to bring entire societies into the Christian fold. That meant converting pagan kings, who exercised real authority, and securing their favor and protection. It sometimes meant promising worldly advantages to prospective converts, such as the temporal benefits of Roman civilization.

Later, in responding to someone else, Jeff said a bit more about "worldly advantages."

I suspect that Steve, a libertarian, is prone to equating social incentives and disincentives with "force". For many of Steve's persuasion the individual human will must act totally without outside influence in order to be considered "free". For instance, if the old pagan religion is no longer sanctioned, if Christians are favored for certain positions in the kingdom, etc., then all conversions are deemed "forced", or at least "coerced" and unfree. Such a view is profoundly mistaken.

I addressed the question of worldly incentives to Christianity at some length in a comment.

[T]he question of social incentives is an interesting and delicate one. I should say here that Protestant as well as Catholic missionaries have had to deal with this question. Indeed, the anti-conversion laws in India are (this may interest you) premised on the assumption that most conversions from Hinduism to any form of Christianity are not "truly free" for exactly the reasons you give. Ironically, this results in the bullying of new converts by the authorities with repeated insinuations that they have not converted freely, that they were offered incentives, and that they therefore should return to Hinduism. So actually, of course, the force is on the other side--from the state against the convert. Apparently one of the incentives is that they get out of the caste system if they are Christians, which is naturally attractive to those of low caste.

It seems to me that there are going to be incentives that arise fairly naturally. Right at the beginning in the Book of Acts we find that the Apostles had money distributed to the widows who were part of the early church. I can just imagine people's asserting (though the Bible doesn't say that they actually did) that some widow converted to Christianity just to get on the Christian dole!

The very fact that Christians (rightly) give special consideration to fellow Christians in the distribution of charity (the Bible expressly enjoins this) is going to be seen as a form of incentive.

In the old days (this is probably not true anymore), including those allegedly individualist 19th century days, Protestant missionaries sometimes had an entire enclave of "mission natives" who built up a Christian community around the missionaries and formed a compound. This could sometimes be defended against, say, marauding Masai. Nowadays I suspect all missionaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, would consider that highly inappropriate, not culturally sensitive, offering the wrong kind of incentives, causing insincere conversions, etc. But I've always thought that I could see exactly how it could happen naturally. For example, the Christian natives naturally want to associate with other Christians. The missionary understandably wants Christian employees. If they are in a region surrounded by dangerous people they want to band together for mutual assistance. So even though that sort of arrangement is now "politically incorrect," I could never get het up about it.

All that being said, it seems to me that from a strictly theological point of view it is ultimately very important that we seek God for the sake of God and that those who are accepted as converts genuinely do want to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course the full realization of that longing after God is a state that many of us struggle after for years and years and do not achieve. But since, in the final analysis, the sincere desire for God and love for God is central to what Christianity is about, I do balk at *deliberately* offering *direct* worldly incentives to people to convert. If the incentives are just there "in the situation," having arisen in some natural way, then so be it. But I do think that in that case one should proceed with special caution in admitting new converts to try to make sure they are sincere and not just cynically "out for what they can get."

And the following Catholic argument could be made: If these people convert, they are going to be taking the Sacrament, so the last thing one wants is for them to be doing so after an insincere conversion, made for reasons of worldly gain. One should avoid that for their own sake!

We have it directly from the mouth of the Apostle: The gifts of God are not to be sold for money.

It's a bit difficult to tell whether the "worldly advantages" Jeff envisages are the kinds of things that would, in the categories I was using, "arise naturally." For example, I'm not entirely clear on what it means to "offer" someone the advantages of Roman civilization. And what would it mean to offer this on condition that the ruler convert to Christianity? I would have thought it might mean offering Roman citizenship, but perhaps that isn't what's in view.

I'm also not completely certain that Jeff was expressing approval of offering worldly advantages, though from the follow-up comment it seems that he was. I apologize if I have misunderstood on this point, though.

As for preferring Christians in government positions, that gets us into the whole question in political philosophy as to whether that is ever a good idea. But if it is ever okay to do, presumably it is so for reasons entirely separate from the consideration that this will induce people to convert to Christianity. That might even be an argument against such preferential treatment. Moreover, if one sets up such a formally Christian country for some independent reasons, one needn't be directly offering a position in government to prospective converts as an inducement.

If there are, naturally, worldly advantages to being a Christian in a particular cultural context, advantages that have been put in place for other good and sufficient reasons, then all this does (as I said in the above comment) is to place an added burden on the pastor, priest, or missionary to make sure that the would-be convert is sincere in his Christian intent and commitment.

The bulk of my negative opinion here rests on the phrase "promising worldly advantages to prospective converts." That definitely conveys to me something like a direct bribe or worldly argument, made to the prospective convert: "Become a Christian, because you will gain social status, a better job, prestige, or money."

And I'm sorry, but that's bad news.

In addition to what I've already said, there is the sheer fact that any such approach as a deliberate missionary tactic would be unbiblical. Consider the following:

The Lord Jesus Christ said,

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. (Luke 9:23)

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Matt. 6:24)

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Mark 8:35-36)

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. (Matt. 5:11-12)

The Apostle Paul wrote,

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. (Gal. 2:20)

It is a faithful saying; For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him. If we suffer, we shall also reign with him. If we deny him, he also will deny us. If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful. He cannot deny himself. (II Tim. 2:11-13) (This passage in the epistle to Timothy appears to have been a hymn or a bit of liturgy in the very early church. )

James tells us,

My brethren, count it all joy when he fall into diverse temptations, knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience, but let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. (James 1:2-4)

The Apostle Peter:

That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. (I Peter 1:7)

And these are only some of the examples that could be given. The entire message of the New Testament is inextricably bound up with the notion of being willing to sacrifice all for the sake of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer wasn't exaggerating when he said, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

It is entirely at odds with this Gospel message deliberately to offer a man worldly gain or advantage as an inducement to become a Christian. Indeed, on reflection on the above Scriptures and others like them I am inclined to say that the Apostles and even Our Lord himself would have been shocked and angered at any such recommended method of evangelism.

It may be replied that people's motives for acting are complex and that we should not demand more purity of motive than a would-be convert can be expected to attain. Well and good. But to use that as an argument for anything that could plausibly be described as "promising worldly advantages to prospective converts" is rather like saying, "Legislators are going to have complex motives for voting for a particular law, so it is legitimate to bribe them outright."

Note that my argument here isn't at all about freedom. I suppose that a legislator who takes a bribe is free. But he is still doing something wrong. He should vote for a law because he thinks it is, all things considered, a good law or a law worth supporting, not because he will personally receive money from someone for supporting it. A legislator who accepts bribes is free. He's free and corrupt. Corruption in government is bad enough. Corruption in religion is an even more serious matter. Let's avoid it like the plague.

A living sacrifice

It's been a long time since I heard this song. It seems to have gotten left behind in the seventies. But it's a good 'un, even if slightly repetitive.

gaither vocal band - Living Sacrifice

Found at: FilesTube

St. Paul:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12:1-2)

The Book of Common Prayer:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves,
our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living
sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that we, and all
others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may
worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son
Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction,
and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and
we in him.

And although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins,
to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept
this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits,
but pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord;

The writing process

Doctor Jenkins turned from the window and there was an almost imperceptible tautening of his whole frame. The Dean, with a slight smile, pushed aside the papers that littered his counterpane, for they were now coming to business. It always amused him to watch Tom Jenkins turning from man to doctor. A little chat about the weather was the correct thing when he entered the room, and he was hesitant, even a little in awe of his distinguished patient. Then it seemed that something clicked and he moved smoothly into action, concentrated and wholly happy. Something of the same sort of process was familiar to the Dean when he settled down to the writing of a book. A wave of self-loathing, of self-distrust, would go over him at first. Who was he that he should dare to take a pen into his hand? And how puerile was the result when he had done it. He would struggle wearily through a page or two and then forget himself, coming to the surface an hour later knowing that his book was his artifact, and whatever the result he could no more not make it than fail to breathe.

Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch, pp. 272-273

My 9/11 Anniversary Post

...will be stolen. See below.

Meanwhile, my gift to Extra Thoughts readers is that I will not give a spiel on where I was and what I was doing when I heard that Muslim terrorists were flying planes into the Twin Towers. It would be boring (let's just say it was a perfectly ordinary morning), and the fact that so many people do it is starting to make it sound like a series of essays from fourth graders on "What I Did On My Summer Vacation." 9/11 was not about me nor about what I was doing that morning.

Please go and read Bill Luse's 9/11 post at W4. Unlike so many other 9/11 posts, perhaps including this one, it doesn't just exist for the sake of the pixels. It has meaning.

For myself, I have nothing particularly original to say this year at the anniversary of 9/11, even though it is the tenth anniversary. My one (somewhat unoriginal) thought is that most people have no idea of how to continue to speak the truth about Muslim terrorism and about what it means to oppose and fight it. Indeed, we have less clarity of speech and thought now than we had ten years ago. Those old enough to have clear memories of the atmosphere before 9/11 will know how much easier it was before that to hear someone on the radio say "Muslim terrorists." It would sound almost naive now--an unthinking ability on the part of someone in the mainstream to speak the truth without hedging it about. We live in a different world now. Even many self-styled conservatives feel that they must speak only of "Muslim extremists," not just of "Muslim terrorists." Somehow the '93 attack on the WTC did not have the muzzling effect that the actual success of Muslim terrorists (in bringing down the WTC) has had. (Apropos of speaking out, perhaps here I should link to a series of posts on Islam and the West that I co-wrote with Jeff Culbreath at W4.)

The ever-controversial Lawrence Auster has said something about 9/11 commemorations so spot-on that I am simply going to quote it for the remainder of my 9/11 anniversary post:

The September 11th attack on America, in which devout Muslim believers carried out the greatest single jihad raid in history, and Muslims around the world cheered and danced in joy over this great blow to the infidel, should have awakened America and the West to the nature of the 1,400 year old warrior religion of Islam. Instead, while triggering a “war against terrorism,” the 9/11 attack inspired liberal America to embrace and approve of Islam much more than it had done before, even as Americans allowed themselves to be placed under permanent and humiliating security measures out of the liberal imperative to avoid the slightest hint of discrimination against Muslims.

These unexpected and devastating outcomes of 9/11 are perhaps the greatest single illustration of Auster’s First Law, which says that the more alien or dangerous a nonwhite or non-Western group reveals itself to be, the more our liberal society approves of it, accommodates itself to it, and forbids any criticism of it. To speak the truth about the unchangeable Islamic command to wage eternal war by violence and stealth against non-Muslims and about Muslims’ 1,400 year long obedience to that command, is to place oneself outside the respectable mainstream. In America you don’t get put in jail for speaking the forbidden truth, you just lose your job and career. This is the reign of fear under which we live.

In sum, the result of 9/11 has not been Western self-defense against Islam, but the prohibition of Western self-defense against Islam. And all the official 9/11 commemorations, notwithstanding their patriotic appearance, will carry that message of American and Western surrender. And that is why they should be avoided.

Only Connect the Prose and the Passion II

A few months ago I wrote this post on the connection between prose and passion in Christianity.

Today I'm thinking about something a bit different--the way that Christianity connects the prose and the passion in the sense of connecting doctrine and emotion.

Last evening I enjoyed myself watching several Youtube videos of the late, immortal Gospel singer Vestal Goodman. Here was one that lifted me up. Vestal's joy is contagious:



If you are, like me, a somewhat cerebral person, it's easy to miss that passion. That's where people like Vestal remind me of what my parents and teachers all taught me when I was little: You have to have a relationship with Jesus Christ. It's not enough just to have head knowledge. You have to love Jesus; you have to follow Him. You have to be committed to Him.

I sit and watch Vestal sing or talk (and there are many more videos of her out there, as you can see at Youtube) and feel a kind of wonder. What must it to be like to be that filled with joy and love? What is it like to have that kind of confidence and peace, a confidence and peace that obviously come not from mere innocence but rather from suffering and pain?

That wonder of mine is a fruitful wonder. It conveys some of her peace to me just to know that there are people who have that peace, that confidence and joy, that trust that God "doeth all things well," that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

Then this morning, I went to church, and we said the Nicene Creed, and for some reason, when we got to "Who for us men and for our salvation came down from Heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man..." I thought of Vestal.

What an amazing thing: There is a deep connection between that solemn, even in some sense "dry," theological truth that the Eternal Son was incarnate as a man, incarnate as a baby in the womb, and the excitement, wonder, and love of the Lord Jesus that one sees in a Gospel singer. The two are not at odds. They may seem to be at odds from the perspective of one Christian tradition or the other: To one person, the joy of Vestal Goodman may seem over-the-top, overly emotional, alien. To another, the solemnity of the Anglican liturgy, including the Creed, is dead and has no heart.

It's my opinion that Christianity desperately needs both. We need joy unspeakable and full of glory, and sometimes we need that joy to take the form of hand-clapping and foot-stomping. Not in all times and places, to be sure, but in some times and places. We need Vestal Goodman, with the Light that lightens all men, the Light that shone in darkness, shining in her face, so that we know that the darkness will never overcome it. We need the opportunity to sing with her, cry with her, and lift up our hands.

We also need doctrine. We need the structure, the discipline, the architectonic, the heart-ravishing beauty of the liturgy. We need to say, slowly and deliberately, the things we believe. We need to do it with some frequency and in words that we did not get to make up ourselves. We need to join hands with the men of all ages who have believed these things, in words that, like fine coins, have pased through many hands and have been polished thereby to a high lustre. We need quiet. We need sacred places.

We need all of these things, because there is a sense in which Christianity contains all of these things. And Christianity contains all of these things because Christianity, alone of the religions of the world, connects the prose and the passion.

A little Gospel

Okay, time for another outbreak of Gospel music.

I know we've had this one before, but hey...Ernie Haase with the Cathedrals, long ago (comparatively speaking): "I Want to See Jesus"



And for more clapping and toe-tapping, Ernie Haase and Signature Sound, not quite so long ago, "Climbin' Up the Mountain." Wait for the piano riff by Gordon Mote. Gordon is amazing. He really can play with one hand tied behind his back, just to make it fair. And for those of you who are a little put off by the Gospel music smile, notice that Gordon has that bluegrass/country impassivity. But you can tell he's having fun.

Matthew 18 does not apply to criticizing public articles

This should not need to be said, but I've become aware (most recently through some reactions to a post at W4) that some in the evangelical community are developing the oddest notions about public writings and public refutations. Apparently Jesus' injunctions about how to handle it if "your brother trespasses against you" in Matthew 18 are being applied to criticism of the public writings of people who claim to be Christians or even who simply may be Christians based on some affiliation of theirs. (I even saw it lately applied to a group of homosexual activists who, as far as I know, make no claim to be Christians at all!)

Now, this is a wild misapplication of the verses. Obviously, if someone unknown to me has written something in public, this isn't a matter "between me and him alone." The whole point of Jesus' instruction is that if something is, initially, a private dispute between two Christians, it should be escalated to a public matter involving the opinion of the whole church only by degrees and only if it cannot be resolved at a lower level. But this has no point to it at all if we are talking about the public writings of one Christian (much less a merely possible Christian or putative Christian, still less a non-Christian). There is no dispute between two individuals. The matter is public ab initio. There is no specific person who has been "trespassed against" who might try to "gain his brother" by getting a private apology and resolution. The entire set of instructions is obviously inapplicable.

I have been told that this misuse of Matthew 18 has even been applied to authors like Rob Bell who write arguably heretical books. When pastors and theologians try to criticize them, they are in turn criticized if they did not first go to Bell privately concerning his published books! This, even if they have no independent private acquaintance with Bell. What absurdity.

Moreover, of course, if the principle applies, it should also apply to public criticism of public critics, which would mean that no Christian could be publically criticized for anything at all before "the steps of Matthew 18" were followed. So the critics of public critics, if they have not first "followed the steps of Matthew 18," are subject to their own criticism of acting unbiblically. This is a reductio of the entire application of the passage, though I suppose it's asking too much for those who misuse it in this way to see that.

So, what does this come to? Well, to quote an old Internet friend of mine, the inimitable Zippy: No, we won't shut up.

Suppressing the truth

This is an amazing video clip at Gates of Vienna:

A reporter interviews a man who was an eyewitness to the raiding of his store. She's supposedly trying to get an eyewitness account. When the man says that 100 or 200 "black dudes in hoodies" raided his store, she immediately interrupts him. She rides over his words again and again trying to pressure him to say that the crowd of raiders was not all black. She believes that she knows that it could not have been all black, and she won't let him say it. Eventually he says something like, "Okay, then...Let me just say they weren't all black." She says, "Yes!" apparently expecting that now he will say what she wants him to say. He continues, "I was the white guy there." She interrupts again, "There probably were other white guys there..."

It's that bad. She literally will not let the eyewitness tell what he saw.

I know that there are conservatives who say that we should never refer to things like "black flash mobs" or "blacks" as the constituency that might oppose certain law-and-order crackdowns. Their idea seems to be to ask, "What's the point? Why say that? It does no good."

But truth is important. That flash mob attacks in America are a black phenomenon is not a trivial truth. That the riots in Britain were vastly disproportionately minority (I've seen one estimate of 70-80% and another of 60-70%) is not a trivial truth.

And the danger is that if we tell ourselves that we must not speak these truths, eventually we get a society full of people like that reporter who refuse to know the truth even when told it by a credible witness. This is not good.

HT for the link to GoV--VFR

Me on everything

For anyone who is wondering, "What does Lydia McGrew think about the fact that London has burned for several nights in a row?" I'll give you a couple of things I've said on Facebook recently. I give them here because this is my personal blog, where I reign as Personal Potentate, so I don't have to deal so much with difficult liberal commentators. One of my comments was that the police in England seem more likely to crack down on a school child accused of "racism" than on violent mobs who loot and burn London. I don't have time to google the stories, but some of you have doubtless read them: Some ten-year-old kid uses some word, or is accused of doing so, in school in Britain, and the police visit his house and put him under investigation.

Another of my comments was that perhaps T.S. Eliot was wrong and the world does end with a bang instead of a whimper, though Britain's leaders seem to be the ones doing the whimpering.

If indeed things have quieted down there (this is me now, not anything I've written elsewhere), as the news stories are telling us this morning, I'm rather surprised. Is it just that there's nothing more to loot? Or did the thousands of thugs actually believe the government's bluff that it would use (gasp!) water cannons and plastic bullets against them? I think if they'd called the bluff they would have found they could go on with their wave of pillage and destruction, their paean of horrible joy to the gods of hate against all that is productive and orderly. The so-called forces of law and order in England are clearly non-functional. It is absolutely appalling.

Still more appalling was the beginning of an AP story I saw last night. It has since disappeared from the news feed when I call up Yahoo, and I consider this good riddance, so instead of trying to find it, I'll just give the gist from memory. It said something to the effect that Cameron's government would now be called on to improve policing (um, yeah) and also to "help struggling communities in economic hard times." I feel ill. That's positively angering. Talk about appeasement. Talk about Danegeld. What does this mean? More government goodies and handouts for the very people who have just been tearing down England brick by brick and burning the rest? Yep, that has worked really well so far. Sickening. What it should have said was something like, "Making sure communities know that the law will be enforced" or "Cracking down on the lawless communities who have come to believe that they can do anything they like." (And, yes, by the way, all this talk about "communities" does point, in the eerily coded fashion of the liberal news media, to the racial nature of this anarchy, especially in its inception.)

No one who has loved English literature and taught English history can fail to be saddened to the point of near-speechlessness by this undeniable further evidence that England is dying. England the fair. England the Sceptred Isle. England of the Book of Common Prayer, of Churchill, of the brave fighters of the Battle of Britain. England the plucky, the quirky. England of the glorious literature and the lovable variety of accents. England of the peaceful countryside, of the orchards and the bees. England of the tough Yorkshire farmers. England now dying of the cancer of liberalism and anarcho-totalitarianism.

Requiescat in pacem, my beloved ancestor. What you once were will not be forgotten.

John Who Saw

From Adrian Green-Armytage, John Who Saw (1952)

There is a world -- I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently to inhabit -- which is not the world in which I live.

In my world, if The Times and The Telegraph both tell one story in somewhat different terms, nobody concludes that one of them must have copied the other, nor that the variations in the story have some esoteric significance. But in that world of which I am speaking this would be taken for granted. There, no story is ever derived from the facts but always from somebody else's version of the same story.

In my world, almost every book, except some of those produced by Government departments, is written by one author. In that world almost every book is produced by a committee, and some of them by a whole series of committees.

In my world, if I read that Mr. Churchill, in 1935, said that Europe was heading for a disastrous war, I applaud his foresight. In that world no prophecy, however vaguely worded, is ever made except after the fact.

In my world we say, "The first world-war took place in 1914–1918." In that world they say, "The world-war narrative took shape in the third decade of the twentieth century."

In my world men and women live for a considerable time -- seventy, eighty, even a hundred years -- and they are equipped with a thing called memory. In that world (it would appear) they come into being, write a book, and forthwith perish, all in a flash, and it is noted of them with astonishment that they "preserve traces of primitive tradition" about things which happened well within their own adult lifetime.

HT: Esteemed Husband

Reality, magic, and temptation

The issue of magic has been on my mind a bit lately, partly because of this post by Jeff Culbreath at W4.

There are, I'm sure, many reasons why contemporary people are attracted to magic. But one attraction of magic has got to be the thrill of making the supernatural real, of having real things happen via something other than the rather boring agency of natural means. To be sure, in an age when we can speak with some truth of the miracles of science, it hardly seems that one needs to turn to magic for that. When I was a child the Internet would have seemed akin to magic. Still, one knows in one's heart that there is some natural explanation for all of this, and one even has some idea of what it is, and that takes the magic out of it. Which is all to the good, in the end.

I imagine that Jesus' followers must have been awestruck when He healed a blind man or made the lame to walk: He really did it, just like that! He has the power to do that. It's real! It's a miracle.

Magic promises that thrill, and promises to give that thrill to the magician: Now you can be the one who can "really do it." That's why, in Acts, Simon Magus (that is, Simon the Magician) offered to pay the apostles for the power to confer the Holy Spirit on people (Acts 18:17-24)! He believed that this "Holy Spirit" thing was a new form of magic power and wanted to be able to do what the apostles did. Peter responded angrily, "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money."

The difference between miracle and magic is that miracles are the gift of God. Even the extraordinary abilities (e.g., the ability to do some miracles) which God gave to his apostles when founding the church were recognized by Peter as gifts that came immediately from God in each individual case, not as "powers" which the apostles possessed in themselves. There is no techne, no magical art, to receiving or bestowing the gifts of God.

Moreover, God does not always do miracles. Many people are not healed. Most people (to put it mildly) are not raised from the dead.

God bestows His miraculous gifts sparingly to remind us that they are gifts. We seek after signs and wonders, after the excitement of personally seeing the real supernatural in action. (Wow! He really did it! It really happened! She was healed just like that!) But for most of us, the sign that is given is the sign, as Jesus said, of Jonah the Prophet (Matthew 12:38-40). For as Jonah was three days in the belly of the fish, so Our Lord rose after three days in the tomb. Powerful evidence? Indeed. But it happened a long time ago, and the study of it does not, for most of us, bring that special magic thrill. And that's all right.

Meanwhile, we walk by faith, hope, and charity. What we have instead of signs and wonders before our eyes or within our power are prayer, obedience, love, and Holy Communion, which, whatever else it is, looks just like bread and wine.

All these, too, are gifts.