The Christian Case for Idolatry

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to worship idols. Now, after years of trying to reject it, I believe idolatry and Christianity are compatible.

A number of evangelical writers have been challenging the monolatrous narrative in a series of scholarly books. They provide a powerful case for listening to the diversity of the ancient witnesses in their original contexts, and call for a Christlike approach of humility, openness, and inclusion toward our idolatrous brothers and sisters.

Some, on hearing this, will of course want to rush straight to the “clobber passages” in Paul’s letters (which we will consider in a moment), in a bid to secure the fundamentalist ramparts and shut down future dialogue. But as we consider the scriptural material, two things stand out.

First, the vast majority of references to idols and idolatry in the Bible come in the Old Testament—the same Old Testament that tells us we can’t eat shellfish or gather sticks on Saturdays. When advocates of monolatry eat bacon sandwiches and drive cars on the weekend, they indicate we should move beyond Old Testament commandments in the new covenant, and rightly so.

Second, and even more significantly, we need to read the whole Bible with reference to the approach of Jesus. To be a Christian is to be a Jesus person—one whose life is based on his priorities, not on the priorities of subsequent theologians. And when we look at Jesus, we notice that he welcomed everyone who came to him, including those whom the (one-God worshiping) religious leaders rejected—and that Jesus said absolutely nothing about idols in any of the four Gospels. Conservative theologians, many of whom are friends of mine, often miss this point in the cut-and-thrust of debate. But for those who love Jesus, it should be at the heart of the discussion.

Jesus had no problem with idolatry.
He included everyone, however many gods they worshiped.
If we want to be like him, then we should adopt the same inclusive approach.

Read the rest.

Does it Feel Good? Continued...

Continuing on the "Does It Feel Good?" vs. "Does It Do Good?" theme from the other day....

Gun Control: Calls for gun control after a public shooting even though none of the proposals would have prevented the shooting.  More gun control feels good.

The minimum wage: The overall net value is nothing.  It makes those getting the raise temporarily more happy (until prices adjust) and some people a lot less happy when they lose their job.  At best liberal economists will argue that it does no harm overall, admitting that it probably does no good.  But it feels good.

The Keystone Pipeline: Everyone acknowledges that it would've actually reduced carbon emissions and would have also reduced the risk of oil spills.  But environmentalists hated it and Obama killed it.   Why?  Oil pipelines don't feel good.  Killing the pipeline was environmentally "symbolic."

Paris Climate Talks: The talks were full of talk and not much else.  There are no legally binding agreements, and no means of enforcement.  But getting that many countries together to talk about "Climate Change" feels good. (Ask NPR).

Affirmative Action: It stigmatizes minorities and mismatches their current abilities with requirements.  But even if it did neither ill nor good, it definitely feels good.

That's all for now.  I bet if we thought about it we could come up with a pretty long list.

Military Opening up ALL Combat Roles to Women

Here.

Well of course they will open all combat jobs to women.  I predicted it.  This has been a foregone conclusion for years in spite of any and all empirical studies or lack thereof.  Because the issue has never ever been about making the U.S. stronger militarily (as if the Navy Seals have really been slacking recently.)  The left loathes the U.S. and would love to have it knocked down a few pegs.

When is the last time you heard someone on the left complaining that our military is not strong enough?  When have you heard the Chomskys say that they want a stronger U.S. military and military presence in the world?  It's not about making the military stronger, as Obama the feckless and mendacious promises, it's about fundamentally changing America as progressives want to change it.  The '60's sexual revolutionaries are the institution.

Student Radicals Take Over Princeton University President's Office

Radical progressive students demand removal of the Godfather of Progressivism from programs and buildings for his racist legacy.

Pass the Cheetos and Doritos.  Stay in tonight.  We're in for quite the show!

What Is It Like to Be a Progressive?

My wife and I were recently discussing various events in the world.  She was perplexed; it's as if the left has a special power to hold many contradictory things before the mind all at once.

I too find progressivism perplexing.  Sometimes I think I understand how someone could think the way progressives do and see the world as they see it.  I believe I have brief flashes of insight where I understand what it might be like to see the world in that way.  And then it vanishes.  The further the left progresses leftward, the more I simply have no idea how to relate.

Thomas Nagel once explored this very issue.  His essay was called,  "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"

True Liberals...

...are now conservatives and libertarians.  Progressives are too totalitarian to warrant the "liber" label.  That's why I've tried to start referring to whom many still refer to as "liberals" simply as "leftists."  There is still ambiguity with the term but not as much.

The left is the side of brainless emotion.   Here too is a reminder of how Democrats can easily turn out the youth vote with appeal to pity, anger, and the like.  The left owns the youth as they own the poor--two of the most susceptible groups to being politically herded by emotional appeal.

Progressive Insurance

I'll never get Progressive's insurance out of principle.

One needs insurance for it not from it: progressive insurance for progressive assurance.

Men Are Stronger Than Women (on average)

Zexy

I posted before on a study which claims that conservatives and progressives are about equally anti-science.

Well, I'm beginning to wonder if that is correct.  It occurred to me that the study about which I posted seems to ignore some obvious propositions about sexuality progressives have a tendency to deny.

Just take the painfully obvious claim of common sense that men are stronger than women on average and ask yourself how many progressives today would think you are a sexist for even thinking about this let alone believing that it's true.   It took me exactly one Google search on the first page to find people at TED actually debating the issue, like this guy at the top of the page:

The Left's Nihilistic Agenda

In the absence of a practical alternative to the capitalist system, the [Marxist] revolutionary project is a nihilism--the will to destroy existing societies without an idea of what to do next.

The persistence of the revolutionary illusion without the revolutionary fact has given rise to what should properly be called a neo-communist movement--one that has learned nothing from the failures of Communism but has not abandoned the cause itself. Neo-communist radicals add new dimensions of oppression to the Marxist model, like racism and "sexism." But it is the same Marxist model that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, identifies capitalism as the root cause of global problems, and regards the United States as the global system's guardian-in-chief.  Consequently, like the Communist perspective it has replaced, the contemporary radical outlook opposes America's wars and opposes America's peace.  All that really distinguishes this neo-communist perspective from its Communist predecessor is its ad-hoc attitude towards the revolutionary future, and the nihilistic agenda that follows.

As an expression of its nihilism, the contemporary left defines and organizes itself as a movement against rather than for.  Its components may claim to be creating egalitarian futures in which racism, "sexism" and corporate dominance no longer exist and in which "social justice" prevails.  But unlike Communists, the neo-coms are not committed to even a rudimentary blueprint as to what such an order might be.  It is this lack of programmatic consensus that leads some leftists to deny that there even is a "left," and makes it possible for a fragmented coalition of neo-coms--including anarchists, eco-radicals, radical feminists, "queer" revolutionaries, Maoists, Stalinists, and vaguely defined "progressives"-to operate side by side in improbable coalitions like the antiwar movement.  It is why they can do so in ways that benefit such anti-egalitarian allies and regimes as Islamic radicals and the Baathist, fascist state of Iraq.

-David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left, Vol II: Progressives (2013): pp.28-29

The Left, Sexual Norms, and the Military

Don't be fooled.  The goal of the left is not to make our military stronger--as if it were not the best and most powerful in the world already (if anything, the left would like to see it taken down a peg or fifty).  The goal is to push forward the opposite of all traditional values, plain and simple.  It is to flip on its face every traditional norm.  This is particularly the case when it comes to sexuality and gender, the summos bonos in the progressive movement.

Sexual and gender autonomy drive almost everything.

Understanding the Myopic Psychology of Liberals

Progressives hate traditional institutions for they are an impediment to swift and unrelenting "progress," and for many, power. But there is more, if Jonathan Haidt is correct.  The left cannot even understand the right, though the right can partially understand the left.  (More below). Given such a state of affairs, where at least one side cannot even understand the other, what civil, political alternative is there to keep us from tearing each other apart other than a return to federalism?

How to Understand Both Liberals and Conservatives (excerpt):

But Haidt’s second major discovery is far more consequential:  the concept of “the conservative advantage.” Based on painstaking cross-cultural social-psychological experimentation, Haidt establishes that the moral foundations of liberals and conservatives are not just different, they are dramatically unequal. The liberal moral matrix rests essentially entirely on the left-most foundations [i.e. Care/Harm, to a lesser extent Fairness/Cheating]; the conservative moral foundation—though slanted to the right—rests upon all six [value categories, i.e. Care/Harm; Fairness/Cheating; Liberty/Oppression; Loyalty/Betrayal; Authority/Subversion; Sanctity/Degradation].

This is a stunning finding with enormous implications. The first is that conservatives can relate to the moral thinking of liberals, but the converse is not true at all. Haidt, who is liberal himself, elegantly explains how and why conservatives will view liberals as merely misguided while liberals tend to view conservatives as incomprehensible, insane, immoral, etc.

Another implication is that liberal prescriptions tend to be incredibly single-minded as compared to those of conservatives. Haidt uses the metaphor of a bee hive to illustrate. A liberal, finding a bee in the hive suffering from injustice, is motivated more or less exclusively by the desire to get justice for the bee. A conservative, being partially driven by the Care/Harm foundation, also desires to alleviate the injustice, but tries to find a solution that also contemplates the survival of the hive itself.

Liberals seek to create justice and equity; whether doing so harms core institutions simply doesn’t enter into their moral reasoning. Conservatives, in contrast to their typical caricature, do care about justice and fairness, they merely cherish vital institutions relatively more. If there’s a conflict, conservatives will err toward protecting institutions. [This is somewhat simplistic insofar as many conservatives will also think that destroying such institutions is unfair and unjust.]

Sadly, “The Righteous Mind” proves irrefutably that trying to explain to liberals that their solutions might undermine vital institutions is fruitless. They cannot and will not relate, or even concede that such concerns fall into the realm of moral reasoning. The good news is that a coalition can be built among the rest of us who understand that destroying the hive to benefit the lone bee results inescapably in suffering for all.

Read all of it.

The Crisis

Thomas Paine still relevant today.  Replace "Britain" with "progressives" and this is about right:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

Here is the whole thing.  Happy Independence Day!

After SCOTUS: Withdrawing From Society

The final installment of Bill Vallicella's recent posts on the same-sex ruling.

Excerpt:

SCOTUS and Benedict

In the wake of recent events, Rod Dreher renews his call for the Benedict Option:

It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the fears of those worried about religious liberty. But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy.

This is especially the case, as it seems to me, given the Left's relentless and characteristically dishonest assault on Second Amendment rights.  The only real back up to the First Amendment is the exercise of the rights guaranteed by the Second.  You will have noticed that the Left never misses an opportunity to limit law-abiding citizens' access to guns and ammunition. What motivates leftists is the drive to curtail and ultimately eliminate what could be called 'real' liberties such as the liberty to own property, to make money and keep it, to defend one's life, liberty and property, together with the liberty to acquire the means to the defense of life, liberty and property. 

Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”

[. . .]

It is time for what I call the Benedict Option. In his 1982 book After Virtue, the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the current age to the fall of ancient Rome. He pointed to Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray, as an example for us. We who want to live by the traditional virtues, MacIntyre said, have to pioneer new ways of doing so in community. We await, he said “a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”

Throughout the early Middle Ages, Benedict’s communities formed monasteries, and kept the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness. Eventually, the Benedictine monks helped refound civilization.

I believe that orthodox Christians today are called to be those new and very different St. Benedicts. How do we take the Benedict Option, and build resilient communities within our condition of internal exile, and under increasingly hostile conditions? I don’t know. But we had better figure this out together, and soon, while there is time.

Last fall, I spoke with the prior of the Benedictine monastery in Nursia, and told him about the Benedict Option. So many Christians, he told me, have no clue how far things have decayed in our aggressively secularizing world. The future for Christians will be within the Benedict Option, the monk said, or it won’t be at all.

Obergefell is a sign of the times, for those with eyes to see. This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices, in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order.

There is a potential problem with the Benedict Option, however. 

Read the rest.

Right and Left on Race

This seems about right from KBJ:

Examine the following diagram (click to enlarge), which I just constructed:

Today's Left ranks the categories as follows: 4 > 2 > 1 > 3. Thurgood Marshall, the former Supreme Court justice, was not just biologically black; he was psychologically and culturally black. If you can't be in category 4 with the likes of Marshall, the next best place to be, to the Left, is in category 2. Individuals in category 2 are biologically white but think, feel, and act black.

It gets interesting after this. I think the Left ranks category 1 over category 3. Clarence Thomas is biologically black, like Marshall, but he's psychologically and culturally white, like John Roberts Jr. (Indeed, he has a white wife.) The Left hates this. I'm sure you know the names Thomas has been called, such as "Uncle Tom," "Oreo," and "Stepin Fetchit." The Left prefers the likes of John Roberts Jr, who is both biologically and culturally white, to the likes of Thomas. They would say that Roberts, but not Thomas, is authentic.

Rachel Dolezal was at one time in category 1. She wanted desperately to be in category 4, but, alas, that was ruled out by biology, so she did the next best thing: she moved to category 2. What say you?

The Root Difference Between Conservatives and Liberals

From Keith-Burgess Jackson: 

Barry M. Goldwater (1909-1998) on Conservatism

I have been much concerned that so many people today with Conservative instincts feel compelled to apologize for them. Or if not to apologize directly, to qualify their commitment in a way that amounts to breast-beating. “Republican candidates,” Vice President Nixon has said, “should be economic conservatives, but conservatives with a heart.” President Eisenhower announced during his first term, “I am conservative when it comes to economic problems but liberal when it comes to human problems.” Still other Republican leaders have insisted on calling themselves “progressive” Conservatives. These formulations are tantamount to an admission that Conservatism is a narrow, mechanistic economic theory that may work very well as a bookkeeper’s guide, but cannot be relied upon as a comprehensive political philosophy.

The same judgment, though in the form of an attack rather than an admission, is advanced by the radical camp. “We liberals,” they say, “are interested in people. Our concern is with human beings, while you Conservatives are preoccupied with the preservation of economic privilege and status.” Take them a step further, and the Liberals will turn the accusations into a class argument: it is the little people that concern us, not the “malefactors of great wealth.”

Such statements, from friend and foe alike, do great injustice to the Conservative point of view. Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on the other foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to man’s material wellbeing. It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place—that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.

The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other hand,—in the name of a concern for “human beings”—regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society. They are, moreover, in a hurry. So that their characteristic approach is to harness the society’s political and economic forces into a collective effort to compel “progress.” In this approach, I believe they fight against Nature.

Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man. The Conservative does not claim special powers of perception on this point, but he does claim a familiarity with the accumulated wisdom and experience of history, and he is not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past.

(Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, ed. CC Goldwater, The James Madison Library in American Politics, ed. Sean Wilentz [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 (first published in 1960)], 1-3 [footnote omitted; italics in original])

Note from KBJ: This is a great book by a great (though, like all of us, imperfect) man. I'm ashamed to say that it took me 58 years to read it. Better late than never.

Mother's Day Meme Fun

Conservative vs. Progressive Views on Tradition

In the previous post, it was noted that Adam Swift thinks that families are a social construct (like an Amish barn...only not.)  This is a typical progressive position.  Part of the reason driving such a view is tied up with feelings (thoughts?) about human nature as well as traditions.  Much more could be said on the matter of tradition (and human nature), but Malcolm Pollack cuts to the heart of the disagreement:

In our recent discussion of the Supreme Court’s DOMA ruling, our reader Peter... made the following response to the suggestion that marriage was a tradition so ancient, and so universal, that some care might be warranted in tampering with it:

Tradition alone does not justify continuance in perpetuity.

Well, I don’t suppose many people would disagree with that: tradition alone does not justify continuance in perpetuity.

A far more interesting question, though, is what tradition does justify. Conservatives and liberals will give very different answers, I think, because they think about tradition in opposite ways.

To the conservative, traditions arise naturally from the workings of human nature, as part of the ontogeny and organic development of societies. They are not the result of scientific planning or sociological theorizing — and like biological species themselves, they only come into view in retrospect. They are, in a sense, part of the “extended phenotype” of our species and its various subgroups, as languages are; and just as languages do, they naturally adapt to, and come to represent, those things that actually matter to the various human groups from which they arise. (Many have been, at least up till now, more or less universal.) In this way they contain a great deal of deeply-buried knowledge about the optimal functioning of the human social organism, often for reasons, and in ways, that themselves need not be explicitly represented in the organism’s consciousness. Because of this, disrupting them will always have unknowable consequences — and so, at least, tradition justifies respect for its embodied wisdom, and caution as regards casual tampering.

To those on the Left, traditions are artifacts. Rather than being organic outgrowths and aspects of human nature itself, they are human creations; they are social technology, whose only purpose is to control and manipulate human behavior. In this view, human “nature” hardly exists at all, and traditions are wholly external things; indeed almost everything about human behavior and human life is external to the individual. This means that to mold human beings, or human societies, into any desirable configuration is simply a matter of discarding traditions, and inventing new ones, until we obtain the correct result. Because of this, tradition justifies very little indeed.

As we see all around us, these views of the world are not particularly compatible, and cannot easily coexist, at least within any given society.

As Peter reminded us, “the times they are a-changing.” Indeed they are: and the faster the rate of change, and the greater its amplitude, the more the strain increases.

Abortion Rights are not Only for Women

An excerpt from Katherine Timpf:

Feminists are now arguing about whether or not it’s offensive to talk about abortion as a “women’s issue” because gender is not that simple and men have abortions too.

“We must acknowledge and come to terms with the implicit cissexism in assuming that only women have abortions,” feminist activist Lauren Rankin stated in July 2013. Or, as Jos Truitt of Feministing explained: “Trans men have abortions. Gender queer people have abortions. Two spirit people have abortions. [!?!?!?!?]  People who do not fit into the box of ‘woman’ have abortions.”

In response, abortion funds around the country have already been changing their names and language to be more “gender inclusive.” Last year, “Fund Texas Women” became “Fund Texas Choice,” because, in the words of co-founder Lenzi Scheible, the group “refuse[d] to deny the existence and humanity of trans* people any longer.” But not every feminist agrees with Rankin and Truitt and Scheible and friends.

At the risk of being branded a “cissexist,” feminist essayist and poet Katha Pollitt wrote a piece for the The Nation today daring to suggest that maybe it’s not totally offensive to link being pregnant with being female. “I’m going to argue here that removing ‘women’ from the language of abortion is a mistake,” she writes. “In an era where politics is all about identity, as a tool for organizing and claiming public space, are women about to lose theirs? Because after all we’re all just people now.”

TB: And now Monty Python weighs in...

Progress! The World's First Three-Way Gay "Marriage"

Excerpt:
Three homosexual men have “married” each other in Thailand in what is being billed as the world’s first three-way same-sex “marriage.” This was, of course, inevitable. It’s inevitable in every country that redefines marriage as anything but one man and one woman. When the culture’s only standard for “marriage” is that the parties love each other, then all sorts of novel configurations are possible. Look for this to come soon to a country near you.

Under the banner of the gay-rights rainbow, the new cultural revolutionaries are not only redefining marriage but also, to borrow from the popular term of 1960s radicals, “smashing monogamy.” What’s to stop these three non-monogamous married men from taking on added spouses? If three is fine, why not four? Or five?

This is, of course, a blatant I-told-you-so moment. This is what we gay-marriage opponents have been warning about. But it’s especially revealing of something else I’ve warned about for a while.
Those of us opposing same-sex “marriage” for reasons like this were told by gay-marriage advocates that we were nuts. Our claims that the redefining of marriage would lead to polygamous marriage and other arrangements were ridiculed. We were denounced as homophobes and bigots who simply hate. We were not just cold-hearted but hysterical. They shouted at us that they would never advocate arrangements like these. We were crazy to even suggest they would support anything but two gay people marrying one another.

But we know better. Those of us who have studied the ideological train-wreck called “progressivism” know better. We’ve watched how progressives “progress.” The only thing you really know about progressives, and that they know about themselves, is that they’re always changing, evolving. Where they stand now, on any given issue, is, by progressivism’s own definition, subject to change.
I often give the example of Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood. It was launched in the 1920s as the American Birth Control League, with Sanger’s interests being birth control and eugenics. Sanger insisted that she and her organization were against abortion. “It is an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn,” she wrote in January 1932. “Some ill-informed persons have the notion that when we speak of birth control we include abortion as a method. We certainly do not.”
Yet, for progressives, what began as birth control needed only a few decades to snuff out life after conception. They “progressed” to where Sanger’s organization rapidly became America’s largest abortion provider. And where do “pro-choicers” stand today on abortion? Now they tell you that you must not only support its legalization but pay for it. If you disagree with them, they smear you as favoring a “war on women.”

Read the rest.

The "Logic" of Progressivism