“…and would not stay for an answer.”
Francis Bacon
Some folks over at ScienceBlogs are conducting a web experiment, dealing with “viral marketing”. I’m not sure I understand it, but I’m willing to play along.
So, here you will find truth. Go for it.
“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate….
January 26, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Sadness and Sin—a Meditation on Abortion
January 22, 2007 By Leave a Comment
On this 33rd anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, I thought I’d republish a meditation that I wrote many years ago (the same meditation is published at manygods.org).
Many good people hold that abortion is an act that is filled with sin. It may be so. Any act may be filled with sin. And abortion is, at best, a sad necessity.
Sin separates—one person from another, humankind from all that is divine. Sadness need not separate; indeed, sadness shared may lift somewhat, and one who shares another’s sadness, with sorrow and care, elevates humanity with the sacrifice.
So we may begin to agree. Abortion is sad, and we may share, with sorrow and care, the sadness of anyone who must endeavor such an act.
Many of those actors are, otherwise than this, good people. If their sad act is filled with sin and stains their souls in some way, then you must pray for those souls and grieve with the good people on their loss.
But must you cry “Murder!” and call in the state to punish and deny? Murder is not of the human realm where sin and grace reside, but of the Law, which numbers murder by degrees and considers circumstance in which degrees are blurred extenuating only, not vital to the case.
Please do not. Do not deliver sad humanity so carelessly to the blunt decree of law. Do not make a criminal of this good woman if at some sad time she must, for reasons that I may not know and must not question, abort a life that quickens within her.
If you do condemn her so, as well as those who helped her with compassion and with skillful care; if you make of her a criminal, who was not one before, deny her liberty, and bring more harm into her life to devil her—if you do so challenge her, you must also challenge those of us who love her, and we are many, and many among us whom you hold dear, or would hold dear if you but knew us.
I know this good woman and know that, challenged, she will respond as her humanity commands, respond with courage and mighty determination. If you would force her to bear a life to term against her chosen course—a course informed by all that is divine in this one woman’s life, all that inspires her goodness and her friends to love her—then you must crush her spirit, brutally. You must destroy her.
That would be a sin indeed. Pray for her rather, and for me, and for your own humanity, that we may all grow in goodness to the best of our powers and care for one another.
Depends on who’s counting
January 22, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Source: Welcome to The Barna Group!
The Barna Group seems to be a Christian research organization. They’ve done a study of people who identify themselves as “evangelicals”; the demographics and attitudes of that group were compared with those of people who revealed themselves as evangelicals on a nine-point scale that the Barna people developed based on the belief statements of the national’s leading participants in the National Association of Evangelicals. The two groups—self-described evangelicals and “nine-point” evangelicals—were very different:The most striking differences relate to the beliefs of each group. Compared to the 9-point evangelicals, those who say they are evangelicals are:
- 60% less likely to believe that Satan is real
- 53% less likely to believe that salvation is based on grace, not works
- 46% less likely to say they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs with others
- 42% less likely to list their faith in God as the top priority in their life
- 38% less likely to believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth
- 27% less likely to contend that the Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings
- 23% less likely to say that their life has been greatly transformed by their faith
In fact, the Barna research also noted that one out of every four adults (27%) who say they are evangelicals is not even born again, based upon their beliefs.
The self-defined evangelicals were also less likely than the nine-point believers to be well-off, to have a college education, and to be married. And this one surprised me: the self-defined group was less likely to call themselves conservative on social and political issues and more likely to identify themselves as Democrats.
The most important finding in the Barnes study involves numbers. By the study’s count, the “true” evanglicals, i.e. those who fit the evangelical ideological pattern, number just about 9-10% of the population, compared to the 35-40% who label themselves “evangelical”. It’s the latter number that’s used most often, and it’s misleading. It implies a level of rigidity and dogmatic belief in the U.S. population that just does not exist. Thank God!
Rent (not the musical)
January 17, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Source: LENIN’S TOMB: The Rentiers.
Lenin (the risen one) has an angry, informative post today about the monstrous dominance of finance captial in the world today, and especially about the disastrous effect that neo-liberalism and the new capitalism has had on life in London, and in Britain generally. He points out that the income of the richest 1,000 Brits has tripled under Tony Blair. Those people own everything, and through their ownership power control everything, and they are no longer living the same lives (or even living in the same country) as the hundreds of millions who are affected by their greed.
…the biggest owners in the entire country paid some extremely exclusive companies with fingers in every pie in the world to manage their assets (money or land) for them. These companies in turn secured for them the largest possible share of the surplus generated by people doing actual productive work (that still happens, you know). In other words, the funds are transferred to them through rent paid on ownership, either as massive shareholders or as landowners. Obviously, this is an ideal-type – there is no pure ‘rentier class’, since these guys will also have involvements in industrial capital, chairmanships, non-executive positions and so on. But you could say that this class of people favours policies that are likely to enhance all forms of rent, and are in a far better position than most to ensure they can achieve it. The financialisation of the world economy under the rubric of neoliberalism has brought some increased risk, but principally it has sped up and amplified the transfer of wealth to the richest.
Pure or not, there is now, in the US as well as in Britain, a rentier class. They are not the people who appear on talk shows, or whom talk show hosts pontificate about. If we see them at all, we see them on the Society page of our more cosmopolitan newspapers, and we know nothing about them but their names and the fact that their tuxedos are immaculately tailored. But it’s clear from Lenin’s post that those people are the enemy; they mean us no good at all.
Keynes warned about the rapacity of the rentiers, particularly the enormous turmoil they were prepared to put societies through to obtain their loot, and he at one point suggested the socialisation of investment, in a Board of National Investment whose role would be to manage aggregate demand and sustain full employment by channeling investment into useful, long-term development.
Keynes rejected the solution that his logic had driven him towards; it would be too revolutionary. I think it’s time to re-consider revolution as an option.