Count the statues in this photo

hmmmm... one, TWO.

All kidding aside, I'm glad this important movie won an Oscar. I really wish Al had hired a professional entertainer to narrate the movie. If you haven't seen this movie yet, then please do. I'm not an Al Gore fan, but I was able to look past his statue-like personality and hear his message.

Palestine - Peace Not Apartheid

Overall I found that the book was helpful but as with most of Carter's books, it became slow at times. I did find valuable information and I continue to respect Carter's character, intelligence, and Christ centered motives. The highlights of this important book are the descriptions of the real people being torn apart by politics and the personal stories of Carter's involvement through the years. He would have done better to concentrate on the former.

The most frequent complaint against this book is the word "apartheid" in the title which has a subtle connection to the racist policies of the old South Africa. That may be an overstatement, but overstatement hardly adds up to the claims of anti-Semitism generated by Carter's critics. I think the criticism largely comes from people that won’t bother to read the book and that are not really looking for solutions in the Middle East outside their own self interest. Apartheid literally means "separateness" and I don’t see that this is a stretch for describing Palestine. A 30 foot wall separating a community of Christians from their own church and roads that are off limits to a particular segment of the population are at a minimum "hints" of apartheid.

The biggest mistake the critics make is that they don’t bother to realize that Carter is not judging Israel or announcing a categorization on their actions. Instead, he is suggesting that there is a choice for the future of Palestine - either peace or apartheid. It seems evident that both options are still on the table and signs of apartheid are clearly visible but peace is still possible.

Carter has the most important gift needed to negotiate for peace. He is able to look at the big picture without getting emotionally attached to one side or the other. People that are only able to see things from their own view can never negotiate successfully. Critics also charge that Carter isn't fair in this book. He does focus mainly one side but that is intentional because it is the view which rarely gets any attention in the US. Why do the critics think Carter needs to waste our time restating the common position in depth? He makes it clear that he is attempting to publicize information that has not been given a wide audience yet - the Palestinian point of view. For this reason the book may seem skewed. The book is not an acquisition. It is a prophetic call for honest examination and quality decisions.

Any one that thinks Carter is being anti-Semitic is short sighted. He has dedicated much of his life to helping Israel live in peace even when it did great harm to his own career. I hope that Israel chooses peace and it is obvious that Carter has the same feelings.

Jesus Camp

My wife and I watched this movie last weekend and it had a wide range of effects on us. Veronica burst into song a few times because the movie reminded us both of familiar camp songs and games we experiences in our childhood. I enjoyed those times, but I can't shake the effect of that view of God in my spiritual formation. In the end, this movie left me feeling very sad.

"Jesus Camp" is a solid documentary that paints a valid picture of the extreme Evangelical Christian mentality. Be warned that it is scary. The kids are cute but the reality is that people are indoctrinating kids with anti-science and nationalistic views of the bible with a heavy dose of bad eschatology. The combination is dangerous and it is happening right now. I do sympathize with the adults in this film. They are responding to a world that seems to be at odds with God's values and their response is a war-like call to combat. I applaud their faith and enthusiasm even if I feel bad that they don't have the tools at their disposal to make better choices. Kids are so vulnerable and it is painful to see them mislead.

The highlights include a visit to planned parenthood, a haunting clip of Ted Haggard, a life size cardboard cutout of George W. Bush and many clips of kids being worked up into a state of hyper-emotionalism complete with speaking in tongues and many many tears.

Give a Cow

I've been researching a wide variety of charities over the last few months. The studies which I've seen have given this organization great reveiws and their name keeps popping up in the news more and more. After reading 2 more articles about them this weekend and watching their story told on the Religion and Ethics Newsweekly PBS show, I've decided to start supporting them.

My wife and I are considering a trip to visit one of their facilities in Africa however the cost of the trip could buy many cows. For now, we will settle for giving enough resources to put a cow in the hands of a needy family.

Welcome to the Homeland

Biran Mann insists that America’s political divide is not a strictly geographical divide between red states and blue states. The divide is between urban values and rural values and this urban—rural schism is the new frontier in America’s culture war.

The book explores the radically different culture evolving just over the horizon of our urban beltways, and explains how Homelanders – Mann’s name for the nation’s fifty million rural whites – have managed to dominate the conservative base of the Republican Party, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, and to use the electoral college, which favors small states, to their advantage. Ultimately, Homelanders are fighting to create a new national culture, one rooted in the traditional values of nineteenth-century America – a trend that may be reversing after the 2006 elections.

Welcome to the Homeland is a product of the emotions felt by urban liberals around the nation (which includes Mann) felt after the 2004 elections. For me it struck a nerve because it is this divide that first became evident to me after the 2000 elections which renewed my interest in politics. It was a profound life changing moment for me. In this book Mann offers his experience being an original homelander - now living the urban northeast - and now venturing back into the heartland to experience red state ideals first hand through the eyes of his conservative brother. This clash of values has been something that many people have been feeling very strongly for the last 6 years.

The best parts of this book are the personal stories of the author as he travels around the countryside with his very conservative and religious brother getting a first hand look at what makes conservatives so conservative. The arguments are the same arguments I’ve had with my relatives when I explain my change of heart and mind. This book helped me by showing both sides in print. Unfortunately there are not enough of these moments in the book. I wanted more.

After reading this book I realized that it is impossible for urban people and rural people to approach politics in the same way. For example – how can someone growing up on a ranch even comprehend why the idea of gun control would be taken seriously? It makes no sense to them that anyone would spend time considering controlling this constitutional right is a lunitic. For these homelanders guns are a part of life that in no way represent violence or create fear in their minds. Urban citizens will of course approach that issue much differently. How can you live in, around, and on top of millions of people without understanding the need for public help in protecting yourself. Both are a rational response to their own situation.

The most prevalent difference between urban and rural values comes in understanding how people come to value the idea of public property and services. Homelanders, primarily property owners, look to government for protection of their private property. The idea of sharing any type of resource in a place where resources are in abundance makes little sense. This is not a result of an innate selfishness or individuality, but it is a perfectly rational and ethical response to their situation. On the other hand, urban citizens value and take great pride in thier public spaces like parks, libraries, and a vast array of public services that are a part of their lives. This too is a rational and ethical response to their urban environment.

For urban citizens, the notion of public property might bring to mind the images of beautiful saturday mornings playing catch with your dad in central park. For a homelanders, the same notion of public property might remind you about that hillside behind your home where your dad first taught you to pitch a tent and start a camp fire that is now an interstate highway or that little pond where you caught your first fish that is now a waste treatment plant. Homelanders view the government as the entity which is orchestrating the slow demise of everything we hold as valuable where urban citizens view government as a powerful tool through which we together develop the resources which we then share in our community. Homelanders view goverment as "them" while urban citizens veiw governement as "us".

Is it any surprise that the basic foundation of our political ideals would be different?

No God But God - Reza Aslan

I was was excited when this book arrived at my door last week so I absorbed the whole book over a weekend. At first glance it is a daunting compilation of the long and complex history of Islam. However, I was surprised by how much fun it was to read. I did not feel like I was in a boring history class. The book does a great job of explaining the history behind all the terms that we hear constantly on the news these days and it really opened my eyes and my heart.

The first realization I made is that the roots of Islam are the roots of every religion. Muhammad's goal, like Moses and Jesus, was to create a just society. Whoever thinks that religion and politics are separate topics never bothered to understand the Torah, the New Testament, or the Qur'an. All of these documents are radical political calls for justice. He spends a great deal of time discussing pre-Islamic Arabia including the vast array of religious and political issues that set the stage for the development of Islam.

The most interesting observation that I made while reading this book is that I now see the dramatic parallel in the problems of both Islam and Christianity. I’m now able to sympathize with moderate and liberal Muslims as they live in the shadow of their fundamentalist brothers. All of us are struggling to deal with the problem of religious fundamentalists that make the following mistakes:

They mistake sacred texts for God’s words
They give power to religious authorities
They don’t read scripture in context of its authors
They believe unbelievable things
They value ancient beliefs over modern understanding

Rezan Aslan makes the central point that Islam is in search of its own reformation similar to the protestant reformation that followed the enlightenment. He implies that this would solve many of these problems as it has to some extent worked in Christianity. He makes the valid point to compare the fundamentalist Islamic believers with the pre-enlightenment Christians Crusades. In many ways radical fundamentalist Islam is a pre-enlightenment mentality struggling to exist in a post-enlightenment world.

The one argument I have with this notion is that fundamentalism in both religions is on the rise not the decline. The enlightenment has if anything increased the rigid beliefs of fundamentalism as both Christian and Islam traditionalists fight to reject the modern world. I hope the Islamic reformation happens much faster and goes much deeper. I wonder if he is being too optimistic. Either way, this book is well written and is effective at communicating a complicated series of events over the course of the last 1400 years.

Dalai Lama in Atlanta?

http://www.dalailama.emory.edu/news.html

Hell frozen over part 2...

I made it through another Episcopal service. The big problem that I'm struggling with is that every creed, song, prayer, gold and silver ornament, and every action seems like a call for allegience to the beliefs of imperialized religion. I feel like the entire service is centered around this notion of gathering up the community and pledging unanimous support for doctrines created during the domestication of the gospel by the Roman Empire. Every prayer has the word trinity or virgin birth nestled in its language. I've been told to cross my fingers behind my back or think only on the metaphorical nature of the language, but this is just too much. I don't want to be constantly reminded about what I've grown to dislike about Christianity. I'm tired of being mad at church and this just forces me to stare the most ugly aspects of Christianity in the face every Sunday. I went there looking for freedom from these system of beliefs and instead they seem to throw those very beliefs up in my face with every word.

I'm completely baffled by this paradox. The Christian churches that have the most open theological views have tied their worship to the most blatant use of closed theological language and ritual. On the other hand, the protestant churches that worked so hard to strip away the creeds and formalized pledges to doctrines are now strictly enforcing their conservative doctrines on their members behind the scenes. What the hell is going on? Somebody explain this to me. One group is celebrating the language they don't believe and the other group is going to great lengths to not publicly say what they do believe. Is this some big cosmic joke designed to drive me to the point of saying "screw you guys, I'm going home"?

Barack Obama

The Obama Campaign has put together a great site. You can create a profile, blog, build groups, send messagees, and it even some fundraising tools (that wasn't a surprise)...

The official Danutz for Obama'08 blog... http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/danutz


Watch his announcement speech. I highly recommend it...
http://capitolconnection.sitestream.com/obamaforamerica/livewebcast.htm

Kiva.org

Thanks to my friend Don Harris, I've found this great site that allows individuals to fund micro-loans to the working poor around the world. It only took me a couple of minutes to get 2 loans setup. This could be more addictive than on-line poker!

www.kiva.org

Peace Be With You

Check out Levellers peace related blog who has started the Christian Peace Blogger network.

While you are feeling peaceful and particularly non-violent, buy a couple of copies of this very short but powerful book by Walter Wink and give them out to a few of your conservative friends. Amazon.com has plenty of used copies for under $5. I think it is one of the best introductions to the teachings of Jesus in a very traditionalist friendly package. He does a great job of presenting the non-violent path of Jesus without loosing the important political implications.

More God Questions

After a few posts about the Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan debates on this blog and some comments on Pastor Bob Cornwall's blog I wanted to explore the differences between having an idea of a non-interventionist God (a God that doesn't or won't intervene in the way of miracles and can't somehow know/plan the future) and an atheist view of no God(s) (the belief that there is nothing beyond what we can see and explain which can be labeled as God). I'm curious what other people that read the crap that I spew will have to say. Anytime you talk about questions of God's existence it gets pretty strange but there is something about writing this stuff down that seems to help me make sense of my own faith.

First, I think many atheists are actually non-interventionists but don't have the language to express the existence of God in a non-interventionist image so they say simply "there is no God". I'm not sure they would agree with my definitions above.

Marcus Borg offers the following dialogue to try and bridge the gap with some of the strict atheist views that often come from people like Sam Harris and I think it gets to the heart of the issue. Borg suggests the response "Tell me about the God which you don't believe in". The general atheist response sounds much like the last couple of books by Sam Harris which talks about all the horrible acts done on behalf of bad religion. Examples in the OT of a jealous, vengeful, God standing in judgement of mankind paint a horrible image of God as Israel blames everything bad they do and everything bad that happens to them on God. The reasonable response that Borg suggests to such an argument is simply - "Great, I don't believe in such a God either." It is helpful to me to realize that the early Christians were called atheists by the Romans because they refused to express belief in God. Of course for the Romans, Caesar was God. I agree with their refusal to recognize Caesar as divine but of course I don't have to stake my life on it as they did.

Another problem with Sam’s strict atheistic views is that he is trying to explain that God doesn’t exist. But what does the word "exist" mean? That word is all tangled up with the words “being” and “life” but that could be a mistake in this argument. It seems to me that existence has unfortunately come to mean that something is physical or is physically present in the universe but why must something be physical to exist? Does love exist? Even the most hard and fast theist will agree that God isn’t “physically present” in the universe. If God was physically present then we could see and touch God which we obviously can't do. Does God have to be composed of atoms in order to exist?

I think that what we mean by the word God is something more like an image that we create in our minds to represent what Paul Tillich calls “the ground of all being”. Sam Harris brings a valid call to let those horrible old images of God die. But our image of God is NOT God. Images can come and go but whatever force makes being and life possible will continue long after any of our mental images disappear. The most important question to ask is not "what image do we have of God?", but instead I think it is more valuable to ask "how does our image of God effect our life and the lives around us?".

I love Book TV

BookTV introduces some great books and I end up buying a book every time I turn it on. This weekend there were several good authors represented. The best was a debate/dialogue between Sam Harris, "Letter to a Christian Nation," and Reza Aslan, "No god but God". You can watch it online here.

I have to admit that I'm really beginning to like Sam Harris. I appreciate his ability to blatantly point out how absurd certain aspects of religion look to the outside observer. He doesn't understand the bible and he reads it just like a fundamentalist Christian but I still appreciate his opinions and willingness to open dialogue. He says things that I often want to say myself. However, I have seen how horribly people react when you try to shoot down their belief system so forcefully. I've made that mistake also, but now I try to take a softer approach. Sam Harris is a valuable asset to the progression of religion. To use metaphorical language, I believe that he is being used by God to heal Christianity and all modern religions. In that light I consider him to be a man of God and an important modern day prophet.

Reza Aslan did a great job of expressing a progressive understanding of scripture and faith. It was really a pleasure to know that people of all faiths can and do look at their own tradition through a modern critical lens. It was one of the best examples of interfaith dialogues that I've seen on TV. I've just ordered his latest book about the history of Islam and I can't wait to start it.

One comment that Sam Harris always makes that hurts his argument is that he always points to the horrible things that Israel blames on God in the Old Testament and assumes they must be believed as literal events and that the authors of the Bible were correct to credit them to God. I like those stories but I don't for a second think that God actually did any of them. Those stories tell us what Israel thought about God and how they used him as an excuse for doing evil things (like killing women and children and stealing land) as well as the reason for prosperity and hardship. These texts do NOT tell us what God told Israel to do or write about. I don't understand why people accept this idea. Just because a story is in the Bible it doesn't mean that we should endorse it or expect it to be factual. King David had a man killed and then took his wife but that doesn't mean we should follow that example just because it is "in the bible". All sorts of horrible things are done in Bible stories but they are there to show what happens when people do dumb things. This type of logic would be similar to hearing radical Islamic claims that they were told by God to fly planes into buildings and then assuming that God did actually tell them to do it. That would be silly.

The mythical OT stories and even the fictional (and exaggerated) elements in the NT are still valuable, not because they are historical facts, but because they tell us something about how certain ancient groups interpreted the world and expressed their faith through that interpretation. As modern Christians we should not always try to imitate the acts of these real and fictional people, but we should look at the lessons in these stories and apply those lessons to our lives.

Faith vs. Belief

There has been a debate on belief.net between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. I think the recent rounds of books by Atheists are good for people of faith. It helps to see your own logic through the eyes of outsiders and this is a wake up call that liberal faith isn’t making its views well known. Fundamentalists seem to have the monopoly on faith these days. It sucks that in this debate Andrew Sullivan is the one making the case for faith. Sam makes great points and Andrew doesn't seem to have the information to make a good case for liberal forms of faith.

The problem with Sam's argument and even his latest book is that he confuses "faith" with "belief". They are 2 different concepts. He is right to shoot down belief in unbelievable things and I agree that fundamentalists in all religions make that mistake, but he must understand faith in a modern and post-modern liberal context is about being confident that you and the world can be transformed into something better by following a particular path (religion). Faith should not be limited to belief that certain events happened as described in ancient texts. Beliefs (about afterlife, miracles, a theistic God, etc) are often combined with faith but are not essential to faith. The main idea behind modern/liberal theology is that we accept ancient beliefs are indeed problematic but we look to incorporate their ancient concepts of faith into a modern (and now post-modern) world view.

I agree with Sam in being anti-belief but I am not anit-faith. I have "faith" that we can change the world and I know that as a result, my faith in that idea has changed me. By changing me I don't mean it "saved me for some better status in an after-life". Instead I mean it changed my priorities and is still changing my character.

I’m convinced that better adult education (Marcus Borg likes to use the term “Adult RE-education”) can solve this problem. We need better theology taught in our churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, etc. Atheists like Sam Harris won’t have the respect within faith communities to combat bad theology from outside the faith however clear and concise theological education from within the world’s religions can make strides by re-educating the masses with a better foundation of faith.

The first step is for all religions to stop proclaiming their own ancient texts as “the one true divinely inspired Words of God”. Faith isn’t to be confused with the super bowl and no single faith group gets to “win”. All the major religions make this mistake and it is divisive as well as horribly damning to God’s image. Viewing scripture as literal history and literal words of God paints an evil picture of God. It transfers all the mistakes of earthly authors onto God. It also thrusts every interpretive mistake onto God. It forces us to think God is a redneck from Tennessee that was on the loosing side of the Scopes Monkey trial. It forces us to try and reason that God commanded Israel to kill innocent women and children or that God can’t transform our lives without spilling the blood of an innocent man in our place. With that view of God in hand it is no wonder people end up launching violent crusades or declaring jihad in God’s name.