WWJT (Who Would Jesus Torture)?

Well, this is disturbing news: A recent Pew Research Center poll asked those surveyed, "Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?" The Center categorized the respondents by their primary religious affiliation and by their frequency of attending church services. 

Check out the link for the complete findings, but here's a quick summary. 54% of those who attend religious services at least weekly said that torture was justifiable at least sometimes, while only 42% of those who rarely attend religious services said it was sometimes justifiable. There's more fun - among the "unaffiliated" (i.e. non-religious), only 40% fell in the "often" or "sometimes" justifiable camp, while a hearty 62% of white evangelical Protestants were so inclined. 

That's right, the more often you attend church and the more self-identified evangelical you are, the more likely you are to think that torture is defensible. Um, hello, what the bloody hell are the majority of regular churchgoers learning in their churches?? 

Followers of the Prince of Peace...yeah, right...

How's your 20/40 Vision?

As we near the end of Lent, I’d like you to take a moment to reflect back upon the season through which we have just traveled. For those in my own church in particular, I’d like to ask you how you did with that 20/40 Challenge I issued at the beginning of Lent – you remember, the challenge of “giving up” 20 minutes a day to be spent in prayer, meditation, or other contemplative practice. If you're not someone who heard that challenge at the beginning of Lent, you can still read along and get the gist of things - for more details, you can view the original post on my church's website, along with a couple of great resources for contemplative practices.

If you were one of those who heard the initial challenge, did you accept it? If you didn’t, why not? If you did, what aspects were the most challenging? For me, on some days at least, it was too easy to rationalize away the setting aside of time (even just 20 minutes!). I’d tell myself that if I kept my mind quiet while I drove around to do a few errands, or as I cooked a meal, or whatever, then maybe that would count for today. Obviously, those compromises fall short of the ideal. However, there is an element of truth in them. I found that when I actually was dedicated to my contemplative practice, I was better able to face the various mundane aspects of my daily living with a more equanimous attitude, a more meditative spirit. When I really did the hard work of meditation, I began to see the beginnings of a glimmer of a glimpse of a transformation at work in me. Of course, when I blew off my practice, that faint flickering was often too easily blown out by circumstances around me.

Rather than discourage me, however, these observations make me want to do more, to keep working, to maintain my contemplative practices, to continue my spiritual journey in the spirit of Wesley’s notion of moving onward toward “perfection”. So for those of us who practice the Christian spiritual path, as we exit Lent and enter the celebration of Easter let’s take this opportunity to renew our covenant to be working together, striving onward toward spiritual maturity and enlightenment, and growing into the fullness of life and love.

Where the hell have you been?

By “you”, of course, I mean “me”, and that question is intended to be directed toward me from y’all (if there are still any of y’all reading this). I will dispense with useless excuses and simply plunge into some of those random musings you’ve come to expect of me.

I’ve been spending some time in my garden these past few days. Looking at it, you might think that I’m using the word “garden” a bit too loosely, because right now all that’s apparent is a bunch of relatively well-plowed dirt (and a perennial rosemary bush in one corner). There aren’t even any seeds hidden below the surface. What you don’t see is the amount of work I’ve put into this ordinary-looking dirt to make it ready (hopefully) to welcome some tomato and basil (and some other yet to be determined) plants in a few days, after the predicted storms pass.

You see, the dirt in my garden is not what you’d call naturally fertile stuff reminiscent of an open patch of Iowa field. No, this is by nature good thick Georgia red clay, not very well suited for the deep planting of tomatoes. So here’s what I’ve done – and if reading details about home agriculture is about as appealing to you as eating Georgia red clay, feel free to skip to the next paragraph, and you’ll still be able to get the gist of what I’m saying. First, I dug up the whole damn thing by hand (well, OK, with a shovel, but you know what I mean). It’s only about 100 square feet, but remember, there’s thick Georgia red clay just a few inches below the surface. Said digging also entailed pulling up some serious protruding roots at about every other shovelful. After a couple of hours of this task, I was pretty sore. I also tested the soil to figure out what additional nutrients it might need. I let this newly turned soil air out for a couple of days, and then returned to add a few things to the soil - gypsum to break up the clay, bone meal to raise the phosphorus level, and general organic tomato fertilizer to enrich the soil – tilling the garden (with a power tiller) after each addition. Finally, I added a layer of fresh topsoil and worked that in to the garden.

Welcome back to those of you who skipped that agronomic tangent! Why on earth would I bore you with all that? Not because I’m trying to prove my farmer creds, but because I wanted to remind you of the vast amount of work involved in growing food. Too often, we think of food as something that comes from the store, rather than from the earth. Now, I don’t want to turn this into a rant on sustainable food, but if you want to know more about that topic just Google Michael Pollan and follow the links (The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a great book by him). And if you don’t know anything about the sustainable food movement, definitely spend some time checking that out.

What I’m really after here is a spiritual analogy, or even just a character development one. For too many of us who profess to follow some sort of spiritual path, we harbor false expectations about the ratio of work to results. That is, enlightenment is not something that suddenly appears out of the sky, nor is it something that happens once for all time, after which we’re left in a perpetual state of transcendent wisdom and loving kindness. No, the process of enlightenment, or in the Wesleyan Christian tradition “moving on toward perfection”, is a gradual and constant one: gradual because most of us will never quite get there, and constant because we’re either moving forward or we’re (sometimes imperceptibly) slipping backward.

When was the last time you challenged yourself to do something that required work, or was out of your comfort zone, or simply was hard (without being something you were required to do)? Are you, perhaps, too comfortable in your comfort zone? Are you willing to settle for mediocrity, or will you stretch your boundaries? As my man the Jedi Pastor noted in his recent post, sometimes it’s good to get outside of yourself, outside of your usual comfort zone (Warning: PETA members should avoid that link!).

Are you really content to be where you are for the rest of your life on Earth? Or do you think, or wonder, or suspect that there might be something more? Are you afraid to reach for something more because you think you won’t get there, or because you think you’ll find out that it’s not really there after all? Why aren’t we willing to learn, to grow, to push ourselves? Are we lazy, or are we afraid of challenges? Are we satisfied remaining where we are, or are we simply afraid to exchange the known for the unknown?

The Christian calendar is approaching Holy Week, the culmination of Lent. It’s easy for many Christians to go straight from the triumphant entry of Palm Sunday to the triumphant resurrection of Easter, completely bypassing Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, past all the suffering that actually leads to the triumph of Easter. That’s also what we want to do in our own lives – bypass the difficult parts, and get right to the triumphant resurrection. But that’s not the way it works. We have to go through the challenging parts to get to the good parts. We have to travel through the wilderness to reach the Promised Land. For that matter, we might not ever get to the Promised Land, or we might not recognize it when we do get there. But one thing is certain – in order to get to the Promised Land, we have to travel through a lot of desert first.

A Purpose Driven Inauguration?

Many commentators have made much of President-elect Obama’s choice of Rick Warren, Pastor of Saddleback Church and best-selling author, to deliver the invocation at the Presidential inauguration later this month. The main issue, according to many who object to his selection, is that Warren has been an outspoken opponent of gay rights, adamantly campaigning in support of Proposition 8 in California (banning gay marriage) and decrying gays and lesbians as being outside of the approval of God.

The real problem with Pastor Warren, at least from a liberal’s point of view, is that he isn’t a totally reprehensible character in the vein of many members of the Christian Right. In fact, Warren and his congregation have done an amazing amount of good things throughout the world in the name of God’s love. However, it is true that on the issue of our LGBT brothers and sisters, he has fallen short of what I would consider to be the truly radical, truly inclusive love of God, having compared gay marriage to incest, pedophilia, bigamy, and the like.

So what’s the appropriate response? Should President-elect Obama have chosen such an outspoken opponent of LGBT rights to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, granting this man a place of honor and prestige before an international audience? Or is this choice, as my friend Harry Knox (who heads up the Human Rights Campaign’s Religion and Faith Program) has made the case, an outrageous slap in the face of all gay and lesbian Americans?

I acknowledge the pain of discrimination and exclusion of the LGBT community, particularly with respect to the Church. I do think that Rick Warren was totally out of bounds in his previous comments, and that his views are grounded in bad theology. At the same time, however, one of President-elect Obama’s main themes throughout his campaign was to emphasize dialogue and rapprochement between Americans with vastly differing points of view.

I think that if you believe that Rick Warren is a decent man who holds terribly wrong and hurtful views when it comes to sexual orientation, then perhaps you could hold out the prospect of changing his mind on that issue, and I believe that the best way to change someone’s mind is to engage them rather than shut them out and demonize them (even if they are demonizing you). As Paul wrote, we are to be devoted to one another in love and outdo one another in showing honor (Romans 12:10). In other words, I believe that we are called to be more generous to others than they are toward us.

If President-elect Obama wants to reach out to the evangelical community and invite them to be part of the national dialogue, he could have done a lot worse than choosing Pastor Warren to deliver this invocation. However, at the same time he reaches out to the evangelical community he also needs to reach out to the LGBT community by making an unequivocal statement of support for equal rights, and even a statement that he believes that God’s love knows no boundaries and harbors no judgment on the basis of sexual orientation. In this way, he could show his willingness to engage with those persons whose religious beliefs differ from his on certain issues while also inviting them to have a seat at the table – but not allowing them to exclude others from that same right of taking their own place at the table. Or as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote:

“Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you…But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.”

Georgia runoff election December 2

Remember that voting thing we did last month? Well, it's time to try it again, thanks to Georgia's antiquated election laws that require candidates to receive not just a plurality, but a majority of votes cast. In this case, however, I'm grateful for the chance to take another shot at a couple of offices. Here are the major races in Georgia for the December 2 runoff election, with my endorsements in bold and brief comments:

U.S. Senate: Jim Martin v. Saxby Chambliss

Sure, it would be nice to have a 60-seat majority in the Senate, but does anyone actually think that the Senate Democrats could impose perfect party discipline on themselves? And remember, that 60-seat majority includes the two Independent Senators, including our old friend Joe Lieberman. Nevertheless, Saxby is an embarrassment and a doofus, and needs to be replaced (although he's not as much of a doofus as our former Senator Zell Miller, as SNL helped remind us recently).

Georgia Court of Appeals: Sara Doyle v. Mike Sheffield

Although Doyle wasn't my first choice in the initial election, she's clearly the better candidate in this runoff. Here's all you need to know - this is a race for a very important and influential judgeship in the state, and Sheffield is a darling of the Georgia Christian Alliance. He has already gone on record as opposing Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas (the latter being the case in which the Supreme Court struck down laws that criminalized consensual homosexual sodomy as violating an individual's right to privacy). Electing Sheffield to the Court would tilt it significantly to the right.

Public Service Commissioner: Jim Powell v. Lauren ("Bubba") McDonald

McDonald is an old hack of a state pol who is in the tank for just about every industry you can think of that he regulates from his perch on the PSC. Oh, and for good measure, he also filled out the Georgia Christian Alliance's questionnaire; it's ever so helpful to know that someone who is running to regulate state utilities is opposed to abortion and gay rights (and when did favoring coal-fired plants and opposing carbon taxes become a "Christian" position??).

Now, go vote!! Runoffs have historically seen much lower turnout than general elections, so your vote is even more important this time around.

Church marketing - what not to do

Now this is funny.

What if Starbucks marketed like the church? Click here to see this video parable, but be prepared to be needled.

Not sure I agree with all of the theology on their original site, but you have to admit there's some cleverness afoot here.

Election post-mortem

I sent in a portion of that prior post (Elections and the Church) to my local paper, and much to my surprise they accepted it for publication, so you can see me in print here once again.

It definitely feels good to be done with the election season. It's as though I can get back to the rest of my life now. Does anyone else have similar feelings?

And just to prove that everything is better under President-elect Obama, check out this image:



Yes, that's my scorecard from yesterday, the first day after the election, with a personal best two-under-part nine holes (I've never shot nine in under par before), complete with my first ever eagle on a short par four (chipped in from just off the green). Admittedly, it was a short/executive course, but I'll take golf success wherever I can get it. Clearly, this is a sign that the universe has seen a significant realignment...

Electoral predictions

OK, I've been resisting this all election season, mostly out of superstitious fear. However, I am now going to follow the advice of Oscar Wilde, "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it". Thus, here are my predictions for the outcome of the Presidential race.

Obama popular vote: 52%
Obama electoral vote: 364

McCain popular vote: 45%
McCain electoral vote: 174

If you really want to geek out on this stuff, click on this link to see the projected electoral map I created this morning.

Having voted early, I can now spend my day in search of free coffee from Starbucks and free ice cream from Ben & Jerry's (I think I'll pass on the free Krispy Kreme donut, though).

GO VOTE!!!

Elections and the church

The following is the text of a brief talk I'll be giving in my church this morning. If you like what it has to say (with the potential exception of specific denominational references, depending on your flavor of church), feel free to borrow excerpts for your own house of faith, especially the final paragraph. And one reference note - the phrase at the end is from RFK, quoting Aeschylus (and although this phrase is popularly attributed to that Greek tragedian, it has actually never been found in any of his extant works).

I’d like to take just a couple of minutes this morning to talk about the upcoming election. Because after all, you haven’t heard enough about the election yet, right?

Here’s a quick exercise, and at the end of it I expect all of you to have your hands in the air (even though we’re Methodists). How many of you have already voted? Great! Keep your hands up. Now, how many of the rest of you are certain that you will vote on Tuesday? Excellent.

OK, you can put your hands down now. I said that I expected everyone to have their hands in the air because I believe that we, as faithful Christians, have a solemn responsibility to exercise our civic duty by participating in our nation’s electoral process. Given our recent history of elections, no one can say that your individual vote doesn’t matter.

Along with this duty to participate is an equally important duty to be informed, to use your God-given intellect to make reasoned choices. To that end, I have a stack of copies of the United Methodist Church’s voter guide, as published by the Board of Church and Society. Unlike some of the other voter guides floating around other churches this morning, this guide specifically does not endorse any candidate or party. What it does do is set forth the United Methodist Church’s official positions on a variety of issues, drawing from published statements such as the Social Principles and the Book of Resolutions, and compares these with official statements from the platforms of the two major political parties. You can pick up a copy in the narthex on your way out today.

And finally, along with our responsibility to be informed participants, we have what I consider to be an even greater task. Come Wednesday there will be electoral winners and losers, joy and sadness, celebration and resentment. I believe that we, as people of faith, must take the lead in helping bring our nation back together after this election season. As Jesus said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” So I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, regardless of who you support, regardless of who receives your vote, and regardless of who wins or loses, at the end of the day let us come together as one people, let us bind up each other’s hurts, and let us move forward in prayer for our new political leaders. Let us work to reunify this nation that God, for a time, has entrusted to us, and let us, by our words and deeds, do our part to make gentle the life of this world. Thank you.

Election recommendations (Georgia)

Since I have received a few calls/texts/emails already asking my opinion on some of the candidates and questions on the ballot, I figured it might be helpful to list a few of my recommendations (I hesitate to call them "endorsements", since that implies someone in some position of authority might actually care what I think!). I welcome feedback, questions, follow-up comments, etc. 

I'm not going to list each and every race, because so many of them are district-specific and outside of my scope of knowledge, and others are ones where I don't have a strong opinion. Here goes:

President/VP: Obama/Biden

U.S. Senate: Jim Martin

State Court of Appeals: Christopher McFadden (although there are some other good candidates here too, like Edenfield and Meyer von Bremen)

Public Service Commission: Jim Powell

State Senate District 42: David Adelman

DeKalb County offices:

Superior Court: Tom Stubbs

Superior Court: Johnny Mason (note - there are two different judge races here)

School Board, District 2: Marshall Orson

School Board, District 9: Ernest Brown (although I know less about this race)

State Constitutional Amendments:

#1 - No, although I certainly understand why some would vote yes (and the Sierra Club has endorsed this one). Basically, it would give tax breaks to owners of large tracts of forest land who keep their land as forests for 15 years (owners of tracts under 200 acres already get this tax break). 

#2 - Yes. This allows for the funding of TADs (Tax Allocation Districts), such as funding the Beltline, by using money from school districts if they so choose.

#3 - No. This would give private developers the ability to raise bond money to pay for the development of "private cities".

DeKalb County Referenda:

Yes for CEO presiding over meetings with the Commission setting its own agenda

Yes for various homestead exemptions

Undecided for school uniforms (mostly I just think it's dumb that we vote on a nonbinding referendum on this topic - isn't this what we elect school board members to decide?)

Again, feedback, comments, and questions are welcomed. And whether or not you agree with me, you should go vote!

Election info

For those of you in DeKalb County who aren't sure about things like your State House and Senate and County Commission and School Board Districts, here's a helpful site from the County:

https://dklbweb.dekalbga.org/voter/street.htm

I'm considering posting a list of my "endorsements", and will hopefully have something up on that soon.

And as you vote, keep in mind the words of that sage political/social commentator Jimmy Buffett:

Are we destined to be ruled by a bunch of old white men
Who compare the world to football and are programmed to defend?

A new candidate

Consider this option (click here).

Oh yes, and more serious posts to follow soon.

Bono on the bailout, and Al Gore the rabble-rouser?

Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative today, Bono said:

"It is extraordinary to me that you can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can't find $25 billion to save 25,000 children who die every day of preventable treatable disease and hunger."

Meanwhile, Al Gore spoke about the severity of the climate crisis and called for an uprising of direct action protests against the construction of new coal-fired plants:

“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration." (emphasis added)

Ponder on those two statements for a while.

Truthiness, circa 2008

I have been doing my best to resist commenting on the Presidential election news cycles, being dominated as they have been by such inanities as porcine makeup. Yet I no longer can resist the onslaught of truthiness brought to bear by the Republican candidates. Yes, truthiness. Those of you who are fans of the Colbert Report know whereof I write. On its premiere episode, Stephen Colbert proclaimed, "We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist…I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart. And that's exactly what's pulling our country apart today. 'Cause face it, folks; we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats and U.S. Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms. No, we are divided between those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart.”

Later, in a non-satirical (i.e., out of character) interview, Colbert explained his satire, saying “Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word…It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?…Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.”

This is exactly the playing field of the current election cycle, particularly since the selection of Governor Sarah Palin as the GOP’s Vice Presidential candidate. It’s not about what is true, it’s about what a certain segment of the populace wants to be true. It’s the notion that if you say something, all I have to do is disagree with your statement and I automatically have put forth an equally valid statement. For example, if I defend evolution and you counter by saying that creationism (or “intelligent design”, an oxymoron if ever there was one) is a “competing theory”, you have elevated intelligent design to an equal level of truthiness as evolution, simply by positing it as a valid alternative. Likewise, if you assert loudly and often enough that the causes of global warming are uncertain, then they really must be uncertain.

You have to live in the world of truthiness to be able to pull this off. Imagine someone challenging the scientific theory of gravity as being “just a theory”. Do you really want to try jumping off the roof to test this “just a theory”? If so, go for it, and I will include you in next year’s Darwin Award nominations.

The Republican candidates continue to utilize this satirical concept in shameful ways. When they run commercials about Senator Obama asserting that a law he supported means that he was in favor of “comprehensive sex education” for kindergarteners, even though what the bill really did was to encourage age-appropriate education for young children to help protect them from sexual predators, they commit truthiness. When they object to Obama’s commercials about Senator McCain noting that McCain is out of touch and can’t even compose emails by claiming that McCain’s war injuries prevent him from using a typewriter and therefore he can’t possibly compose emails, even though McCain himself has said in interviews that his cell phone is his favorite gadget, then they commit truthiness. (Gee, if only someone would invent a cell phone that you could use to send emails…wow, I wonder when they’ll come up with that…)

Similarly, when your son bravely joins his unit to deploy to Iraq, and you give a speech extolling the virtues of his unit because they will “be there to defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans”, you engage in truthiness because you ignore the supreme fact that the evil terrorists who attacked America on September 11, 2001 were not Iraqis, and that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia didn’t even exist on September 11, 2001. With all due respect to the honorable members of Private First Class Track Palin’s unit, the 1st Stryker Brigade, 25th Infantry Division’s Combat Team, they are not being deployed to fight the enemy that attacked us on 9/11.

KA and SI, help me out here. The idea that by repeating a meme often enough it takes on a degree of truth – dare I say, truthiness – is repugnant to those of us who believe in actual truths, who think that there are in fact objective measures of truth and falsehood, and who believe that intelligent, reflective persons will comprehend these measures and will apply them to the most critical choices of our generation. And if they don’t, I suppose they will get the President they deserve…and I will get a sizeable incentive to emigrate to Sweden or Canada.