Ever have one of those insights where you’re going along doing or saying something and all of a sudden you get an “ah-ha” moment? I had one of those tonight, in the midst of a presentation on the current conflict in Lebanon - my faith community asked me to speak to a gathering, based on my experience covering the Lebanon desk in the Conflict Resolution Program at The Carter Presidential Center many moons ago.
So here’s my insight – perhaps some of you will find it glaringly obvious, but I have yet to hear this idea put quite this way in the media anywhere (maybe I should forward this post to Tom Friedman?). If you are among my American readers, you are supporting both sides of the current conflict in Lebanon with your dollars.
How is this, you might ask? First, your tax dollars go to the U.S. government, which gives Israel several billions of dollars of aid each year, from which Israel turns around and purchases weaponry from American defense contractors, with which to wage the current conflict. Second, your dollars purchase gas for your vehicles (and many other petroleum-based products), a portion of which flows to Iran, who uses those dollars to buy weapons to send to Hezbollah, with which to wage the current conflict. And for those of you who might object to whether your gas purchases directly fund Iran, the macroeconomics of commodity markets function such that all sellers benefit from all buyers, whether directly or indirectly.
So there you have it – your dollars buy the weapons for both sides of this conflict. Oh, and as a side note, who profits from your dollars in both instances? American corporations – either the military industrial complex defense contractors or Big Oil. And who ultimately pays the price? Immediately, Lebanese civilians do. In the long run, we all do.
10 August 2006
07 August 2006
Back in the blogosphere again
I offer my apologies to my devoted readers (both of them – well, OK, maybe there are more than two out there) for my extended absence. No, I wasn’t actually enjoying a six-week vacation; it’s just that when one is self-employed and is away for a couple of weeks, there’s no one else to take care of the work in one’s absence. That, and I suppose I’ve been waiting to find something stirring enough to comment on it.
Guess what? I found something. This AP article (as found in the NY Times) cites a recent Harris Poll that 50 percent of U.S. respondents still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in March 2003. What’s worse, that figure has actually increased from 36 percent last year.
These opinion findings fly in the face of the facts, including the Iraq Survey Group’s (a fact-finding mission comprised mostly of American experts, with some Britons and Australians also) comprehensive report that took 16 months and over $900 million to complete. That report declared that Iraq had dismantled its NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) weaponry programs in 1991, and it had no such WMDs as of March 2003. Naturally, Saddam wanted to restart those programs if at all possible, but as of the beginning of the U.S. invasion there were no such weapons arsenals in Iraq.
Why does the American public persist in believing this concocted story? Perhaps it’s because American politicians and media outlets persist in pushing it. A couple of weeks before the survey, Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) released a report stating that 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since 2003. What the press release failed to note was that these munitions were abandoned shells, almost all of which were 15 years old or older, and their degraded chemical contents rendered them utterly unusable as weapons. It’s sort of like finding some old Civil War era Confederate shells and concluding that the South has an actively armed conspiracy to rise up in rebellion against the North again.
Various media outlets such as Fox News, talk radio, and bloggers latched onto this report and trumpeted its supposed findings in screaming headlines. Could it be that these simplistic, misleading headlines led devotees of such right-wing media outlets to believe the implied conclusions, without a critical examination of the underlying facts? Is the American public (or at least half of it) that easily misled? Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, a graduate of Harvard College and the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a 1992 MacArthur Fellowship recipient, describes himself as “flabbergasted” at these poll numbers, saying that “This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence”.
Is this true? Have we finally entered into such an Orwellian society that large segments of the American public are unable to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from spin? By limiting themselves to their preferred slanted media outlets (left and right), are Americans willingly complicit in their ignorance? Has the proliferation of specialized media made it no longer possible to inform the American electorate in any reliably objective manner? If you only get your news from Fox News and talk radio, how can you ever have a doubt in your mind as to the propriety of the current war in Iraq? Similarly, if you only get your news from The Nation and other left-leaning outlets, how can you ever approve of the use of American military force? And if you get your news only from the major networks, well, how can you have any informed grasp on reality regardless of political slant?
Which brings me to today’s word (with apologies to Stephen Colbert): sycophant. Merriam and Webster define this as a servile self-seeking flatterer. Remember the old children’s story about the emperor who has no clothes? The sycophants would be the ones who told him he looked absolutely fabulous in his new outfit, even though he was actually butt-naked. So I ask you, can’t we at least arrest these media outlets for public indecency when they walk around butt-naked in their sycophantic ravings? How about politicians? Bill Clinton got in a world of trouble for exposing himself to only one intern (and he’d probably call it “butt-nekkid”). Yet here are all these naked wanna-be emperors parading around on the national stage – where are the cries of public indecency against them? I tell you this, if we’re going to return America to its time-honored sense of old fashioned morality and decency, we have to do something about all of these naked politicians and media personalities. So I say to America, stand up for traditional morality, and put some clothes on those emperors!
Guess what? I found something. This AP article (as found in the NY Times) cites a recent Harris Poll that 50 percent of U.S. respondents still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in March 2003. What’s worse, that figure has actually increased from 36 percent last year.
These opinion findings fly in the face of the facts, including the Iraq Survey Group’s (a fact-finding mission comprised mostly of American experts, with some Britons and Australians also) comprehensive report that took 16 months and over $900 million to complete. That report declared that Iraq had dismantled its NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) weaponry programs in 1991, and it had no such WMDs as of March 2003. Naturally, Saddam wanted to restart those programs if at all possible, but as of the beginning of the U.S. invasion there were no such weapons arsenals in Iraq.
Why does the American public persist in believing this concocted story? Perhaps it’s because American politicians and media outlets persist in pushing it. A couple of weeks before the survey, Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) released a report stating that 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since 2003. What the press release failed to note was that these munitions were abandoned shells, almost all of which were 15 years old or older, and their degraded chemical contents rendered them utterly unusable as weapons. It’s sort of like finding some old Civil War era Confederate shells and concluding that the South has an actively armed conspiracy to rise up in rebellion against the North again.
Various media outlets such as Fox News, talk radio, and bloggers latched onto this report and trumpeted its supposed findings in screaming headlines. Could it be that these simplistic, misleading headlines led devotees of such right-wing media outlets to believe the implied conclusions, without a critical examination of the underlying facts? Is the American public (or at least half of it) that easily misled? Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, a graduate of Harvard College and the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a 1992 MacArthur Fellowship recipient, describes himself as “flabbergasted” at these poll numbers, saying that “This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence”.
Is this true? Have we finally entered into such an Orwellian society that large segments of the American public are unable to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from spin? By limiting themselves to their preferred slanted media outlets (left and right), are Americans willingly complicit in their ignorance? Has the proliferation of specialized media made it no longer possible to inform the American electorate in any reliably objective manner? If you only get your news from Fox News and talk radio, how can you ever have a doubt in your mind as to the propriety of the current war in Iraq? Similarly, if you only get your news from The Nation and other left-leaning outlets, how can you ever approve of the use of American military force? And if you get your news only from the major networks, well, how can you have any informed grasp on reality regardless of political slant?
Which brings me to today’s word (with apologies to Stephen Colbert): sycophant. Merriam and Webster define this as a servile self-seeking flatterer. Remember the old children’s story about the emperor who has no clothes? The sycophants would be the ones who told him he looked absolutely fabulous in his new outfit, even though he was actually butt-naked. So I ask you, can’t we at least arrest these media outlets for public indecency when they walk around butt-naked in their sycophantic ravings? How about politicians? Bill Clinton got in a world of trouble for exposing himself to only one intern (and he’d probably call it “butt-nekkid”). Yet here are all these naked wanna-be emperors parading around on the national stage – where are the cries of public indecency against them? I tell you this, if we’re going to return America to its time-honored sense of old fashioned morality and decency, we have to do something about all of these naked politicians and media personalities. So I say to America, stand up for traditional morality, and put some clothes on those emperors!
06 July 2006
Musing abroad
Dan is currently musing abroad, on holiday in Europe. He will return soon with tales of the virtues (or lack thereof) of left-leaning agnostic countries, old churches, traditional and modern cuisines, and the pleasures and perils of 20 hours of sunlight per day.
20 June 2006
The best of times, the worst of times
There’s a lot of news out there these days about progress (and the lack thereof) in religion, specifically Protestant denominations. Several large American mainline denominations have had conventions and conferences, both national and regional, of late. Note this USA Today article about various denominations, particularly the Episcopal Church USA and the Presbyterian Church (USA), and their ongoing debates over same-sex unions and ordination. At the time of this writing, the Episcopalians are still holding their General Convention in Columbus, Ohio – this is a triennial conference of the Episcopal Church throughout the USA. They are still debating resolutions about whether to express regret to the global Anglican community regarding the ordination of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as a bishop a couple of years ago. In a hopeful sign of progressiveness, however, they elected a woman (and a liberal one, theologically speaking), Katharine Jefferts Schori, to be their new “Presiding Bishop”, which is sort of like being the chief Archbishop over the whole country. Bishop Schori is a very interesting woman – she earned a Ph.D. in oceanography in 1983 and worked with the National Marine Fisheries Service before changing career paths and entering the ordained ministry, and is apparently a strong advocate for the Millennium Development Goals. Naturally, there are some Episcopalians who are unhappy about her election – although they say their unhappiness stems not from her gender, but from her progressive theology.
Meanwhile, a recent regional Conference of the United Methodist Church was a mixed bag of religious tricks. On the bad side, during a debate on an resolution about bringing the troops home from Iraq, one delegate addressed the Conference by reading a passage from the Quran about killing infidels and the like, and cited this passage as evidence that Muslims are inherently violent, and therefore we'll never be able to cease the war on terror until we subdue them all. Apparently this good Christian brother isn't familiar with Psalm 137, where the psalmist writes (verses 8-9) “Babylon the destroyer, happy is he who repays you for what you did to us! Happy is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against a rock.” Nor is he probably familiar with Hosea 13:16, “Samaria will become desolate because she has rebelled against her God; her babes will fall by the sword and will be dashed to the ground, and pregnant women will be ripped up.” Funny, sounds like Christians have their own violent past, doesn't it?
In other words, Christianity doesn’t have an exclusive angle on peacemaking and love, nor does Islam have an exclusive angle on a violent past. All of us religious types have histories we need to overcome, to evolve beyond. Unfortunately, some religious types are stuck in the past, or want to defend the past and are fearful of evolution (spiritual as well as biological). We who are not, I believe, are obligated to continue striving for enlightenment and understanding, both within ourselves and throughout our faith communities. Anything less will condemn us to the ash heap of history, because history is inherently progressive and forward-moving.
Should we hope or despair? Should we be optimists or pessimists? I reached one tentative conclusion this past week – I think I might try to be a spiritual optimist and a political cynic. That is, I do think that history inevitably moves forward, and human enlightenment has no choice but to grow and expand. The alternative, I suppose, is species extinction. I don’t think that this progress is neatly linear – reformations always spawn counter-reformations, and the forces of retrenchment get pretty fierce when they begin to perceive that the struggle might not turn out their way. As noted author (and former Episcopalian priest) Barbara Brown Taylor put it, "human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God." Here’s my question: If the God you worship is in such dire need of your protection, what kind of deity is he? I could say the same thing about the so-called “Defense of Marriage” amendments kicking around Congress and various state legislatures - if your marriage needs to be defended from two gay men or two lesbians who love each other and are monogamous with each other and want to get married to each other, perhaps you should be less concerned with them and more concerned with what’s going on in your own marriage.
Meanwhile, a recent regional Conference of the United Methodist Church was a mixed bag of religious tricks. On the bad side, during a debate on an resolution about bringing the troops home from Iraq, one delegate addressed the Conference by reading a passage from the Quran about killing infidels and the like, and cited this passage as evidence that Muslims are inherently violent, and therefore we'll never be able to cease the war on terror until we subdue them all. Apparently this good Christian brother isn't familiar with Psalm 137, where the psalmist writes (verses 8-9) “Babylon the destroyer, happy is he who repays you for what you did to us! Happy is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against a rock.” Nor is he probably familiar with Hosea 13:16, “Samaria will become desolate because she has rebelled against her God; her babes will fall by the sword and will be dashed to the ground, and pregnant women will be ripped up.” Funny, sounds like Christians have their own violent past, doesn't it?
In other words, Christianity doesn’t have an exclusive angle on peacemaking and love, nor does Islam have an exclusive angle on a violent past. All of us religious types have histories we need to overcome, to evolve beyond. Unfortunately, some religious types are stuck in the past, or want to defend the past and are fearful of evolution (spiritual as well as biological). We who are not, I believe, are obligated to continue striving for enlightenment and understanding, both within ourselves and throughout our faith communities. Anything less will condemn us to the ash heap of history, because history is inherently progressive and forward-moving.
Should we hope or despair? Should we be optimists or pessimists? I reached one tentative conclusion this past week – I think I might try to be a spiritual optimist and a political cynic. That is, I do think that history inevitably moves forward, and human enlightenment has no choice but to grow and expand. The alternative, I suppose, is species extinction. I don’t think that this progress is neatly linear – reformations always spawn counter-reformations, and the forces of retrenchment get pretty fierce when they begin to perceive that the struggle might not turn out their way. As noted author (and former Episcopalian priest) Barbara Brown Taylor put it, "human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God." Here’s my question: If the God you worship is in such dire need of your protection, what kind of deity is he? I could say the same thing about the so-called “Defense of Marriage” amendments kicking around Congress and various state legislatures - if your marriage needs to be defended from two gay men or two lesbians who love each other and are monogamous with each other and want to get married to each other, perhaps you should be less concerned with them and more concerned with what’s going on in your own marriage.
02 June 2006
Tongues of fire?
In Western Christianity, this Sunday is Pentecost Sunday. For those of you somewhat unfamiliar with the Christian calendar, this holiday celebrates the occurrence in the early Church wherein the Holy Spirit is reported to have descended on the gathered followers of Jesus like “tongues of fire”. According to certain gospel accounts, the post-resurrection Jesus promised his disciples that although he’d be leaving soon (ascending to heaven), they would receive this indwelling Holy Spirit, which in later Christian teachings became regarded as the third person of the Trinity (the others being “the Father” and “the Son”).
What happened on Pentecost, according to the record of the Book of Acts of the Apostles, was that the frightened disciples of Jesus, left alone after he went on up to heaven, were gathered together in a house when all of a sudden this wind blew through, and these tongues of fire descended on their heads, and they all started speaking in different languages – languages recognizable to the travelers of various nationalities gathered in Jerusalem at the time.
(An interestingly humorous and oft-overlooked side note: Some who heard this talk thought that perhaps the disciples were merely drunk. Peter, in their defense, said that they weren’t drunk, because it was only nine o’clock in the morning. Note that he didn’t say “Oh no, we’re good followers of Jesus, we’d never be drunk.” No, he merely argued that it was too early in the morning for them to be drunk yet. But I digress…)
Nowadays, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians often practice this phenomenon of speaking in other languages or tongues, technically known as glossolalia. It is seen as a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit in a particular believer – often concomitant with a special receiving or baptism of that same Spirit. It’s occasionally associated with ecstatic prayer, but also can be part of a quieter devotional practice.
That’s all fine, but here’s my rant on the current practice – and this can apply to a lot more than just glossolalia. The emphasis too often winds up being on the individual believer and the individual practice. Rather than looking at what one believer can or can’t do, or whether that believer or another is filled with a particularly holy or enlightened spirit, let’s focus instead on the oneness of the Spirit that’s supposedly doing all this indwelling. The point of the story about the early disciples of Jesus isn’t that they all had special language skills because of their special relationship with the divine spirit; rather, the point is that this spirit, working through them, was able to bring together an incredibly diverse crowd of folks from all nations by speaking to them in ways they all could understand.
If you’re thinking that I’m continuing with the theme of my last post – that whole underlying unity of the cosmos thing - you’re catching on. I also wanted to include a comment from my friend the Psych Pundit (you can find a link to his blog on the side of this page - although his schedule has precluded him from updating it as frequently as he’d like, it’s still quite a good read). PP noted in an email to me that my last post made him think of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and paleontologist who lived and worked in the first half of the 20th Century. He propagated such concepts as the noosphere, a sort of higher level of consciousness interconnecting all humans (or perhaps all sentient beings), and the Omega Point, a final unity toward which all creation is evolving together. PP’s comments, in essence, were that Teilhard stressed that our most profound interconnectedness will ultimately occur at this higher-order level of consciousness, as opposed to the lower-order level of quantum field constituent parts.
I think that the book I mentioned might agree with PP’s analysis and comparisons with Teilhard – perhaps it was only my clumsy rendering of those ideas that made it seem otherwise. When you think about it, Teilhard’s collective interconnected consciousness sounds a lot like various Buddhist concepts, all of which go back to this underlying unity of all things. Hey, if Jung can have a collective unconscious, why can’t we have a collective consciousness also?
Some folks have even posited the notion that the Internet is an early concrete step toward creating the noosphere. A really interesting aspect of this (well, interesting to me, at least) is that this evolution toward an Omega Point is at some level a conscious evolution, and that probably as we progress in this evolutionary process, it becomes more and more of a conscious process.
So are we yet at a point in human evolution when we can begin to evolve consciously? Can we start taking steps to evolve in ways that will be beneficial to all of humanity, to all sentient beings, to the entire planet, to all that is? One can only hope that we’re getting there. The alternatives don’t seem very appealing for our species.
What happened on Pentecost, according to the record of the Book of Acts of the Apostles, was that the frightened disciples of Jesus, left alone after he went on up to heaven, were gathered together in a house when all of a sudden this wind blew through, and these tongues of fire descended on their heads, and they all started speaking in different languages – languages recognizable to the travelers of various nationalities gathered in Jerusalem at the time.
(An interestingly humorous and oft-overlooked side note: Some who heard this talk thought that perhaps the disciples were merely drunk. Peter, in their defense, said that they weren’t drunk, because it was only nine o’clock in the morning. Note that he didn’t say “Oh no, we’re good followers of Jesus, we’d never be drunk.” No, he merely argued that it was too early in the morning for them to be drunk yet. But I digress…)
Nowadays, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians often practice this phenomenon of speaking in other languages or tongues, technically known as glossolalia. It is seen as a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit in a particular believer – often concomitant with a special receiving or baptism of that same Spirit. It’s occasionally associated with ecstatic prayer, but also can be part of a quieter devotional practice.
That’s all fine, but here’s my rant on the current practice – and this can apply to a lot more than just glossolalia. The emphasis too often winds up being on the individual believer and the individual practice. Rather than looking at what one believer can or can’t do, or whether that believer or another is filled with a particularly holy or enlightened spirit, let’s focus instead on the oneness of the Spirit that’s supposedly doing all this indwelling. The point of the story about the early disciples of Jesus isn’t that they all had special language skills because of their special relationship with the divine spirit; rather, the point is that this spirit, working through them, was able to bring together an incredibly diverse crowd of folks from all nations by speaking to them in ways they all could understand.
If you’re thinking that I’m continuing with the theme of my last post – that whole underlying unity of the cosmos thing - you’re catching on. I also wanted to include a comment from my friend the Psych Pundit (you can find a link to his blog on the side of this page - although his schedule has precluded him from updating it as frequently as he’d like, it’s still quite a good read). PP noted in an email to me that my last post made him think of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and paleontologist who lived and worked in the first half of the 20th Century. He propagated such concepts as the noosphere, a sort of higher level of consciousness interconnecting all humans (or perhaps all sentient beings), and the Omega Point, a final unity toward which all creation is evolving together. PP’s comments, in essence, were that Teilhard stressed that our most profound interconnectedness will ultimately occur at this higher-order level of consciousness, as opposed to the lower-order level of quantum field constituent parts.
I think that the book I mentioned might agree with PP’s analysis and comparisons with Teilhard – perhaps it was only my clumsy rendering of those ideas that made it seem otherwise. When you think about it, Teilhard’s collective interconnected consciousness sounds a lot like various Buddhist concepts, all of which go back to this underlying unity of all things. Hey, if Jung can have a collective unconscious, why can’t we have a collective consciousness also?
Some folks have even posited the notion that the Internet is an early concrete step toward creating the noosphere. A really interesting aspect of this (well, interesting to me, at least) is that this evolution toward an Omega Point is at some level a conscious evolution, and that probably as we progress in this evolutionary process, it becomes more and more of a conscious process.
So are we yet at a point in human evolution when we can begin to evolve consciously? Can we start taking steps to evolve in ways that will be beneficial to all of humanity, to all sentient beings, to the entire planet, to all that is? One can only hope that we’re getting there. The alternatives don’t seem very appealing for our species.
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