01Aug

Selling Body Parts, and Giving Away Our Collective Soul

“You have the forehead of a prostitute, you refuse to be ashamed” (Jeremiah 3:3). Thus says God to his rebellious kingdom. The “forehead of a prostitute” is an ancient expression that referred to an inability to blush. It bespeaks a loss of shame, a seared conscience, a calloused soul, and a hard heart.

What is shocking about the recently released Planned Parenthood videos isn’t just the scandal of fetal parts for sale by abortion providers, but the disturbing nonchalance (nay, defiance) with which it is being greeted by many. (I’ll pause, of course, to acknowledge that Republican presidential candidates have made a lot of noise about this).

A writer named Robin Marty at cosmopolitan.com opined on July 14: “I’ve read the emails. I’ve watched the short-version video. I’ve read the website and the other anti-abortion action groups’ press releases. I’ve even poked through all the primary sources posted so far in the “Document Vault.” Now, frankly, I’m just going to yawn.”

A conservative website called Newsbusters has helpfully counted up the minutes and concluded that “the broadcast news shows spent more time in one day on Cecil the Lion than they did on the Planned Parenthood videos in two weeks.”

The media have begun to cover this because they aren’t able to cover it up. When they have taken up the story, it has generally been to sympathize with Planned Parenthood. Lester Holt on NBC’s Nightly News intoned that Planned Parenthood is “under fire” from “activists”. This headline from Reuters proclaims: “Planned Parenthood slams secret video as false portrayal of fetus tissue program”. The “Grey Lady” leads off an online article in this way: Abortion opponents on Tuesday renewed their campaign against Planned Parenthood, with immediate impact among Republicans in Congress and the presidential race. (The New York Times online).

The dominant narrative of the media seems to be that this is a “stunt” or “fraud” (as though the Planned Parenthood representatives are scripted actors), perpetrated by a “far right” (and therefore dismissable) group. (As an aside, I find it odd that we never hear of any “near right” groups, or of conservatives that aren’t also “extremists”).

Salon.com has screaming headlines like “What the Planned Parenthood hoax really proves: Right-wing extremists have no qualms about destroying peoples’ lives” and “The Planned Parenthood hoax is the GOP’s Trojan horse: How Republicans are hijacking the national conversation” (www.salon.com).

Newsweek (article here) implies soothingly that one can disregard the source of the material, because David Daleidan once wrote an anti-abortion article for the conservative outlet “The Weekly Standard”, and made reference to “prayer life”.

Even the Obama White House has chimed in: The White House on Thursday waded into the debate, calling the group behind the sting videos “extremists on the right.” (CNN article) Always keen to show that they are thinking for themselves, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said. “And Planned Parenthood has indicated that’s what has occurred here.”

I am not going to opine here about the legality of the fetal parts trade–I don’t doubt that in fact it is legal, just as abortion is legal. “Legal” doesn’t equal “good”, of course. I’ll accept that Planned Parenthood doesn’t make that much money per body part–as if that has any relevance. Perhaps people can even justify the fetal body parts market, by representing fetal biomedical research as a silver lining of hope in the dark cloud of abortion. I furthermore won’t even question here the claim that Planned Parenthood may provide many good medical services to women that are not related to its abortion provision.

At the end of the day, though, all of this public conversation depressingly reveals the coarsening of our culture. Our outspoken ones flash with anger that any would dare shine a spotlight on this tragedy, but do not blush with shame that it has even been occurring. It reveals just how far askew our moral compass has drifted in recent decades. Our national discourse has become an echo chamber of cynicism and spiritual death.

We have sold baby parts, and bought a prostitute’s forehead in the bargain.

31Jul

Wayward Pines

I caught the finale of the Fox Miniseries “Wayward Pines”, another entry in the interesting genre of the dystopian future. The series began with solid characters and an air of mystery–FBI agent Ethan Burke wakes up after a car accident, to find himself in the hospital of a small Idaho town. He wanders around this sleepy locale which has the veneer of a lovely community, but something sinister lurks just beneath the surface. He quickly finds that he can’t seem to leave–all roads circle back toward town. A heavily fortified fence surrounds the valley, beyond which are heard unearthly howls, and we see glimpses of menacing creatures. What is going on with this creepy town and its fearful residents?

Spoilers here: Stop reading now if you plan to watch the series!

Flash forward 10 episodes, and we have our answers. We have learned that the town is really the brain child of a visionary scientist, who foresaw the end of humanity and created the town as a fortress and humanity’s last refuge. The town’s residents were all cryo-frozen in 2015 and then reawakened 2000 years into the future. The rest of humanity has meanwhile evolved into cannibalistic monsters (referred to as “aberrants” or “abbies”) that hunt and kill anything on feet.

In the final episode, the scientist, David Pilcher, reveals that he isn’t done playing God. He doesn’t like it that Ethan Burke has “outed” him and his operation to the rest of the townspeople. He has decided that it is time to pull the plug on this “batch” of humans by turning off the power to the protective fence. Like many a screen villain before him, he listens to opera music in his opulent mountain lair and watches the progress of the cleansings. His own henchmen turn on him and he is killed, but not soon enough to end the destruction he has unleashed. The mutants swarm in and kill most of the town fairly quickly in a set of fast paced scenes that seem reminiscent of zombie apocalypse movies like “World War Z”. Ethan Burke rescues some of the townspeople, who make it into the fortified complex that overlooks the city. Ethan blows himself up in an elevator shaft to kill many of the “Abbies” and saves the others. His son is conked on the head by debris, and awakens from a coma three years later.

Ethan’s son finds that things have come full circle to where they were at the beginning of the series. The town seems to be back to normal, but this is illusory. In fact, a cadre of cold-blooded fanatical youth have also survived, and managed to overpower the adults. Everyone who survived the mutant apocalypse has been put back into cryo-freeze and a new batch of humans is living in terror under the malignant reign of these fanatical youth. A statue to David Pilcher stands in a park where the bodies of three people dangle, hanged for trying to leave Wayward Pines.

I have to admit that I was left a bit crestfallen by the final twist at the end. Did Ethan really sacrifice himself only to have the “Hitler Youth” take over? If this is the fate of humanity, is it worth saving? These are the interesting questions that have theological implications as well. Even as we humans show brilliance in the face of hostile natural forces, using all of our cleverness and ingenuity to survive and thrive, we nonetheless remain our own worst enemies. Despite the spark of divinity–that “image of God”–that is imprinted upon us, we are fallen creatures. “Wayward Pines”, like Holy Scripture, doesn’t give an optimistic appraisal of our fortunes, when we are left to our own devices. The final questions for humanity remain open: Will we destroy ourselves? Will we play God, or rather seek the real one?

27Jul

1500 Year Old Leviticus Scroll Revealed

A burned scroll so fragile that it could not be unrolled has finally yielded up its secrets, thanks to medical technology and the ingenuity of a computer programmer.

This week a computer scientist announced that his team found a way to unroll the scroll virtually. Working off x-ray scans of the artifact, specialized software detected the layers of parchment and digitally unwound them, revealing for the first time Hebrew characters written on the scroll about 1,500 years ago.

“I’ve actually never seen the actual scroll,” says Brent Seales, a professor at the University of Kentucky. “For me, that’s a testament to the power of the digital age.”

You may read more here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/1500-year-old-text-has-been-digitally-resurrected-burned-hebrew-scroll-180956031/?no-ist

13Jul

Thoughts on the Supreme Court Ruling (Yes, That One)

The recent Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, has for now closed (perhaps we should say foreclosed now) the debate on marriage that has been raging in the secular world, and has legally redefined marriage to include relationships other than heterosexual couples. In light of this landmark ruling, some are jubilant, others dismayed. The temptation for us is to say nothing, let our progressive friends have their day of rejoicing, and remain focused on our core ideals. However, we would be remiss to refrain from commenting on so important a moment.

Unfortunately, the media’s full court press on this issue has left Christians being pilloried as being “against” something that is now seen as wonderful. I will sidestep the temptation to speak of what we at this site may or may not be against, in order to affirm instead what we are for.

1. We are for love. Love between people is a reflection of God’s love for us. “God is Love” declared St. John the disciple. Love is a gift, and a very great one. Love is about something deeper than romance and genitals, as I have written elsewhere. Love at its best is “other elevating” rather than “self gratifying”. It sacrifices all for its beloved.

2. We are for gay, bisexual, lesbian, and transgendered persons, as well as those who have other kinds of sexual appetites. We love you as we would any other brother or sister. Love means, however, that we cannot offer you a poisoned gospel. Blessing and absolving anything that God has not condoned is an act not of true love, but of love’s opposite, and it does you no favors in eternity.

3. We are for sexuality, which is a gift from God. It is a garden of delights. However it is clear from sacred scripture, which we recognize as God’s revelation, that for our own good, and for that of our children who need stable families, God has put a wall around that garden. We recognize that we are not above our Creator, and therefore we respect that wall. We respect it even to our personal detriment. We respect it even in the face of a potential loss of fellowship with those who now find such a stance to be outrageous. Obeying God has never been without cost. We have always been asked to “surrender all” for the cause of Christ. Again, that is the result of our love for God–we honor our Beloved.

4. We are for marriage. We believe, with scripture, that marriage is sacred and holy, instituted by God. We believe that it is a pillar of civilization. We mess with it at our own peril. Marriage has been understood for millennia as the union of man and woman. Let me be clear on one point–it is heterosexuals, and not homosexuals, who have done the most damage to marriage. And the church, the institutionalized body of Christ, has also let the world down on this one. We have contributed to the confusion about the definition of marriage. We should repent of the bigger sins that we have allowed to slip by us in the 20th century, and put the “holy” back into “holy matrimony.”

We have not created stable and loving marriages.
We have been complicit as the culture cheapened and redefined “love” itself as something other than the sacrificial love that is advocated in the Bible.
We should have refrained from blessing terrible relationships between abusive heterosexual couples when we were aware of them.
We (mainly Protestants in this case) should not have caved on the issue of mixed faith marriages if we knew full well that means a loss of children to a foreign god.
Better premarital counseling and guidance might have helped some couples avoid making mistakes, or else given them tools to improve communication, reduce stress, and remain committed during the rocky times in a marriage.
We must be honest and admit that no-fault divorce and easy remarrying has done more to shred the institution of marriage than anything gay marriage could do.

We already have allowed society to redefine this institution from a lifelong stable union into an intellectual fig leaf for transient sexual gratification between consenting adults. It is a short step to either lose the fig leaf and just fornicate, or to extend it to other kinds of relationships. Both of these have happened, and often the church has been complicit.

5. We are for children. We believe, as is also demonstrated in numerous studies, that they thrive best and prosper most when raised in a stable two parent family with a mother and father who love them. I would go further and say that they should be in a loving Christian family.

6. We are for the U.S. government. As people who love God, we would hope that our nation would seek after Divine blessing rather than curse. Still, we know that we enjoy the fruits of liberty and have lived under a more benign government than most in history have known. Christians in Ancient Rome were under a hostile regime, yet sought to be best citizens they could be, except where conscience forbade it (such as in the worship of Caesar as a god). We also aim to be our nation’s best citizens. We will continue to pray for the U.S and its leaders. We can and should pray for revival. We should always ask that the holy Spirit of God would blow through our land, to refresh the churches and to bend the hearts of the people back toward their God.

7. We are for truth. We must not give up on speaking the truth for the sake of popularity or other personal gain. The civil definition of “marriage” has changed, but God’s definition of “holy matrimony” has not. The corollary of “what God has joined together let no man tear asunder” is “what God has not joined together, let no man try to do so.”

8. Most of all we are for God, the maker of all things, to whom we owe our very existence. God didn’t merely flick us into existence and go away, but has loved us and offered us a relationship. We have been invited to enter the divine dance. We are still to be witnesses to God’s love in a hostile world. We must “walk in love as Christ loved us”. We must stand fast to our calling to share the good news. That hasn’t changed.

10Jul

A Quote by Jonathon Edwards

“The more excellent any thing is, the more will be the counterfeits of it.” Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1753)

05Jul

A Quiet Hero Passes Away

Nicholas Winton, a Briton who said nothing for a half-century about his role in organizing the escape of 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, a righteous deed like those of Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, died on Wednesday in Maidenhead, England. He was 106.

Powerful Words From Shooting Victim’s Sister

“…she taught me that we are the family that love built. We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive. I pray God on your soul.”

–Sister of DePayne Middleton Doctor, quoted in the Washington Post.

27Jun

Cheap grace

In the aftermath of the tragic shooting in South Carolina, a shockingly racist hate crime, this bit piqued my interest:

What too many whites seem to demand from these families’ statements, however, isn’t really grace. As the journalist Jamelle Bouie pointed out, people like Santorum insist on what the German theologian and anti-Nazi freedom fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” — the “preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance” from those who have sinned. The forgiveness they want is so cheap that I can only call it “Wal-Mart grace”: low-priced but shoddy, destructive of real community and built on exploitation.

Source: LA Times editorial online at: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0625-baptist-charleston-forgiveness-20150625-story.html

The author goes on to suggest a theological error–that whites need to atone for their years of racism. As if they could do so. In fact, the heart of the gospel is this: We cannot atone for our own sins. Only Jesus can pay that price.

However, while we can’t atone for the past, we can choose a better future. We go forward trying to live differently, and making what amends we can out of love and gratitude. The word that the author should have chosen here is the word “repentance”. This is the word that Bonhoeffer chose. For even as Jesus says “I forgive you”, he also says, “go, and sin no more.” To do otherwise is indeed to cheapen that precious gift of grace.

25Jun

Sleepy Hollow: Apocalypse Word Salad

“Sleepy Hollow” is a show that trades on a formula: This or that cursed object or ritual is about to usher in the apocalypse, or visit some doom or tragedy upon an innocent girl, or both. It reminds me a bit of an old show called “Friday the 13th” in which a curio shop owner collected occult objects that the heroes were trying to get out of public circulation.

The first episode of “Sleepy Hollow” has a headless axe-wielding British horseman emerging from a barn to terrorize a sleepy upstate New York community. In what seems a mashup of Irving’s Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane also mysteriously awakens 200+ years after facing the horseman in the 1700’s. In this telling, Crane is no wimpy schoolteacher, but rather a revolutionary war hero, played enthusiastically by Tom Mison, who is resurrected to take on this hideous beast. He teams up with a street wise female cop (Nicole Beharie), who becomes his partner of sorts. Some of the enjoyment in the early episodes is watching him cope with modernity, even as she must come to grips with the realization that there may be supernatural forces at work.

Fairly quickly, things take a turn for the apocalyptic. The headless horseman is none other than one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who is about to usher in the End of Days.

The Bible is treated in typical media fashion as a book of arcana that contains a recipe and doomsday calendar for the earth’s end. (Of course, to be fair, there are some Christians out there that view parts of it this way, too). The Bible is discarded for the most part except to offer up a frightening passage here and there from Revelations or Ezekiel. I haven’t watched enough to see if they are even using real verses or just making stuff up. In any case, even if the verses are real, there is no context or theological framework to make sense of them. The show basically puts the scripture in a blender and hits “frappe”.

True believers will be saddened to note that although demons abound, there is very little of God to be found anywhere. The forces in play are demons, not angels. The wrath of Molech is substituted for the wrath of God. And of course, the End of Days can be averted if humans can just stop that next portal from opening, or disrupt a profane ritual involving dribbling blood on some tied up female victim, or just get get that [insert occult object here] off the streets.

Perhaps they should have stopped with the pilot. The proverbial “jumping the shark” occurred somewhere fairly early on. Two seasons now have seen a proliferation of creatures and occult entities to rival even what the old 1960s “Dark Shadows” soap opera could envision at its campiest. (A Barnabas Collins vampire would fit right in; Alas, but Jonathan Frid was born too early). At least “Dark Shadows”–and “Ghostbusters”, to name another that pops to mind–didn’t take themselves too seriously. In “Sleepy Hollow”, that sickening sound you hear isn’t the rolling of heads onscreen, but of eyes offscreen, as the show chugs along, introducing pied pipers, cursed Judas coins, good witches fighting evil ones, a demon named Molech snarling at his human servants, a Frankenstein monster created by Benjamin Franklin, and so on.

So consider watching this for the atmosphere (though this seems to get less creepy as the silliness mounts), and perhaps for some unintentionally campy fun. But don’t expect to learn anything of eschatological or biblical importance. You won’t find much similarity with Washington Irving’s tales, either, aside from some names.

06Jun

Policeman buys groceries for struggling shoplifter

In Tarrant, Alabama, a woman was stopped for shoplifting this past December. When she mentioned that she was struggling to feed a family, the officer, William Stacy, ran inside and bought her groceries.

The officer’s kind act was caught on camera by a bystander who posted the clip online. It quickly went viral racking up more than 650,000 views.

Johnson’s family of six, including her two daughters, two grandchildren and a niece, have been living off of disability and welfare. The welfare check she was supposed to receive this month had gotten lost in the mail, according to AL.com.

And while Stacy’s decision to lend a helping hand was a generous one, the kindness didn’t stop there. The Tarrant Police Department has since signed Johnson’s family up for a local toy drive and collected food donations from the community, eventually delivering two truckloads of groceries to the 47-year-old’s apartment.

Read it all: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/officer-buys-eggs-for-gma-caught-stealing_n_6310630.html

This is a most welcome change from all those police brutality stories.