Provocative questions ...

Christianity, Religion, & Politics

Is Christianity relevant today?

         What are the viable remnants of that faith?

How much of today's Christianity is related to the original?

       The name is retained; what else?

Does Christianity require democracy?

Can a politician be a Christian? Or vice versa?

Does Christianity encourage capitalism?

Answers at the bottom of the page, but no fair jumping ahead.

Christianity has been formative for American culture, or so we're told by early writers of our nation's story. Interestingly, and perhaps more accurately, western Christian practices and western culture have shaped each other over the centuries.

Despite the rise of the religious right, there's a long-term estrangement between early Christian and modern American values that is visible and growing.  "The Republican and Democratic parties are not merely uncomfortable, imperfect, homes for people of faith; they are prisons that artificially divide us and prevent us from coming together as a community to advance the common good."  A Christian alternative to America's broken political duopoly - Michael Stafford

But God is on our side, right?

Joshua had the same question for the sword wielding fellow he saw outside Jericho.  He asked, "Are you on our side or theirs?"  "Neither," came the answer, "but as the captain of the Lord's army have I come."  Read that as, "I didn't come to take sides, I came to take over."

No, God is not on our side.  

     The relevant question, are we on His?  

           How do we get there?

So then, the questions:

Is Christianity relevant?  
Of course it is, but perhaps the church has some catching up to do.

What remnant of the original remains?  
All of it.  Religious practices come and go, but the central elements of Christianity remain unchanged.

How much of American Christianity is related to the original?
The real thing is a small core surrounded by a whirlwind of life issues; how do I live in this culture or context, how can I serve His purposes in this time and place.  It's a stronghold of extraordinary peace surrounded by a blinding conflagration of violence and trouble, turmoil and fury; it's your refuge, your fortress.

Does Christianity require democracy?  
No.  Nor even personal freedom.  Nor denominations, nor massive organizations, nor hierarchies, nor authoritarian rule ...

Can a politician be a Christian, or vice versa?  
Sure; in Him, all things are possible.  These days though, even He might have some reservations.  :)

Does Christianity encourage capitalism?  
No.  Nor personal property nor the pursuit thereof.  

Are those things wrong?  No, they're just not necessary parts of a life of faith.  Sometimes, they might even be an encumbrance.

So, what are we going to do with what we know?

Most Powerful Good

The most powerfully good thing you might ever do is, just for a moment, care for another and do something for their betterment.  Anything.

(Kenya photo: our Guruguru kids - January 2013)

It doesn't take much to meet an important need in another's life.  It might be your child or another's.  A word of encouragement, a meal, a helping hand.  For some, a year's tuition ($40-$80) can make the difference, or a week's food ($7) perhaps.

Click here for a suggestion ...

There are many more like this one.

Easily done; just noticing and then doing.  
World changers, help bringers  ... powerful stuff from a simple choice.

Luke 10:25-37

Don't read this part.  It's from Einstein and others, and it's difficult.

The most powerfully destructive thing you might ever do in your lifetime is to see such a simple need and turn away.  Doing so destroys your soul as you choose your own distractions and mindless pleasures over the real life so close to hand.  Doing so consigns the one you see to the fringe, to the disenfranchised, to the unheard.  You've decided that you are the center of the universe after all, and in so doing, forfeited your own humanity.


I remember a fellow I worked with years ago.  We were talking about need in the developing world, and he was trying to persuade me he was a giving sort of person, I suppose.  He bragged about chipping in $20 in the collection plate when he went to church.  He didn't go often.  Considering his income, I don't think that really qualified as caring about others.

“Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Excuses for the inexcusable ...

(NC-17 subject) .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

WHY? BECAUSE F*** YOU, THAT'S WHY.

This particular expression of frustration is interestingly common across the less refined and more vocal segments of our culture.  Don't Google it unless you're ready for the flood of anger and imagery.  The real world we live in is a little rough around the edges.

Curious why such thinking might be so prevalent?

From Washington to Wall Street, folks find themselves fed up with excuses for the inexcusable.  One more reason for banker bonuses, one more excuse for Congress failing to pass a budget, one more reason for the multi-trillion dollar debt, ... none deserves a considered response; profanity seems the only fitting answer left to us.  Congress doesn't represent the citizenry, Wall Street doesn't serve the marketplace, our votes no longer count, and corporations own our government.  It's the answer they deserve; that's why.  At least that seems to be the thinking expressed.

These are interesting times from which we'll eventually emerge, of course, but popular culture informs us.  There are many things which will need to be dealt with, one way or another. 

Considering government's recent record, the anti-Christ would be an understandably popular alternative for many, as has been humorously pointed out a few times.

Dissent and change, frustration and protest, government and the governed, all are wonderful players in the human laboratory.  Our hope is that such conflict and the inevitable change it provokes will be beneficial.  Will it?  Judging from today, what are the best options available?

Comparatively speaking, our country is young still.  Following its first throes of shaping and learning, it finds itself troubled by the same issues which brought down great nations and empires.  Overspending at the expense of the citizenry, a rapidly rising gap between rich and poor, power serving itself, hubris and megalomania, we've seen it all in the history books.  

So what's next?  
               Thoughts? 

Welcome to Wall $treet

In the U.S., the average individual wage earner makes around $34K.  

On Wall $treet, the average income was recently reported as $362K. They're well paid and immune to prosecution, apparently.  Too big to jail, as has been said in halfhearted protest.

Until the world's financial marketplace is perhaps disassembled and rebuilt from scratch, we are faced with a well-equipped battle force with an impressive record of conquest, plundering, and indirect deaths now exceeding millions.

The suggestion to 'enter at your own risk' is sarcasm, of course; you can't get far enough away to be safe.

There's currently no place on earth that is safe from their reach.  Estimated deaths in sub-Saharan Africa range from 1.1 to 2.4 million from the world marketplace crash in '08/'09.  They're no longer with us, and Wall $treet has faced not one conviction, not one prosecution, not one admission of wrongdoing.  

If such things cause you concern, write your congressman before moving on.  Or drop a note to the White House at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

Truth Ver.0.6

What if you were being told a version of the truth?
    Just the part someone wanted you to know...

Michel Foucault

“Reality” is created by those who have power. One of postmodernism's key theorist Michel Foucault argues that whoever dominates or controls the “official” use of language in a society holds the key to social and political power.

Like when the Soviet Union was the ‘red menace’ or the ‘evil empire’; that’s what our leadership told us about it. The CCCP actually was all those things, of course; at least at the leadership level it was. Interestingly, their citizens were told similar things about us. Those were similarly true. The power play and posturing of nations was in the hands of the few.

The citizens of the Soviet Union were just people, though. Just like us, we discovered after the wall came down; just exactly like us in hopes for peace and prosperity and in desires for their children’s future. They and we were fed the lies of power players; it’s called propaganda. It works; both we and they were fed the fodder that keeps sheep happy and cooperative, and we ate it.  We did so without the proverbial 'grain of salt' that suggests we inquire a bit before blindly accepting.

In the 60’s, I remember an emerging alternative. It was volatile, radical, fractured, and demanding. The response of my government was violent and intolerant. It denied the claims made against it, that the war in Vietnam was immoral and based on lies, that the military/industrial interests were driving the nation down the wrong path. It took fifty years to put to rest that in basic substance, the radicals were correct. We were lied to in extraordinary depth and breadth. Our nation had become un-American.

We found that the Chinese were building nuclear weapons, perhaps 400, in order to take over the world; lies. America had at the time more than 10,000 and was improving their targeting precision; the Chinese were nervous, understandably.

Colin Powell holding a model vial
of anthrax while giving a presentation
to the United Nations Security Council

Down the road, we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; false, it later turned out. Our intelligence organization found massed troops on the Saudi border; also false.  Not mistakes, but selected reasons justifying a war already in the plan.  We traced chemical weapons; also false.

Radical, militant Islam isn't universal. Some of what we see is a response to a perceived American sponsored reshaping of the world. We've attacked them, or so it appears to them.  And we've not attempted to correct their thinking.  After all, they're irrational fanatics that cannot be intelligent or diplomatic; more misrepresentation.

Congressional studies over the last twenty years have been published; they show that America is distrusted around the world now. Folks are nervous about the nice folks that used to be their friends, and who now look like they are in fact conquering the world. The world admires our historic principles and uniformly distrusts our behavior. From their viewpoint, we do not live by the principles we advertise. Truth, justice, freedom, and democracy, all are in question if judged by our behavior outside our own borders; and inside too, sometimes.

President George W. Bush addresses the
nation from the Oval Office, March 19,
2003, to announce the beginning of
Operation Iraqi Freedom, "The people of
the United States and our friends and allies
will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime
that threatens the peace with weapons of
mass murder." The Senate committee found
that many of the administration's pre-war 

statements about Iraqi WMD were not
supported by the underlying intelligence.
(understatement, understandable but troubling)

In recent decades, regulatory changes gave us imaginary money and derivatives as a means to generate wealth apart from the legitimate marketplace. Things to buy and sell that extract monetary value from the legitimate marketplace. These aren't investments in food or machines or services; they're just bets on which way the wind will blow. Imaginary stuff and not connected to the real world.  That imaginary money, pumped from the legitimate marketplace, exceeds the GDP of the world several times over.  That means ...

Most of the money in the world is not tied to value any more; it used to be, but now it's tied directly to derivatives; that is most of the money in the world.  (Derivatives were gambling in the U.S. until Wall Street persuaded the government to change the law.)

Most financial transactions (15 times world GDP) are just foreign currency exchanges.  Use dollars to buy francs or whatever.  The financial industries spend little time on goods and services and most of their time on extracting wealth from the marketplace where the rest of us live.

Your money used to represent value.  X dollars = an ounce of silver.  Or more X dollars = and ounce of gold.  It crossed over to mean a bag of potatoes = nn dollars = a day's work = a ticket to Birmingham = a small bag of processed corn meal.  Goods and services; things of value.  Now it's also a wager; worth millions or nothing; all imaginary and completely disconnected from 99% of the people in the world.  Well, actually, it's a drain-line connected directly to their artery, pumping life blood.  Out.

So what have we done to the world? We had the chance to be community participants, to work together for good. Have we done well?  Are we well received?  Or is the world approaching the occupy/tipover point where such thinking is deadly.

We've been here before, of course; a tipover point, I mean.  There's still time to pick your side.

Speaking of choosing a side ...

"You're probably right, a man should have an opinion ... but those mountains have been there for 600 million years.  Long after we're gone, they'll still be right there.  Talking about who owns them is like two fleas arguing over which one owns the dog."  ~ Crocodile Dundee

The Uberwelt War Machine

America is at war, it appears, and against its own citizens in some cases; at least the unimportant ones.

Wars between nations are generally over territory and resources. Driven from the top, war focuses on some power or wealth at the expense of others. Individuals become progressively less valuable, more expendable and insignificant as you move down the chain of command. They matter less. 

Interestingly, we find that same wealth and power are the focus on Wall Street and in the international markets.  Lacking the freedom of former despots to invade a region and kill the residents, financiers create new ways to extract wealth and resources from others.  Others who matter less.

Wall Street and the EU spent two decades leading to the crash of '07/08.  Too big to fail, they were rewarded by governments at the expense of citizenry.  At the periphery, millions died.

“Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations.” — Noam Chomsky 

Thomas Jefferson said in 1802:
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency ..."

Wall Street and the international financial community, whom government serves unfailingly, have created an uberwelt, an over-world of imaginary wealth and imaginary plays.  It has virtually nothing in common with the real world, the source from which it extracts wealth.  For the moment, the financiers and their political playmates have the upper hand.  The gap between the wealthy and everyone else is widening as it has for decades, now at an impressively accelerating pace.  The inherent instability in such a structure is becoming clear as is the greed and arrogance of those who would facilitate their dream of luxury by burdening the poor to do so.

In 1988, then-Fed chairman Alan Greenspan stated, "What many critics of equity derivatives fail to realize is that the markets for these instruments have become so large not because of slick sales campaigns, but because they are providing economic value to their users."  But not everyone had a good feeling about this financial instrument. In his 2002 Berkshire Hathaway letter to shareholders, company chairman and CEO Warren Buffett expressed his concern with derivatives, referring to them as "weapons of mass destruction."  He wasn't worried enough.  The 'Great Recession' followed.

Didn't the banks pay back the bailout funds with interest?!  Spokespersons for government and industry point to the payback as justification, somehow, for their irresponsible behavior that caused the death of so many. 

• The middle-class lost a percentage of what they had; it will be another decade before they've reached the break-even point; did the payback cover that?  It's only the middle-class; they matter less.
• The poor lost ground and the safety net is strained beyond capacity; did the payback cover that?  It's just those poor; they matter less.
  
• Elsewhere in the world, the price of corn doubled as a result of government mandates for ethanol and Wall Street's misbehavior; five years later, it has yet to recover.  Did the payback cover that?  Oh, never mind; they died; by the hundreds of thousands up and down the east coast of Africa, they starved.  But it's OK, they matter less.  At least to Wall Street and their government playmates, they don't matter at all. (do not follow the link without parental permission)

What goes around comes around, sadly.  If you plant, you harvest.  We needn't concern ourselves with providing the punishment that the greedy deserve; absent a radical change of heart, they've already bought it.

  

Of great concern though is the suffering caused among the less fortunate in our own country and around the world.
  

Feel free to shift sails and join in.  It's a different world than it was just a few years ago.