A walk for the president

h/t AllenS

"At a Berlin church, Muslim refugees converting in droves"

"Zonoobi, a carpenter from the Iranian city of Shiraz, arrived in Germany with his wife and two children five months ago. He is one of hundreds of mostly Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers who have converted to Christianity at the evangelical Trinity Church in a leafy Berlin neighborhood."

Like Zonoobi, most say true belief prompted their embrace of Christianity. But there's no overlooking the fact that the decision will also greatly boost their chances of winning asylum by allowing them to claim they would face persecution if sent home.

Martens recognizes that some convert in order to improve their chances of staying in Germany — but for the pastor motivation is unimportant. Many, he said, are so taken by the Christian message that it changes their lives. And he estimates that only about 10 percent of converts do not return to church after christening.

"I know there are — again and again — people coming here because they have some kind of hope regarding their asylum," Martens said. "I am inviting them to join us because I know that whoever comes here will not be left unchanged."

Being Christian alone does not help an applicant, and Chancellor Angela Merkel went out of her way this week to reiterate that Islam "belongs in Germany." But in Afghanistan and Iran, for example, conversion to Christianity by a Muslim could be punished by death or imprisonment, and it is therefore unlikely that Germany would deport converted Iranian and Afghan refugees back home. (read more)

Better make that conversion authentic then.

Is ending the War on Drugs the Christian thing to do?

"The New England Conference of United Methodist Churches voted in favor of a resolution on Saturday to call for an end to the Drug War using Christian principles, according to a release from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)."

The resolution states:

In the love of Christ, who came to save those who are lost and vulnerable, we urge the creation of a genuinely new system for the care and restoration of victims, offenders, criminal justice officials, and the community as a whole. Restorative justice grows out of biblical authority, which emphasizes a right relationship with God, self and community. When such relationships are violated or broken through crime, opportunities are created to make things right.”

They then go on to mention an extensive list of concerns and reasons to end prohibition, such as public health, violent trafficking, and countless innocent lives lost or thrown into overcrowded prisons.

Does this mean some sort of gay marriage accommodation is not far behind?

Worrying about the fate of the faith, what should the Christians do?

Post same sex marriage Supreme Court decision David Brooks suggests Christians....

Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution.

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex... 

Consider a different culture war, one just as central to your faith and far more powerful in its persuasive witness.

We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.

Social conservatives could be the people who help reweave the sinews of society. They already subscribe to a faith built on selfless love. They can serve as examples of commitment. They are equipped with a vocabulary to distinguish right from wrong, what dignifies and what demeans. They already, but in private, tithe to the poor and nurture the lonely.

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse...

I don’t expect social conservatives to change their positions on sex, and of course fights about the definition of marriage are meant as efforts to reweave society. But the sexual revolution will not be undone anytime soon. The more practical struggle is to repair a society rendered atomized, unforgiving and inhospitable. Social conservatives are well equipped to repair this fabric, and to serve as messengers of love, dignity, commitment, communion and grace.

Top voted up comment there...

While I agree with everything you say here, David, the truth is that, if your Social Conservatives were to do what you suggest, they would be Social Liberals, the reincarnation of Dr. King. Young people have no interest in Right Wing Christian values not merely because those values are anchored in sexual repression, but because they also contain strong elements of racism, denial of climate change, materialism, and hypocrisy. Apparently Jesus was an arch capitalist, a proponent of greed and guns, and an opponent of health care. These RW Christians have mingled radical-Republican ideology with Christian values for so long that it has become impossible to disentangle them. So youngsters are throwing it all out and starting over. I can only say, amen to them.

"Religious conservatives are the targets of discrimination, lawyer says"

"Religious conservatives are the ones being discriminated against for their stance of conscience." said Jordan Lawrence a veteran attorney who in 2006 represented a female photographer in one of the cases widely cited in the “religious freedom" law.

“Nobody has a religion that says they have to deny service to gay people, the way the other side portrays this issue,” he said. “That completely distorts reality and makes this seem like a segregated lunch counter in the South.”

He added: “I’ve had a long time to ponder this and I can’t think of a single person who has said ‘My religion says I can’t sell goods and services to gay people.’ Nobody.”

What some are saying, he insisted, is that they cannot be a party to a ceremony in which marriage is defined differently than between one man and one woman—or serve as an advocate for such a marriage.

People such as website designers, videographers, social media specialists and advertising agencies that devise campaigns—if asked to advocate political or religious platforms— have a right under the law to decline

“They don’t have a standard product – it’s a message they have to formulate to put out there, but people want to ignore the fact that asking a [Christian] website designer to create a website that God does not exist could create some crisis of conscience.”

The threshold for denying services in a religious protection case, he said, is whether the task required by the religious person is “expressive.” Does the job involve some sort of creativity?

Here, Jordan Lawrence cites a couple of instances, one, which made it's way to the New Mexico Supreme court, where a concurrence accompanying the court’s opinion, one of the justices wrote that the Huguenins (a photographer) “now are compelled by law to compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives,” adding “it is the price of citizenship.”

The second instance, an example where this time a governor was singled out for her Christian belief, did not go to the courts, but it did make the news.

In 2012, Sante Fe, N.M., hair stylist Antonio Darden made news when he said he would no longer cut the hair of Gov. Susana Martinez—or offer her the secret hair coloring recipe he designed just for her—because he disagreed with her opposition to gay marriage. Although his stand did not involve a religious protection law, Lorence used the anecdote to make a point.

“The governor’s aides called not too long ago, wanting another appointment to come in,” Darden, who is gay, told a local television station at the time, "Because of her stances and her views on this, I told her aides no. They called the next day, asking if I’d changed my mind about taking the governor in and I said no.”

Lorence said the media rallied behind Darden.

“The stories said ‘Wow, what a principled guy. They treated him like a hero because the governor violated his beliefs,” Lorence said — and the fervor caught on.

“Waiters and waitresses in the area vowed not to provide service to the governor if she came in to eat because of her stance on same-sex marriage,” he said.

Lorence believes laws that protect religious convictions are in place for a reason, and should not be politicized.

“Because this hairdresser was on the right side of the political debate, he got a pass in the press,” he said. “It’s wrong to view religious liberty laws as a fortress of the conservatives, that if you wipe out laws protecting religious liberty you’ve somehow seized a strategic stronghold of the enemy and brought them closer to defeat.”

Reached at his shop, Dardon told the Los Angeles Times that he had every right to deny service.

How can the hairdresser not see that it is HE who is singling out people, indeed punishing the governor for her Christian beliefs?

"Sharia law or gay marriage critics would be branded ‘extremists’ under Tory plans"

“Anyone who expresses an opinion that isn’t regarded as totally compliant with the Equality Act could find themselves ranked alongside Anjem Choudary, Islamic state or Boko Haram,” he (Simon Calvert, Deputy Director of the Christian Institute) said.

He added: “How many times a day do intellectually lazy political activists accuse their opponents of ‘spreading hatred’?

“The left does it, the right does it, liberals do it, conservatives do it, it is routine.

“Hand a judge a file of a thousand Twitter postings accusing this atheist or that evangelical of ‘spreading hatred’ and they could easily rule that an EDO (Extremism Disruption Order) is needed.

“It’s a crazy idea – the Conservatives need to drop this like a hot brick.”

Why would anybody want to hold a hot brick without a proper glove?


Never mind... smart-alecky internet.

It Happened To Me: "I Didn't Know I Was Working For A Christian Marketing Agency"

“Alright, that was an easy one. I’ll give ya another,” said Rob, and he quoted another verse from the Bible. Not being a religious person in any way, but also not wanting to cause any trouble, I buried myself in my article about cottages in Northumberland and ignored the conversation. I figured maybe it just happened once in a while. When I told my husband about it over dinner that night, all he could say was, “Welcome to Lake Mary.”

 

"In all the jobs I’d worked, I’d never heard anyone so much as ask anyone about their religion or faith, much less have a group discussion about it in the office. But this was my first time working in Lake Mary, home of Christian entertainment channel, Good Life 45, among other things. I wondered if this was a more common occurrence the closer you got to the Bible Belt. I hoped it was just a first day fluke and left it at that." (read more)

 

“What do I love when I love my God?”

The last two interview questions posed to John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University. The interview was conducted via e-mail, by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and published by the New York Times.

G.G.: "If Derrida doubts or denies that there’s someone who guarantees such things, isn’t it only honest to say that he is an agnostic or an atheist? For most people, God is precisely the one who guarantees that the things we most fear won’t happen. You’ve mentioned Derrida’s interest in Augustine. Wouldn’t Augustine — and virtually all the Christian tradition — denounce any suggestion that God’s promises might not be utterly reliable?"

J.C.: "Maybe it disturbs what “most people” think religion is — assuming they are thinking about it — but maybe a lot of these people wake up in the middle of the night feeling the same disturbance, disturbed by a more religionless religion going on in the religion meant to give them comfort. Even for people who are content with the contents of the traditions they inherit, deconstruction is a life-giving force, forcing them to reinvent what has been inherited and to give it a future. But religion for Derrida is not a way to link up with saving supernatural powers; it is a mode of being-in-the-world, of being faithful to the promise of the world."

"The comparison with Augustine is telling. Unlike Augustine, he does not think a thing has to last forever to be worthy of our unconditional love. Still, he says he has been asking himself all his life Augustine’s question, “What do I love when I love my God?” But where Augustine thinks that there is a supernaturally revealed answer to this question, Derrida does not. He describes himself as a man of prayer, but where Augustine thinks he knows to whom he is praying, Derrida does not. When I asked him this question once he responded, “If I knew that, I would know everything” — he would be omniscient, God!"

"This not-knowing does not defeat his religion or his prayer. It is constitutive of them, constituting a faith that cannot be kept safe from doubt, a hope that cannot be kept safe from despair. We live in the distance between these pairs."

G.G.: "But if deconstruction leads us to give up Augustine’s way of thinking about God and even his belief in revealed truth, shouldn’t we admit that it has seriously watered down the content of Christianity, reduced the distance between it and agnosticism or atheism? Faith that is not confident and hope that is not sure are not what the martyrs died for."

J.C.: "In this view, what martyrs die for is an underlying faith, which is why, by an accident of birth or a conversion, they could have been martyrs for the other side. Mother Teresa expressed some doubts about her beliefs, but not about an underlying faith in her work. Deconstruction is a plea to rethink what we mean by religion and to locate a more unnerving religion going on in our more comforting religion."

"Deconstruction is faith and hope. In what? In the promises that are harbored in inherited names like “justice” and “democracy” — or “God.” Human history is full of such names and they all have their martyrs. That is why the difference between Derrida and Augustine cannot be squashed into the distinction between “theism” and “atheism” or — deciding to call it a draw — “agnosticism.” It operates on a fundamentally different level. Deconstruction dares to think “religion” in a new way, in what Derrida calls a “new Enlightenment,” daring to rethink what the Enlightenment boxed off as “faith” and “reason.”"

"But deconstruction is not destruction. After all, the bottom line of deconstruction, “yes, come,” is pretty much the last line of the New Testament: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”"

"Shall we talk a bit about movies that aren’t about Christ, but use blatant Christ imagery for effect?"

An excerpt from a conversation titled 'Jesus On Film'...

"Few things in cinema give me so severe a case of the eye-rolls as the use of the crucifixion pose to underline the importance and nobility of any sacrifice a character makes. I’m looking at you, Keanu Reeves at the end of The Matrix: Revolutions, Charlton Heston at the end of The Omega Man, and Sigourney Weaver at the end of Alien 3."

"I have no particular problem with films that equate a protagonist with the Messiah in relatively subtle ways, especially if they’re creative about it—that Marlon Brando Superman monologue, equating Jor-El with God sending his only son to Earth to save it, was a pretty brilliant way of drawing out the significance of two icons by combining them—but the crucifixion image itself always strikes me as laying it on too thick. Even in a sequence that otherwise works well, like Spider-Man’s dangerous self-sacrifice to save the lives of a train full of New Yorkers in Spider-Man 2, can easily overdo any parallels, at which point iconic misappropriation turns into pretension. Even people with no religious beliefs might admit that Spider-Man momentarily exhausting himself to stop a train isn’t exactly on a level with Jesus voluntarily dying to save the world from hell."

"Mostly, I just hate having the imagery thrown into my face. Fiction is full of characters who die for the greater good and then are resurrected, from Gandalf to E.T. to Spock to “American Jesus” Alex Murphy in RoboCop (as we discussed in the film’s Movie Of The Week Forum). But it’s always a more effective plot gambit if the writers don’t point out its religious DNA." read more

'Duck Dynasty' Family Raises the Ante

"We want to thank all of you for your prayers and support. The family has spent much time in prayer since learning of A&E's decision. We want you to know that first and foremost we are a family rooted in our faith in God and our belief that the Bible is His word. While some of Phil’s unfiltered comments to the reporter were coarse, his beliefs are grounded in the teachings of the Bible," reads a statement posted on the family's Duck Commander website. "Phil is a Godly man who follows what the Bible says are the greatest commandments: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart' and 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Phil would never incite or encourage hate. We are disappointed that Phil has been placed on hiatus for expressing his faith, which is his constitutionally protected right. We have had a successful working relationship with A&E but, as a family, we cannot imagine the show going forward without our patriarch at the helm. We are in discussions with A&E to see what that means for the future of Duck Dynasty. Again, thank you for your continued support of our family."

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.

Once more we are met on a great battlefield of that war.

Who thinks freedom is a pretty darn good thing?

"Jindal: 'Messed Up Situation When Miley Cyrus Gets a Laugh, and Phil Robertson Gets Suspended'"

"Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal criticized the suspension of Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson by network A&E."

“Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the State of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those they disagree with. I don’t agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended," said Jindal in a prepared statement.

Over a Daily Caller, Matt K Lewis also sees it in terms of a divided "two Americas".

When you consider the more effete, cosmopolitan America that “Pajama Boy” represents, you’ll get a sense for why the Duck Dynasty folks are out of touch with today’s acceptable norms. There is a huge schism between red state America and blue state America, and these two stories seem to symbolize the yawning chasm. 

We (by We, I mean those paying attention to this) seem to be caught up in a version of what the Wikipedia "tit for tat" page describes as a "death spiral." That's my impression, for whatever is worth. I don't want to stick my neck out too far on this. I wanted to carefully consider it before posting\copying and pasting about it.

While Axelrod has empirically shown that the strategy is optimal in some cases, two agents playing tit for tat remain vulnerable. A one-time, single-bit error in either player's interpretation of events can lead to an unending "death spiral". In this symmetric situation, each side perceives itself as preferring to cooperate, if only the other side would. But each is forced by the strategy into repeatedly punishing an opponent who continues to attack despite being punished in every game cycle. Both sides come to think of themselves as innocent and acting in self-defense, and their opponent as either evil or too stupid to learn to cooperate.

As a Christian, I want to promote love, understanding and cooperation.

“I know that people accept me for who I am.”

Eric Fromm has received a lot of hugs on campus lately — at least once a day since he “came out” as an atheist last week in an article in his Christian university’s online newspaper.

And while the Northwest Christian University student body president doesn’t quite know what to do with all the new attention he’s receiving, he says it’s a welcome change from the isolation, verbal attacks and accusing questions that he’d grown to expect as rumors about his nonbelief circulated.

Though his active campus involvement was enough to win him the student government presidential election, Fromm said he’s felt judged by some of his peers throughout college because, as he wrote in the article that appeared in the school’s Beacon Bolt newspaper last week, “I couldn’t force myself to believe in God.”

“I’m too young to really know what’s going to happen after death,” Fromm said. “What I really want to focus on is what I’m doing here, and what it’s going to change.”

The Register Guard