extremism on the right and on the left

I’m deeply disturbed by the increasing extremism of political views; both on the left and the right. I have close friends on both sides of the political spectrum; I find it increasingly difficult to have a reasonable conversation with either side.

I suppose the extremism on the right bothers me more, because most of my conservative friends claim to be followers of Jesus, and many of them have been life-long friends. My friends on the left are more recent acquaintances and tend to be young, secular academics with a high level of idealism.

The problem is that my friends on the left have no friends on the right to challenge their thinking—by the same token my Christian friends on the right have surrounded themselves with other politically conservative Christians and information sources from the right—there is no check and balance—no civil dialogue. This reminds me of a line from Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed”.

Apparently I am cursed with the ability to look at both sides of an issue, weigh a variety of news sources from both right, left and center in order to resolve my own views of the specific issue on its own merits without resorting to either left or right ideological paradigms to aid me in my evaluation process. One of my conservative friends this week told me that she likes to keep it “simple.” The problem is, life is not simple--its complicated.

Here is a link to a open letter from Brian McLaren to Evangelical Christians: I heartily add my voice to his in this appeal.

http://www.brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/an-open-letter-to-conservative-c.html

I was disturbed this week in a conversation with a life-long Christian friend to find that we had absolutely no common ground to discuss health care reform. She sent me news articles from some fringe right-wing news sources regarding “death panels” and health care, and I responded with what I thought was a reasonable article from the New York Times. She said, “I don’t know how you can stomach reading that stuff’ … I was left speechless. To emphasize that I am in the center and not on the left, two weeks ago, I found myself in a spirited debate with two leftist friends, in which I was defending Sarah Palin. I was amazed at their vitriol and hatred for this bright young woman. We finally had to agree to disagree. I am perplexed and concerned about this increasing polarization on the right and the left and the inability to have any kind of reasonable dialogue.

This has happened before in history, and religion has been a key part of it. It happened in the late 1920s in Mexico in the Cristero war between Catholic priests and peasants and the secular Mexican government. It happened in the 1930s in the build-up to the Spanish Civil War in which 7000 priests were killed. It happened in 1948 to 1956 in La Violencia in Colombia in which 200,000 people perished. In each case there was a growing Manichean discourse, of “good” vs. “evil” and of the “armies of God” against the forces of the “devil” before the outbreak of violence. In Colombia, our evangelical brothers and sisters were considered to be on the side of the devil and their churches were burned and hundreds of evangelicals were killed by well-intentioned Catholics “in the name of Christ.”

Alexis de Tocqueville correctly saw that the strength of democracy in the United States came from the separation of church and state, and our religious pluralism, in which people learned to “agree to disagree” without resorting to violence. He was impressed that the American public was highly religious, and yet religiously tolerant, willing to allow a variety of religious and public views. This attitude of mutual toleration and civil discourse seems to be rapidly disappearing in our nation.

If you, my dear reader, are on the political right, may I appeal to you to develop some friendships with people on the left, especially if you call yourself by the name of Christ? And if you are on the left, would you consider developing some friendships with thoughtful people on the right? We cannot allow ourselves to become Lebanon, or even worse, Israel-Palestine. Our democracy is at stake, not to mention the influence of the gospel.

The Cylons are coming? Tweeting with the Mind.

My wife and I enjoy watching the updated version of the Battlestar Galactica series (2004) staring Edward James Olmos. We are currently in Season 3.The premise of the series is that the human race was nearly destroyed by a race of machines with artificial intelligence, who had been created by humans and enslaved until they rebelled. Eventually, these machines come to self-awareness and design or clone human bodies for themselves into which they download their consciousness. A war ensues between Cylons (the human-looking machines) and humans. A group of forty-five plus thousand human beings flee through space in ships, pursued and hounded by the Cylons. Oddly enough, there is a religious theme running through the series. The humans are polytheistic and the Cylons are monotheistic. The Cylons know that the only thing they lack to become fully human is to learn to love.

This is a similar theme of war between humans and machines in the Terminator series. Most machines are bad, but some have been reprogrammed to protect humans such as John Conner.

I am generally an early adaptor with technology – at least earlier than many of my friends (although not all: MC and JJ come to mind). I have been on Facebook for several years and I recently started playing around with Twitter. (I only use Twitter rougly once a week to send out prayer requests for Deb and our "god-party" - it sends them directly to the cell phones of those following me as a text msg.) I have to admit that I have not gotten up to speed with Skype, mostly because I am normally too busy to spend much time on the telephone. I have had long and occasionally contentious arguments with some of my friends about the value of adapting to and using technology to facilitate long distance communications in relationships. It has been my argument that the new communications technologies make participation in long-distance, virtual community not only possible, but potentially a virtue. However my friends rightly point out that there are negative cultural and ethical downsides to new technology (See Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology).

I was stunned recently to see a headline on CNN that someone had sent a message on Twitter using their mind: Brain-Twitter project offers hope to paralyzed patients. When I mentioned this to several friends, they looked at me strangely, like I was delusional. Nevertheless, it is true. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, using no keyboard but just a red cap with electrodes, were able to send a message on twitter (a “tweet”) on March 31 by just focusing on the letters.

Technology seems to just keep making it faster and easier to send communications fluidly around the world. Visual reality can be captured as digital images, edited in numerous formats, uploaded, reassembled and sent around the world. Politicians now have to be careful what they say off the cuff, because of amateur reporters with digital cameras capturing visual and auditory film and uploading it to blogs. (See Friedman's The World is Flat)Blogging and twitter gives voice to anyone who has anything to say, whether it has value or not. Newspapers and professional reporters doing hard news are rapidly disappearing, yielding to the amateur digital competition (see the Newspaper Death Watch).

And now, I will be able to send my thoughts to your cell phone via Twitter. As long as I keep my thoughts under 140 characters! Apparently the Cylons and the Terminator are reflections of humanity's underlying anxiety about unchecked technological change. What will be my first mental tweet?

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God will guard your minds (140 characters)

For more information about research into sending messages with Twitter using the mind, check the following online articles:

Video: Brain Interface Creates Twitter Messages

Researcher use brain interface to post to Twitter

Telegraph.uk: Scientist updates Twitter using only his mind

Blog commentary on the Social Mosse: "Twitter on my mind"

The big space blob, the sparrow and me (or, why I am not worried about swine flue)

I remember when I was an adolescent, living on a farm in Ohio, I used to go out in the fields and lay on my back on a hillside and watch the clouds float by. I remember feeling a sense of awe and peace – closeness to the presence of God. Psalm 19 says “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” in the NIV. I like the NASB even better which says “their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.”

An online article from National Geographic caught my eye this past week. Scientists were able to see a “space blob” that was 13 Billion miles away. Actually, it was also 13 Billion years away, in the past. This blows my mind.

When scientists “see” objects in space, not only are they immense distances away through space, they are immense distances away through time because of the time it takes light to travel through space. So when the scientists were observing this sudden flash of light 13 billion miles away – the most distant object in space ever seen through telescopes – they (the astronomers) are also looking 13 billion years back through time.

Click here for the full article:

This object, called Himiko, existed only 600,000 years after the “big bang” of creation, which is not a very long time on a scale of 13 billion years. Scientists believe that someday, they may have telescopes powerful enough to look all the way back to the beginning of creation … 13.6 Billion years ago.

Here is what amazes me … to meditate on the immense infinitude of the God who created this spatial object 13 billion years ago, and who manages and holds all of creation together. Col. 1:17 Says of Christ, who in orthodox theology was present at the creation with the Father and the Spirit (see Genesis 1:1), that “in him all things hold together.”

Quantum physics is studying the minutely small quantums that make up the most infinitismal basis for reality. Astronomers are reaching out to the moment of creation through their telescopes. Science and faith are ultimately in harmony – faith can “see” realities that science cannot yet discover.

Think about this for just a moment: The God that loves me and cares for me, the God that is small enough to be a baby in the manger or to rest comfortably in a virgin’s womb, is also the God that is right now 13 billion miles away managing the area of the universe which, once-upon-a-time, contained Himiko. Not only is he (our God) there right now, but he IS there 13 Billion years ago (human language begins to fail at this point). AND YET, while he is managing powerful universal forces 13 billion years away and in the past, he also finds time to feed the sparrow, number the hairs on my head, comfort me in my daily struggles.

Wow. That is all I can say. It puts all of our temporary light affliction into an amazing perspective. Our minds simply lock up when we try to imagine this kind of infinitely great, all powerful, all present, infinitely loving and infinitely just God. Human language just will not suffice. No wonder he had to take on humanity and come and live among us to give us a human-sized, comprehensible image of himself “in which all the fullness of deity dwells.”

If he can manage a universe that big, and possibly even multiple universes, I don't think I need to worry about swine flu. If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his concern, I will not die without his knowledge and permission.

I think I will go out tonight and lie in my backyard and look at the stars. It makes all my problems shrink.

Click here for an NPR webcast on All Things Considered about the phenomenon

A Biblical Approach to the Economic Crisis

NOTE: I found an excellent theological analysis of our current economic mess written by Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggeman, professor emeritus of Columbia Theological Seminary. I am pasting in the first part of the article below. You can access the entire article HERE.
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So far as I know, the Bible says nothing explicit about subprime loans and the financial implications of such risky economic practice. There is a great deal, nonetheless, that the Bible has to say about such a crisis as we now face. I will comment in turn on a biblical perspective of an analysis of the crisis and a biblical perspective for an alternative economic practice.

While the specifics of the current market collapse are peculiarly modern, biblical perspectives are pertinent because the fundamental issues of economics are constant from ancient to contemporary time, constants such as credit and debt, loans and interest, and the endless tension between haves and have-nots.
We may identify three dimensions of the theological-moral foundations of the current economic crisis:

AUTONOMY. A sense of the isolated, self-sufficient economic individual is deeply rooted in modern rationality and comes to full expression in U.S. “individualism” that resists communitarian connectedness and imagines the individual person to be the primary unit of social reality. Such an individual is completely autonomous, owes no one anything, is accountable to no one, and can rely on no one except himself or herself.

Such a self (perceived almost exclusively as an economic self) is without restraint and is self-authorized to enact Promethean energy to organize life around one’s own needs, issues, and purposes. The autonomous, self-sufficient self takes as the proper venue for life “the market” and understands the market as a place of self-advancement at the expense of all others who are perceived either as rivals and competitors or as usable commodities.

This same autonomy is articulated in the Bible under the rubric of “the fool” who says in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). The capacity to live without the gift or summons of God has immediate practical implications, for autonomy sets the fool over against the neighbor, most especially the poor neighbor. The one who says in Psalm 10:4 “There is no God” is the one who seeks out neighbors for exploitation: “They lurk that they may seize the poor; they seize the poor and drag them off in their net. They stoop, they crouch, and the helpless fall by their might. They think in their heart, ‘God has forgotten, He has hidden his face, he will never see it’” (Psalm 10:9-11).

.... continued at www.wondercafe.ca