Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Jesus loves Osama—and that’s not the worst of it

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This is spot-on:

A couple of years ago, the Telegraph ran a story entitled Church’s ‘Jesus loves Osama’ sign criticised. Apparently, some Baptist churches in Sydney, Australia, put up signs which read simply, “Jesus Loves Osama.” Smaller print at the bottom contained the Biblical reference supporting that assertion: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44).The signs were apparently not well received. Even the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, commented on the sign, noting the church “should have chosen a less offensive way of spreading its message.” . . .So, what’s so shocking about the “Jesus Loves Osama” sign? It isn’t that someone might understand that the church is saying that a human being’s killing of thousands of people is somehow morally acceptable. . . . No one who has the most basic understanding of Christian teaching would arrive at that conclusion. It isn’t that the church’s priority is wrongly focused. . . . The “Jesus Loves Osama” sign is a statement of straightforward Biblical truth.
The problem is this: we don’t want God to love Osama bin Laden. We want there to be people who do such awful things that God’s love doesn’t extend to them. We want some people—a very select few—to burn in hell. Our skin crawls to hear that some people like Osama bin Laden who have done great crimes may not pay for those crimes in the great hereafter. “Where’s the justice in
that?” we cry. It isn’t justice. It’s compassion. It’s mercy. It’s forgiveness.

This is the scandal of the gospel (or part of it, anyway):  “God loves everyone” actually means God loves everyone, including the people whom we don’t like and who hurt us and whom we consider enemies and of whom we don’t approve.  He loves those awful liberals and those awful fundamentalists and those awful atheists and those awful evangelicals, and those awful Republicans and those awful Democrats, and yes, those awful terrorists and those awful militarists, and pretty much anybody else that you might consider awful, just as much as he loves you.  And we really don’t want him to, and he does anyway; and not only does he love them, Christ died for them on the cross just as he did for you.  Whomever you define as “us,” and whomever you define as “them,” Christ died and rose again for both, and he loves both, and offers the free gift of salvation to both.  That, and nothing less, is the gospel.HT:  Shane Vander Hart

The importance of theory

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“Most modern people have a curious contradiction; they abound in theories, yet they never see the part that theories play in practical life.  They are always talking about temperament and circumstances and accident; but most men are what their theories
make them; most men go in for murder or marriage, or mere lounging because of some
theory of life, asserted or assumed.”—Gabriel Gale, in “The Shadow of the Shark.” The Poet and the Lunatics. G. K. Chesterton

Do these taxes feel high to you?

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Though the theory underlying the Obama administration’s response to the current economic crisis is usually described as “Keynesian,” it’s interesting to note that John Maynard Keynes himself would demur.  Michael Barone puts it well when he writes,

“Animal spirits,” said John Maynard Keynes, are the essential spring of capitalism. We depend on the animal spirits of investors, high earners and entrepreneurs for a growing economy.Keynes, a subtler analyst of market economies than the single-minded booster of high government spending that so-called Keynesian economists depict, knew whereof he spoke. People don’t just respond in linear quantum jumps to the incentives and disincentives they perceive around them. They perk up when their animal spirits are aroused, and they slump down into inertia when they are not.

A good illustration of this comes from, of all people, Whoopi Goldberg.  Read the link, then check out this video (they’re from different parts of the conversation):

My wife watched the clip and read the transcript, then looked at me and said, “I didn’t think Whoopi was a Republican.”  She isn’t, but she sure sounds like one here; and if someone like Whoopi feels this way, you can be sure a lot of other rich folk do too.  I think Barone’s argument goes a long way to explaining why.

The Clintonites managed to hit a sweet spot with the 39.6 percent rate. It was a number that started with a three. To high earners, not bothering to calculate exact returns to the last decimal point but just concentrating on the big picture, it seemed that the government was taking just about one third—hey, maybe a bit more—of their incomes. They would get to keep the other two thirds, pretty much. So they proceeded to try to make intelligent investments and to earn large amounts of money without being preoccupied with how much the government would snatch from their hands.Quite a contrast with the 1970s, when the high income tax rate was 50 percent, and 70 percent on “unearned” (i.e., investment) income. In that environment, the animal spirits of the productive class were directed away from making productive investments and toward sheltering their income from seizure by the government. . . .I think there is a serious risk that the Obama tax proposals are going to bring back those days. Yes, they call for returning the high income tax rate only to the sweet spot of 39.6 percent. But they also want to reduce the amount of the mortgage interest and charitable deductions for high earners, which would channel less money to charities and more to the government (and thus to public employee unions and, through them, to the Democratic Party) and would raise the effective rate on high earners to above 40 percent—a number with a four in front of it.Add on to that the state income tax rates of 10 percent or so in place or in contemplation in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California—states with more than a quarter of the nation’s high earners—and you are looking at income tax rates above 50 percent.When you get a number with a five in front of it, you are in grave danger, I submit, of directing the animal spirits of our most productive citizens away from productive investments and toward tax shelters: “Those bastards want to take half my money, and I’m not going to let them get it.” You are at risk of directing our economy back into the unproductive slog of the 1970s and away from the robust growth of the 1980s, 1990s and most of this decade.

His argument is, in essence, that most economic actions aren’t purely rational responses to a detailed command of the facts, but rather are in response to more general perceptions, and that these perceptions don’t shift gradually, little by little, but rather tend to do so all at once when a particular threshold is crossed.  As he notes,

When gas prices earlier last year were at $2, $2.50, $3 and $3.50, most Americans opposed oil drilling offshore and in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When they hit $4, opinion shifted. The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors and the governor of Florida suddenly favored offshore oil drilling. As for Alaska, nuke the caribou!

This suggests that taxes can in fact be higher than most conservatives would prefer without causing much of an adverse effect, as long as they don’t feel higher to the folks whose investments drive the economy; it also suggests, though, that if you overshoot your target even a little, the adverse effect of your miscalculation is likely to be a lot worse than you would consider to be rational.  If Whoopi’s reaction is any guide, I suspect the Obama administration isn’t going to know what hit it.

The Peter Principle in the White House

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As was the case more than once during the campaign, SNL’s doing a better job of dealing with the news (in its own inimitable way) than the people whose job it is to cover it; this sketch captures the deer-in-the-headlights cluelessness of the Treasury Secretary so well, it’s almost painful to watch.  For all his résumé, it’s clear that Timothy Geithner is out of his depth in doing the job he’s been given; he has risen to the level of his incompetence.Unfortunately, it isn’t just Secretary Geithner.  We were repeatedly told during the campaign that Barack Obama was going to improve America’s reputation around the world—but that doesn’t appear to include our allies, since we’re not even two months in to his administration and he’s already managed to infuriate the Brits.  Though delivered in the “stiff upper lip” tone that Americans associate with our closest ally, the outrage in the British media at the way President Obama responded to their prime minister’s visit is clear.  I’m sure they particularly appreciated this curt dismissal of their concerns from an official in the State Department: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”True enough, I suppose, except of course for the fact that unlike those other 190 countries, the UK has been a staunch and consistent ally of our government . . . Now, as the whole David Brooks episode clearly demonstrated, this White House is remarkably thin-skinned when it comes to criticism and complaint, and so when the firestorm erupted, they defended the President—if you want to call this a defense (emphasis mine):

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama’s inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president’s surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk. . . .The American source said: “Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero-sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.”

In other words, as Power Line’s John Hinderaker summed it up, “Don’t blame us, we’re incompetent!”  Except that there’s one other factor referenced in the Telegraph article:

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama’s inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to “even fake an interest in foreign policy”.

It seems clear that indifference—to foreign policy in general and Great Britain in particular—also played a part in this:  Barack Obama and his administration simply didn’t care enough about Gordon Brown’s visit or our alliance with his country to try to be competent about it, or even to try to hide their lackadaisical attitude about it.That said, the portrait painted here of an overwhelmed president who’s unable to keep up with the demands of his job in any sort of effective fashion is deeply worrying, and particularly when combined with his own expressed opinion that he’s “very good” at the job.  This is a member of the Self-Esteem Generation, all right.  It’s no wonder he inflated his résumé (follow the links from that post), took credit as a Senator for work he didn’t do, and gilded the lily in his autobiography to make his first job look much better, and his decision to leave it much more meaningful and meritorious, than it really was; he’s the product of an educational system that’s been more concerned in recent decades with making sure students feel good about themselves than about giving them the education they need to live lives that merit a healthy self-respect.  It’s all of a piece with him taking a job at a law firm, slacking on billable hours, and spending much of his time working on his autobiography (which he didn’t even manage to finish, at least while he was there).Up until last November, none of this has been much of a problem for Barack Obama; he’s had the brains, the grace, and the charm to keep wangling his way along and retelling his story to suit himself without anybody minding enough to cause him any problems.  After all, nothing was really riding on him.  The law firm wasn’t depending on him; the Illinois State Senate got its bills passed whether he did any work or just voted “present” (though the man who ran the shop was happy enough to boost him by putting his name on bills anyway); the US Senate kept running along whether the junior Senator from the state of Illinois was in his seat or not.  Being President of the United States, however, is different; and now, this is a problem.  This is the first actual job he’s had since his days as a community organizer (which were, by his own admission, unsuccessful) in which his job performance actually matters—and it’s one of the biggest jobs in the world, and his performance is all-important.  Now, it matters immensely whether he gets things done, and whether they’re the right things; and unfortunately (for us), he has never cultivated the habit of digging deep and digging in to get things done, he has never cultivated the endurance necessary to true accomplishment—in Nietzche’s words, he’s never practiced “a long obedience in the same direction”—and so he doesn’t have the habits and skills and life patterns necessary to do that job effectively.This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, since it was all there in his résumé, for anyone who cared to look; but too many people didn’t.  The McCain campaign tried to make the point, but they couldn’t get beyond talking about “experience,” as if it was simply a matter of time served, when it was really a matter of character.  This allowed the Obama campaign to counter it emotionally, by making “experience” mean “old, tired, and four more years of Bush”; it allowed them to counter it mathematically by adding Sen. Biden to the ticket, when in fact Sen. Biden’s career in the Senate basically consisted of nothing much more than Sen. Obama’s time in the Senate, spread out over many more years; and perhaps most fatally, it allowed them to portray Sarah Palin, when she was named as John McCain’s running mate, as equally “inexperienced.”  Thus what should have been a powerful comparison for the McCain campaign—that Gov. Palin had accomplished far more of substance at a similar age than Sen. Obama—ended up being used against them.  People looked at the numbers and missed the real point:

Two things would leap out from Sarah Palin’s résumé—a pattern of overachievement and a pattern of actually getting things done. Two things would also leap out from Barack Obama’s résumé—an undeniable wealth of talent and an equally undeniable dearth of accomplishments. . . .In truth, Sarah Palin is the kind of employee virtually every enterprise seeks—the kind who gets things done. And Barack Obama is the kind of employee a company hires only when it’s in the mood for taking a risk and willing to wager that the candidate’s past performance isn’t predictive of his future efforts.

So far, that risk isn’t looking too good.

This is convicting

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from Brant Hansen of Letters from Kamp Krusty:

After working in both mainstream and Christian radio, I think I’m ready to write my own book about the many I encounter:  They Like Church But Not Jesus.I mean it.  I wrote before:  Based on my observation, Jesus is simply not the most influential guy around.  I’ve seen it over, and over, and over.  In fact, I’d say it’s a theme at my job:  People just aren’t that into Jesus.  He ticks people off.——————-I’ve been corrected many times by Christians—after reading something Jesus actually said.  They don’t like it.  I’m serious.  “You know, all the commandments can be summed up with love the Lord your God with all your heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus said that, and . . .”Ringing phones.   “Hello?””You forgot one:  Evangelize.”Jesus stands corrected.Ring.”Well, it’s not quite that simple, you see, because . . .”No, no.  It can’t be that simple.  Not here. . . .No big deal, but—so you know—it happens again and again.  This is where my “If Jesus Had a Blog” stuff comes from, by the way.  Real conversations with learned Christians, and real objections to stuff Jesus said.People do love the Bible.  But not the Gospels.  They quote Biblical stuff to me all the time, but it’s not ever stuff Jesus said.

Now, to some extent, my own experience doesn’t exactly fit with that; at least, I haven’t seen that degree of Jesus-avoidance.  What I see is more of a pick-and-choose Jesus—people love Jesus (just look at the songs that dominate “contemporary” worship, to say nothing of our Jesus-ish commercialism), but the Jesus of their own imagination and reconstruction.  Brant’s right that the real Jesus continues to tick people off now the same way he did 2000 years ago; the difference is that when he’s not physically right in our face about it, we can find tamer, safer, more “spiritual” ways to deal with him than killing him.  We find ways to reduce him to fit our own agenda—including, as Brant notes, using other Scripture to defend ourselves against the radically challenging things he says, which is of course a radical misuse of Scripture.  As Luther reminds us, the Scripture is first and foremost the word which contains the Word, the cradle that holds the Christ; Jesus is the center on which the Scriptures pivot.I appreciate what Bill Roberts had to say about this over at The Thinklings:

I think there are two paths we can take in response: the first and easiest one is separation: separating between us and them, “Christians” versus “Christ-followers”, those who believe they “get” Jesus and those who don’t (though all of us Christians think we do). Some have decided to chunk the church and be Christians all on their own. That’s tempting, because there are plenty of churches that don’t teach the Gospel, that are disobediently pursuing a success that is contrary to success as God defines it, and who avoid talk of Jesus because he offends people.The other path is the far better one, and far more difficult. It’s what I believe Brant’s saying here, and it’s being said by many others these days, and I’m so thankful for that. The other path is the path of reformation: to preach Jesus, to speak of Jesus, to speak of and live the Gospel 24×7. To face up to Jesus’ words, his glorious, terrifying words, and become people who live that Word out every day.

Another addition to the blogroll

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As someone who started posting on Sarah Palin a couple months before her nomination helped the MSM see that the deepest desire of their collective heart was to slander libel her to within an inch of their lives, I’ve been pleased to see the rise of various grassroots networks dedicated to her support.  I tend to be a late adopter on such things (it took a long time for friends to talk me into joining Facebook), but I’ve jumped in and joined one of them, the Read My Lipstick Network, and their blogroll is now in the sidebar.  (I must confess it seems a little strange to me, not being the type to wear lipstick, but American politics is in something of an odd phase these days anyway.)  For those who are into politics (which isn’t everyone who drops in here, I know), there are some good blogs in there, and I encourage you to check them out.

Word of the day: “Overcharged”

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Is it just me, or does this tell us way too much about this administration?

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Friday before sitting down to their working dinner, she presented him a small green box with a ribbon. Inside was a red button with the Russian word “peregruzka” printed on it.”I would like to present you with a little gift that represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying and that is: ‘We want to reset our relationship and so we will do it together.'”Clinton, laughing, added, “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” she asked Lavrov.”You got it wrong,” Lavrov said.” Both diplomats laughed. “It should be “perezagruzka” (the Russian word for reset), Lavrov said. “This says ‘peregruzka,’ which means ‘overcharged.'”

While they’re at it, maybe they should give the American people one of those buttons.HT:  Monique Stuart, via R. S. McCain

Arrogance Judged

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(Isaiah 47; Revelation 18:1-8)

If you look in your bulletin or up on the screen, you can see that I titled this brief message “Arrogance Judged,” because that’s what our passages this morning are about—God’s judgment on the arrogance of Babylon. I might have called this message “The Other Side of the Coin,” because that too is what it’s about: the other side of the coin to God’s promise of deliverance. For God’s people to return to Israel, they must first leave Babylon; after the Babylonians went to all the trouble to drag them away from Israel to begin with, they aren’t going to say, “Sorry about that, never mind, we shouldn’t have done that, we’ll just send you all back home now.” Babylon is arrogant in its power, confident in its mastery, and sees no reason to accommodate the wishes of one of its subject peoples. The Jews existed to accommodate them, not the other way around. Daniel and his friends had an effect on Nebuchadnezzar, but not enough to change that mindset. As such, Israel’s deliverance wasn’t going to come as part of a win-win situation—it was going to come together with God’s judgment on Babylon their oppressor.

And isn’t that usually the way it goes? The oppressor, the abuser, the manipulator, the evil people and movements and governments of this world, don’t generally stop doing what they do and start doing what’s right just because somebody says “pretty please.” Most of the time, his deliverance of the oppressed means his judgment on the oppressor; his love requires his wrath. There are those who complain about the book of Revelation, or about the Old Testament prophets, because they use the language of war and blood and fire; but the truth is, the prophets are just realistic. They know that God’s deliverance isn’t going to come at no cost to anybody—and they know that it shouldn’t; those on whom God’s judgment falls have earned that judgment by their actions and attitudes. The message of the prophets is that the judgment the wicked have earned is coming—not necessarily quickly, for God shows his mercy and his patience even with the worst of us, but it is coming, as sure as sunrise and as utterly unstoppable.

There is in this both a warning and a promise. The warning is that we aren’t exempt; and indeed, it may be that the more sure we become that we have nothing to worry about, the more reason we have in truth to be concerned. After all, part of the indictment against Babylon was that Babylon was oblivious to the judgment she was storing up by her actions; her leaders and her people thought they’d earned their success and that it would continue indefinitely. The problem was, they’d built their nation and their culture on the wrong foundation, and put their faith in gods of their own invention, gods who could not save; their confidence in themselves was misplaced, because it lacked the necessary support to hold up. They thought judgment would never come, that they would never pay the price for their actions; but it came anyway, and Babylon fell.

The promise is that God’s justice will come. It may not come as swiftly as we wish—after all, we want God to show his mercy and patience to us, while we’re usually not as keen for him to do so to those who make our lives miserable—but it will come. It may come as it came upon Babylon, or it may come in other ways; it’s instructive that in the Psalms, when David is praying that God would take care of his enemies, he tends to ask God to destroy them either by killing them or by bringing them to repentance. Sometimes that’s the result of God’s patience with our enemies—sometimes they bring themselves to their knees and come to ask our forgiveness. That can be a hard thing for us to think about; it’s easy to be like Jonah and really want God to blast our enemies and the people who do us wrong. But as we see in Jonah and as we see in the words of Christ on the cross, even the Ninevites, even the Babylonians, even the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus, are not beyond his love and redemption; even for them, Christ died. It’s his desire to destroy his enemies by making them his children; it’s his desire to destroy the evildoer and the wicked by humbling their pride in repentance. But if they will not, then the time will come when they will reap the whirlwind they have sown, as Babylon did.

This means, finally, that we must be careful; this is why the warning comes in Revelation 18:4: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues.” The Israelites of the exile had been dragged into captivity, but they weren’t in prison; they were part of Babylonian society, and they had the very real option to go native, if you will, to just become Babylonians themselves. This can be a powerful temptation, even in extreme situations—the most extreme form of this is what we call “Stockholm syndrome,” which some of you may remember from the case of Patty Hearst, who went from terrorized kidnapping victim of the SLA to an active participant in their crimes. Under more normal circumstances, we see it in the temptation to go along to get along, to go with the flow, to compromise with the world; it’s easier to just not fight it. This is a temptation we need to resist. This isn’t to say that we need to separate ourselves from the world—I don’t say that no one’s called to that, but most people aren’t; rather, we need to differentiate ourselves from the world even as we live in it. We need to separate ourselves from the ways of the world and to live the Jesus way in the midst of everything the world is doing.

Sarah Palin, sexism, and shoddy research

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I haven’t wanted to waste time and space giving attention to the dubious study that purports to show that Sarah Palin’s looks hurt her as a politician; but when Bill O’Reilly interviewed one of the academics behind the study, with Tammy Bruce also in the conversation, I had to post this.  I do think there’s some legitimate material here about the way in which women are perceived in our society, but it’s clear watching this smirking Ph.D. that she wants people to draw negative conclusions about Gov. Palin which, as O’Reilly and Bruce point out, her study simply doesn’t justify.  (The real question here is whether the Democratic Party deliberately used and encouraged societal impulses and tendencies which they would normally have denounced as “sexist” in an effort to undermine Gov. Palin specifically and the McCain/Palin ticket more generally; for my part, I think they did, and believe a study on that could be quite enlightening.)

HT:  C4P

Zimbabwe PM Morgan Tsvangirai injured, wife killed

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in a highly suspicious car crash.  They were on their way to their rural home when they were hit by a lorry, which PM Tsvangirai says drove at them deliberately.  The roads in Zimbabwe are bad enough that car accidents are nothing unusual, but this one smells like an assassination attempt, especially as the recently-formed unity government has so far been largely non-functional—despite the formal agreement to power-sharing, Robert Mugabe and his thugs have been unwilling to let the MDC do little things like actually govern.  PM Tsvangirai has left the country, going to Botswana for medical care and a little emotional space.When my father-in-law heard this, he said, “That’s blood on the hands of South Africa.”  If this does turn out to be a deliberate attack on the prime minister and his party, then I’ll have to agree.