The Tony Jones Blog at Patheos
I read a lot of people referring to last week as “America’s Worst Week,” what with the Boston bombing and the Waco explosion and rivers flooding and Lindsay Lohan getting a new TV show. But, you know what, we live in a pretty good time, especially for those of us in the U.S. So, as a Saturday reality check, I point you toward these twelve graphs that show how good life really is right now. Click on the graphic to see the rest:
HT: frequent commenter Patrick
This morning on Marketplace Morning Report, Krissy Clark filed a story entitled, “What Does ‘Welfare’ Mean to You?“:
Once upon a time, the word welfare simply meant, faring well. That’s how the framers of the U.S. Constitution used it in the preamble. Right after the part about “forming a more perfect union” and before the part about “securing the blessings of liberty”, there’s a charge to “promote the general welfare.”
And yet, if you go out on to the street and ask people how they feel about the word welfare today, the feelings are, to put it mildly, fairly negative.
“It’s for people who sit on their butt all day and don’t do anything and then say ‘give me your money,’” is how John Frazer, a car service driver from San Diego, put it.
“It’s kind of associated with failure,” added Suncana Laketa, a graduate student from Arizona who said she had received welfare in the past herself.
She goes on to explain how the word has changed — how it has been demonized. The label “gay” has undergone a similar change, as many parents have had to explain during the annual reading of “The Night Before Christmas.” And here’s a telling book title about how labels are used: Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show
You see, calling someone a “liberal” isn’t just a forensic exercise in academic differentiation. It’s a political act. And leaders who claim a theological tradition that’s particularly attuned to the political should stop acting naive about the politics of labels.
This post and the hullaballoo that surrounds it has the potential to be seen as internecine sniping, so I’m going to try to draw some larger lessons.
Richard Dawkins thinks that if you believe religious things, you cannot be a journalist. (photo: Murdo Macleod)
Andrew Brown lays bare the hypocrisy of Richard Dawkins:
Richard Dawkins and Twitter make one of the world’s great pairings, like face and custard pie. But whereas more accomplished clowns ram custard pies into the faces of their enemies, Dawkins’ technique is to ram his own face into the custard pie, repeatedly. I suppose it saves time and it’s a lot of fun to watch. On Sunday afternoon he was at it again, wondering why the New Statesman employs an imaginative and believing Muslim:
“Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed [sic] flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist.”
But this is only half the fun. The real comedy comes when he lifts his face from the pie, dripping scorn and custard, to glare at the audience who can’t see how very rational he is. Because there are some people who don’t understand that everything Dawkins says illuminates the beauty of reason.
Read the rest: Richard Dawkins’ latest anti-Muslim Twitter spat lays bare his hypocrisy
So, by extension, no one who believes any religious creed is fit to be a journalist.
Prolegomena: There are two guns in my house — 12-gauge shotguns. They are in a gun safe; each has a trigger lock; the shotgun shells are stored elsewhere. I hunt, and I fear guns. They are breathtakingly powerful.
Premise 1: When you live in a society with other human beings, you necessarily give up some of your freedoms. This is incumbent upon each individual citizen in order to reap the benefits that society offers. For example, you have the benefit of driving a car, an incredible perk of modern society: it gets you places far more quickly than your feet, adds billions of dollars to our economy because of its efficiency, etc. However, you can’t drive a car anywhere you want; you must stay on the paved roads — indeed, you must stay on one half of the paved roads. If you cannot abide by these rules, you abdicate your right to drive a car.
Premise 2: The Bill of Rights is an anachronistic document, and it therefore must be interpreted for our present situation. It was written at a time in which firearms were not nearly as powerful nor accurate as they are now; today, firearms can do exponentially more human damage than they could in 1789. It was written in order to protect against a monarchy or military dictatorship; under the command of the president, the US military is the most powerful force in the world by an order of magnitude, and could therefore easily put down any populist uprising.
Literally:
The researchers found that belief in a punitive God was significantly associated with an increase in social anxiety, paranoia, obsession, and compulsion. Conversely, belief in a benevolent God was associated with reductions in those four symptoms. Belief in an indifferent God was not linked to any symptoms.
So does this mean that God-fearing individuals are more anxious because of their beliefs, or that individuals who believe in a loving God have less to worry about? Possibly both, say the researchers.
Read the rest here.
Dan Savage and Andrew Marin
I don’t know Dan Savage. I like what he does, I think that Christians have a lot to learn from him, and I’ve gotten a couple Twitter responses from him, but I’ve never met him. I’d like to. I think we’d have a good conversation.
I do know Andrew Marin. I know him well. He’s a good friend whom I get to see a couple of times per year. We email and text a couple times a month, and I last saw him in January.
I have mixed feelings about some of the things that Dan Savage does and writes. His It Gets Better Project is really, really good. It’s Kingdom-of-God good. Some of his sex advice makes me a bit squeamish, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But when it comes to the Christian faith, Dan is blinded by his own upbringing and by the pain that he has seen inflicted on GLBT persons by those claiming the name “Christian.” While I can’t blame him for the anger he harbors, he is an outspoken atheist — an atheist with an axe to grind against all who claim the Christian faith.
I have mixed feelings about the work of Andrew Marin and the Marin Foundation. They are avowed “bridge builders” in these tense days, as many Christians and churches are still trying to figure out how they deal with the increasing acceptance of GLBT persons in society. As such, both Andy and the Foundation have refused to take a public stance on the questions, “Is homosexuality a sin?” and “Do you support marriage equality?” I don’t agree with this stance, but I do understand why they’ve taken it.
photo by Steve Knight
No one knows more about the ECM, especially in the UK, than Jonny Baker. He’s been around since before the beginning, and he’s published on it as well. Recently, he received an email asking what happened to the emerging church, and he posted his response on his blog:
Here at Patheos, we’re undergoing some significant back-end upgrades this weekend. Most importantly for Theoblogy readers is that we are switching to Disqus for all comments. The bad news is that all of your existing comments will temporarily disappear this weekend as they are being migrated from WordPress to Disqus.
The great news is that once this migration is complete, discussion will be much more robust on Theoblogy. Not only will threaded conversations be easier to follow, you can “like” comments, link your comments to Facebook, and other such fun stuff.
If you do not have a previously approved comment, your first comment on Disqus will require approval. But once you pass that low threshold I think you’ll be thrilled with how commentary runs. Plus, offloading the comments from WordPress to Disqus should result in much faster load time for this blog and for other Patheos blogs as they undergo the migration.
While I’m on it, let me just say how happy I am to be blogging at Patheos. Deb, Leo, Cathie, Hillary, David, Murray, and all the other staff are truly great people who are attentive to their bloggers’ needs. My traffic continues to grow. Indeed, I think I’m a better blogger because I’m here, because I have an editor, and because I’m part of a larger team.
As always, thanks for reading. And thanks for your patience with the migration this weekend.
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