Mark Byron

It's Hard to be a Godly Soldier Without God

The military gets a lot of church-state cross-fire, as religous liberals and secularists complain when chaplians get too evangelistic and religious symbolism and rhetoric slide into things. However, this Earl Tilford piece points out some of the downside of de-godding the military that liberals would not like.

[A]ll wars are quintessentially human endeavors. It’s impossible to kill inanimate objects like MiGs, tanks, trucks and missile sites. But we do kill people. To make “crispy crittering” easier, we noted, we dehumanize the enemy with terms like “Japs,” “Dinks,” “Gomers,” “Krauts,” “Huns,” “Injuns,” “Rebs” and “Yanks.” We noted the Nazis refereed to the genocide of Jews as “evacuation” and the murder of the mentally and physically handicapped, homosexuals, and other “inferiors” as “medical re-socialization.”

We can quickly dehumanize the enemy in an God-free setting. Religion often does bring conflict, but in most Christian flavors, it treats even the enemy as fellow creations of God worthy of respect.

Tilford closes with this thought-

When absent God, human advancement—whether ideological, political, philosophical or technological—reflects our intrinsic nature, which is evil. Better we fly with a wing and a prayer.

Secularizing the military would tend to make it more brutish rather than less, so peace-lovers on the left should be careful what they wish for in our military.

 

 

Uncle Tom's Mosque

This was not good news out of northeastern Nigeria; the jihadist group Boko Haram has been bombing churches in the Muslim part of the country on an alarmingly regular basis, but they have now added a new spin to their attacks-

A suicide bomber has killed five people at a mosque in the north-eastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, security officials say. The attack, reportedly by a teenage boy, narrowly missed one of Nigeria's most revered Muslim traditional leaders, the Shehu of Borno.

The blast happened at a mosque near his palace in the centre of the city as Friday prayers finished.

The operative word here is traditional. These leaders were put into power by the British when they ran Nigeria; they have no legal authority these days, but are respected by folks in the region. For a group who's name translates to "Western learning isn't kosher" (haram is unclean/forbidden, the inverse of halal in Arabic), the traditional rulers would be likely seen as collaborators with Western rule and Western culture, even if they were otherwise devout Muslims.

When you add Friday's autoboomer to this NPR story from Thursday about Boko Haram hooking up with Yemen's branch of al Qaeda and a north-African al Qaeda branch, you have a recipe for a civil war level of trouble in Nigeria as well as seeing Nigeria exporting jihadists as well as Internet banking scam spam.

Edifier du Jour- Micah 2:3-5(NIV)

³ Therefore, the Lord says:

“I am planning disaster against this people,
    from which you cannot save yourselves.
You will no longer walk proudly,
    for it will be a time of calamity.
⁴ In that day men will ridicule you;
    they will taunt you with this mournful song:
‘We are utterly ruined;
    my people’s possession is divided up.
He takes it from me!
    He assigns our fields to traitors.’”

⁵ Therefore you will have no one in the assembly of the Lord
    to divide the land by lot.

Sometimes, passages have very little to do with the modern-day believer or the Church as a whole. That sounds a bit dispensationalist, where they divvy up passages and place them in various buckets, but this seem to go squarely in a Primarily For Israel bucket. Trying to make this fit into the modern day seems tough.

God does have a wrathful side that we are well-served not to see. That is very true, but I am at a loss for a good hermeneutic on this one.

Edifier du Jour- Micah 1:1-2(NIV)

The word of the Lord that came to Micah of Moresheth during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah —the vision he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem.

² Hear, O peoples, all of you,

listen, O earth and all who are in it,

that the Sovereign Lord may witness against you,

the Lord from his holy temple.

We don't like to be critisized, and that makes large parts of the Bible problematic, since they point out our flaws and transgressions. People generally prefer pats on the back to constructive criticism.

That meshes nicely with a quote I read earlier today from C.S. Lewis-“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” The commentators on that Facebook post were giving Joel Osteen both barrels, but we can create a lot of the same effect by railing against other people's sins; its easy to rag on materialism when you don't have much and easy to rag on homosexual stuff when only a few people, if any, have struggles with it in the pews (if they did, you ran them off long ago).

It's harder to talk about things that we don't do well. Hospitality is one our pastor addressed; we don't do a good job of looking after the little guy as individuals beyond throwing a token dead president in the Christmas benevolence offering plate. That hits closer to home that some of the more esoteric sins that few people get involved with.

Tunnels at Both Borders

Border tunnels were in the news Thursday as they were being shut down; only one was a good thing. On the Mexican border, border patrol folks found a smuggler tunnel into San Luis, AZ. Another tunnel was found in Tijuana, but it hadn't been completed under into the US.

On the northern border, another tunnel was shut down, but in that case, it was the Detroit-Windsor tunnel. It was shut down Thursday due to a bomb threat. That border crossing has a single bridge, the Ambassador, that got the extra traffic this afternoon.

The owners of the Ambassador have been fighting tooth and nail to keep a second rival bridge from being built, running attack ads on the bridge and its backers and financing a referendum drive on the new bridge; Canada has pledged to pick up the tab for the bridge, but the fear of rising taxes to pay for it is played up in the ads.

Despite my dig at the Ambassador folks yesterday, even they wouldn't go to that lengths to get extra business. However, this situation points out the need for some backup on that busy border crossing, where a lot of car parts come and go across the border.

Condi Cheney

Condi Rice is getting a major push for Romney's VP in the last few weeks; Peggy Noonan put in a plug for her in her WSJ essay of the week (hat tip to William Sulik on Facebook).

That reminds me of Dubya picking Dick Cheney as his running mate; Cheney didn't scratch a demographic itch in the electorate but gave Bush a solid national security backstop that helped ease the IHOP-diplomacy-school meme that governors tend to get.

The same would be true of Rice; there isn't much of a voting block who would switch over to Romney because of Rice being on the ticket, since she appeals largely to the establishment Republican that was largely in Romney's pocket to begin with. She'd bring gravitas that most of the usual suspects on the VP list lack and be able to hit the ground running as an international surrogate for a President Romney.

However, she'll not shore up Romney's right flank, especially on social issues. Rice is a moderate Presbyterian and is not a culture warrior, which will make folks a bit nervous when Romney himself is a newly-minted social conservative, albeit seemingly earnestly so. Dubya had his evangelical Methodist background to offset Cheney's mainline Methodist persona; Romney doesn't quite have that luxury.

Is that enough to lose Romney support on the right? Most folks in that demographic will see the ticket as an improvement over the incumbents and vote accordingly. The folks who are already queasy about a Mormon in the White House might wind up pulling a Constitution Party trigger, but there will merely be a decrease in fervor with a MR-CR ticket.

Condi won't win over much of the black vote; she'd likely get a chilly reception at an NAACP gig as well, where quips about old Mormon racist theology would get swapped out for "House Negro." Nor will she win over too many women; a few RINOey types who hold Planned Parenthood fundraisers at the country club might come alongside but she would have little allure for the blue-collar moms that Sarah Palin could reach.

Romney could well do worse; a Rice pick would save money, as she could take the National Security director portfolio and save some payroll. However, it runs the risk of dispiriting the conservative base without doing much to win over swing voters.

 

Thursday Musings

Interesting piece on the future of Mexico's PAN. Things don't seem that bad on the ground, since the winning PRI presidential candidate is from the pro-market neoliberal wing of the party and a PAN-PRI coalition with PAN as the junior partner might be easier to get things done than with the PRI in opposition.

After 12 years, swing voters wanted to give some one else a shot; thankfully (on economics, at least), it seems that Mexico got Bill Clinton rather than Barack Obama when they replaced their conservatives, incoming presidente Pena is more like Slick Willie both on economics and on sexual proclivities.

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This is the year of the Black Mormon. First, we have Utah's first Haitian woman congressional candidate in Mia Love and now we have young Jabari Parker. He's being compared to LeBron James as a basketball prodigy, and made news by cutting his school list down to 10, including BYU; he's going to be a senior this year and would prefer to stay close to home in Chicago.

One interesting aspect is that Parker might be one-and-done-for-now if he follows the Mormon pattern of spending two years on mission at 19. He'd likely be leaving $20M on the table if he spends those two years before being drink-legal (clown metaphor, bro) doing something other than terrorizing NBA defenders.

Both BYU and Kentucky (another one on his list) are used to losing freshman, but BYU normally expects to get theirs back.

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If you've got Yahoo e-mail, you might want to change your password.

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Interesting piece on setting the timing for Ramadan. Thing are moving towards an astronomical definition that can allow it to be firmly placed in advance, but since there is no one Islamic authority, things vary from place to place; we have an Orthodox-Western split on the liturgical calendar, but this makes Christians look like a focus of unity.

Keep that in mind in conversations about Sharia; there isn't one take on how to be Muslim, as this Ramadan-timing story shows, so we shouldn't assume a Taliban version when the S-word is bandied about.

 

ID Wars-A False Front

One troubling bit of rhetoric on the left is to make a big deal about having a picture ID in order to vote; VP Biden was playing that card in his NAACP speech this week. In their eyes, having to get the ID is tantamount to a poll tax and hits poor and minorities hardest.

Given all the things that require ID, I would think that voting would be the least of a non-IDed person's worries. Banks will want some ID from you in order to set up an account and doctor's offices generally will ask for ID as well. Getting some medicines will require ID if they are abuse-prone; even getting Sudafed will need ID to avoid the meth-makers from getting ahold of it. A friggin' library card will need ID in most places.

If all those things hasn't gotten you into the Secretary of State's office yet, you have problems beyond voting and need to be ministered to. Some the GOTV money that goes into voter registration drives might be better spent (at least on a humanitarian level) getting folks a state ID card, which, thanks to the motor-votor law, will get you registered to vote as well if you're a citizen and over 18.

Christmas in July: Matthew 2:19-23(NIV)

¹⁹ After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt ²⁰ and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”

²¹ So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. ²² But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, ²³ and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: “He will be called a Nazarene.”

We're not given much detail on Jesus' youth. We see Him as a precocious 12-year-old schooling the scholars of the day, but nothing else between His birth and the start of His ministry about age 30.

Did He go through the Terrible Twos? Seemingly not, since a sinless kid wouldn't go "Mine! Mine!".

How quickly was He potty-trained? Yes, that would be my favorite radio station, WTMI, Way Too Much Info.

Thankfully for modern kids, we don't have that info. It's hard enough for adults to model Jesus' behavior; having a perfect standard for tots and tweens to live up to would be even more mind-blowing.

Midweek Musings

Deutschland über Dallas, as fellow CMU grad Chris Kaman is heading to the Mavs. He got dumped on the Hornets as part of the Chris Paul trade and was biding time this last year. Kaman is about as German as I am (he's got German grandparents and I have German great-grandparents) but plays for the German national team with new teammate Dirk Nowitski.

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Another big man is staying put for the moment; the big Dwight Howard-to-Brooklyn deal fell through. Houston and the Lakers are rumored to be the next landing spot for Superman 2.0; Kobe, Steve Nash and Howard doesn't seem quite fair.

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Neither does having Rashard Lewis and Ray Allen coming off the bench for Miami. Lewis went from being the most overpayed player in the league to one of its better bargains at league minimum and Allen went from having to go mano-a-mano with Los Heat to being D-Wade's caddy. Guilding the lily, but I recall Detroit beating a Laker team that seemed similarly overstocked.

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This is a sad story, doubly odd in that I have been in Caryville, TN on my way down I-75 over the years; to-and-from Florida in the early 00s and to-and-from central TN in the early 2010s. A handicapped 19-year-old was dumped there by her IL-based mom. Since she wasn't officially anyone's charge, there were no laws broken.

The mom dumped her in Tennessee in part for their Bible Belt Baptist caring. There are plenty of Baptists in Illinois, though. I recall an old Southern Baptist pastor who was in Midland that came from southern Illinois; you needed a chain saw to cut his drawl.

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Another sad one out of Detroit brings to mind the old Mae West line "is that a gun or are you happy to see me?" It was a gun, and it went off when a gal hugged a off-duty cop at a party, killing the hugger.

Christmas in July: Matthew 2:16-18(NIV)

¹⁶ When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. ¹⁷ Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

¹⁸ “A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”

Interestingly, Jesus might have been spared had he just gone up with his parents to Nazareth, since Herod was taking out his wrath on metro Bethlehem.

The inhumanity of taking out whole populations of toddlers is a head-shaker, but humans do have a way of doing nasty things to hang on to power. Herod didn't quite have absolute power, given that he was a vassal of Rome, but his large power was largely corrupting.

Pearls of Lesser Price

Back in 2004, I had a joke post about the Anglicans filling a funding hole by selling naming rights to dioceses, creating the Ben Gay Bishop of Bath and Wells.

As it turns out the real-life B&W Bishop, Peter Price, was making news in good liberal clergy fashion, blaming the rioting of last year on government cuts and made the riots out as “a kind of spiritual escape.”

Chris Johnson loves fisking such folks, so I bopped over to his blog after reading the Get Religion piece I linked to above; yep, he gave poor Rev. Price both barrels and reloaded.

Christmas in July: Matthew 2:13(NIV)

¹³ When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

This extended road trip into Egypt isn't commented on much, but it runs very much counter to the idea that nothing much bad happens to faithful believers. God's own blood is getting run out of Dodge.

That should be a wake-up call to folks who assume that since God has their back, that the tornado will always miss their house and the flood waters work around their property. No, God is still with you, but that's no guarantees that all the balls bounce your way.

Monday Moanin'

Just when gas prices were climbing down from $4/gallon levels, we get this news out of Norway where their oil production workers might go on strike. They have a center-left government at present, so the government might be in position to make good on a pledge to force workers back to work a-la Taft-Hartley; it's easier for a socialist government to play bad-cop with workers than parties of the right.

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Let's hope Occupy Mexico City runs its course; the PRD, the left-most of Mexico's three main parties, lost 38-32 to the PRI in presidential elections, and the left is not happy, claiming fraud, which was a PRI stock-in-trade back in the 20th century when they held power for seven decades running. A half-percent worth of fraud might be Occupy-bait (it was the conservative PAN candidate, outgoing president Caldaron, who won such a squeaker last go-round in 2006, so there was less basis for complaint), but not six.

Hopefully, a day or two of venting will get the PRD yahoos calmed down. One upside is that if the PRD proceeds to be rejectionist and uncooperative, a PRI-PAN coalition would be likely in the legislature, keeping things from lurching too far leftward, especially if new president Peña takes a page from the more neoliberal leanings of the late-20th century PRI leaders.

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Delmon Young had better keep that hot bat going, for he may have company in left; Nick Castellanos, the Tiger's star farm-hand, is a third-baseman by trade, but they are starting to get him practicing some in left, since the corner infield spots in Detroit are well stocked with a pair of All-Stars and DH is spoken for once Victor Martinez gets off the DL. Good move by the Tiger brass; a stint playing left in the fall league or a Caribbean winter league might be a good next step.

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Not a good sign; Melinda Gates (Mrs. Bill) is on a birth-control kick and is putting her foundation's big wallet where her mouth is. It's a different world-view when kids are a problem to be avoided rather than a blessing to be nurtured. It's not a far cry to see some more repressive countries pressure women into having fewer kids (like China) rather than Gates' goal of letting women choose to have less kids; having more kids is not a bad option, especially as the developed world start diving well under the 2.1-kids-per-woman birth rate needed to keep the next generation the same size as the current one.

The Gates Foundation spends a lot of money looking after the education of kids, but is now spending a lot of money to cut down the clientele of the schools in the future. Some of those kids will wind up migrating north to hold down the economic fort when we retire, is demographic trends continue; heading them off at the pass via birth control isn't that much if any of a virtue.

Rent-a-Center

No, not the one behind Taco Bell in Midland, the Brooklyn Nets. The details seem to be in the works for Dwight Howard to land in Flatbush with Brook Lopez heading to Orlando and Kris Humphries landing in about the least-Kardasianesque town in the league-Cleveland (Utah and Milwaukee would be close runners up for that honor).

A minor irony in this is that Cleveland is helping to create a rival for Miami after getting jilted by LeBron two summers ago. It appears that the Nets are overpaying some, especially if they don't get him signed to a long-term deal. If not, they just wasted three number ones on a rent-a-center deal.

That being said, players of Howard's caliber are few and far between and mortgaging your draft future as much as the Stepien Rule (Cleveland's other gift to the NBA) will allow may well be worth it, especially if you can fill in the role-playing gaps with low-cost veterans rather than iffy players that a top-caliber team would be drafting with those (hopefully for the Nets) late-first-round picks.

Christmas in July: Matthew 2:9-12(NIV)

⁹ After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. ¹⁰ When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. ¹¹ On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. ¹² And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

I hadn't thought of this before, but the Magi were an indicator that Jesus was not just good news for the Jews but for the world as a whole. These were foreigners who weren't part of a Jewish culture looking for a Messiah. Yet, despite all that, they were overjoyed with the prospect of this kid.

However, I might want to take the "Despite all that" back; the Jews of the day were so used to a string of false messiahs that they were conditioned to be skeptical of the real One. When these would-be seers saw something major going down in Judea, they could accpet Jesus without a lot of baggage and gave gifts oddly marking his future, including a gift of funeral geal.

The Magi also had nothing invested in the local status quo. Herod, on the other hand, had a lot invested and wanted to keep his job.

If It's the Final Annual Sale, How Come You're Having it Again Next Year?

On our way over to Grand Rapids to visit Eileen's sister and her clan, we saw a greenhouse who was having a "final annual sale." One would think that would mean they're going out of business, but at second thought, it would the last sale on annual plants for the year.

I Googled for that, and found this Facebook entry for a greenhouse in Iowa having a final annual sale as well. It's dated the 21st of June, so you probably missed it.

Gangland

Here's an interesting statement from Dr. Bashir-

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said the US is trying to destabilise Syria by providing political protection for "gangs" operating in the country.

In an interview for German TV, Mr Assad also said Saudi Arabia and Qatar were arming "terrorists" in Syria. He also accused Turkey of giving the "terrorists" logistical support.

What is the Baathist Party other than a very well-armed gang? Granted, it is a gang that has been the recognized government of Syria for a few decades, but one that gained that power by gun-point rather than the open support of its people.

Yes, most nations start that way, having kicked out the previous rulers in some extra-legal fashion, but the good ones establish themselves and earn their legitimacy at the ballot box. The bad ones either don't bother with democracy or set up a one-party state to give the facade of popular support.

Also, the winners don't get tagged terrorists. Try calling the Boston Tea Party a terrorist act and see their modern namesakes start to take offense; if a Syrian resistance group did that to a load of Russian goods in Aleppo harbor, that would be a terrorist act, albeit one that was bloodless.

Christmas in July: Matthew 2:1-3(NIV)

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem ² and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.” ³ When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him.

We're used to the image of the Wise Men showing up on Christmas Day bringing their devotional bling. However, church tradition has them showing up 12 days later, giving us one version of Epiphany (a second one common to the Orthodox has Jesus getting baptized that day as well). That turns the manger unto Extended Stay Judea's Bethlehem franchise; Joseph and Mary must have gotten the two-week discount rate and gotten the hay changed at least once.

Even that version is iffy. We don't have a time-frame here, but the Magi hit Jerusalem after Jesus was born. So much for being there the night-of. The twelve-day version doesn't seem to have much footing, either.

What is of import is that a new king being born is going to make the existing monarch nervous, especially if it isn't his son. More than one king has dispatched contenders to the throne, even their own sons, if they were worried about being sent packing sooner than they'd like.

However, any plans to remedy the situation were foiled by God sending the Carpenters out of harms way over to Egypt until cooler heads were in charge in Judea.