The Problem With the GOP

I was born a Republican. I have voted Republican in nearly every election (I have voted for a few Democrats). The Republican Party is doing its best to alienate me. I grew up with Ronald Reagan as my president, even though I was too young to vote for him. (I did vote for him in the mock elections we had in school.)

The thing Ronald Reagan is that he inspired people to be great, but not with the help of government. Reagan's vision was a country where the government was less intrusive. He sought to cut taxes and reduce the size and scope of the government. Sure, he was not as successful as he had hoped.

Modern day Republicans bear no resemblance to Reagan. Reagan would be horrified at the big government Republicans. There are no major Republicans advocating Reagan's vision. They are intent on passing new laws. When Barry Goldwater went to Washington as a senator from Arizona, he sought to repeal laws.

John McCain is not a small government Republican. But then neither were any of the Republican contenders, with the exception of Ron Paul, and perhaps Fred Thompson.

I have no idea who I will vote for. It sure will not be Obama or Clinton. McCain does not have my vote. I may leave it blank or vote third party.

Wake up, Republicans, or become a permanent historical party, just like the Whigs.

Decisions, Decisions

I am in the midst of trying to figure out my class schedule for the fall. I know that I will be taking Historiography, but mostly because I have to. I am torn for the second class. I am trying to decide between Problems in North Carolina History and American Revolution and Early Republic. Neither really strikes as more interesting than the other.

The High Modernist Church

I just finished reading James C. Scott's book Seeing Like a State. In the book, Scott, an anthropologist from Yale, dissects the high modernist view of the world. Essentially high modernism is roughly the time period of the early nineteenth century to mid twentieth century. Your run of the mill high modernist is someone who believes in endless progress of scientific reasoning. It is not so much a belief in science, as in biology, chemistry, physics, etc. It is a belief in the science of reasoning. There is no value of what has come before. In fact it is a hindrance. Scott uses the example of two cities that were highly influenced in their design by high modernist thinking. One is Paris, France. Paris is an old city, and it was difficult to retrofit it to a modernist grid system. The older part of the city was built up with no rhyme or reason, in the view of an outsider. The other city is Brasilia, Brazil. It was totally planned from the ground up by designers with a high modernist view.

Scott details how Brasilia did not turn out the way it was expected. He details many such things: Prussian forestry science, Soviet agricultural collectivization, and others.

He does not mention the church, but I think we can apply some of these lessons to the church. Somewhere in the nineteenth or twentieth century, this sort of thinking permeated through the church world. Everything became cookie-cutter. (I have numerous book in my library that prove this.) Everything was reasoned. Everyone had to have the same salvation/sanctification experience. Every church had to be run the same way. Every church plant had to done to exacting specifications. Every church building had to look the same way. (Not everyone does, of course, but you can almost date the decade in which a church was built by looking at the architecture.)

Centralized church bureaucrats (like centralized bureaucrats in the Soviet Union, or anywhere else) drew up plans for everyone to follow. The problem is that these cookie-cutter plans seldom worked. A church plant in midtown Manhattan, New York City is going look vastly different from a church plant in rural Iowa. The ministries that exist in a mountain community in Washington state are going to look much different from a multi-ethnic church Miami.

I think a good number of people in the church world have come to realize this. What works here will not work there. Just because Pastor Big Shot in Dallas baptizes people at the local water slide does not mean it is going to be effective in anywhere else.

As ministers, we have to know our community better than anyone else. This is one thing I struggled with as we were running our church into the ground. I went back and forth with the district big-wigs (250 miles away, in another universe). I kept trying to tell them what our community was like, but they would not listen. They insisted we do things by their methods. We tried to change, but the money they were supporting us with was taken away.

Every church must be local and meet the needs of its community. I am not a fan of this word, but it must be organic.

Happy Easter

I hope everyone had a great day celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, our only hope for salvation. Let us not forget that today is the central day of the Christian year.

Oil and Gas Companies Making Record Profits? -- Good

I, for one, am glad that the oil companies are making profits, and big profits. "Why? Are you crazy?" you ask.

Simple, I own them. No, I am not some big tycoon, but I am an owner of the oil companies. It is likely that you are, too.

I have some mutual funds for my retirement. Yesterday, I received the annual report in the mail. As part of my mutual fund, I own shares in Chevron and Exxon Mobil. So if they make a profit, so do I, which means more money for me when I retire.

I also own shares in evil pharmaceutical companies: Abbott Labs, Eli Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer, among others. So when they make a profit, it helps me.

If you have a retirement account such as a 401(k), IRA, 503(b), or whatever, you likely own shares in companies that make huge profits. If your account does not own shares in these type of companies, you should probably move your money elsewhere.

I encourage you to take a look at the annual report and see which companies you own. Remember the next time you curse how much they make, you are reaping a part of their profits. So, if they make less, you make less.

I am not a Plumber

To paraphrase the prophet Amos, I am not a plumber, nor the son of a plumber.

Last week, a knob on the bathtub broke. I ventured to a local big box home improvement center to purchase new knob. I shut off the water. When I tried to fix it, I noticed another piece that was broken. In the process, like an idiot, I tried to fix it anyway. When I turned the water on, and the whole thing shot out of the wall. I then ventured back to a local big box home improvement center to purchase the missing piece. They did not have the exact piece, so I got something "close." After trying to fix it, with a hacksaw involved. Again, the water goes on, and, again, the whole thing shoots out of the wall. It was like on the cartoons.

My wife says, "I'm going to call a plumber."

I said, "Okay."

Faith and Family in the Storm

I have been immersed in reading about the Holocaust over the last week (see previous posts). I finished Bartov's Mirrors of Destruction today. I am also looking into anti-Semitism for my research project for my class. With some time, due to spring break, I picked up a book that has been on my shelf for a decade or so. Blood and Honor is the autobiography of Reinhold Kerstan.

Kerstan was born in 1931 in East Prussia--which is now part of Poland, but was German at the time. He was less than two when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor.

His father was a Baptist minister, and the family wound up at a church in the middle of Hitler's Berlin. Brought up in the Christian faith, he was saw the biblical heroes (Abraham, Moses, David, the Apostles, etc.) as his heroes. They were all Jews, as were some of his friends and the family doctor. He could not reconcile that with the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime, especially the horrifying event of Kristallnacht.

The father is drafted into military service and sent to the front. His older brother Seigfried is sent away to school. Young "Reini" is sent to Czechoslovakia to a Hitler Youth school.

His world of faith in Christ collides with his faith in the Fatherland. Turmoil ensues internally and with his fellow students who wind up "crucifying" him. His faith sustains him through his months at school and in the bewildering aftermath of the war. He is eventually reunited with his family.

It gives me pause to think how would my faith hold up under similar circumstances. Not just the horrors of the war, but in the poverty stricken aftermath.

Hate Crime is a Redundant, Repetitive Term

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been reading Omer Bartov's Mirrors of Destruction. Bartov says that there should be a distinction between the Soviet Gulags and the Nazi death camps. This comes, as he says, from a "failure to distinguish between racial genocide and political persecutions" (p. 173). I ask, "Is one worse than the other?"

Is mass murder by the Soviets of political dissidents some how more noble than the Nazi killings of Jews because of their Jewishness? While the Soviets were not motivated by racial motives, they killed as many people as, if not more than, the Nazis. It is easy to say the Nazis were worse, but in doing so, we somehow saying the Soviets were better. I cannot buy that.

In our city, we had a recent "hate crime"--a term that is ridiculous because it is redundant. A white man approached an interracial couple (white woman, black man) in a store parking lot. He apparently uttered some racial slur and fired a gun. Many were up in arms about this "hate crime." I ask, "Would it have been better if he had criticized the car they were driving and fired a gun?" Is the murder or assault of someone worse because they are attacked because of their ethnicity, or for some other reason.

This brings me back to the idea of a "hate crime." Is there such a thing as a "love crime"? Is not all crime motivated by--or at least facilitated by--hate? If we truly love someone, we will not violate them or their property.

Utopia

Leszek Kolakowski writes: "When I am asked where I would like to live, my standard answer is: deep in the virgin mountain forest on a lake shore at the corner of Madison Avenue in Manhattan and Champs Elysees, in a small tidy town" (Modernity on Endless Trial, 131). This is his definition of utopia.

It is so utterly crazy. It is so utterly contradictory. Of course. That what utopia is. Utopia is something we create in our mind that is contradictory. It is impossible to have utopia. As Kolakowski points out, utopia cannot exist. In order to have a utopia, where all is peace and joy, one has obtain it at gun point, which is in violation of what utopia is. Utopia becomes, of necessity, totalitarianism, because the ideal must be enforced.

We are now reading a disturbing book by Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity. Using the Holocaust as a focal point, Bartov writes, "Totalitarianism is modern utopia brought to its ultimate concrete conclusion" (p. 158).

I think we all have a little bit of a Utopian in us. We often say (or think) things like: "If the rest of world just saw things like I did..." That is a Utopian statement. We are contemplating what our ideal would look like when enforced on the world.

Perhaps we need to get beyond our fascination with an idyllic world. The next time you think about how great your Utopian world would be, remember you are probably the only one thinking that. (Am I being Utopian saying that?)

By the way, my utopia involves a couch, high speed internet, and an unlimited supply of sweet tea.

This is So Clinton

Is there anything that surprises you about the Clinton machine? The Clintons claimed a "mandate" in 1992 and 1996 when Bill failed to receive 50% of the vote.

Now, with Hillary trailing in total popular votes, total pledged delegates and primaries/caucuses won, the Clinton machine floats the idea that the leader in all three, Barack Obama, should take second place to Hillary. Do not get the idea that Hillary will ever take the second spot.

More typical Clinton behavior. Do we really want another four (or [shudder] eight) years of this stuff?

Where's the Nazarene Revolutionary Guard?

I clicked the link for the Nazarene Revolutionary Guard blog and got a page that said it was gone. Could the goons have gotten to them?

Spring Break

Ahhhh! A week off. I am looking forward to the coming week of time off. I will, however, not be a couch potato the whole week. I will be working on my bibliographic project for my Twentieth Century European History class. Maybe, I will also be able to post a little more.

Unintended Consequences

We just finished reading Leszek Kołakowski's book Modernity on Endless Trial for my Twentieth Century European History class. For the last several years I have considered the debate between modernity and post-modernity, which are both slippery terms to define.

One thing from the book that captured my attention was the author's thoughts on the Reformation. Kołakowski was a Marxist who converted to Catholicism, which accounts for his dim view of Protestants, especially the Reformers, and particularly John Calvin.

He effectively says that the Reformation brought about the downfall of Christianity. Calvin sought a return to apostolic Christianity. In the process he marginalized Aquinas, as a theologian, and many of the church fathers. The result was not a return to more authentic Christianity, but that the Church in the process was stripped of is moorings to past. It was now adrift, tossed about on the waves of secular reason. What followed were the deists and proponents for natural religion.

What this says is that we, as Christians, need to be careful about how we handle our differences with fellow Christ followers who have a different take.