David Swindle's Notepad

WTHR: Blu Ray reviews of "Coraline" and "Watchmen Director's Cut"

2009-07-30T17:36:00.002-04:00

Here.

Newsreal: CNN: Jack Cafferty presents Dinosaur Dan Rather’s dreams of socializing the news

2009-07-30T17:34:00.001-04:00

Here.

Newsreal: HBO: Maher decries “profit motive” and sees conspiracies in healthcare, prisons

2009-07-29T20:34:00.001-04:00

Here.

Newsreal: HBO: Bill, one can’t pick minorities’ “side” when one denies the Left’s lie of a racial war

2009-07-29T20:32:00.001-04:00

Here.

Newsreal: Fox: Ann Coulter tells Geraldo that Birther movement “just a few cranks out there”

2009-07-29T20:23:00.002-04:00

Here.

Parcbench: Auteur Report Card: Judd Apatow

2009-07-29T19:51:00.002-04:00

Here. My judgment: "Funny People" has a great pedigree and I'm hoping it's good.

Newsreal: Media Matters cuts Horowitz interview, hides politically-incorrect truth

2009-07-25T19:20:00.001-04:00

Here.

WTHR: My "Harry Potter" review

2009-07-25T14:31:00.002-04:00

Here. Not my strongest review IMHO.

Newsreal: MSNBC: Chris Matthews bullies his way out of winning an easy debate with G. Gordon Liddy

2009-07-25T14:25:00.003-04:00

Here.

As much as I enjoy conspiracy theory from far away, it starts to get really old when you have to deal with people who actually believe in it. I'm going to resist the temptation to stumble into the blackhole of a debate with a birther.

Newsreal: Comedy Central: Douglas Rushkoff talks corporations with Stephen Colbert

2009-07-25T14:18:00.002-04:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Douglas Rushkoff

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Mark Sanford

Here. I have a post following up on my review of Douglas Rushkoff's new book.

Parcbench: Stuck in '80s Childhood Hell

2009-07-25T13:54:00.002-04:00

Here. A piece on the death of childhood. I tried to write something comedic and it came out tragic at the end.

American Thinker: Looking to the future through reviving the past

2009-07-25T12:36:00.003-04:00

This is one of the key pieces on my variant of conservatism. A question to my friends who don't particularly care for all things "conservative"... if I define conservatism in the fashion of this piece then what do you think? Would that be something worthwhile? Might that help explain part of the reason for my recent joining up with the "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy"?

Newsreal: CNN: Arrested Black Professor Claims Racism

2009-07-22T11:06:00.002-04:00

Here.

Newsreal: MSNBC: Maddow tries to paint the Right as Kooks with “Birther” coverage

2009-07-22T10:49:00.003-04:00

Here. Fun stuff here. I'm a big fan of conspiracy theories as my readers know. Just not in taking them seriously.

Newsreal: HBO: Bill Maher’s redemptive moments

2009-07-22T10:45:00.002-04:00

Here. As much as I'll rag on Maher when he's out of line I won't hesitate to highlight when he does and says some decent things.

Parcbench: Brent Smith's review of "Burn Notice"

2009-07-22T10:25:00.003-04:00

My good friend Brent Smith has a review of "Burn Notice" at Parcbench. Be sure to read it.

FrontPage: My review of Douglas Rushkoff's Life Inc

2009-07-22T10:13:00.003-04:00

Here. I quoted from Joanna in my review as an example of how people are already putting Rushkoff's approach into practice.

Newsreal: HBO: Just because you have an excuse to be racist doesn’t mean we’ll tolerate your racism

2009-07-19T14:09:00.001-04:00

Here.

American Thinker: What's so conservative about vigilantism?

2009-07-18T11:19:00.002-04:00

Here. My DVD review of "Taken." Mentioned in the article are my friends Chris Yogerst and Brent Smith.

Newsreal: The Methodology of Media Matters, AKA Media Antimatter

2009-07-17T23:55:00.002-04:00

Here. My critique of Media Matters differs in both rhetoric and substance from how most on "the Right" would challenge the organization. Yes, they are "character assassins" but by and large their lies are those of omission. It's easy to get turned off by "harsh rhetoric" when you don't understand where it comes from or what it's a reaction against.

Parcbench: America’s Greatest Film Critic Is One Of Its Weaker Pundits

2009-07-17T23:46:00.002-04:00

I co-authored this piece with Chris Yogerst, my colleague at Parcbench. It critiques Roger Ebert's blogging. This is Chris and my first collaboration and we're hoping to do more in the future.

WTHR: "Bruno"

2009-07-14T22:51:00.001-04:00

Here. I loved it. Funniest movie in a long time.

Newsreal: MSNBC: Isn’t justice supposed to be blind, Rachel?

2009-07-14T22:48:00.002-04:00

Here.

Newsreal: HBO: Meghan McCain is not Generation Y’s Best Voice… Yet…

2009-07-12T16:46:00.003-04:00

Here. Painful to see a Generation Y blogger thrown to the Boomer wolves. She's just not capable of defending herself.

The new member of the family: Maura Swindle

2009-07-12T11:17:00.008-04:00

Yesterday the Swindle family got one bigger. April, Ash, and I drove up to Bunker Hill, Indiana (about 90 minutes) to pick up Maura, a female Siberian Husky puppy from the breeder.

Maura is a red and white husky with the boldest, most endearing blue eyes. She also has an intriguing pattern on her forehead. It almost looks like a maple leaf from the Canadian flag.

There are now two females in my life who have my complete devotion -- and these are the only circumstances in which April would ever tolerate such a development. (Perhaps the only other would be if April and I have a daughter some time down the road.) I'm head-over-heels for Maura. She's the most adorable, affectionate dog we could have ever imagined. Right now as I type this Maura is lying next to me and she's put her head over my right arm. I think she's fallen asleep in my arms.

I could get used to blogging with a puppy in my lap. (Though as she grows bigger it'll likely get more difficult!)

April's taken a few pictures which are worth sharing.

This first one shows Maura's confrontation with our cat Butters. I don't think he likes her very much yet. She's still too shocked and overwhelmed with having a new home and family that I don't think she's formed an opinion of him yet. She does enjoy his toys, though, including many he never cared for much like the yellow springy ball between the two of them.

And this picture of her immediately melted my heart and confirmed that she was in the right family. She fell asleep against my DVD shelf, the documentary section in fact! You can see some of my leftist political documentaries in the background.

(The DVDs pictured for those curious: "The Trials of Henry Kissinger," "The Fog of War," "The Hunting of the President," "Uncovered," "Outfoxed," "The Yes Men," "The Control Room," "Wadd: the Life and Times of John C. Holmes," "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies," "American Pimp," "Inside Deep Throat," "Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy," "This Film is Not Yet Rated," "Chain Camera," "The Aristocrats," "Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist," "Capturing the Friedmans," "Ashes of Rhetoric," "The Confessions of Robert Crumb," "Divine Trash," and "Unprecedented.")

Once Maura's adjusted more and done being house-trained we'll probably have a barbecue or something and everyone can come and meet her.

Newsreal: The Right models itself on Hitler?

2009-07-10T11:47:00.002-04:00

Here.

Newsreal: Rachel Maddow: The Mary Poppins of the Left

2009-07-09T10:28:00.003-04:00

Here. Hopefully with this post my college friends who have been troubled by my rightward turn can begin to see how my approach differs from some of the tendencies within the Conservative Movement that they so despise.

Newsreal: Free Speech TV: As Absurd as the Flying Spaghetti Monster

2009-07-08T09:50:00.003-04:00

Here. A different approach to seeing the Left as a religion. Expect more of these posts.

WTHR: My "Public Enemies" review

2009-07-06T22:41:00.003-04:00

Here. Not as bad as "Transformers 2" but about as substantive. Why is the title of the movie on top of Johnny Depp's crotch in that poster?

Newsreal: Pro-Socialized medicine because you’re a nurse or because you’re a socialist?

2009-07-05T19:22:00.004-04:00

I have a blog post at Newsreal, a new blog from the David Horowitz Freedom Center. I discuss Real Time with Bill Maher -- a show I watch regularly and hope to write about regularly as well.

Parcbench: My piece on Michael Moore

2009-07-02T00:24:00.002-04:00

Here.

WTHR: My "Transformers 2" review

2009-06-29T13:24:00.003-04:00

Here. One of my most brutal reviews in a long time.

My New Family

2009-06-26T21:01:00.006-04:00

This summer has really started out well for my new family. April began her new job and is loving it. After 3 weeks of training she's started a new schedule which allows us to see each other a little bit more. The only principle drawback for the time being is that we don't have a regular day off together. She has Thursday and Friday off while I have Saturday and Sunday free.

In spite of this difference in schedules, though, neither of us are lonely. For the past two weeks April's 14-year-old brother Ash has been staying with us. The plan is for him to live up here with us for the summer and we're just thrilled to have him. Ash is a quiet, thoughtful young man. He enjoys video games and movies a great deal -- as I did at his age. He's also very creative. He's shown a talent for writing short stories and drawing -- talents that April and I are eager to help him develop while he's staying with us.

So he doesn't spend his entire summer just playing video games I've encouraged Ash to start a blog here so he can reflect on the things going on his life. I'd encourage others to comment on his blog and encourage him at this time in his life.

I'm going to do my best NOT to indoctrinate Ash into my life of politics/movies/religion. (Especially this religion/politics blackhole that I've stumbled into.) He would be far better off and happier to just avoid this crap altogether. That doesn't me he won't pick up on things, though. (See his most recent blog post, inspired by a conversation we had Tuesday night when he and I drove to pick up April from work.) And April told me last night that she caught him watching CNN after we went to bed!

Pretty soon our family will be growing bigger. A few weeks ago we put down a deposit on a Siberian Husky puppy. We don't know for certain what we're going to name her yet. April wants to call her "Maura" but I don't really like the sound of that. And I think it's important to actually meet the puppy first and get a gauge of her personality before choosing a name. Here's a picture of her here:

Well that's pretty much the family story for the summer so far. More updates as they come. I'm sure I'll have plenty to say once we pick up the puppy in a few weeks.

Parcbench: Auteur Report Card for Michael Bay

2009-06-23T13:44:00.003-04:00

I make my opinion of Michael Bay quite clear here. I'd prefer more films like "The Rock" and "The Island" and fewer like "Transformers." I have no expectation of that hope being fulfilled.

WTHR: My "Drag Me to Hell" review

2009-06-22T23:03:00.001-04:00

Here. A great horror/comedy.

WTHR: My "Land of the Lost" review

2009-06-22T22:41:00.002-04:00

Here. A very pleasant surprise.

15 Books in 15 Minutes

2009-06-21T11:21:00.005-04:00

(From my friend and old Castleton Arts co-worker Scott Grow.)

Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, tag 15 friends, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you.

My choices:

Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Ulysses by James Joyce
Radical Son by David Horowitz
The Conservative Soul by Andrew Sullivan
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
What Liberal Media? by Eric Alterman
Kaddish by Allen Ginsbergy
The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright
Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh
Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm
The Bible
Further Along the Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
Uncivil Wars by David Horowitz

Parcbench: Auteur Report Card of Harold Ramis

2009-06-19T12:17:00.004-04:00

I have a piece at Parcbench discussing the films of Harold Ramis -- read it before you decide to see "Year One." Or just observe the film's pathetic 20% on Rotten Tomatoes and see the connection between an auteur reading and the probability of a new film's quality. How do you know if a film is going to be good? Just look at who the director is and what they've done previously. It works almost every time.

Some kind words from my friends out in the blogosphere

2009-06-17T12:46:00.002-04:00

I got several great responses from some of my blog friends about my FrontPage interview.

Yesterday Jon Rowe had some kind words at his blog and at the team blog he's a part of, Positive Liberty. Jon's gotten to see my political evolution. I first came across his writing when researching for a Daily News column. He specializes in blogging about the founders and their religious views but writes about all kinds of other subjects as well. He's pretty essential reading.

I also received some very kind words from Bookworm, a newer friend I've made since I started writing for FrontPage. Be sure and check out her blog as well. She always has interesting and provocative thoughts.

Front Page: Making Peace with David Horowitz

2009-06-16T07:50:00.004-04:00

I'm interviewed here at Front Page by Jamie Glazov about my political evolution. Subjects discussed include the origins of my political engagement, my second thoughts, my involvement with the Academic Freedom campaign, the dialogue between Wolfe and Horowitz, radicalism, my spiritual views, Inter-Faith, and my current New Centrist ideas.

American Thinker: Losing Mum and Pup

2009-06-13T11:41:00.003-04:00

I have a review of Christopher Buckley's Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir here at American Thinker. My conclusion has a preview of David Horowitz's new book, A Cracking of the Heart, that's coming out this fall. It has a similar theme -- exploring the life of a family member who has died -- but goes about it in an entirely different style.

Both books are must-reads that I enjoyed tremendously.

Parcbench: Sarah Palin Vs. David Letterman

2009-06-12T09:57:00.003-04:00

Here. I'll defend the most famous alum of Ball State when he's attacked by an overzealous politician who doesn't know how to take a joke.

Parcbench: Pixar Vs. Dreamworks

2009-06-11T10:22:00.002-04:00

Guess which side I fall on.

WTHR: My review of "The Hangover"

2009-06-11T10:09:00.002-04:00

Right here. Usually my B+ reviews aren't this critical.

Front Page: Why Conservatism Can't Be Cool

2009-06-05T09:53:00.003-04:00

(And why it doesn't need to be.) Here. Quite pleased with this piece. Horowitz also has a great piece here praising Obama for his speech in Cairo.

Parcbench: The Lies Sasha Grey Tells Herself and Her Fans

2009-06-04T12:03:00.002-04:00

Here. Quite pleased with how this piece turned out.

You Don't Know What You've Got 'Till It's Gone

2009-06-02T12:27:00.006-04:00

April started her new job yesterday. Her training runs for three weeks and she works from 9-5, Monday through Friday. This schedule doesn't really fit very well with my work schedule (3:15-10:15 Monday through Friday.) It means we only really get maybe an hour or two together each day after I get off work. And usually by that time we're both pretty tired. It also means that I'm alone with about 5 hours of writing time (from 9 in the morning until 2 or so when it's time to get ready for work.)

Initially April and I both thought this might be a good thing. I'd get plenty of "writing time" in every day. This is a frequent conflict between the two of us. Usually when I'm not working I want to spend my time working on articles, blog posts, and my books. And she wants to spend time with me. And it's difficult to get a balance between the two needs that satisfies both of us.

And now that I have this period of daily literary time I've come across the problem: I miss my wife. I MISS HER A WHOLE LOT. I really don't like being apart from her. If the choice is between my writing and her it's really not a difficult decision. And it never should have been. Looking back to all the times when I picked my writing over her I feel like such a fool. I want to be with her. She's continually on my mind and it hurts my heart to be apart from her. I look forward to when she's done with training at her new job and we can get into a routine in which we have more time together.

WTHR: My "Up" review

2009-06-02T10:24:00.003-04:00

Wonderful picture. I was even talking with April about going and seeing it again while it's still in theatres. If you have children then you must take them to see it.

WTHR: My review of "Angels and Demons"

2009-05-27T11:51:00.004-04:00

Perhaps "bitch slap" would be more accurate. Here.

Parcbench: Stealth Conservatism

2009-05-27T11:39:00.002-04:00

I have a new article here at Parcbench. I had to defend "Superbad" from this utterly unacceptable assault and misrepresentation. Expect more light, pop culture oriented pieces from me there in the future.

WTHR: My review of "The Wrestler"

2009-05-26T09:42:00.003-04:00

Here. I'm very satisfied with this review and this film. Darren Aronofsky remains my all-time favorite director. The book review I reference in the review is, of course, this one here.

Parc Bench: The Top 10 Reasons Why The Kindle Beats The Book

2009-05-14T10:25:00.002-04:00

My first article for Parc Bench is now available here. Enjoy.

WTHR: My review of "Star Trek"

2009-05-12T14:27:00.001-04:00

Here. Blown away.

Front Page: Cravings for Death

2009-05-11T10:20:00.001-04:00

I have a spiritually-oriented review of Jamie Glazov's United In Hate at Front Page here. Those who have followed my spiritual writings might be interested to see what happens when they cross paths with my political writings.

Cinema Diary: Tales of the Black Freighter Bite Size Review

2009-05-04T12:09:00.000-04:00

I haven't been updating my Cinema Diary blog at WTHR as frequently lately since I've been so busy with other things but I'm going to make an effort to start posting on it more frequently. Here's my Bite Size Review of the "Tales of the Black Freighter" DVD. Five word review: Rent it, don't buy it.

WTHR: My "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" review

2009-05-04T10:12:00.000-04:00

The Dave was not pleased at all to see his childhood so disrespected.

A wonderful bachelor party from some great friends

2009-05-03T13:39:00.000-04:00

The wedding is officially 13 days away so it was about time to get the bachelor party out of the way. Yesterday evening my dear friends Tim Birkel, Brent Smith, Josh Buress, Bob Jones, and Andy Bond gathered for a celebration coordinated by Jon McDermid, my Best Man. We didn't do anything particularly crazy -- no strippers or binge drinking. We just went to Buffalo Wild Wings for beer and wings and then went and saw "X-Men Origins: Wolverine." (The movie was a bit of a disappointment -- I'll be writing my review this afternoon -- but at least we could all take in the murder of our childhood together.) Afterward several of them had the chance to come back to my and April's apartment.

It was a simple gathering but that's all I really wanted. At the end of the night I felt so lucky that I had such wonderful friends supporting April and me as we prepare to begin our married life together. Thanks to those who came, those who wanted to be there but couldn't, and especially Jon who made it all possible.

American Thinker: Like a pocket full of razor blades

2009-05-02T13:46:00.000-04:00

My review of Jamie Glazov's United In Hate was published today at American Thinker. Check it out. It's a piece with which I'm quite satisfied.

Re-branding Freedom for the Post-Bush Generation

2009-04-30T20:05:00.000-04:00

I just knew that I was bound to receive at least one pro-reparations advocate who would respond to my recent Front Page article “The Return of the Reparations Monster.”

Dear Mr. Swindle,

I don’t know what nationality you are but no one needs permission from neither you nor anyone else to justify what they feel they need for amends to be made to the African American community for slavery. The middle class in the Black community is not the norm as any State of Black America report will tell you. Besides that, the idea behind reparations is based on the 40 acres and a mule which was promised and never granted to ex African slaves after slavery ended. American is definitely fundamentally racist because the system of slavery here which laid the foundation for a huge part of America’s economy was based on race. I suggest you look up the Slave codes and the Black codes as well as “Jim Crow” laws to refresh your memory if you feel that America is not fundamentally racist.

The thing that gets to me is the lack of honesty when the topic of racism and American Slavery is discussed. It is not Black people’s imagination or opinion when they state that America has at its roots racism. The root of racism in America’s social fiber is an historical fact that has yet to be rectified because it still goes on today. For example, how many young white men are killed by the police on a yearly basis in the United States in comparison to Black young men? This is just one example. The only way the issue of racism will be solved in America is for people to be honest and not argue about facts as if they are opinions.

Sincerely Yours,

Pearl

From the tone of Pearl’s message she struck me as reachable. Unlike others who had slurred me in the past as a “racist” for writing about David Horowitz’s ideas, she had yet to hurl the epithet at me or attack me personally. So a friendly response seemed appropriate:

Pearl,
Thanks for reading my article and sending me your thoughts on the issue of reparations. I look forward to discussing this subject with you and getting your take. I'm always eager to get my readers' opinions, especially those of people like yourself who disagree with me.

1. I don't think I said in my article that anyone needs my permission to argue on behalf of reparations. However, since we live in a democratic society, those who advocate for reparations do need to try and persuade large sections of the population to support their cause. They have to sell the reparations cause in the marketplace of ideas and need to be able to grapple with intellectuals like David Horowitz who would challenge them.

2. I'm glad that you said in your email that we should argue based on facts and not opinions since I'm concerned that in your characterizations of the black community you're doing the latter. The facts are that according to the US census 24.7% of African-Americans were at the poverty level and 47% of African-Americans owned their own homes in 2004. As I discussed in my article, the African-American middle class has grown by leaps and bounds. In 1940 87% of African-Americans were at the poverty level -- in 60 years that fell more than 60%.

The challenging and politically incorrect question that follows from these statistics is this: if a majority of the African-American community has escaped the poverty of their ancestors why does a segment of African-Americans remain in poverty? Because if America is fundamentally racist and oppresses blacks as they strive to pursue their dreams then we wouldn't have only a quarter at the bottom. Any answer would be an opinion up for debate but Horowitz offers a fact-based reply in his essay "Martin's Children" drawn from the research of Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom: "Currently 85% of all poor black children live in fatherless families. In other words, the poverty rate for black children without fathers is nearly six times that for black children with two parents. A far more effective anti-poverty program would be to promote black marriages."

3. "Jim Crow" laws were only in the Southern states and were abolished 40 years ago by a coalition of both blacks and whites, including a white President and a white Supreme Court. What relevance do they have to demonstrate America is fundamentally racist when they were abolished long ago?

4. Why is America not fundamentally racist in my view? Because its founding documents -- the Constitution and the Declaration -- are race neutral and set up a system in which all could live and thrive on the strength of their merit. It took time for that system to be extended to all persons but in 2008 we saw the clear fruits of that extension in the presidential victory of Barack Obama. (Who, if you're curious, I voted for and supported, and who does not support reparations himself.)

5. I'm not sure how many young white men and young black men are killed by police. Since you favor facts over opinion do you have any to demonstrate your point?

6. I had a few questions for you about how reparations might work. When reparations legislation is passed and the federal government decides to start mailing out checks, how much would someone descended from slaves receive? Would my fiancee April, who is bi-racial, receive a check that is half the size of the check my future father-in-law, John, would get? When April and I have children five or ten years down the road would each of them receive a quarter of the amount their grandfather received? Would upper-class African-Americans like Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama receive checks too? Now Barack Obama would not receive a reparations check since he does not have any ancestors that were descended from slaves, correct? And would the first daughters, Malia and Sasha, only receive checks the size of April's since only half of their DNA comes from someone descended from slaves? How is this going to work exactly in your view?

Thanks Pearl. I anticipate your response so I can better understand this issue.

Take care,

David Swindle

I haven’t heard back from Pearl yet, though I certainly hope that I do. Because I’ve got a whole host of exciting ideas to exchange with her about the principles that have made our country great – thoughts she’s probably not hearing.

I was particularly hoping she might jump on my fourth point regarding the racial neutrality of the founding documents, perhaps parroting a common leftist misrepresentation of the Constitution: “Well it says that blacks are only to be considered three fifths of a person! There it is! Institutional racism in the very fabric of the American Idea!”

As Horowitz discussed in Uncivil Wars, Such an understanding flies in the face of everything we know about the three-fifths compromise in history. The idea to count slaves – not African-Americans -- as only three-fifths of a person for representational purposes was proposed by the North to give Southern slave states fewer congressional representatives and thus less political power. It was actually the “institutionally racist” southerners who wanted to count slaves as whole persons. Had Pearl been alive to argue at the constitutional convention she’d have no doubt taken the position that slaves shouldn’t be counted at all!

But Pearl probably hasn’t heard that. And if she would in the future then she probably wouldn’t listen because the person saying it would be a “conservative” and perhaps, heaven forbid, a Republican -- so important ideas about American liberty fall on deaf ears for no reason other than the political identification of those articulating them.

The nature of political movements is that they encompass many different issues, groups, and personalities. And unfortunately it’s often human nature to ignore a whole movement’s ideas because you passionately disagree with one segment, one issue, or even one person. If conservatives are wrong about one thing that’s obvious to you then they’re wrong about everything and really not worth your time.

There are many understandable but ultimately unacceptable reasons to be hostile toward “conservatism.” For some it’s the Iraq war. Others didn’t like George Bush and company. Others might be focused on cultural issues like abortion or gay rights and disagree with the GOP’s take on those issues. Still others might get turned off by the Christian Right or the hyperbole of talk radio and Fox News.

But those aren’t intelligent reasons to reject so-called “conservative” ideas. The American Idea works. Capitalism works. Individual liberty should be the animating principle of our society. We should be skeptical of government’s ability to fix every problem. And these values should be defended from the Islamic totalitarians who want to replace them with Sharia law. Disliking Bush or some of the players in the conservative movement can’t rationally translate into dismissing these ideas because the fact is this: these ideas are only “conservative” if that’s the label one chooses to stick on them.

So what’s the answer to this problem? A generational shift in thinking in how we define and understand political ideology and the culture war. Do we redefine “liberal” away from the Left so that it refers to the Center? Do we refashion “conservative” to be somehow more appealing to the masses? No, we have to create a new movement and define a new ideology unburdened by the failures and associations of history.

In 1962 Horowitz wrote Student, and broke with his Old Left parents to help keep the Socialist Dream alive by helping to found the New Left. Today my generation has a different pursuit to maintain: the American Dream. And in its defense I propose the foundation of the New Center – an inclusive, bi-partisan, open-minded, passionately skeptical, big tent ideological umbrella for those prepared to transcend the Baby Boom culture wars and move on to more constructive pursuits.

Maybe people like Pearl won’t buy the American Idea if it’s a Movement Conservative selling it. But perhaps she, and others like her, might pay it a second thought if instead it’s offered by a New Centrist.

WTHR: My "Gomorrah" review

2009-04-29T10:54:00.000-04:00

Here. Those interested in seeing the film might want to read my review or another review so they can familiarize themselves with what's happening before going in.

WTHR: April's senior show

2009-04-24T12:39:00.000-04:00

I have a write-up of April's senior show here.

WTHR: My review of "Duplicity"

2009-04-21T12:51:00.001-04:00

Here. Not bad, not great - a clear C. Nowhere near as good as "Michael Clayton," of my A+ films of 2007.

Beautiful Child

2009-04-18T20:32:00.000-04:00

In just under a month I'll be marrying my fiancee April Bey in a small Inter-Faith ceremony at my parents' home in Carmel. Many people in my life have yet to get to know April very well and are no doubt eager to learn more about why I have decided to spend the rest of my life with her. Why do I love April so much?

It's certainly a question with many answers and I intend to provide a few of them in essay form on my blog.

For this first one, there's one of the facets of April's personality that I want to focus on: the Beautiful Child within her.

As most of the people who know me well are quite aware, I have a tendency toward seriousness, often to a fault. My attention is always focused on the world of ideas, grappling with big questions of politics, religion, and culture. The English major in me is always analyzing everything. My inner child is often one of my most downplayed parts of my psyche.

This is where April steps in to complete me.

One of the aspects of April that fills me with the most joy is her more pronounced inner child. I love this part of her so much. And I'll give a few examples of it.

1. Animals, dogs, and puppies
I have never met anyone who loves animals as much as April. Any creature that's "cute" just overwhelms her with joy and emotion. She loves the above video of Christian the Lion, for example. She is obsessed with cute animals on the Discovery channel. She especially loves our cat Butters and wants to get a Siberian Husky puppy to be his companion.

She also gets very upset when animals are mistreated. The other day we drove by a dog that had been hit by a car and April got very upset -- she actually started crying and I had to comfort her. Similarly, she can take and enjoy the most brutal of horror movies ("The Devil's Rejects" is one of her absolute favorites) but if there's any violence toward an animal then she gets deeply disturbed.

2. Bugs
Just as April loves cute animals she detests and fears non-cute creatures, particularly bugs. And it's not just stinging insects like bees or spiders that might be poisonous. If there's a moth or a ladybug in the house she'll get up and shriek and demand that I kill it immediately. It's a stereotype that women hate spiders in their bathrooms and need men to kill them. I never expected I'd have a wife someday who actually would have me kill her spiders. But the other day April came to me yelling in terror at the spider in her bathroom and I had to perform my husbandly duty and execute the invader. I loved it.

3. Kids' movies
Even to this day April loves children's movies, especially Disney films. We had to get "Pinocchio" the day it was released on Blu-Ray and she has vowed to complete her Disney collection. Frequently the films we get from Netflix are movies she loves from when she was a kid that she wants to share with me. Even new kids movies she'll often have an interest in. It's only been by the grace of God that I've managed to avoid seeing "Beverly Hills Chiuhuaha" and "Hotel for Dogs." (Her interest in those movies is obviously tied in with point one.)

It's important to understand, though, that this is just one side of April's amazing personality. She's not a child. She's also a grown woman, intelligent, fierce, mature and hardworking. She's a serious artist whose work I'll be promoting. (Come and see her senior show in the Atrium gallery from Tuesday May 5 until Saturday May 9.) I'll be exploring these other aspects of her soul in future posts.

Relinquishing Junk: Newest Updates

2009-04-17T09:55:00.001-04:00

I've got a few updates to my website to highlight:

I've revised my Cinema Ideologica essay collection to include my Religulous review. For those who haven't seen this I've pulled together all of my Front Page pieces and relevant blog posts on the subject of looking at film in an ideological fashion. The essays are also illustrated with images from the films discussed. Think of this as the fetus for a book of mine that might be born someday on the subject.
James Snapp, Jr. recently responded to my essay The God Metaphor. I've added his response to the compilation Angels and Aliens. I think he gives the exchange a good conclusion. I don't feel a need to offer another retort. Also my standing policy for all dialogues and debates I host is to give my guest the last word.
Check out Thus Spake Pigman, the director's cut of my Front Page interview with Bosch Fawstin. This version of the interview includes images to illustrate the discussion.

Front Page: The Return of the Reparations Monster

2009-04-17T09:51:00.000-04:00

My newest Front Page article here. It discusses how a bill has been introduced again to set up a panel to study whether it's necessary for the federal government to pay reparations for slavery. Apparently someone missed the results of the 2008 election.

Arguing About the Apostle Paul

2009-04-14T12:46:00.000-04:00

In the Facebook discussions about my essay “Why Bible-Believing Christians Should Accept Homosexuality” one of the biggest points of contention was the question of context. One of the hinges of my argument about what Paul has to say in Romans about homosexuality was that he needed to be read in context. We needed to know who he was writing to, what kind of homosexuality he was condemning, when he was writing, and what the environment was like. I argued that when one did that, it was revealed that Paul was not making a blanket condemnation of all homosexual acts.

My critics felt otherwise. They argued that verses from Paul could be picked out and applied to our lives today, never mind the context in which they were written.

My friend Andrew Balke wrote in one of his replies,

You're right, I'm not simply writing off these verses due to context. Paul did not either, as he said in his letter to the Hebrews "For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit," as I stated above, this does not suggest dead Scripture which is no longer relevant to this day in age.

Andrew’s arguing that scripture isn’t just meant to talk about the time and place it was written but can be applied to our lives today – a not altogether controversial point and one with which I’d agree.

We certainly can read the Bible and gain from it ideas about how we are to live our lives. What we can’t do, though, is read it without care. And I think that’s what many of my traditional Christian friends are doing when they lift out traditional “clobber passages” to condemn gays. They’re misapplying scripture in a destructive way. They’re not reading Paul in context.

Long Hair, Women, and Slaves

But they’ll read other Pauline verses in context and justify how we shouldn’t just yank verses out into modern circumstances.

Consider 1 Corinthians 11:14-15:

Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For long hair is given to her as a covering

I guess that means men can’t have long hair today, right? Guess you’re in trouble Andrew. I remember your hair was quite long when we were in college. I'm not sure if it's still as long today.

Or how about what Paul has to say about women in 1 Timothy 2:9-15

I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, ¹⁰but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.

¹¹A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. ¹²I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. ¹³For Adam was formed first, then Eve. ¹⁴And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. ¹⁵But women^a]">[a] will be saved^b]">[b] through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

Women can’t wear their hair in braids, they can’t wear jewelry, they cannot teach or have authority over men, and they must be in “full submission.” I hope for the sake of your wives and daughters you don’t take his verse as literally and out of context as you take Romans 1 regarding gays.

But perhaps you want another example. How about what Paul has to say about an institution we now all universally regard as evil? Slavery.

Nowhere in the New Testament, including in Paul’s letters, is slavery condemned. Many verses -- when read in a simplistic, context-free manner – can even be used to justify slavery. (Wikipedia cites five: (Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:22-25; 1 Timothy 6:1; Titus 2:9-10; 1 Peter 2:18), Yet my friend Andrew Racer insists that if homosexuality were not a sin it would be made clear. Why then is it not made clear in the New Testament that slavery is evil and sinful? The answer is simple and painful: The Bible does not make things clear. It’s not easy to understand, it’s not black and white. And intelligent, reasonable people can interpret it in numerous contradictory fashions.

This point allows for a great bridge to the next substantive criticism I faced in my essay.

The Doubling of Knowledge

From my friend Paul Cooper, a Baptist pastor whose ministry I support:

And I do want to restate that you and a very small minority of "liberal Christians" are arguing against 2000 years of collective church agreement on this issue. Christians have fought over a lot of stupid things and important things for 2000 years. We've split over tons of things. But until the last couple of years or so - no one in orthodox Christianity was making the argument you are making. That speaks volumes.

There was something like 1850 years of church agreement on the issue of slavery yet it was primarily abolitionist Christians that led the push for the destruction of an institution as intolerable and insidious as American slavery. It was people who started challenging traditional interpretations of the verses which could be considered “Slavery clobber passages.” (How one can read Paul’s letters not as defenses of slavery can be read here. You’ll note the author does much the same thing I and other “liberal” Christians do on the homosexuality clobber passages – cite context and the original language.)

Now what prompted these passages to be read in a different light? What prompted Christians to start challenging slavery? There’s a simple answer: more information. And when I say “more information” I mean greater knowledge about humanity and human experience caused by there being more people. When one starts to get more information, when one starts to get additional human perspectives, one is often forced to revise one’s position. On the issue of slavery it was the slave perspective. People came to realize that contrary to the propaganda of the day blacks were human beings, not animals. And so thousands of years of interpretations of what we thought God wanted had to be revised.

The phenomenon that this ties into is the doubling of knowledge, a theme that runs throughout the work of Robert Anton Wilson, my most important philosophical influence. Here’s a quote which explains this concept in a basic way:

Wilson: All we can say now is we got a model that seems to work -- for the present. It probably won't work in another ten years; the lifetime of models is getting shorter.

Walker: Why is this?

Wilson: Because of the information explosion: information is doubling faster all the time. It took from the time of Jesus to the time of Leonardo for one doubling of knowledge. The next doubling of knowledge was completed before the American Revolution, the next one by 1900, the next one by 1950, the next one by 1960. You see how [it keeps] moving faster? Now knowledge is doubling every eighteen months.

With all these new bits, bytes, blips of information, no model can last long because models only include the bytes of information that were available when the model was made. As new bytes of information come in it gets harder and harder to adjust our old models to include the new blips and beeps of information, so we've got to make new models.

More explanation is available here and he also writes about it in Prometheus Rising. In short, what we know about everything is increasing at an accelerating pace.

How this relates to our discussion on how we are to regard what the Bible says about homosexuality is that in the last 30 years we’ve gotten a wave of new information about sexual orientation and the experience of being gay. This information, in the form of research and human experiences, demands that we reevaluate old interpretations of these subjects, including how we read the Bible. Further, on the subject of the Bible itself we know more about the collection of documents that make up the New Testament today than we ever have throughout human history.

Just as the slave perspective caused us to change how we choose to interpret what the Bible says about slavery, the gay perspective should force us to change how we choose to interpret what the Bible says about homosexuality.

The Young Lady and the Old Woman

Andrew Balke:

These two interpretations of the Bible cannot both be true. Homosexuality cannot be both a sin and not a sin. Since most people have understood that these verses condemn homosexuality, you are indeed warping the meaning.

This right here is the root disagreement. Andrew, Paul, and most “Bible-Believing” Christians live in a reality tunnel that cannot accept or understand paradox and mystery. They are stuck in a mindset of Aristotelian logic, everything is either black or white, A is A, True or False, there is one right meaning to everything (and it's the one they themselves hold.) They fail to see that how they are conditioned determines how they see the world and that there are multiple, often conflicting ways to see the world, many of which are equally valid.

To demonstrate this I have an exercise from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, one of several books my Dad lent me when I was recently promoted into a management position at my job at Sallie Mae. Many of you are likely familiar with these images and the exercise.

Take a look at this rough sketch of an old woman for a few seconds.

Now look at this second sketch and tell me what you see.

You see an old woman, right? Similar to the sketch you were first conditioned with. But what if you met someone who said that it wasn't an old, ugly woman but a young beautiful one? You'd think they were crazy. You'd think they were distorting the true image of this picture in favor of some ridiculous interpretation that wasn't there. And you wouldn't be able to see the beautiful young woman until they shared with you more information. Until they showed you the picture I'd conditioned them with:

Stare at that image for a few seconds before again looking at the more detailed sketch and you'll suddenly see how others are seeing the more detailed sketch.

Andrew, a picture is black and white. It can only be one image, can't it? A picture can't be both a beautiful young woman and an ugly old woman. It has to be one or the other. True or False, Right and Wrong. That's the end of the story, right?

Now, this point being made, I'm not arguing that one can make something mean anything. It's difficult to look at the detailed image and make the case that it's a picture of Barack Obama celebrating his presidential victory.

There's an obvious rebut to my use of this exercise: "Oh come on, Dave, that's an image that's designed to have two meanings. Paul didn't design Romans 1 to have two meanings so your comparison here is inaccurate." No, Paul likely didn't intend for their to be two meanings. But to make this criticism is to miss the forest for the trees. The fact is Paul is gone. We don't know what he meant. Maybe Paul wasn't even sure entirely what he meant. Maybe God intended for there to be some ambiguity. We don't know the "correct" way at interpreting it. But if we are to see his epistles as part of the collective wisdom of humanity and one of the visions of God -- as I do -- then we're going to have different interpretations of it given our own experience of what God is.

To conclude the argument on homosexuality I offer this argument: it's better to choose the interpretation that not all homosexual acts are sinful just as it's better to choose to see a beautiful young woman than the ugly old woman. It's better to accept and promote this evolution of Christianity and to bring more people into the Christian tradition than to stay stuck in a destructive past that has brought so much pain.

Moving on from this specific issue to the bigger picture, what this final argument boils down to is this: God and the universe he created are paradoxical and mysterious. Some people can accept that, others cannot. We see it all around us in the very nature of the universe. Matter and energy are the same thing, they're just different forms of one another. Light travels as both particles and as waves depending on how we look at it. And in the Christian religious tradition Jesus is both entirely God and entirely man.

In the Easter Sunday service of Converging Streams Inter-Faith ministry that I attended this past weekend, Reverend George Wolfe had a description of God in his sermon that seems to sum up this point: God is a verb. We need to start out with the idea of God as a noun, as a person, as a thing. But as we continue our spiritual development it's possible -- and necessary -- to transcend this to begin to understand God not as a thing but as an action. God is a verb without a noun. Such an idea is a paradoxical contradiction almost in line with Eastern religious traditions. (This ties into moving from Stage II of spiritual growth to Stage IV.) The experience of God is not a thing to be known but an experience to be had. And it's an experience I intend to continue pursuing with my friends, whether we agree or disagree on just what that experience is supposed to entail.

Front Page: From Mohammed to Ayn Rand

2009-04-14T10:04:00.001-04:00

Here's my newest Front Page piece. It's an interview with artist Bosch Fawstin about his new book ProPiganda: Drawing the Line Against Jihad and his upcoming comic The Infidel, both of which feature his anti-Jihad superhero Pigman. I'm not sure I agree entirely with all of Bosch's ideas but it's still compelling, challenging stuff that's worth considering.

My WTHR review of "Observe and Report"

2009-04-13T10:17:00.000-04:00

Here. Great comedy, a bit darker than expected but that's welcome.

Front Page: Misreading Horowitz

2009-04-10T12:48:00.000-04:00

I have a rebuttal to Chris Goff of Free Exchange on Campus here at Front Page. Goff has already replied to it here. I guess the ball's in my court now.

Front Page: If You Can't Handle Christianity...

2009-04-09T10:29:00.000-04:00

Here's my DVD review of "Religulous" for Front Page.

WTHR: My review of "Adventureland."

2009-04-07T10:39:00.001-04:00

Not exactly the movie you're expecting but still quite satisfying. Here.

Books In Depth: Introduction of Jamie Glazov's "United in Hate"

2009-04-03T12:18:00.000-04:00

I introduce Front Page editor Jamie Glazov's new book here. My review is forthcoming.

WTHR: My review of "Monsters Vs. Aliens"

2009-04-03T11:43:00.000-04:00

My review here. More disposable entertainment from Dreamworks. Wonder if they'll ever make art like Pixar does with "Ratatouille" and "WALL-E."

Front Page: A Defense of Academic Freedom

2009-04-03T11:38:00.000-04:00

My review of David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin's One-Party Classroom is available here.

My WTHR review of "I Love You, Man"

2009-03-23T10:53:00.000-04:00

Funny film. My review here.

Why "Bible-Believing" Christians Should Accept Homosexuality

2009-03-20T14:09:00.001-04:00

Recently my friend Paul Cooper linked to an article on a Baptist News website about how pastors should minister to gays and lesbians. He endorsed the article's more gentle, Christ-like approach to the issue saying,

"Thought provoking article on ministering to those struggling with homosexuality, not being anti-homosexual, but still believing what God's word says about sin."

Now what I should've done when commenting on Paul's link was commend him for taking a more positive stance on homosexuality than the evangelicals that have come before him. Both gays and Christians have come a long way over the last 30 years. To see this I'd encourage everyone to rent "Milk," one of 2008's best films, now out on DVD. Back in the 1970s Harvey Milk, the country's first openly gay elected official, had to fight against Christians who sought to pass laws that would make it illegal for gays and anyone who supported them to be teachers in California's schools.

Now, 30 years later, you've got Christians like my friend Paul who would never support such fascist bigotry. Paul still regards homosexuality as sinful but believes that the church should reach out to gays and lesbians with Christ-like love and compassion.

But that wasn't enough for me. Instead I had to challenge him, suggesting that perhaps homosexuality actually wasn't a sin. He pointed me toward Romans 1 and one of our frequent thoughtful discussions ensued and quickly became heated after I accused him of making an ad hominem argument and he got irritated at me for critiquing his style of debate. We soon reconciled, I promised Paul an essay laying out my argument, and he provided the following links to chew over while I composed it:

http://www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=2881
http://www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=2945
http://www.robgagnon.net/articles/homoNeilElliottResponse.pdf

My argument is this: in spite of traditional interpretations of Biblical passages it's entirely possible to be both Christian and gay. It's possible to be a Christian parent and to love and accept a gay son or daughter and their partner just as one might embrace a straight child and their spouse.

How is thus done? Well, let's take a look at Romans 1 since that's apparently the scripture of choice to justify the idea that all homosexual acts are sinful. (There are others but this is the most popular one.) Here's Romans 1:18-32, the translation is the NIV:

¹⁸The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, ¹⁹since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
²¹For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²²Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools ²³and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
²⁴Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. ²⁵They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
²⁶Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. ²⁷In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
²⁸Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. ²⁹They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; ³¹they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. ³²Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

I'm going to do what traditional Christians tend not to do when they cite this passage: put it in context. When Paul says "them" and "they" who is he talking about? What is this passage really about? When he condemns sex between two men or two women here in what context is he talking about gay sex?

Traditionalist Christians will say this passage condemns all homosexual acts. "Liberal Christians" -- a category I basically fall into -- will say that Paul was attacking something more specific to his time and culture. I'd point readers to this article here at Religioustolerance.org. (Further challenges to traditional "clobber passages" that traditionalist Christians use to make their anti-gay arguments can be found here.)

What Paul was talking about here was Pagan fertility cults in Ancient Rome. He was attacking ex-Christians who reverted to Paganism and engaged in homosexual acts -- behaviors they had never engaged in before which were "unnatural" to them. The institution he's attacking is very different than than the institution of modern homosexuality that we have today. He's not talking about two modern persons who feel naturally attracted to the same sex who decide to commit to one another. For an accessible exploration of this point I'd encourage readers to check out the documentary "For the Bible Tells Me So."

I have yet to hear a sound refutation of this argument. Part of the reason for that is that without scriptural backing it's difficult to explain just why homosexuality is inherently sinful. Unable to point to their half dozen verses Christians have a hard time explaining just why being gay is sinful. Most commonly-accepted sins can be justified as sins without so much as a Bible verse. "Sin" refers to separation from "God." (I talked about this in my previous spiritual essay "The God Metaphor.") A sin is an action or behavior that causes you to retreat into yourself and away from the collective consciousness. It's not hard to explain how adultery, theft, lying, and murder do this. It's not hard to show how promiscuity or even masturbation can act as retreats into the self. What's more challenging is to explain how two men or two women loving each other and wanting to build a family together does this.

But Rob Gagnon, one of the theologians my friend Paul referred me toward, gives it a good go:

No, what troubled Paul and all the authors of Scripture (and almost certainly Jesus; see The Bible and Homosexual Practice, 185-228) was something endemic to all same-sex intercourse, whether particularly exploitative or not. Same-sex intercourse represented a structurally incongruous attempt at merging sexually with a sexual same, with someone who was not a gender complement, and therefore not a person that could bring completion in the sphere of sexual relations to the sexual self. In short, the problem with same-sex intercourse is that it does not restore the original sexual unity portrayed in Gen 1:27 and 2:21-24. There a binary, or sexually undifferentiated, human is split down the “side” into two constituent parts, male and female. Sexual relations are pictured as a reconstitution or re-merger of these two parts into a sexual whole. Men and women are different. They are different in ways that complement—fill in the gaps and moderate—the sexuality of the other. That difference constitutes an essential prerequisite for all sexual unions. Sexual attraction for persons of the same sex amounts to sexual self-absorption and narcissism or, perhaps worse, sexual self-deception: a desire either for oneself or for what one wishes to be but in fact is. It is a misguided attempt at completing the sexual self with a sexual same when true integration requires a complementary sexual “other,” a sexual “counterpart.” “One-fleshness” is not just about intimacy. It is first and foremost about structural congruity. Similarly, there is structural incongruity or incompatibility in a sexual relationship between an adult child and parent, a man and his adult sister, humans and animals, and adults and children. Concerns about fidelity, monogamy, permanence, and love come into play only once the prerequisites for an acceptable sexual union have been met.

The problem with Gagnon's intelligent argument is that it flies in the face of the reality we know about gay couples. One spouse needn't have opposite genitals than the other in order to complete them. There are hundreds of thousands of very happy, entirely functional, committed gay couples out there. And their straight allies who know them don't really see any significant differences between their relationships and heterosexual ones. The sour fruit that sin produces are nowhere to be found.

Such spiritual lemons can be found in the gay community, though. And it's important to distinguish between the homosexuality I'm defending and the kind I'll join traditionalist Christians in condemning. Within the gay community there are still plenty of voices advocating promiscuity similar in style to the Pagan orgies Paul condemned. Homosexual promiscuity -- anonymous sex at the bathhouse -- is more clearly sinful. It has all the hallmarks of sin -- it's a destructive retreat into the self that was critical in fueling the AIDS epidemic of the '80s. Traditionalist Christians have clearly recognized this as dangerous, sinful behavior. Where they falter is that they have not chosen to embrace the most effective alternative: the promotion of committed gay relationships. Instead they've overreached, arguing that homosexuality is a psychological disorder that can be cured. The idea that gays can be programmed into being straight is another folly that cannot be supported by the evidence. (The film poster illustrating this essay, "But I'm a Cheerleader," is a comedy about a girl sent to a homosexual deprogramming camp. I highly recommend it.)

This approach toward the issue of homosexuality is an example of the "New Centrist" political philosophy I'm developing. From the Left it takes an acceptance of homosexuality and the gay community. From the Right it takes a celebration of marriage and an aversion to the desctuctiveness of promiscuity. It challenges the "smash monogamy" premises of the Radical Left and the "homosexuality is a sin" ideas of the Christian Right.

Where the discussion concludes, though, is into a postmodern abyss as I unmake my argument and those who disagree with me. "Well Dave, all you and your 'liberal Christian' so-called 'scholars' are doing is reading into the Bible the way you want to. You're just creating an interpretation that fits with your pro-gay agenda politics and liberal worldview." Well sure I am. I'm reading the Bible through my reality tunnel and developing ideas through the lens of my experiences. I'm going into the Divine Supermarket and picking the ingredients for my vision of God. The difference between myself and most traditionalist Christians is that I admit and acknowledge that the glass between me and the Bible is there. Traditionalist Christians can't seem to grasp that. When they read the Bible and come to their conclusions they seem to think that they have direct access to "the mind of God." They think there's only one right way to interpret the scripture and it just happens to be the way they're doing it.

This is a profound fallacy and an example of the sin of pride. A Christian should never say, "The Bible says homosexuality is sinful" or "According to God it's a sin to be gay." The reality is this: no one knows the Truth. As humans separated from God we can only guess at it. When you read the Bible you're making an interpretation of it. The statement, "From my reading of scripture, all gay sex is sinful" is acceptable. God doesn't say homosexuality is a sin. You say that God says homosexuality is a sin. Just as I say that God says it's not. And as Christianity continues to progress into the 21st century we'll just have to see which vision comes to triumph.

Books In Depth: A New Horowitz Book: "One-Party Classroom"

2009-03-19T12:03:00.001-04:00

Horowitz has a new book out which I introduce here. My review is forthcoming.

Books In Depth: An Overview of "Hating Whitey," Part 2

2009-03-18T11:29:00.001-04:00

Here's my second post providing an overview of the essays in David Horowitz's essay collection Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes. It explores such themes as affirmative action, black support for the Democratic Party, one of the principle causes of poverty, and kitsch Marxism.

My WTHR review of "The Last House on the Left"

2009-03-17T11:31:00.000-04:00

Here. Gave it a D+.

My WTHR review of "Watchmen"

2009-03-09T12:16:00.000-04:00

Here. I was quite pleased.

The Politics of Watchmen

2009-03-06T11:18:00.001-05:00

In my newest Front Page piece I dissect the political themes of Watchmen. I explain the ideological origins behind each character and the overall political theme that can be taken from it. I encourage everyone to take a look at it before seeing the film so you can enjoy it in a political context. Also expect my forthcoming WTHR review of the film.

Angels and Aliens: A Theological Discussion

2009-03-05T14:29:00.000-05:00

I've recently compiled all the exchanges that I've had with James Snapp, Jr. on theology. Angels and Aliens: A Theological Dialogue Between James Snapp, Jr and David Swindle can now be read here. If there are any future responses then this compilation will be updates. I've thrown in James and my pictures as well as titles and images to illustrate each essay. The text is also colored, James's words in a dark red and mine in purple. Those who have read the dialogue between George Wolfe and David Horowitz will likely see a similarity in the style of the formatting. Enjoy.

The God Metaphor

2009-03-05T13:34:00.001-05:00

She is my heroin. I am hopelessly addicted to being with her. When she leaves me I miss her terribly.

She is my car. Together with her I can go much further and faster in life than I could without her.

She is my book. I can read her over and over again, continually making new discoveries and interpretations of her personality and character. I can study her forever.

------

These three metaphors each describe romantic love. Each is useful to a certain degree and can be elaborated on and further developed. The concept of "romantic love" is an abstraction. We all know what it is, but we need metaphors and images to describe it. We also all need multiple metaphors to describe it because it's a force that transcends human understanding. It's dangerous to have only one metaphor for romantic love, that is embraced dogmatically. One metaphor is not enough. To consider only one aspect of love by way of one metaphor is to miss other vital aspects of the idea. For one to really begin to understand love one must utilize multiple metaphors about it, metaphors that conflict in their description of it.

I bring up the subject of metaphor and the fairly neutral example of romantic love in reaction to James Snapp, Jr.'s recent response in our ongoing dialogue on theology. In elaborating on his description of hell, which I challenged in my essay A Junkyard of the Souls as sounding apart from the Christian tradition, James makes an admission he had to expect me to jump on:

The Biblical descriptions of hell as a fiery lake are metaphorical, but I believe they are accurate metaphors. I don't expect the unquenchable fires of hell to be exactly like the quenchable fires on earth, any more than I think that the pearly gates will be exactly like earthly pearls.

James admits that passages in the Bible are not to be taken literally but metaphorically. Just because it's written that hell is a fire it doesn't mean that when an unbeliever dies they will quite literally be dropped into an ocean of sulfur. The metaphor is necessary to describe an intangible spiritual idea and for one to take it too literally is to err.

The challenge for those interested in Christianity, the Bible, and spirituality is this question: when does history and fact end and metaphor begin? Which stories in the Bible are to be taken as literal events and which are to be seen as metaphor-laden myths? Just how literally are we to take the Bible?

Many Christians don't like to deal with metaphors at all. In their reading of the Bible everything is as written. The Book of Genesis is not a collection of metaphors about the creation of the world, it's a history book of the creation of the world. The planet is something like 6000 years old, the earth was created in six days, and there used to be a talking snake. When the Bible said that God spoke there actually was a booming voice coming out of the sky, talking to an ancient Hebrew patriarch. The Exodus narrative is to be taken literally. Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" is pretty much how it happened. The law books of the Old Testament were actually the laws handed down to the ancient Hebrews by God. There really was a Job who was tested by God and there really was a Jonah who spent three days in the belly of a big fish. Jesus was actually the son of a deity and was born of a virgin. Every miracle attributed to him in the New Testament he actually performed and he did die on the cross and rise again three days later. And finally, the Book of Revelation is to be understood as a blueprint of how the world will end. The Left Behind series is a pretty accurate description of what's going to happen. This approach lines up with M. Scott Peck's description of the second stage of spiritual growth.

Another way of looking at the Bible is to just dismiss it all as an ancient worldview and a collection of backwards myths. The Genesis account of the world is anachronistic since we have scientific knowledge about evolution, the age of the Earth, and the creation of the universe. Jesus was just a man, if he even existed at all. The Bible is to be more or less ignored. This approach lines up with how Peck describes the third stage of spiritual growth.

These two approaches tend to butt heads an awful lot. In the summer of 2007 I wrote a three-part story series for WTHR about this conflict which had recently been reignited with the popularity of such popular "New Atheist" books as The God Delusion, The End of Faith, and god Is Not Great. For the first story I visited the Indianapolis branch of the Center for Inquiry and interviewed Reba Boyd Wooden and David Hunter, two secular humanists. I felt at home there as they presented their ideas challenging a literalist reading of the Bible and supporting an embrace of the scientific perspective.

For the second story I visited a church in West Field, Indiana and interviewed its pastor and one of its members. And I also felt very much at home there during their church service. In Pastor Kirk Welch and Dr. Gerald Mick, the two men I interviewed, I saw something that perhaps the New Atheist authors had missed: kind, loving people who seemed to live as though their essence was infused with the spirit of Christ. This was a phenomenon I'd seen many times before in my many Christian friends. (Yes, those of you reading this, you know who you are and should realize darn well I'm talking about you in particular!)

For the third story I interviewed three friends who didn't fit into either the atheist or believer camp. First was George Wolfe, an inter-faith minister who I would grow much closer to in the coming years. Second was my friend Laurie Hansen, who embraced occult, conspiracy, and mystical ideas. And third was my then-roommate Luke Harris, who had once been a devout Christian as I had, but whose faith was gradually shattered as his intellect could no longer embrace a literal interpretation of the Bible. He'd come to define himself as a deist, a spiritual disposition most well-known for being the god of choice for the founding fathers.

The spirituality that I've come to develop since writing the story series finds a middle ground between atheism and fundamentalism. Atheists are right to challenge a literalist reading of the Bible that demands one throw much of modern science out the window. Yet they're wrong in completely dismissing God and often ridiculing people of faith. "Bible-Believing" Christians are right to pursue spirituality, imitate Christ, and seek a relationship with God. Yet I'd challenge their often dogmatic readings of the Bible. Instead of trying to explain and prove every idea of the Bible they should come to understand the role of faith better. I have no problem with a Christian who says, "I know I can't prove some of the claims of the Bible but I'm content with just suspending my disbelief and going on faith. I might not understand how or why something happened, but I'm willing to accept that God's mysterious and I'm not going to be able to have every answer." This shows one is comfortable with mystery -- many people in both the believer and atheist camps are not. When one reaches the point of truly understanding Christianity in this context -- accepting the unknowable -- it's not long before one can arrive at learning to embrace the mystery of an undefinable God who can only be understood in conflicting metaphors. This final spiritual perspective, the one I advocate, roughly lines up with how Peck describes the fourth stage of spiritual growth.

So on the subject of heaven and hell, I think they do in fact exist -- as profoundly useful and accurate spiritual metaphors for where a soul can send itself.

You go to "hell" because you embrace "sin" -- yourself and your own desires -- instead of embracing "God" -- everyone else. When you live a life for yourself you gradually fall into a spiritual hell. This isn't a metaphysical place you go when you die, so much as a state of being. Live for yourself and you'll become so miserable that you might as well be roasting in some underground cavern filled with demons.

I utilized the metaphor of heaven and hell in my recent WTHR film review of the infernal romantic comedy "He's Just Not That Into You." I applied it to the subject which I started out talking about in this essay, romantic love. Here's how I concluded my review:

Most of the characters are stuck in a popular description of hell. They're all sitting around a big table with forks and spoons that are six feet long. And they're finding it impossible to feed themselves with such unorthodox silverware. So they begin to starve in their loneliness. In heaven everyone is seated around the same table with the same unwieldy forks. But it's the greatest meal ever because they discover their long spoons are perfect for feeding one another across the table.

You're ready to get married when you're done feeding yourself. And most problems in relationships seem to come when one person isn't feeding the other and is instead attending to their own needs. My fiancee April and I tend to primarily have problems when one of us is being selfish (usually me.) It's a continual struggle to try and feed the other person and trust them to feed you instead of just resorting to your old ways of feeding yourself.

You get married when you decide that you're going to start feeding your talents and energies into something other than yourself, when you're ready to actually create something new: a family. That's what the characters in the film don't understand and why they're so unhappy. And because the film doesn't get that it's about as engaging, intellectually challenging, and life-affirming as a slasher flick.

This approach of seeing the stories and concepts of the Bible as metaphorical descriptions of intangible experiences can be seen in Douglas Rushkoff's Testament comic series, another interesting take on spiritual matters I'd recommend. Over the course of the series' 22 issues which are collected in 4 trade paperbacks the stories of the Old Testament are juxtaposed with that of a dystopian future. Also thrown into the mix are ancient gods at war with one another who seek to influence the characters in both storylines. A more intellectual exploration of similar themes can be found in Rushkoff's book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.

So, this approach to spiritual matters defined, we can move from hell to universalism.

James, if the Judeo-Christian metaphor of God is embraced in a literal fashion and the universe he has created runs on universalism then you're quite right that it would be accurate to describe such a being as a tyrant. He's the incestuous king that forces all of his children to marry him whether they love him or not. If one's conception of "god" is as an omnipotent man in the sky then universalism should be condemned. God doesn't love you if he forces you to be with him whether you want to or not.

But God isn't a man up in the clouds with a long white beard. God isn't a being. That's just one of the metaphors we've come to describe God. And many people have grown fixated on it, like someone who thinks of romantic love only as a heroin.

You're right that Gully and Mulholland do indeed weigh scriptures and downplay stuff they don't like. But their doing so isn't much different than you weighing the scriptures that describe hell as a fire to come to the conclusion that such verses aren't to be taken literally but metaphorically. They -- and I -- are just reading the metaphor more broadly than you. They are weighing the scriptures to come up with a different version of God than you are. You are weighing certain scriptures more heavily than they are.

Because the reality is that everyone who reads the Bible does this. It's impossible to take everything at the same level. Most people aren't going to read Leviticus 20:9 ("For anyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother; his blood is upon him.") in the same light as Matthew 5:38-39 ("You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' 39 But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.") My friend Paul Cooper recently wrote a nice essay on this latter verse, by the way. People are going to "weigh" scriptures at different levels and come up with great excuses for why we're not supposed to take certain ones literally. After all, most Christians today would accept that we shouldn't literally rip our eyes out if they cause us to sin. We should metaphorically rip our eye out. If you can't handle having a computer or television in your house maybe you should cancel your cable or internet service.

The Bible provides so many ingredients in creating one's heavenly meal that no one can eat the exact same divine dinner.

And so I'll conclude with addressing the two reasons you give at the end of your comment for why we should embrace the traditional Christian model of Heaven and Hell:

First, belief in the continuation of individual souls and a Final Judgment encourages good behavior – "good" being defined as God defines it. But without the expectation of a Final Judgment, people may define moral goodness according to their own tastes and desires. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, a fuzzball God who reassures the believer that his life has a purpose, but who never holds him morally accountable, is one of the most convenient ideas ever imagined.

Second, belief in the continuation of individual souls and a Final Judgment affirms individual responsibility. That belief implies that the differences between worshipping God or worshipping oneself, between loving or hating, between hope and despair, and so forth, are consequential. But in a universalistic model of the afterlife – whether all souls go to heaven, or to the collective consciousness – the individual will experience no consequences of these choices at all. Resistance is futile; the soul will be assimilated. I do not believe that God is so tyrannical. I believe that our decisions to accept or reject God's grace in this life matter, and that the New Testament oozes with that premise.

I'm going to challenge you especially on the first point. The promise of heaven does not encourage good behavior or moral goodness. One needn't exhibit either in order to go to heaven, one need only pray the prayer accepting Christ as your Lord and Savior. So how heaven motivates one to be good is beyond me. Maybe if the non-Biblical idea that "good people go to heaven" is promoted then it might but I can't see Christians wanting to promote something they believe to be untrue.

On the second point, the model that the traditional Christian version of God has set up is not about rewarding personal responsibility. As reiterated from my first point, Heaven is not a a reward for those who are responsible.

There's also an unpleasant piece of nihilism one has to deal with in univeralism which James all but identifies. In the spirituality I articulate -- the idea that upon death we will return to a collective consciousness -- we do not "pay" for our crimes. And the reason for this is simple: when we die we cease to exist as individuals. When we die we go to "heaven." And what is "heaven"? It's oneness with the universe and oneness with God. We no longer exist as individuals, but only as one with the divine. This is an idea that we're incapable of comprehending. Our minds cannot get the idea of not existing as we know today. (Go ahead and try, doing so is one way to all but slip into meditation.) So we have to develop metaphors like heaven and hell, hades and paradise, reincarnation, or the visions of other mystical traditions to try and explain it.

I am a Christian. I have accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. But that doesn't mean the same thing as when I was an evangelical, "Bible-believing" Christian ten years ago. It doesn't mean I have a Golden Ticket to a mythical Heaven. What it means is that I look to Christ as the perfect example of how we are to live. I look to his crucifixion as a metaphor for giving up oneself completely for others. This is the path to a spiritual heaven -- the sacrifice of the self in service to others and to the world. This is how you achieve happiness and spiritual fulfillment. Through embracing Christ in this fashion, you and he save yourself from your sin and the hell of a life of misery, a life of sin.

The Christianity I lay before others is one option of many in the Divine Supermarket. And I'm not saying that everyone has to or should embrace my perspective on these issues. I'm simply laying it out here for others who were once where I was, for those who cannot accept the dogmas and spiritual brutalities of literalist Christianity but who have come to realize that there is something out there we might call "God." There is a middle ground between atheism and fundamentalism and I invite those interested to pursue it with me.

My WTHR review of "Milk"

2009-03-03T14:14:00.000-05:00

My review of "Milk."

Not my strongest review IMHO. Usually with my reviews I try and make an original contribution to the discussion of the film. Here I felt I couldn't really do that without getting overly political. And while I think I do have some interesting thoughts on the film, WTHR just isn't the right venue to express them. We'll see if a piece about it emerges sometime in the future.

The Love Language April Speaks to Me

2009-02-23T10:45:00.000-05:00

It had been three weeks since April and I had done laundry. Something had always seemed to come up and since neither of us really liked going to the laundry mat -- last time we had to deal with this creepy homeless guy -- if we had an excuse to put it off we usually did. April had contracted a nasty cold that weekend that she'd been battling and the thought of dragging her out into the freezing night after I got home from work at 10:30 or so was a thought I couldn't bear.

By Thursday I was scraping the bottom of my clothes barrel. I was out of underwear, had only one work-appropriate shirt left, and had one pair of pants yet that could likely stand to be worn for one more day. Calling April that night as I drove home from work I told her, "Look, we don't have to do laundry tonight but if we're not going to then we need to swing by Wal-Mart so I can buy some more underwear. But we absolutely have to do it on Saturday afternoon. No exceptions."

April agreed to my bargain but said she wanted me to come inside so we could talk for a little bit before making the late night Wal-Mart run. This seemed odd to me. Typically we talked on the phone during my entire 5-10 minute drive home from work. Why would I need to come in so we could talk some more? Why couldn't she just be ready when I got home and come and hop in the car with me? I didn't really think anything of it or argue.

When I arrived April was lying on the couch, exhausted from her long day and the toll of her sickness. She had been coughing all week and it pained me to see her so unhappy. She told me she had something for me in the bedroom. I walked in and turned on the light to see our laundry piled in their hampers.

"Oh, you got the laundry all organized for us for when we go and do it this weekend," I said, blind to what she'd actually done.

"No, I did the laundry," she answered.

I was stunned. This had never happened before. Since we'd moved in together April and I had always done our laundry together. Loading up the laundry, driving to the laundry mat, messing with the change machines, and folding the dried laundry was always an irritating chore we endured as a couple. And what had April done? She took it upon herself This Biggest of All Laundry Loads (at least 15) in her sick state to do for me. Something I never expected and would never think to ask. Why? There was only one answer: because she loved me.

In preparation for our wedding George Wolfe, who will be leading the ceremony in May, leant us The Five Love Languages: How To Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate by Dr. Gary Chapman. The book's thesis is that men and women hear the message that they are loved in different ways. Chapman argues that to make a marriage succeed one must learn to speak his spouse's "love language" so they can continue to feel loved once the initial period of infatuation has worn off. The love languages that Chapman identifies are:

Quality Time
Words of Affirmation
Gifts
Acts of Service
Physical Touch

I didn't have a hard time determining which love language April spoke. For her it was clearly "Quality Time." She was always wanting to be with me and do things together. And I'd learned that I could show her how much I loved her by offering to spend time with her when I didn't have to. I might offer to take her out to lunch before I dropped her off at class. And I knew how important it was to have time dedicated toward just the two of us being together.

Until Thursday night's surprise I wasn't sure what my love language was. I didn't know what it was she could do to show me she loved me. Now I do. My love language is "Acts of Service." I feel loved when April does selfless acts which make my life just a little bit better.

I'd encourage other couples who are concerned about making sure their spouse feels loved to consider the ideas of The Five Love Languages.

My review of "He's Just Not That Into You"

2009-02-23T10:39:00.001-05:00

My WTHR review of "He's Just Not That Into You." Not that great of a film but I get some good relationship commentary out of it. I think it's one of my stronger reviews of late.

I Can't Save Everyone

2009-02-20T23:38:00.000-05:00

I don't get nearly as many emails about my articles, reviews, and blog posts as I'd like -- but what writer does? So when I do receive responses from people I make a point to respond, engage the commenter in dialogue, and see if I can make a new friend. I do this because some of the best friends I've made in my life started out as people just emailing me about something I'd written. I'm thinking of Andy Bond and Alex Carroll in particular -- two guys who responded to columns I wrote for the Ball State Daily News and ended up becoming two of my most loyal friends. These reader responses have also allowed for thoughtful intellectual exchanges. See the recent dialogue I've had with James Snapp, Jr. here and here on biblical and theological matters. My response to his most recent comment is forthcoming.

And if someone disagrees with me -- and that's frequently the case -- I tend to operate under the assumption that most people are reasonable, intelligent, and entirely reachable. It's important to realize, though, that some people aren't. The world is filled with people whose heads might as well be filled with rocks instead of brains. They're just so dumb that you wonder how they managed to put their pants on this morning. Other people aren't stupid but just inherently evil, selfish, and malevolent. Frequently these two types manifest in the same person. These people are not worth wasting your time to try and persuade. Rather, they can only be held up for ridicule so we can all just feel a little better about ourselves. "Well, I might not be that smart or great of a person but at least I'm not as bad as that loser."

That's the judgment that came to mind as I read a most unexpected response to my recent Books In Depth blog post discussing the interconnected themes in the first four essays of David Horowitz's Hating Whitey. My post comprises a piece of the research I'm doing for a book I'm working on about Horowitz's ideas. My intent in doing the research in public was so others could contribute to the process of trying to understand Horowitz's ideas. That doing so would attract people who would demonstrate the validity of the ideas is an added bonus I wasn't anticipating.

The central subject of Horowitz's book is racism, specifically that directed towards whites by blacks and leftist radicals. In the book's opening essay Horowitz sums up his point by talking about two conflicting visions in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement: the unifying dream of black-white brotherhood of Martin Luther King, Jr as opposed to the racist, black supremacy of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam. Horowitz celebrates King and his ideas while passionately renouncing the destructiveness of this competing ideology. As an example of this approach to the issue of race he singles out the author bell hooks for her essay "A Killling Rage" which begins, "I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder."

Who would have thought I would get someone who would defend such an intolerable thought?

In response to my post I received a comment from a black supremacist calling himself "Frank Talker," who then reprinted his comment on his blog along with the rather pretentious note at the bottom which seems to accompany all of his posts:

"Article copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker.blogspot.com/) is included"

The great thing about the Internet is that it allows anyone to become a writer and express their ideas. This is also one of the worst things about the internet. You get people trying to write who don't know how to do it. Before I was struck by Talker's anti-white racism I had to first figure out just what it was he was saying in his jagged, mediocre prose. He begins:

'…[T]he poisoning of the civil rights movement into an anti-white movement…' This was always an 'anti white' movement. It is impossible to love your enemy since they ultimately wish you dead. Only by hating them with productive anger can you ever hope to defeat them. No White ever loved the rapist of his own daughter so why would any Black do so? Such a claim reflects the White fear that Blacks seek rightful payback for the institutionally racist nature of White culture. Moreover, Whites are so scared of this they condemn any attempt by Blacks to defend themselves such that Blacks must allow themselves to be killed in order to be more moral than White racists. If the situation were reversed, no White would ever do this - and never has.

Perhaps there's a reason he calls himself Frank Talker and not Frank Writer. Maybe he should start posting videos of himself ranting on YouTube instead of composing poorly-written blog posts. Why is it that he capitalizes "White" and "Black"? What's that about? Further, throughout his comment he doesn't really know how to organize his thoughts into coherent arguments. I'm sure it all makes sense in his mind but the point of writing is to be able to communicate to others how one idea connects to another. Frank Talker doesn't have the mental capacity to do this.

I especially enjoyed throughout his comment how he would try and make arguments to support his racist ideology and actually instead demonstrate the idiocy of his thinking. Consider this most embarrassing logical error:

Whites want to embrace Black pacifists since Whites believe they will be let off having to pay the inevitable price for White racism – being racially abused themselves. Whites would never accuse a raped White woman of being immoral if she came to hate men, so this argument is merely special pleading for Whites. Sauce-for the gander is always terrifying but, when the jig is up, inevitable. Whites simply have to accept reality, grow up and face the music.

No, I wouldn't accuse a rape victim who became an anti-male sexist of being immoral, I'd accuse her of being psychologically damaged -- the same judgment I'd apply toward Talker. To make a negative judgment about the nature of the billions of men on the planet based off of your experience with one man is a logical fallacy. It's also the way racists -- and morons -- tend to think. If I have bad experiences with one person of a certain race, sex, religion, etc., then I can apply those experiences toward how the entire group is. That's the thinking which Talker supports. And it's only a few steps from there to it's logical conclusion. If a whole group of people is inherently, irredeemably malevolent and violent then the only thing one can do is exterminate them. Antisemitism very naturally leads to Nazism and the Final Solution. Racism toward blacks very naturally leads to the KKK and lynchings. And the white-racism of Talker very naturally leads to justifying violence toward all whites: "Violence toward Whites is perfectly justified so long as Whites remain racist." There's no reasoning with a mind this warped.

That seemed to be Horowitz's impression when he provided a quick reply which I knew would likely make Talker's head spin with its "politically incorrect" truths:

Dear Frank,

Your ancestors were enslaved by blacks and liberated by whites. If it weren't for whites you'd still be a slave or living in the hell hole that is black Africa today. Unfortunately, your racist hatred of whites has prevented you from receiving the most valuable gift they had to offer which is civilization. My condolences.

David Horowitz

(Those scratching their heads at his reference to enslavement by blacks should read Uncivil Wars, watch one of the first episodes of "Roots," or do any kind of basic research about the history of the slave trade.)

Talker's conclusion should be profoundly amusing to anyone who knows me:

'…[B]lack rage… only serves to inspire racist ideas -- that blacks are dangerous or uncivilized…' No, it also serves to show that Blacks are possessed of righteous anger, as the White invaders of Iraq & Afghanistan claim. Racism is always a judgement upon one's skin color, not upon one's behavior. This blog author actually believes that if Blacks behave differently, Negrophobes like himself will treat them better! If this were the case, racism would not be called racism it would be called something like behaviorism!

Because racism is immoral there can be no reason why anti racism should be any different. It is a dog eat dog, every man for himself world, after all; and to the victor go the spoils.

Because this blog author does not define racism, objectively, he tacitly admits to a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic issues so that both he and David Horowitz are racists. The most racially paranoid are always those with White skin as they instigate the very hate crimes they pretend to castigate.

Apparently I'm a racist and a "Negrophobe," mainly because I didn't post a dictionary definition of "racism" at the top of my post. (Really Talker is lying, though. For him I'm actually a racist because I'm white since all whites are racist.)

I'm not going to trot out April, my bi-racial fiancee, to try and prove that I'm not a racist. I have nothing to prove to Talker or anyone else. The idea that I'm a racist is as absurd as someone claiming that I'm actually a salami sandwich. I'm more amused than insulted. To try and demonstrate to him that I'm not a racist is a fool's errand. I have white skin, therefore there's nothing I can say to prove that I'm not a racist.

I never really wrote that much about race and I still don't because the truths of the matter just seem so obvious. There's so little ambiguity to debate. Every single person of color I've ever met has seemed no different than myself or anyone of my own ethnicity. Some were brilliant, others were dumb (like Talker.) Some were Christlike, others were malevolent (also like Talker.) They were people. There was no correlation between skin color and who someone was as a person -- one of the core truths of Martin Luther King Jr's vision. This is profoundly obvious. And unfortunately it's a lesson that cannot be argued in an essay to those whose minds have been traumatized to the point that they cannot comprehend it. If you can't see it in real life then you won't hear it no matter how intelligently it's argued. And so reality must be accepted: I can't save everyone. I can only hope that someday they'll develop the intelligence and humanity to save themselves.

Pornography and the Inability to Handle Freedom

2009-02-19T09:48:00.000-05:00

My usual routine when I get off work at 10:15 every night is to give April a call as I drive home so I can see how her day was. Usually these conversations are pretty basic. She tells me what she cooked for dinner and how the day's classes went. On Tuesday, though, I got more of an earful as she immediately began ranting about the speaker she'd gone to see that night on campus: anti-pornography crusader Michael Leahy, author of the book Porn Nation.

You see, some of the subjects of April's senior show are female beauty and sexuality. (See the above example.) She's doing a series of drawings rendered on wood of pictures of women from the 1920s and 1930s. She's trying to show female beauty and sexiness as it once was -- clothed and with a focus on their faces. She's demonstrating how one needn't show cleavage and scantily clad bodies in order to be sexy. April recently posted some of the pieces she's already completed and it's safe to say the project so far is a tremendous success.

So she decided to attend Leahy's talk on pornography since the subject related to to her show. And she ended up getting so frustrated with his story and presentation that she got up and walked out. There are many things that April absolutely will not tolerate, and near the top of the list are infidelity and the inability to take responsibility for one's actions. (One of her ex-boyfriends had cheated on her.) So for someone to combine those two sins is to unleash a perfect storm of her rage.

[As a side note, to demonstrate April's hatred of infidelity I have an amusing anecdote. The other day April and I were getting dressed and ready for the day when she discovered a pair of panties she didn't recognize. She came out to the living room to confront me about them. "I wear a size X and these are a size Y," she said. "Where'd they come from? Who is she?" she asked in her most intimidating voice. I froze. I didn't have an answer. I certainly hadn't cheated on her and didn't know where they could have come from. I just kept babbling declarations of my innocence and ignorance and finally grabbed the panties which looked like they were April's size. I flipped the tag up and then said, "April, they're size X." She walked away sheepishly and I went and gave her a hug.]

In Leahy's talk he described an almost lifelong addiction to pornography which he claims warped his view of how women should look. He was no longer attracted to his wife and was instead attracted to the porn star look. So what did he do? Bored with his less exciting wife, he had an affair with a woman who looked like a porn star. So who was to blame? The porn.

April had had enough. As if the guy's sensationalized presentation with its questionable, unsourced factoids wasn't bad enough, now the guy was trying to pass the buck on his infidelity.

When I got home she showed me the hand-out she'd gotten at the speech and continued venting her frustration. She pointed out that for Leahy the term "pornography" was a particularly large umbrella. It wasn't just Playboy and hardcore internet videos but any kind of media that excited one sexually. A scantily-clad model on the cover of GQ (the recent one of Jennifer Aniston that arrived in my mailbox awhile back would likely qualify) or a music video would be considered pornography.

At first I was struck by a list of 15 "Fast Facts about the Big Business of Pornography." These started off normal, talking about how much money the porn industry made and compared it to the revenue of other entertainments like sports. Then the third fact seemed a bit out of place: "Child pornography generates $3 billion annual revenue world wide." Um, WTF? Legal pornography and child pornography are two completely separate issues and to conflate them as one is only an attempt to propagandize against the former. There was no source to back up where this "fast fact" came from. The next "fast fact" was similarly dubious: "the largest consumer group of Internet pornography are 12-17 year olds."

Where'd they get that statistic? Further, how is that even possible? The term "consumer group" implies a market that buys something. Teenagers can't buy pornography online; they don't have credit cards and their parents certainly aren't going to let them use theirs. They're not consumers of online pornography they're thieves and porn sample gluttons.

Included in this list about the "Big Business of Pornography" were five facts about women's body image that the author didn't even bother trying to tie to pornography. One was "80% of 10 year-old girls have dieted, and at any one time, 50% of American women are dieting." And that's porn's fault? Porn causes women who don't need to diet to diet? (Never mind the fact that our country has a problem with unhealthy eating and obesity and most of us should be dieting and eating better.)

Finally Leahy pulled the rape card with his final two "facts":

"In a controlled test conducted with college-aged males exposed to hard-core ponography on a daily basis over a 2 week period, over half of the men admitted that they would rape a woman if they knew they would get away with it."

"1 in 4 women on college campus are sexually assaulted or raped, double the rate in the general population."

See how sneaky that is? He's trying to argue that porn causes men to rape women and that's why the rape rate is so high on campuses -- you've got tons of unsupervised 18-22 year-old-men who fuel themselves on pornography and then go out and rape their female classmates. Too bad it's crap on both counts -- first that porn causes rape and second that the college rape rate is that high. The "1 in 4" statistic has repeatedly been challenged as a radical feminist exaggeration. (See this influential take-down by Heather Mac Donald.)

The inside of the hand-out then included a summary of Leahy's story and the back provided his answer to this horrific problem: accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Those expecting me to revolt in anger should know me better. Looking through Leahy's handout, his website, and the table of contents to his book I didn't see anything talking about utilizing government to try and censor the media or outlaw pornography. (Now I could be wrong in this interpretation of his position, I haven't read his book yet and I wasn't at his talk.)

If all Leahy is doing is telling his story, throwing up some bogus statistics, encouraging people not to use porn, and advancing a Christian message then I'll happilly join him in the debate about the dangers and merits of porn (because there are both.) And I'll take his thoughts with a greater degree of respect and seriousness because he's had the good sense to realize that government is not capable of destroying the porn industry nor would such an act be its role. He has chosen not to become a political radical. He has chosen not to try and utilize government to enact his vision of how the world should be better.

The debate about porn is really a debate about freedom and human nature. When we have a free society there are going to be people who cannot handle the responsibility of being free. And they're going to screw their lives up and there's little we can do to stop it at a mass level.

In the example of pornography there are going to be people like Leahy who become "addicted" to porn and allow it to influence them in destructive ways. But at the same time there is going to be a larger group of people who can use and enjoy pornography responsibly. It won't necessarily warp their sexuality or destroy their marriage but enhance both. For many couples porn is a positive thing, occasionally shared in the bedroom and an initiator of discussions about each partner's sexuality. (It's a myth that only men enjoy porn.) For many single people it allows for a release from the sexual tension that comes from not having a partner.

The root of the problem is not the institution of legalized pornography but the reality of human nature. And government is not capable of radically changing people or effectively changing the world. It can nudge things a little in the right direction and perhaps propel gradual changes over time, but that's about it. How could government go about eliminating pornography? Who wants to give government the power to draw the line between what constitutes porn and what doesn't? In the age of the internet is it even possible to stop pornography?

Maybe we can make a better world. Maybe you can persuade people to live their lives better and do things that will make themselves happier. Maybe you can warn them about potential dangers. Those are all noble, valuable goals. And I'll encourage people in their pursuit of them, as long as they do not decide that the primary tool for their remaking of the world will be the power of the United States government.

Books In Depth: An Overview of "Hating Whitey," Part 1

2009-02-18T10:19:00.000-05:00

On my Books In Depth blog I have a recent post up discussing the first four essays in David Horowitz's essay collection Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes.

It's a good introduction to Horowitz's stance on the issue of race.

My First 25 Years on This Planet

2009-02-17T09:43:00.000-05:00

Time for a little reflection on the occasion of my recent 25th birthday, on the places I've been, the ideas I've held, and the wonderful friends I've made along the way.

January 29, 1984
I was born in Bloomington, Indiana, the first child of Ralph and Renee who had met at Indiana University in, I believe, 1980.

My father was working on his Ph.D. in psychology and my mother was pursuing her master's in Social Work. She would later change her master's to Library Science. I have only vague, foggy memories of my early childhood in Bloomington that I suspect are likely more influenced by my parents' stories of what we did there than what I actually remember myself.

January 29, 1989
At 5, I was a happy child playing in the California sun in pre-school at Bing Nursery School.

In 1987 we moved to Sunnyvale, California, a town just South of San Francisco. My father had gotten the opportunity to work with someone in his field whose work he respected. I remember being an imaginative child who enjoyed coming up with elaborate fantasies and who staged epic stories with his collection of action figures. A year and a half later my brother Jeremy would be born.

We lived on Chetamon court and I remember the relative safety of the court -- instead of being on a street with cars regularly passing by -- allowed for a sense of security and a great environment for games. There were other kids my age who lived across the street who I befriended and teenage girls next door and across the street who would babysit me. We would often ride bikes, scooters, and later roller blades around the court. One of our neighbors also had a pool that we would enjoy in the summer.

January 29, 1994
At 10 I would have been in fourth grade at West Valley Elementary School.

My sister Natalie had been born just a few months ago in September. This was one of the best times of my life. I had a strong core group of friends -- Will, Nick, Danny, and Scott. The five of us would regularly get together for events and sleep overs. We bonded over video games and comic books, collecting X-Men and Marvel comics trading cards.

I was also doing well in school. Each year I participated enthusiastically in the science fair, usually doing informative projects instead of experiments. The previous year I had done a project about snakes which won an award allowing me to present it at a pharmaceutical company as a reward. West Valley also had a strong reading program and I developed a passion for books. I particularly enjoyed such childhood staples as Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl. This pastime gave birth to my own creative endeavors. I started writing short stories, often illustrated or co-written with Nick, that usually featured children getting into adventures or developing super powers, obviously influenced by our X-Men cards. These pursuits, which were met with the strong encouragement of my parents and peers, were the origins of my writing career.

The good times were not to last, though. That fall we moved back to Indiana, this time to Carmel, an affluent suburb on the North side of Indianapolis. I was unaccustomed to being the "new kid" and found few friends but many tormentors at College Wood Elementary. When we moved into a new house on the other side of town the following spring my parents decided to switch me to the new school, Mohawk Trails Elementary, right away instead of just letting me finish out the year in misery at College Wood as had been initially planned. This was a smart decision and I had a much better experience at Mohawk, making many new friends. One friend I made was a quiet girl named Alissa. She would disappear from my life for about ten years at the end of fifth grade but would re-appear in my sophomore year English class at Ball State. I would later have the opportunity to rekindle the friendship, develop a friendship with her fiancee Tim, witness them get married, and share the joy in the recent birth of their son Sam.

January 29, 1999
At 15 I was a freshman at Carmel High School and at the peak of my Jesus Freak period. In 1996, as a seventh grader, I'd begun attending the St. Mark's United Methodist Church youth group. I made such important friends as Jacob and Jon. I became a Christian and gradually developed a radical and intense understanding of the reality of the evangelical Christian idea of salvation. My identity was primarily that of passionate Christian on a mission to save the world. I wanted to become a minister and live a life of poverty, emulating the example of Jesus as closely as possible.

My interest in journalism was also being nourished. At the time I was in Newspaper 1, the lead-in class to being on staff for the Carmel High School HiLite. In this class I would continue my friendship with Joanna, a friend I'd first made in the previous years in the "young Christian subculture." Joanna was also a passionate Christian though far more grounded and sensible than I -- traits she maintains to this day.

I would join the HiLite staff the following year and serve in such roles as copy editor, entertainment editor, review writer, and columnist. I still continued writing fiction, though, keeping notebooks of stories, often featuring my classmates.

My period of radical Christianity would begin to end a year and a half later when I'd begin to doubt, question and study. But the image and the idea of Christ would remain embedded within me, even though I no longer believed as I once did.

January 29, 2004
At 20 I was a sophomore at Ball State, double-majoring in English (creative writing) and Political Science. The new identity I was cultivating was not that of Christian evangelist but leftist polemicist. In January of that year I decided to take my Swimming In Broken Glass column for the Ball State Daily News in a political direction, unleashing regular broadsides against the Bush administration and the Conservative Movement. I envisioned a career as a political writer, pundit, and Democratic Party operative. I gradually abandoned this path as I grew weary of the nastiness of modern political culture and the approach of certainty that such work demanded. I doubted my way out of evangelical Christian and I gradually doubted my way out of the Left.

My fiction writing at the time was put on hold while I explored poetic experiments. I emulated Allen Ginsberg first and later T.S. Eliot. Under the influence of one of my favorite professors, Pat Collier, I developed a fondness for British Modernism, embracing Virginia Woolf and James Joyce especially.

My roommate the previous year and in the two remaining years of college that would follow was Josh. He was also a Christian and his quiet, gentle sensibility and set of hobbies seemed to make him the perfect match for Joanna in the summer of 2003. They would begin dating and their marriage was the second I'd get to witness after Tim and Alissa's.

It wasn't long after Josh and Joanna would tie the knot that a third set of friends would move on to the next stage of life. At Vincennes University Jon had met Lauren, a girl who had been in Joanna and my graduating class ('02) at Carmel High School. They too would marry -- an ideal match -- and I had the honor of serving as Jon's best man.

January 29, 2009
And now here I am at 25, preparing to follow my friends before me and marry my soul mate. I'm engaged to be married in May to April Bey, the most beautiful, wonderful woman in the world.

April and I first met during my senior year of college when she was a freshman. I had been asked by one of my English professors to present to his class about my website. They were making their own sites and he wanted to use mine as an example. April contacted me after the class and we started dating shortly thereafter. Our initial relationship was too brief. Other guys pursued April and miscellaneous bits of drama provoked me to foolishly end the relationship too soon.

We wouldn't get back together for a year and a half or so. It was the fall of 2006 and I had just graduated that summer from Ball State and was living in Broad Ripple with my friends Luke Harris and Bob Jones. April was now a sophomore at Ball State and still pursuing her drawing major with hopes of one day teaching art at the college level. She invited me up for a double date that ended up never happening. I continued to pursue, though. I insisted we go out on a date, I believe it was to see "Saw III," and our passion for one another was set ablaze again, like a camp fire that had died down to smoking embers and then suddenly reignited by a squirt of lighter fluid.

Over the course of 2007 my infatuation with April gradually matured into true love, and I discovered that she too felt the same way about me as I did with her. By December of 2007 I proposed to her and moved back to Muncie to live with her.

It's difficult to say why April and I ended up together and why I love her. What makes us compatible? I think what it comes down to is that in some important ways we're similar. When I look at Tim and Alissa, Jon and Lauren, and Josh and Joanna I see couples where the husband and wife are each almost startling mirror images of one another. It's not that they're the same -- each individual has important differences from their spouse -- so much as they share a similar spirit. It's the same with April and me.

She's an artist and I'm a writer. We both have the urge to create and interpret the world. We're both deeply driven people, vowing to make our passions our livelihoods. We both have a childlike side, still both having affections for the artifacts and habits of fifteen and twenty years ago. (She DVRs her "Little Mermaid" cartoons and I have all four "Thunder Cats" DVD box sets.) We both also have an aggressive, confrontational tendency, neither of us hesitating to challenge other people whether it be on a political position or an unacceptable action. This last point, of course, is the most dangerous for our relationship because frequently we end up in the other's cross-hairs. In every argument, though, when we come out on the other side our relationship grows stronger, and we renew our commitment to support one another and build this family.

To begin to lay the financial foundations for the family we will create I juggle two occupations. Since moving up to Muncie in December of 2007 I've worked at Sallie Mae as a collector. It's been a transformative experience for me, educating me about freedom, capitalism, corporations, and human nature. I've also applied the skills I developed as an English/Poli Sci major and a writer toward my job, allowing me to earn a promotion last month to the level of senior collector, a management position with new challenges and responsibilities that allow me to continue to learn about our world.

When I'm not working or spending time with April I'm usually writing. Every week I write a film review for WTHR. I also free lance for Front Page Magazine, a publication that five years ago I could have never imagined myself writing for and supporting. Recently I've mainly been doing political, ideological readings of films, though I have other ideas for pieces as well.

I'm also at work on two non-fiction books. The first is a memoir focused on my attempt to work out a truce between Peace Studies Professor George Wolfe and conservative writer/activist David Horowitz -- two men who would profoundly influence me. The dialogue I coordinated between the two of them on my blog is the central narrative but I include discussion of other related subjects that will likely be familiar to regular readers of my blogs and the friends with whom I often debate. I'm still working out the ideas of this book and readers will have an opportunity to contribute to my shaping of the themes as I post about them here.

I'm also working on a book devoted to explaining and analyzing Horowitz's books and ideas. Writing and research for this book appears on my Books In Depth blog.

During 2007 I wrote the first draft of a young adult fantasy novel, tentatively titled The Adventures of Virginia Valadore, Book One: A Voyage Out, the first of a planned series. This project is on hold while I focus on my nonfiction projects but I have every intention of getting back to it.

So what does the future hold? What entries might I have for January 29, 2014 when I'm 30 and January 29, 2019 when I'm 35? May will be a big month for April and me. She'll graduate, we'll get married, and then we'll take our week-long honeymoon in the Bahamas. After that she'll begin working again -- perhaps in her old job as a collector at Sallie Mae, or, if we're lucky, in a position in her field. We plan to stay in Muncie and build up our savings as she applies for graduate schools. When she's accepted somewhere she wants to go we'll move.

I don't have firm graduate school plans yet. I'm not sure where I'd want to go and what I'd want to study -- I have many passions and career possibilities. Right now I'm content to just continue writing articles, reviews, blog posts, and the early drafts of my books as April and I start our marriage.

The future ahead looks very exciting and I hope to continue it with the friends I have, to maybe rekindle friendships with those I haven't seen in awhile, and to pick up a few more as life continues.

"Taken" review

2009-02-16T10:13:00.000-05:00

Here's my review of "Taken" for WTHR.

I think I'm going to make a point of linking to everything that I write on my blog here. That includes WTHR reviews, Front Page articles, Books In Depth blog posts, updates to my website and my Cinema Diary blog posts.

Superhero Conservatism

2009-02-13T09:44:00.000-05:00

My newest Front Page piece. It's a lead-up to the article I'm going to write about the politics of "Watchmen." I discuss the political themes of last year's superhero films.

The Divine Supermarket

2009-02-07T21:48:00.000-05:00

The other day David Horowitz did a post on his blog promoting my Books In Depth blog and the dialogue he engaged in with Prof. George Wolfe. As a result I've received all kinds of interesting emails and comments from his fans and readers.

These responses were always interesting. One was from a Canadian philosophy professor who doubted George's intelligence and the merits of studying Gandhi. Another was from Charles, a parent who told me all about how his daughter had been indoctrinated in her college teaching program. He claimed that the problem of indoctrination in higher education was much worse than Horowitz suggested. When I told him that the vast majority of my professors had been professional and that I agreed with Horowitz's estimation that perhaps 10% of faculty members might abuse their classrooms he accused me of being so brainwashed by the Left that I couldn't even realize I was being indoctrinated in my Ball State English and Political Science courses. This was rather insulting, offensive stuff. I pointed him toward my archive of Front Page articles to demonstrate my current ideological orientation and have yet to get a response from him.

One of the more thoughtful emails, though, came from a young woman named Abby, who applauded me on taking the time to read Horowitz's books and develop a more informed view of him. She described freedom as the ability to know what you believe and why. She talked about how when she used to be a leftist she did not have the ability to describe why she held certain opinions. As I responded to the different ideas she articulated -- with my usual brand of agnosticism -- the dialogue turned to the ultimate question of God, which in her last email she asked in this way:

"Can you give me a little background on where you're at in your belief/disbelief of Him?"

I began to write a response yesterday but had to leave for work without finishing the email. And as a result the thoughts started rolling around in my head until a new metaphor was formed, significant enough to warrant a blog post.

"Do you believe in God?" is always the wrong question to ask, in my view, because it oversimplifies the issue. It's as though we're the last person being served dinner on an airplane and they've run out of chicken and only have the fish left. Your choices are either you can have the fish or you can have nothing (along with the peanuts you were already given earlier.) You can either believe in "God" or you can believe in nothing.

That's not exactly the choice presented to us in real life, now is it? Because there isn't one definition of who "God" is or what he/she/it entails. Belief in "God" is not a yes/no, black/white question.

Often when first asked the question "Do you believe in God?" I'll employ that all-too-irritating practice of answering with a question: "Well, which god?" Then, since I'm usually talking with a "Bible-believing" Christian, as they like to be called, they'll say, "Well, the God of the Bible." Then here's the question that I answer with that really stumps them: "Which 'God of the Bible'?"

There are many, many gods out there. The Divine Supermarket is well-stocked with choices for spiritual nourishment. And I'm not just talking about the obvious choice of whether to embrace Allah, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, Brahman, Zeus, Mother Earth, or perhaps the tastiest of deities, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (pictured above in all His Glory.)

Within Christianity there are so many variations and "Gods of the Bible" that it's fair to say that while different groups of Christians may call their god by the same name they are effectively praying to different beings. Some Christians believe in the God who created the earth some 6,000 years ago, who intervened throughout human history (including to murder the enemies of the people who worshipped him,) and then inspired men to write texts about him which are 100% perfect and correct in every way. Some Christians believe in the God who created the earth in a way that lines up with what scientists have discovered about the age of the planet and the universe. They regard Genesis as not being literally true and much of the Old Testament as just "God inspired" but they believe all the supernatural elements in the New Testament and believe those texts to be more or less true. These two Christians believe in different gods. (And one likely thinks the other is going to hell because of it.)

Some Christians believe in a God that has decreed that in order to go to heaven one must accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. All others are going to hell. Some Christians don't like this idea and instead embrace a non-Biblical idea of a God that lets "good people" go to heaven and only "bad people" go to hell. Some Christians embrace Universalism, arguing that through Christ's sacrifice on the cross all will be redeemed and enter heaven. These three Christians believe in different gods.

I could go on in this fashion, showing further varieties of the Christian god but I'll spare you.

So it turns out that there is not one package of Judeo-Christian God wonder bread with just a single brand of Jesus jelly and Holy Ghost peanut butter. Instead at the Divine Supermarket we find whole aisles filled with variations of the Christian gods.

So I guess to answer the original question, do I believe in God? I wouldn't say I believe so much as strongly suspect that there's a God. (Using my probability scale I'd probably put the existence of a "God" somewhere between 70 and 80%.) And what do I mean by God? I mean there's some kind of spiritual phenomena at work within our universe that after several thousand years on this planet we're just beginning to explore and nowhere near able to comprehend.

So is there a God? Probably, but I don't think it has much resemblance to the idea of God held by most Orthodox believers of any religion. I tend to see each religion and their versions of God as different items in the Divine Supermarket. To be fully nourished and to grasp that which is un-graspable one should eat from different spiritual food groups. Get a bunch of Buddhist bananas, a carton of Islam Ice Cream, some Native American nectarines, a six pack of Hindu Hot Dogs (tofu of course,) Pagan pop tarts, and some Christian chicken wings. And don't forget to pick up a hearty serving of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (No need to come up with a food to go with that religion since the deity himself is edible.)

Now that doesn't mean that everything in the Divine Supermarket is right to eat. There's certainly spiritual junk food out there and spiritual bleach. And some Divine Supermarket customers will tell you that everything except their spiritual food of choice is poisonous.

The past several months April and I have been attending George Wolfe's Inter-Faith services. George is an ordained Inter-Faith minister and has services every 2-3 weeks. Each service is similar in style and structure to what many people are accustomed to in a Christian worship service. There are hymns, prayers, readings, and rituals. The primary difference is that the source of all four are from religious traditions from around the world. George also does something of a "sermon" which incorporates the themes of the readings. Where this differs from what most people are used to in a church service is that really George leads a discussion, asking questions and creating a dialogue instead of just preaching his ideas. The Inter-Faith congregation is small enough that these discussions flow naturally, usually with everyone able to contribute. April and I have warmed to George's services and spiritual approach and for our wedding this May have decided to have him marry us in the Inter-Faith wedding ceremony he has written.

So on the God question my tentative conclusion after only a decade or so of research is this: religious traditions are metaphorical representations of a likely true phenomenon. They're like the Supermarket metaphor that I created for this blog post. They allow for a graspable map of a territory far greater than we can ever hope to comprehend. We only run into problems when we forget that these human maps are not the divine territory itself.

What's that soldier doing to the little girl?!

2009-02-06T13:40:00.000-05:00

My newest Front Page article -- my fourth -- was published on Friday. It's titled "America the Rapist?" and is a review of writer-director Alan Ball's "Towelhead."

It continues my recent approach with looking at film in a political, ideological fashion. In my review I discuss the film's symbolic content. The movie was OK. If I was to give a letter grade I would have probably wagered a C, maybe a C+. April says that she would have given it a B-. She appreciated the film's moments of awkwardness -- when the film makes you feel uncomfortable.

Overall I don't think the film really did very much. Its characters weren't very interesting. It wasn't that funny. The coming of age aspect of the film failed to really go anywhere since the protagonist was so barely defined. It said nothing of substance about the problem of racism. All it had were a series of shocking elements and the political stuff I discuss in my review.

Right now I'm currently working on two articles for Front Page related to the politics of the superhero genre and the upcoming film "Watchmen," out March 6. Expect those pieces in the coming weeks.

Looking at Film Ideologically

2009-01-23T12:24:00.000-05:00

Today David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine published my third article for them, "Clint Eastwood's Libertarian-Conservative Vision." In the piece I discuss the actor-director's career in an ideological context, looking at the conservative and libertarian themes that appear throughout his films.

The essay can be seen as in the style of analysis that I first developed in my previous Front Page piece on the leftist themes in the films of Steven Soderbergh. I hope to continue writing pieces in this fashion on filmmakers that interest me and plan to develop this mode of criticism. It wouldn't be difficult to expand the pieces on Soderbergh and Eastwood to book-length chapters that looked at all of their films in much greater depth.

However, there are some hazards to this approach which I'd like to get out of the way before I continue down this road any further. I'm going to articulate what I'm not doing:

1. I'm not making the argument that a director is always trying to push a political agenda on his audience. In my Soderbergh piece I note that the "Ocean's" trilogy features a malevolent capitalist as the antagonist in each film and that the third film features a plot by Ocean's gang to redistribute the wealth away from the rich guy that earned it. In my Eastwood article I point out how in "Million Dollar Baby" the film depicts a protagonist who works hard to improve her lot in life; she's juxtaposed with her trailer trash family who stay at the bottom because of their laziness and immorality. Now, when Soderbergh and Eastwood were making their films, did they do so with the idea in mind that they were going to use their films to advance political points? Possibly, but more likely not. Films certainly can be made with the goal of promoting a political agenda, but unless the filmmaker all but admits it -- and sometimes they do -- then we can't really know for sure. I prefer a less malevolent explanation. Films are an expression of the people that make them. Their philosophy and world view will manifest in their art often without even their intent.

2. I'm not saying that one should avoid a film because of its ideological character or that because a film leans heavily in one political direction it's inherently bad. Nothing could be further than what I'm trying to say with these essays. In my Soderbergh article I talk about how he produced 2007's drama "Michael Clayton," a film with such an anti-corporate outlook that it features a company that hires assassins to kill people who threaten it. "Michael Clayton" is a film that I love passionately. It's a great film because of the compelling characters it creates, the talented acting performances that bring them to life, the elegance of the cinematography, the literary quality of the dialogue, and the excitement of the plot. To avoid seeing it or to allow the film's leftist sub-plot to seriously taint one's enjoyment of the picture is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

3. I'm not saying that the themes I'm seeing are "actually there." It's perhaps on this point where I get a tad postmodern and English-majorey. How do you know when you see an idea in a film, book, or other piece of art that it's actually there? Well the only honest answer is you don't. Art is about the interaction between artist and audience. It's a meeting of minds that results in the creation of something that was not there before. That's why it's so exciting, every time a different person sees a film they're going to walk away with different ideas and interpretations. Because I think we'll all agree that the ideas in a piece of art are not limited to what the artist intended to put in them. Sometimes outlooks slip in without an artist realizing it. I don't think that last sentence is something particularly controversial or anything too outlandish with which anyone would disagree.

This last point in mind, I suppose it's only fair to ask then what is it that I am doing with this style of film analysis. And for that I only need a single point to explain myself. Ideas only work when they are made tangible through people, art, history, and symbols. The value at looking at films ideologically is that it allows for a discussion and demonstration of ideas. It's an excuse to talk about ideas. And that's what I hope to continue through looking at films.

Saying Yes to One Instant of Certainty

2009-01-22T15:34:00.000-05:00

My friend Marc Goodwin recently sent me this essay. Marc and I have had plenty of engaging discussions in the past months in which our world views have come into conflict. My vision of agnosticism has bumped up against Marc's traditional Christianity. The foundation of my opposition to his arguments on behalf of an orthodox understanding of God, Christ, and the Bible comes from my assertion that we cannot know anything for certain. We get closer to guessing at the probability of truth based on the amount of evidence we have and the variety of sources from which it came.

So of course I was intrigued when he sent me an essay purporting how we could move "From Relativism and Skepticism to Truth and Certainty." How could I get beyond this skepticism approach which I seem to have become stuck in for the past several years? Wading through the text I was reminded why I abhorred so much philosophical writing. So often abstractions are tied together so tightly one after another that at one point you just have to reread sentences to try and figure out what's being said.

Consider this example:

For it is silently presupposed by Strauss that the sufficient and necessary condition for knowing truth and achieving wisdom is the brilliance of a mind. In the light of Christianity this is of course a great mistake because very many simple people may be more open to the faith and receive it as a gift from God than the greatest minds. But it is also an illusion in the light of the insights philosophy can gain: in many of his dialogues Plato outlines the important ethical conditions of philosophical knowledge of the truth and the tremendous obstacles to the knowledge of truth and the sources of errors which afflict most of all the most brilliant and gifted of the Sophists.

Or how about this:

But it is not enough to characterize the inescapable givenness of my own being in indubitable knowledge by referring to the immediacy of the cognition of my being. We have to add that our own being is accessible to us in an entirely interior fashion-by being consciously lived from within. There is no more immediate and interior givenness of a being than this self-awareness of the person. It is decisive to see with Augustine that my being is not given here like an object over against me of which I would be conscious, as this occurs in explicit reflective self-knowledge (se cogitare).

Ideas and philosophy are important but they're only of value if they are made accessible, usually through metaphor or literature. It's for this reason why I've been looking at film in an ideological fashion, seeing political themes demonstrated in popular movies. It's not that ideas need to be dumbed down so much as made accessible through concrete examples.

So I'll explain the key point that Professor Josef Seifert was trying to make. It boils down to this: we can be certain about the world and ideas because we are certain that we exist. That's the argument. That's the silver bullet in the heart of the werewolf of Skepticism. Seifert says,

The truth of these facts, the truth of the proposition that I exist, and that I doubt, is likewise discovered in the indubitably known fact that I exist. More than that, Augustine says that each of these facts and truths implies even infinitely many others which formally follow from it.

...

Thus from the indubitable truths of fact about my own existence and acts follow infinitely many other factual truths about my knowledge.

So because we are certain we exist we can thus construct other certainties from this. One certainty builds off of another certainty. There's an aspect of this thought with which I do agree and passionately support. In Richard Linklater's film "Waking Life" one of the characters (the one pictured at the top,) says to the ever-dreaming protagonist,

The quest is to be liberated from the negative, which is really our own will to nothingness. And once having said yes to the instant, the affirmation is contagious. It bursts into a chain of affirmations that knows no limit. To say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence.

Admittedly this statement has the same problem of excessive abstractions which I've just condemned in Seifert. That aside, the basic point remains. When you allow yourself a single belief others will flow from it whether you want them to or not. I've explored this in previous posts, particularly ones on the subject of abortion where I tend to delight in spinning out the implications of such beliefs as "abortion is murder," "life begins at conception," and "legalized abortion is a holocaust." This problem also comes in the belief "everything in the Bible is true." All of a sudden one must believe in witchcraft and speaking in tongues and that koalas could migrate back to Australia after getting off Noah's Ark, and so on and so forth. Your rational mind might reject such ideas but hey, because it's in the Bible, that means it's got to be true and you must now subvert your rational mind into coming up with elaborate explanations to defend them.

So Seifert is right that one certainty births an infinity of certainties if we are to consider "certainty" as synonymous with "belief," which I suppose we can. I disagree with his more fundamental point, though. First, in the idea that we are certain that we exist and second in that even if we did possess that certainty that it could flow out to other subjects.

Do I possess the belief, "I know I exist"? No, I'm not certain that I exist. I don't really understand human existence. Do I exist? I seem to have some kind of consciousness but it's possible that my being is actually part of something else that's far larger and more transcendant than an individual person. One metaphor that I tend to like is the one Grant morrison gave at Disinfocon 2000 when he pointed out that if someone stuck there hand through a two-dimensional plane then someone on the plane would see five separate circles and would be unable to comprehend that they were all in fact just parts of one hand.

What I know of myself and the certainty of my own existence is only a collection of my sensory perceptions, which I've learned are to be distrusted. It's on this second aspect of my disagreement with Seifert that I have a point so mundane that I become puzzled when it's met with confusion or argument.

If we had a certainty of our existence that wouldn't lead to certainy of the "outside world" because our sensory perceptions and judgments about them are fallible. There are many simple examples to demonstrate this. But do I really need to give them to you? Surely everyone can look back in their life at a time when they thought they saw something or they thought someone meant something in a certain way and it turned out they were wrong. (Heck, one should be able to look back on something that happened today that was like that.)

What we see is not always what's there. How hard is that to accept? Everytime we see something or make a judgment about something we are making a guess that has every chance of being proven wrong at a later date when we discover more evidence for it. This point should not be something radical or controversial but an entirely basic facet of human existence necessary to be understood in order to live a life that isn't continually falling apart.

Agnostic for a Stalinist?

2009-01-06T15:56:00.001-05:00

Today my second article for David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine was published. (For those who missed it, my first article, "Lessons from the Dragons' Den" is available here.) In "The Cinema of the Fellow Traveler" I discuss the films of director Steven Soderbergh in the context of political ideology and his new film starring Benicio Del Toro, "Che."

For many years now Soderbergh has been one of my favorite filmmakers. I especially enjoyed "Traffic" and "Ocean's Eleven" and thought "Solaris" failed to get the credit it deserved. I appreciated his experimental style and the creativity of his vision. Further, I enjoyed the many films he produced. "Michael Clayton" was one of the best films of 2007.

This year he released his newest film, "Che," a two-part, four hour film dramatizing the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I'm not too happy about it. Guevara was a Marxist revolutionary who helped found a totalitarian government. He was an executioner who justified killing people without trial. Politically he was a Stalinist.

In my article I discuss Soderbergh's political ideology as it manifests itself in his films and as he describes his views in recent interviews. One of these comments that he made explaining his approach to Guevara and the making of his films stuck in my craw a bit. At the Cannes film festival he said, "I’m an agnostic. I’m not personally invested in building him [Guevara] up or tearing him down." I didn't call out Soderbergh for this abuse of agnosticism in my article but I will now.

My deep appreciation for a philosophy of general agnosticism toward everything is something I've pontificated on quite a bit. I've argued on behalf of a mystical Christian agnosticism. I've described my variation of centrist liberalism as a kind of political agnosticism. So therefore, my friends who frequently disagree with this disposition, are now in a position to ask, "Well gee, Dave, it sounds like your mind's made up about Che. You obviously believe he was a bad guy. Where's your great philosophy of agnosticism now?"

Here's the important thing to understand about this analytical approach: agnosticism is not the same as neutrality. I do not know that Che was an evil man. I don't believe that he dedicated his life to a political philosophy that history has demonstrated to be a totalitarian failure responsible for millions of deaths. Rather, I simply have abundant evidence to support both propositions.

The agnosticism that I advocate considers all ideas not on a dualistic, yes/no, good/evil, black/white understanding but rather a sliding scale of probabilities. The question is not "Is this true?" But rather, "How likely is it that this is true?" and "How much evidence do we have that this is true?"

All ideas fall somewhere between 0% False and 100% True. I don't think we can ever have enough evidence to place anything at 0% or 100%. The more evidence you have in support of an idea, the higher the probability of its truth. Yet we cannot reach certainty because the equipment we have in gathering our evidence is imperfect and incomplete. Our senses and our minds are not always correct in what we think we're perceiving. Further, we simply do not have enough information available to us. We never have a complete picture of anything.

So on the question of Guevara, we have an awful lot of evidence that he really wasn't a figure we should celebrate. There are plenty of books written about Guevara, Cuba, and Marxist-Leninist ideology. And Soderbergh, who claims to have spent years researching for his project, should have read them. So what's to be agnostic about? We're talking about a specific person and specific events. We're not talking about whether God exists, whether Jesus rose from the dead, or complex philosophical ideas. Did Guevara execute people without trial? Yes. Did he help found a totalitarian dictatorship? Yes. Did he fight on behalf of an ideology that fails to produce functioning societies? Yes. Are each of these "yes" answers a 100% on the truth scale? No, they're each probably somewhere between 90 and 99.99% in their probability for truthfulness. (Is anyone going to argue that Guevara didn't help found the Castro regime? I suppose it's possible but the likelihood of such a historical fraud is minute.)

In describing my thinking to some people sometimes I get the line of questioning, "Well if you think this way how can you even take a step? After all you don't know 100% that the floor is even there." We don't live our lives based on absolute certainty, we live it based on probabilities. We go to the store to buy a carton of milk because there's a relatively high probability that they'll have milk in stock. You don't know for 100% about anything. But you don't need to know something 100% in order to hold a position, make a decision, or take an action.

My fiancee sent me this. Perhaps as a hint that she wants to spend time with me?

2008-12-30T15:07:00.001-05:00

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A Junkyard of the Souls

2008-12-28T21:57:00.000-05:00

I received another thoughtful response from James Snapp, Jr. on the subject of harmonizing the seemingly contradictory gospel accounts of Easter. He puts forth an intelligent, detailed harominization scenario and I encourage everyone interested in the issue to read it. He also provides the best answer one can give to my question regarding the angel discrepancy.

For my continuation of our discussion I'd like to focus on James's comments on hell and salvation. James primarily argues from a position of traditional Christianity yet he presents a decidedly untraditional vision of hell. In his comment he wrote:

But I don’t think the situation is quite like you pictured it; I don’t think hell is primarily a place where sinners are punished. One of the terms that Jesus used for hell was “Gehenna” – the city dump of Jerusalem. I think hell is, in some respects, a dumping-ground of wrecked and unsalvageable souls -- more of a consequence than a punishment. When a car is wrecked beyond repair, the owner is not punishing the car by sending it to the dump; he is just acting on his assessment of the severity of the wreck. Similarly, when people sin, they wreck their lives, and part of the church’s job is to introduce them to God the Mechanic/Repairman of the Soul, so to speak. A lot more cars are going to go to the dump than are going to be repaired. But if that is what the drivers deliberately chose, refusing to drive safely and refusing to go to the repairman, why despair about that? You can’t drive their cars for them. Why be enraged at the Car-maker, or the Repairman, or the Gas-station Attendant (via this rough analogy, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), because they allowed people to drive recklessly and to avoid repairing their cars? I harbor some rage about the situation, too, but it’s not directed at God; it’s at all the influences that persuade people to drive recklessly and to avoid taking their cars to the repairman.

James, I think you and I both have an affinity for metaphor when writing about spiritual matters. You conception of hell as something of a "junkyard of the souls" in which broken souls reside is compelling. You suggest that hell isn't really a punishment, it's just a place to isolate souls that have destroyed themselves. It certainly clashes with the usual description of hell as a place of punishment and suffering. How do you reconcile your vision of hell with the description offered in the following verses?

If we look at Luke 16:19-26 we see hell described as a place of torment in which the rich man suffers unquenchable thirst:

“There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’

Or we see in 2 Thessalonians 1:9 that the apostle Paul describes hell as a punishment:

They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might

Further if we consider the Revelation (specifically 20:9-15) we see the traditional view of a lake of fire:

And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

If we are to take a traditional, literalist approach to the Bible then it seems difficult to avoid the reality of hell as a place of fire, suffering, and punishment -- basically the vision that the Church and traditional Christians have articulated for centuries. God has created a horrible place for people to go who commit one specific sin: the inability to believe in him and accept his sacrifice. God is able to forgive all sins save for this single one.

To answer your questions... "But if that is what the drivers deliberately chose, refusing to drive safely and refusing to go to the repairman, why despair about that?" No one deliberately chooses hell. No one decides, "I'm going to spend eternity in hell." Instead, people who are confronted with the gospel and choose to decline its literal interpretation are more likely simply applying the same skepticism toward your religion to which you apply to all others.

Yes, your version of God is kind enough to offer humanity a choice. But the choice is more accurately described as that of the tyrant king who tells his subject that she can either marry him or spend the rest of her life in the dungeon. But even that is a better situation than the one we have. We don't even know that the king exists and that the choice is real. We only have people acting on behalf of a king we don't know exists who insist that we must accept his wedding invitation or spend eternity in the dungeon.

Let me make my spiritual position clear. It's not my view that hell exists and that it's a place of flames and punishment. I'm merely pointing out that if one is to take a traditional, literalist approach to scripture then such a vision of hell is unavoidable. I certainly don't know what, if anything, happens after we die. However, I do have a guess. One thing that individuals can agree on is that when we die we become one with the universe again. We are no longer independent beings and our consciousness ceases to be its own. We return to the dust from whence we originated.

We can guess at what this experience approximates to because throughout our lives we experience a oneness with existence frequently in many different forms. When we are asleep we are one with existence. When we are intoxicated either through alcohol or other drugs we are one with existence. When we meditate we are one with existence. When we have an orgasm we are one with existence. When we lose ourselves in art -- whether it be film, painting, music, literature, even video games -- we are one with existence. Even when we expend ourselves physically and fall into the so-called "runner's high" we are one with existence. Any number of activities can result in our consciousness unifying with the universe. This is always a pleasant experience, a state of being for which most people live. "Heaven" is an accurate term to describe it.

And so, working within the Christian tradition of spiritual metaphor, I suppose I could be described as a universalist. In my view everyone goes to heaven in that all individual consciousnesses upon death return to the collective consciousness. We all become one with the universe, one with God. I tend to find this position summed up in Christian terms in this excerpt from William Barclay. I'm also a big fan of Philip Gulley and James Mulholland's book If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person. Further, I tend to see the parable of the lost sheep as evidence for a gospel of universalism.

A Clear Definition of Christian Radicalism

2008-12-05T12:50:00.000-05:00

Almost everyone wants to change the world and make it a better place. Yet we all have different ideas about what change is needed, how it should be enacted, and what exactly that greater world would entail.

In many of my recent writings and discussions on ideology I've spoken about the concept of political radicalism. It's been one of the central subjects I've explored on my Books In Depth blog. I've argued that the key question in determining which people and ideas fall within the radical bucket is this: "Do your plans include using the power of government to reshape our world and our society?"

If your plans for making this world better do not include changing laws, invading other countries, spending taxpayer money, or getting specific people into power, then you're not a radical. You might be a radical but you're not a political radical.

Radicalism comes in many forms. Most people are familiar with its leftist, communist, and socialist varieties. They tended to get an awful lot of attention in the 1960s with the rise of the New Left. The 1980s, though, a new vision of political radicalism came into power and prominence with the formation of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and the rise of the Religious Right. This disposition has gone by many names but the one I prefer is this: Christian radicalism. (Part of the reason I do this is because I find it necessary to isolate this tradition from the one it's most associated with, namely, conservatism. The two have intertwined frequently and often allied but they're ultimately very different, a subject I'll address at some point in the future.)

Most Christians want to make the world a better place. Doing so is at the heart of the gospels. Helping the unfortunate and living a life of love is what Jesus was all about. Where we see a problem arise is when Christians decide to use the force and the power of government to further their mission to Christianize the world.

When I first became familiar with Pastor Rick Warren I was optimistic. It appeared he might help lead politically-minded Christians in a more constructive direction than the Pat Robertsons of the world had. It's now become clear that that's not the case at all.

On December 3, Warren appeared on Fox News's Hannity and Colmes to promote his new book The Purpose of Christmas. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan and Steven Benen.)

During the course of the program he had this exchange with Sean Hannity:

HANNITY: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. OK, so with that understanding, there's always going to be human evil. The question is, can you eradicate it. In other words, the whole issue came up. Can you — can you talk to rogue dictators.

Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, wants to wipe Israel off the map, is seeking nuclear weapons.

WARREN: Yes.

HANNITY: I think we need to take him out.

WARREN: Yes.

HANNITY: Am I advocating something dark, evil or something righteous?

WARREN: Well, actually, the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped. And I believe...

HANNITY: By force?

WARREN: Well, if necessary. In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers. Not good-doers. Evildoers.

The statement was highlighted by numerous blogs and I'm joining them in outrage that someone who is supposed to represent Christ is going to advocate that we assassinate a foreign leader, thus starting a war with Iran.

According to Matt Duss who contacted Warren's office for further comment the pastor was referring to Romans 13, a passage that is generally interpreted to mean that one should submit to the governing authorities:

1Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. 3For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. 4For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. 5Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. 6This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. 7Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

I was even more frustrated by a later comment in the interview:

WARREN: And the Bible also says that governments can do things that I'm not supposed to do as an individual. God has authorized — God has not put the law in my hands. He's put the law in the government's hands.

This is dangerous, absurd stuff. God's put the law in the government's hands? God put government on the earth?

Governments are man-made institutions. And they are as fallible as the people that designed and run them. It's role is not to do God's Work.

Further, I'm going to have to argue with the Apostle Paul, or rather, a literalist reading of Romans 13. No, the authorities that exist have not been established by God. The American People voted for Barack Obama this election and George W. Bush the last. God did not pick our leader.

Further, a literalist reading would require one to accept the absurd notion that all governments are legitimate and God has ordained them. If Pastor Warren accepts a literalist reading of this passage then he's contradicting himself because to assassinate Ahmadinejad would be to rebel against a government authority that God has supposedly established. No government has the authority of God to exist.

My main point here that I hope my Christian friends consider is this: the government of the United States should be a tool of no god and of no religion. It should not be thought of as godly or God-inspired or to possess the authority of God. Please continue to practice your religion by imitating Christ. Just remember, Christ didn't seek the power of government to change the world. All he needed was a cross and his life.

By all means be a Christian, just don't be a Christian radical.

A few loose ends to tie up:
1. On the question of whether the military should assassinate the president of Iran I'm open to discussion. The answer seems pretty obvious, though: absolutely not. It would start an unneccesary war and be a war crime. It would completely destroy our moral standing in the world even further than anything for which the Bush administration has been responsible. That's not to say leaders should never be assassinated. If we were in open war with Iran then it might be a different story. If we got the chance to take out some of Al Qaeda's leaders then there'd be room for discussion.

2. On the proper interpretation of Romans 13, the general value of respecting governments and authorities does seem quite sensical in the Christian sense. But an absolute interpretation of that general principle seems clearly in error. If it became the policy of the US government that Christians could no longer practice their religion then certainly that wouldn't be a law to respect.