Still sick.  Worse.

No point in categorizing this.  Nothing I write will be coherent anyway.

Had a sort-of important meeting yesterday morning, relatively early.  It was cold and rainy.  I got lost on the way and was late.  On the way home I called home and told Jennifer that, even though I had said I was feeling under the weather, I was ready to do a bunch of work once I got to the house.

After I arrived at the house, I took off my coat and tie and went to bed.  I though about getting up at noon, and at 1:30 pm.  I got ups around 2:45 pm.  And that was only because I knew the children would be coming home.  Calvin has a concert tonight that I will miss.  Actually, I would have gone to a men’s retreat but I will miss that.

I hate being sick.

Almost caught up with BSG.  I’ve already mentioned how incredibly Gene-Wolfish it is.  Totally different scenario and yet with almost identical aspects (paganism, demon-enemy-human-wannabes, questions about the one God, politics and questions of constitutional legality).  Quite amazing.

What if Josh Whedon could have afforded to work for much less and had piloted Firefly on the SciFi network?  We would be in season four this year, right?

I love Lost but hungrier actors seem to be more faithful to a successful program.  I hate watching the planned story-arc shudder under the weight of fickle stars.  Of course, I’m not really blaming the people making the decisions.  They are making their way as seems best to them.  I can hardly expect them to hurt themselves because I want my TV show to work.

Who would have ever thought that the guy playing the Cuban-American police chief was capable of such greatness?

Spoiler: So, did the abused blond Cylon simply want suicide?  Or was she intentionally sending a flare to the Cylons?

Spoiler: Casey can’t be Starbuck’s baby can she?  Boomer-2 was impregnated first and her child is still an infant.  So they either sped up the process or else she is simply a human child who has been taken.  Or, worst of all, she’s a tiny cylon model.

Spoiler: I can sympathize with the cylons all–except for the brother model.  The seem evil without any hint of anything better.

I’m not liking Season 3 as much in some way…  Because there is not as much ship/military life being portrayed.  One of the lessons of the popularity of 1 and 2 is that we are fascinated with space opera and military society.  BSG is popular for much the same reason that Halo is such a popular video game.

Spoiler: Is there an explanation for the Balthar relationship with the illusionary Cylon and the corresponding Cylon’s illusionary Balthar?  The only thing I can imagine is that Balthar was a Cylon all along.  But that would mean that there is no human-cylon relationship really involved.

It is incredibly frustrating to be sick and look at one’s to do list.  Sickness was not on the schedule for this week.

I’d love to say that I dwell on trivialities while sick, but every reader of this blog knows that trivialities are dwelt upon while healthy as well…

If WWJD? is such a flimsy basis for personal guidance in decision making for deciding what one ought to do, how can “What do Roman Catholics do?” be such an authority for these same critics when they want to argue about what we should not do?

How is it that one finds some people, who mock WWJD? bracelets, also argue against others not, on the basis of any confessional or doctrinal formulation, but on the basis of the hypothetical question, “What would the Puritans do?” or “What would John Calvin do?”?

Which is more useful: Recommending the perfect book that your audience will find unreadable or recommending a really mediocre book that your audience can read and, if they do, will be helped?

Is the point to reach people or to wear one’s credentials with pride?

The evidence.

And the giveaway is, “Try as I might, I cannot imagine John Knox or the Westminster Divines sitting placidly and reading this book.”

Here’s a proposition: Teaching people how to make snap judgments based on associations is not teaching discernment.

If you scroll down to comment #21 you’ll see a stellar response from a man who is obviously more patient than I am.

Hat Tip: BHT

John Armstrong just published an editorial on Ted Haggard. Here is a kind of lengthy quotation because I think it is important.

Ted Haggard had become the public face of the “E” movement in America. Like it or not, this is how the world sees it. Haggard stood side-by-side with James Dobson and had become the go-to-guy for the media. He was also the man, who only a few years ago (2003), proclaimed: “This is Evangelicalism’s Finest Hour” (Christianity Today, June, 2003). Said Haggard at the time, repeating the mantra of much of American evangelicalism:

This is one of the most exciting times for evangelicalism worldwide. Evangelical Churches are growing aggressively both in America and overseas. In the 1960s the dominant churches in most American cities were liberal churches. Now, the largest and strongest churches in most cities are evangelical.We’re better funded than ever before. We now have missionaries, printing facilities, Bible distribution efforts, and seminaries. There’s a new megachurch opening in America every two weeks, and the vast majority are evangelical.This is evangelicalism’s finest hour. It is the time for evangelicalism to assert itself in the public debate of ideas. One of my passions is to ensure that evangelicalism is thoughtfully and effectively presented. NAE needs to facilitate the body of Christ in the communication of the gospel.

Later in this same interview Haggard added words that now must haunt those who read them. When he spoke these words his relationship with a male prostitute was likely going on, or at least it was about to begin. Said Haggard to Christianity Today: “I don’t see dark clouds on the horizon anymore (for NAE). It’s profitable, it’s growing, and it’s organized.”

Is it me or do you see the hubris in much of evangelicalism? I do not believe Ted Haggard actually spoke out of character for evangelicalism, at least broadly speaking. This is how most of our leaders, at least those over fifty in age, actually see the present. One has to wonder if this personal failure, and the loss of many “moral issue” initiatives and endorsed candidates in the recent national elections, might lead a few of us to wake up to the real situation in our churches and leadership. We have adopted a public and private position that is filled with self-righteous triumphalism and it pervades almost everything we say and do.

Criticizing Haggard is not the point. If anyone feels good about himself for not having been subject to the sort of domination that Haggard was under, then he is in deep trouble. The point is: What does this mean about Evangelicalism? If someone can look at Evangelical Christianity in North America and think it is doing well, then it doesn’t seem to strange he would invent a rationale allowing him to keep a manstress and yet remain a qualified pastor. Fantasies of power lead in many directions at once. None of them good.

And I doubt they are restricted to visible leadership of mega-organizations. If ambition correlates with deviancy, then frustrated ambition probably does also. Statistically speaking, are the scandals among newsmaking evangelical leaders statistically different from scandals in the pulpit in general? Do we even want to know the answer to that question?

[Warning: see Jim’s comment below for some judicious thinking–which was pretty much lacking in my post.]

I’ve mentioned before how much a liked Season One of Prison Break. I thought of this while reading the third installment of Doug Wilson’s reply to Sam Harris. According to Wilson, Harris makes a great deal of the moral superiority of the modern West over every other time and place because we have allegedly recognized that slavery is evil.

What Doug points out is that virtually all the slavery mentioned in Harris’ chosen texts (unlike the slavery of the American South) is a penalty for some kind of crime, usually a property crime in which the perpetrator has a liability that exceeds his present value. In other words, slavery (which was often a temporary situation) was simply the Israelite alternative to serving prison with hard labor.

In fact, it is quite possible that the main difference between ancient slavery and modern, is that the modern is much more severe:

we are not dealing with two million murderers, rapists, or violent offenders. Quite a few of these inhabitants of these secularist kennels of yours were idiot teenagers with a bag of pot, and they were sent off to these graduate schools of crime and vice from courtrooms that were as secular as anything someone like you could desire. These are courtrooms where if an attorney were to quote the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule with any kind of approval, the judge would wet his pants. You told us that this was an easy moral question. Why haven’t we solved it yet? Why does the United States house two million slaves? That is twice the population of the state I live in. Given this, your easy dismissal of biblical ethics is just that, far too easy. “Anyone who believes the Bible offers the best guidance we have on questions of morality has some very strange ideas about either guidance or morality” (p. 14).

This is where Prison Break comes in. While that show has, as all fiction does, a great many fantastically impossible situations, the horrors of prison life are, if anything, understated. And what this means is that describing prison as a “kennel” is rather tame. Prisons are places where men are sent to be raped and brutalized and killed in many other ways by worse men. Not only do we all know this, but it is not a rare thing to find a prosecutor speaking positively about prison because this is included in the punishment (i.e. how it is a deterrent to “white collar crime”).

I’m not going to spend a great deal of time or energy arguing for what everyone reading this already knows quite well: On God’s long list headed, “Why I hate the U.S.,” the prison system is near the top–probably even above the US Army-produced sex trade (our main contribution to the economies in some regions) and close with abortion. We all know it is evil. We all know it causes unspeakable harm to people every day. And we don’t care. No Christian candidate would ever get anywhere advocating getting rid of prisons. At best, any kind of prison reform other than building more of them would do nothing to help his campaign. More probably it would destroy his chances in the primary.

We simply don’t think the ongoing torture matters. Those people are convicts no matter how innocuous their crimes. They don’t matter. So screw them. Literally.

What sort of mental block is going on that we simply continue this hell-on-earth day after day decade after decade? One insight I think is found in Albert Jay Nock’s, “Anarchist’s Progress”:

Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one’s conscience.

Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it – the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers – felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.

The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect – nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time.

But sooner of later this ceases to be a delusion and becomes a self-conscious evasion. Do we not hold members of other societies responsible for their atrocities? How long can we do this and remain dedicated to Not Thinking About It when the elephant in the room is sitting on our laps? Sooner or later, as we have TV shows and movies all portray rather tame versions of what goes on in bloody real life, and as we find officials admitting and using to their advantage the horror, it has to occur to us that this, this is Something We Are Not Supposed to Let Happen.

And yet where are we to go to start acting like civilized human beings again? Are not our politicians constantly promising to extend the scope of this man-made hell? When being tough on crime means swift justice, it is a good shtick and worth voting for. But it hasn’t mean that for a long time. It means hardening criminals, training them, and adding to the number of rapes occurring on public property.

Sounds like an odd thing for the God-and-country club to assume the moral high ground for.

So, naturally, I’ve only just discovered BSG. So far, I’ve made it through the 2003 miniseries and Season One. I can’t believe I almost missed it.

I can’t believe that I have a whole’nother season to watch before I get to the present one. This is exactly the sort of quality show I expect to discover after it has been long canceled. The gods of media mediocrity are growing weak. There is hope.

It is stupid for me to try to describe this show or analyze it thus far since I am obviously the last life form in the universe to learn about it. But I have to say something.

It is so amazing to see such a powerful cross between The Book of Long Sun and Firefly/Serenity. The Whedonesque use of camera and space effects is obvious. But the polytheism and the prophecy and the politics and the enemy race wanting desperately to be joined with humanity is all so strongly reminiscent of a series of books by Gene Wolfe that probably most viewers have never heard of… And the correlations may all coincidental, but it is hard for me to watch the show and not see Patera Silk make an appearance.

I cannot believe I’ve not watched this before. I cannot believe there is more to see.

I’m sitting here working on a project. Jennifer is sitting on the couch behind me. She says, “Here’s a job that’s from ten to three. They say it is ideal for a mom with school-aged kids.”

Of course, not all our children are school aged. We talk a bit about how to deal with our youngest. And then I say, “Well, they’re aiming at your demographic so go for it.”

But, of course, this bothers me a great deal. Jennifer worked for a major imprint for a major Christian publishing house for several years. Her boss lived in another state and she was his office staff, getting proposals ready, working with authors, and working with contract workers, as well as organizing with printing and other departments. Before that she was on a staff where, at one point, she was responsible for a magazine, a newspaper, and a newsletter (I was also a member of the team and, yes, for awhile, she was my boss. I liked the arrangement so much I decided to marry her and make it permanent!)

But after about a decade of being a mother with a professional husband who (hypothetically) was supposed to bring home the income, she is now reduced to getting hourly clerical jobs.

I hate to sound bitter, but it often looks to me like a great many jobholders need to justify their incomes by describing their work as mystically as possible to make it look like not many people could do it. If it became clear that almost anyone could learn the software applications and procedures in a month and that the quality of their work depended on abilities and intelligence that are not as easily measurable or quantifiable, the world would become a frightening and unstable place for many.

One semester in seminary I worked nineteen hours and held down a full time job and did just fine (other than a week’s tussle with pneumonia which, thankfully, hit just in time to be medicated during spring break). I wonder, if one were trying to break into the corporate world, how he would get that across. I think this is an issue that faces a great many pastors. They have, by every measurable standard, shown themselves as able to learn and work and get things done. But this simply does not get credited to them.