Conservative Doldrum vs. Christian Hope

Not by choice, but not by coercion neither, have I been watching a lot of FOX News lately; particularly O'Reilly, Hannity, and Beck. And here's my question. Is not FOX News as ridiculously biased on the conservative perspective as is CNN the liberal? Now I understand that talking heads are what they are. Everyone has the right to an opinion, and the right to share it, and if they can get paid to have people watch it, that's fine by me. But when it comes to just reporting News, does anybody do that anymore? (besides the local news of course.) Another problem is that people like Beck are extremely influential in people's lives. He must express many Americans sentiments, otherwise he would not be so popular. But it seems that FOX News is now the alternative for conservatives. It's Nirvana to CNN's Guns and Roses. Maybe the press is so overwhelmingly liberal that this is necessary, but I'm a little concerned about conservatives today. I've spent the last two weeks of my life with people more conservative than the people I am accustomed to being around, and while I deeply appreciate these people, I am becoming infected by their apocalyptic paranoia. Today's conservatives seem perfectly content to consider the war (against our country's increasing liberalism; a debatable position itself)lost and have resigned themselves to fear mongering, complaining, and waiting for the ball to drop. Conservatism, in my life time, has never been so depressing.
Here's the impression I get of today's conservative viewpoint: Our country is headed towards inevitable socialism, which in their minds means totalitarianism. Socialism+national debt= fall of our nation. Our youth culture has no ambition or morals. We must get back to the way things used to be.
The problem here is twofold. One, there's seems to be no plan on how to get things back to the way they used to be, other than preaching to to the choir, and fear mongering. Two, no real attempt is made at dialogue with liberals or the youth culture, and thus my generation has no idea why things so much better then, and why things are comparatively worse now. Then was the the Great Depression. Then was two World Wars, and the Holocaust. Then was Vietnam. Now is all sorts of bad too, but its all sorts of good as well, as well as was then. I wish divorce wasn't prevalent. I wish violence was not so volatile. I wish abortion wasn't on the rise. I wish our government wasn't so big and didn't spend so much money. But is it really all a part of a giant Obama/socialist conspiracy that started all the way back in the 60's? Attempts to explain how we got where we are have their merit, certainly. They can help us moving forward, but what about the future? What do we do to curb all this badness? If I hear a conservative who thinks in those terms I might not feel so stifled and lethargic.
Now it's no secret that the American conservative is generally speaking, a religious person, and is most likely Christian. I am a deeply committed Christian myself, and so the religious angle matters to me. It is inconsistent with Christianity's message of hope to be so despairing, is it not? Don't we know that we win? Society must go down the tubes. That's its natural course, so why would we want to return to a better time, when one, regardless of what time you find yourself in a society, its regressing, two, its still not the optimal situation which is the kingdom of God, and three, regardless of what age we find ourselves in we have the keys of the kingdom, and a message that applies to our neighbors, an urgent message at that? Isn't the call to return to better days, a call to return to something that is not the kingdom of God as much as looking forward to better days (like progressives) is the same thing. Call out abortion, I say, but not in the name of the Constitution, but in the name of what's right. And if we live under a socialistic, totalitarian government, yeah it sucks, but either way we have God on our side, and a gospel that not even the government can contain. (Besides we still are considered a center-right nation. Republicans are going to win the house and senate. How close to socialism can we be?)
Some Christians attachment to an American ideal seems to be a form of idolatry. Perhaps this because I was born in 1982, received a public education, and didn't grow up in Christian home. Perhaps I learned a different history than some in previous generations did. The idyllic age is unfortunately not a part of my experience. Hence, my lack of sympathy. I can see that it probably feels pretty crappy to see a generation of folks destroy everything you fought for, believed in, and cherished.
A wise man told me something. He said the problem today is that young people do not listen to experience, and that older folks do not listen to developing perspectives. A healthy society does both. Trust me when I say I've listened to "the old" perspective, and I'm genuinely trying to be sensitive to it, mostly because I think it would be foolish not to. But I ask you to look at mine. As a young person who has no attachments to the things of the past, but who wishes that the government wasn't so big, the borders were not so open, and the debt wasn't so high, who is a Christian and a Biblicist, let me lead us to a perspective of hope, let me call all people liberal and conservative to move past discussions that depend on man's wisdom, to faith that believes that God wins, despite all contrary evidence. Let us focus on the task, saving people, so they will be on the right side of society's salvation. Patriotism and nostalgia are a distraction from that.

Lebron and the Distinction Between Disappointed and Angry

Anger is the result of felt injustice. Injustice is the breech of a moral contract, spoken, or written, or unspoken, or unwritten. Do we as Cleveland fans have a right to be angry at Lebron James? It depends on what we're angry about. Because just because it feels unjust doesn't mean that it is, and as it pertains to Lebron's decision as a free agent, he broke no rules, written or unwritten. He never promised the city of Cleveland that he would stay for his career. He may have promised owner Dan Gilbert. We'll never know, but that would explain his anger at least. Of course, before Gilbert goes out calling people disloyal he needs to have a conversation with Mike Brown, the the winningest coach, percentage wise, in Cleveland Cavaliers history. Perhaps we are angry about the way that he went about it, carving out a one hour time slot in prime time just to take a piece out of our hearts. That was mean, granted. It was classless and ill-conceived. It added fuel to the fire, but how much less angry would we have been if he had made the same decision quieter. I think we might not have reacted so emotionally so quickly, but I think the burning of all things James would have been inevitable, and it might have squelched a Dan Gilbert email that he is now regretting forever. The seat of our anger comes from our belief turned expectation Lebron not only would stay in Cleveland, but more importantly wanted to win a championship in Cleveland. We gave our hearts to him. We wouldn't have done that had we not been convinced that he wanted to be for Cleveland what Jordan was for Chicago. The story was set up beautifully. James was being criticized for all the same stuff Jordan was in roughly the same period of his career, and then Jordan got Pippen, and Jackson, and the rest is history. All Lebron needed was "Pippen" and "Jackson", and the Cavs could be a dynasty. Alas, it seems that James had a different idea. No doubt, James decision was based on wanting to win championships. He took less money to go to Miami. He also wanted to stay in Cleveland. He wanted Bosh to come and be his "Pippen". Bosh wouldn't come. Lebron looked at the roster, post Bosh signing with Miami, and said, "to win the title, we have to get through Boston, Orlando, Miami, and Los Angelas". Gosh, I'm just one guy" This was the identical thought that went through his mind in the Boston series. He just didn't have it in him to carry them through the playoffs. He believed it in '07, '08, and '09, but not in '10, and you could see it on his face, the last three games of the series. I agree with Dan Gilbert, Lebron quit in the Boston series. He felt the burden of an entire city and folded underneath the pressure, and when Bosh sided with the Heat, Lebron decided he couldn't take that again. This is interesting because we're really hard on our athletes that lack a competitive spirit, but in some sense, it was Lebron's drive to win that led him to despair, and led him to choose Miami. Regularly we declare cynically that players always go where the money goes, and we kill them when they go to inferior teams for more money. Well, Lebron went to a superior team (with him on it)for less money, and we kill him for being disloyal. I point out this double-standard adding one caveat. A truly competitive spirit tries to win, always. Even if he's down two games to Boston in the second round, and he still has to get through Orlando, and the Lakers. Losing brings out character. I appreciate that Lebron hates losing. At least he didn't just smile and peace out, but he was a sore loser, and still is. He has to still play hard in Miami to win, not to mention with 9 summer league bench warmers. Winning is hard no matter where you are, and one would've have liked to see Lebron stay in Cleveland in sheer recognition of that fact. I mean, they did have the best record in the NBA two years in a row. (Combined Record- 127-37!)Perhaps there's stuff going on with management we'll never know. You can take this rant as an outsider's opinion, but this is how things appear to me given the facts that I have. What hurts is that through deciding to go to Miami, Lebron James communicated that he was not as enthusiastic or optimistic about Cleveland as we had believed him to be. The jury's still out for me whether this was misguided. I think it was spurred mostly by the media constantly comparing Lebron to Jordan. I think we were self-deceived. Lebron is a great basketball player who truly wants to win, but something's missing, that thing that Jordan, Kobe, Magic, Bird, and Wade have. The Derek Jeter factor if you will. He never had that look in his eye. He's actually a perfect Pippen to Wade's Jordan. We should've saw it coming. As second fiddle, Lebron doesn't have the pressure of a city's expectation and cursed history. He can be his goofy self and let Wade lead. He can make pretty passes, nasty dunks, and put on a show while Wade brings the necessary leadership. He wasn't who we thought he was. We should've known that championships are more appealing than Ohio, or where you grew up. We should've known that Lebron wasn't the King, but the Knight. But we wanted to be witnesses of the next legend, the next greatest player, the next dynasty. Lebron didn't see it that way, and he left, and it hurts.
If Lebron was unjust he was unjust in the way he went about leaving Cleveland. But this is not the issue is it? To call him disloyal assumes a moral imperative, and that loyalty is morally imperative. Only when the spoken/unspoken,written/unwritten contract is breached,is anger justified. Truly loyalty is nice. But in this situation, is it imperative? What loyalty are we asking Lebron to hold? He was drafted. He didn't have a choice to come to Cleveland. Is he disloyal to his word? What word did he give that he would stay in Cleveland. He finished out his contract without ever asking to be traded. Was he morally obligated to stay here? If he was, what's the meaning of "free agent". Of course he's not obligated to stay in Cleveland. Loyalty is based on a promise, and he fulfilled his. We feel betrayed because we let ourselves believe things that weren't true, but Lebron never shared them. A little look at recent history makes that clear. So somebody turned out not to be who we thought they were, but he never led us on, we led ourselves on, therefore, the anger, the bitterness, is unjustified. But the disappointment, the shock, and the loss of respect, well, at least that's how I feel for now.

Cars

Is society the collective refusal to examine philosophical presuppositions?


Okay. I am only a little serious. But I thought about this upon thinking about cars. Only capitalism could justify the automobile's popularity. First of all when you are driving a car, you are encased in thousands of pounds of metal moving at speeds up to 100 mph. Your options of communication with fellow motorists are few and the possibility of malfunction at some point is moderate to high.
And they cost money. And they depreciate in value. And if you work anywhere other than the three to five major metropolitan areas, you need this metal case of speed and death. It's nuts. And people drive 50 miles an hour. (I said 50 miles and hour! That's 73.3 feet per second!)To appreciate the force of this, run into a wall as fast as you can from ehh... 20 yards away. You will be traveling, probably, 10mph. Ridiculous. And why do we perform this daredevil stunt with a regularity that results in 1000 miles of driving every month? We have to get to our job. Wow. The need for capital has caused us to believe that we are safe at speeds up to 100 mph encased in a metal shell, depending on, essentially, electricity, and combustion, as if these things just work on their own and never break down, as if elderly people aren't licensed, as if we never make mistakes, and as if every one on the road has lasek surgery and has perfect vision. The well known fact that it is much safer to be suspended thousands of feet above the earth for hours, in a motorized flying machine made of metal may shed more light upon our lunacy. Long live the mighty dollar.

*Disclaimer* This post is meant mainly for humor, but is also intended to be truthful. As it stands, I own a car, and am okay with it. I am also okay with capitalism, but am also anticipating the perfect economy of Christ's kingdom.

Coffee

I am not addicted to coffee. I have evidence. I fasted from coffee for lent last year, and had basically no problems. I am however on the verge of obsession with coffee. I cannot work without it. It's a mental thing however, not really physical. I cannot stand to work without a liquid to drink, especially coffee, particularly when my work involves reading, which most of the time it does. And there's something about that taste in my mouth. It's wonderful the way that coffee lingers. This is my coffee comment of the day.

The True Christian

I find that the true Christian is unconventional. I do not mean that he is often unconventional, or that that his most distinguishing characteristic is unconventionality. I mean that he is a person void of convention. He is not even conventional in his conventionality. Now I must qualify what I mean by "true". For I do not think that either the mark or the mode of a "true" Christian is unconventionality, but that the sincere, genuine, fully functioning, completely sanctified Christian is unconventional. And by "conventional", I mean that he is himself in each and every situation that he finds himself in. He has no clique, albeit a community, which is entirely different. He has no clique because he is not afraid of being disliked, and has no desire to conform, and yet is consistently aware that "non-conformity" is a form of conformity, and that conformity itself is not the virtue in question: neither is non-conformity, but to the extent that conformity and nonconformity can be considered virtues, they are virtues if they conform to truth, and no person conformed to truth can succumb to the pressure of fitting into social norms. The conformist to truth is also a conformist to unity, and thus promotes it within himself and within society. He is a soul-undivided, utterly authentic, and contagious to all other authenticity seekers. Because he is okay with himself, others sense that he is okay with them, or they want to rid themselves of him because they have no power over him, and since they are not okay with themselves, they need this power.
I must finish with two qualifications of separate points just made. One, I promote neither acquiescence nor anarchy. The conformist to truth, a.k.a. the true Christian, stands up for what is right and against what is wrong, but he lives within the order he has known and understands since childhood. He must in conscience stop something that happens within the order is bad, not primarily because it creates disorder within the order, but because it was bad before the order existed, and will be bad upon the order's dissolution, and if the order prevent him from promoting something good which he must promote, he must promote it within the order and accept the order's consequence. So he is a non-conformist to the order but a conformist to truth, which compels him to conform to the order unless the order becomes non-conformed to truth, and still there is a way to refuse, without rebelling. For instance, say eating peas is wrong. Your mother, your authority, thus your order requires you to eat peas. The wrong reaction is to simply eat the peas, well as to deny your mother's right to authority. You refuse to eat the peas, receive your spanking, and go to bed a member of the order and a non-eater of peas. Or say you must eat peas, but your mother never makes them, and forbids them in your household. Likewise, you go buy peas, cook them, eat them, and take a spanking a pea eater.
The second qualification is more of a clarification and it deals with the question "What is truth?" How do I know in the first place that I mustn't eat peas (or must). And it is clear that I am assuming truth to have a thesis/antithesis quality. All I can say for now is that this is not a metaphysical or epistemological enterprise and that the first statement of the current post should be pretty revelatory of my basic assumptions about truth. To put it more bluntly. I am a Christian. I am assuming that the Nicene Creed is true, and I am assuming a classical Christian view of the necessity of antithesis. In as much as this enterprise concerns conformity as it relates to the Christian,(of which there is entirely to much confusion over lately)I want to call Christians out of conformity to the world all together, especially if it is pious because conformity to piety is the most deceptive of all. And lastly I am not suggesting that the true Christian can not be pegged. Anyone can be pegged. Pegging is the advantage of the subject, and he can be mistaken, but he cannot be prevented from opining, and thus pegging. If anything, the true Christian has no doubts about his pegging. He believes he is what God says he is, and lives joyfully in that. It is the church that will be difficult for the world to peg. Because the church is not a clique, it is a community. And as a community, it includes everybody, and everyone relates to everyone, exactly as they are. The former rule of subjective pegging applies. A church can be pegged as well as any individual, but not in truth. Because once one knows that the truth is that there is one body and many members of which Christ is the head, then one knows that any other peg is a mistake, and one can live in a distinct, truly non-conformist community; non-conformist in the sense of the main difference being a conformity to the truth instead of the world. In that sense, the church really is only more difficult to peg by reason that it is more complex than the individual, so we are back to where we started. The way out of this "paradoxicism" is a matter of the will. It is to truly not care what others think, only to take God at His Word and do what He says. This is a great mystery; non-conformity that cannot display non-conformity, but surely it can be practiced.

The Pluralistic Christian in a Pluralistic Society

What do you do when you find yourself in the following cultural situation? You live in a modern western, nation in which the great majority of its citizens claim to be Christians, yet the basics of Christianity is mostly misunderstood, or the pervading attitude towards the challenging Christian teachings is a form of apathy, or complacence? What do you do when you find yourself trying to follow the teachings of Jesus by reading the Bible, and most of your peers application of the Bible is to change nothing, except don't drink, get divorced, hang out with bad people, watch unbiblical movies, or say dirty words, but by all means support war, be rude to liberals, listen to Toby Keith curse and womanize, and make fun of sinners.
(I realize that many of my readers are sensitive to my implications. I am not talking about you. And I realize that I am misrepresenting a whole lot of individuals who are socially conservative, but also very cordial, polite and loving. Please realize that I am being slightly facetious, and that I in no way intend to ostracize my conservative brothers or sisters or make them look ridiculous. I am expressing however a common sentiment among more liberally minded Christians, and this is going somewhere. I don't wish to upset anyone.)
As Christians, we're called to be different; not different for the sake of different, but different in a way that is redemptive. But what does "different" look like in a pluralistic/secular/christian culture. It sure doesn't look like being a homophobic, pragmatist, elitist who doesn't drink or watch bad movies or a drinking, porn-watching, populist, who volunteers at soup kitchens, and pays more for gas effective cars. Why can't someone be a Christian who dislikes capitalism, because they believe it's about marginalizing people, more than helping them? Or be green, or a vegetarian, or vote yes for socialized health care? (Or not?) But who also hates pornography, abortion, and alcoholism? Why can't all of these qualities exist in one human without it being contradictory? What if its exactly what the Bible intends a Christian to look like within a pluralistic culture? What if "Biblical" in a pluralistic culture looks like each subculture appearing pluralistic? What I mean is that the culture is pluralistic in that many worldviews are accepted by the culture at large, but once people find others who agree with them, they form subcultures that are not at all pluralistic. This explains how subcultures become the authority of Christians' lives, instead of the Bible. This explains how the Bible gets re-interpreted in light of the subculture instead of the Bible shaping the opinions of the one individual. But I am convinced that if we interpreted the Bible before filtering it through our culture, that we would produce a truly pluralistic subculture, and that this subculture would be truly counter-cultural, and being that it would be biblically based, redemptive.

Ronald Reagan

The other day I heard someone say that that Obama is a communist. I think this is ridiculous, and a shameless piece of fear mongering. I heard another person say that Ronald Reagan was a fascist. This is just as ridiculous. I urge anyone reading this to look up both "fascism" and "communism".
Anyway, I was born in 1982. That means that I was born in the second year of President Reagan's first term and spent the first six years of my life under his presidency. Needless to say, I don't remember much about him. I remember that my father didn't like him. He (my father) said that Reagan was cocky, suspicious, and a warmonger. So that has been my general impression. But when I figured out that I was a Republican in high school, (as if you even have a choice in rural Ohio), I liked Reagan, but only because I was a Republican, and in my mind Republicans were the "moral" party that didn't make me pay taxes. Even so, the impression that he was a little shady, and arrogant stuck.
Recently, I found myself stumbling upon some old Reagan speeches and debates in the eighties, and I decided that my Dad's assessment was maybe a little off. President Reagan seemed to be very charming, eloquent, informed, and authentic. In fact, having grew up under the Clinton and Bush administration and now Obama, listening to Reagan made me feel like he was the last truly "presidential" Commander in Chief. People talk about how eloquent Obama is. He's a first year communications major compared to Reagan. Compared to Reagan's sincerity, Bush is a downright liar. And as far as charming in concerned, Clinton may have had a way with interns, but even liberals seemed to like Ronald Reagan. I found myself really appreciating President Reagan. If he's not sincere, he's the best politician, but I really think he's the last president I can listen to and believe that he really believes what he's saying, and that it has nothing to do with votes, but with the integrity of the office. I don't know. That's just my impression.