Religion and its Malcontents

Bret Stephens (via Mangan) writes:

As with religion, [global warming enthusiasm] is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers."

And more in like vein.  This is, of course, a riff on Michael Crighton’s famous “Environmentalism as Religion” speech in which he blames the AGW hoax (among others) on the religious impulse.

As I have written before, I believe this to be misleading.  It is precisely at the point where people stop believing in the God of the Bible that they became susceptible to all manner of nonsense in an effort to fill the religion-shaped hole in their psyches.  Stephens, et. al are correct to criticize religious approaches to what should be empirical questions, but it never seems to occur to them that the continued effort at undermining true devotional religion is actually exacerbating the problem.

This reminds me how, post-1991, atheists, when confronted with Soviet brutality, claimed that Russian communism was actually a religious movement, official statements to the contrary.  (They never seemed to realize this before 1991.)

Similarly, Calvinism has become the go-to whipping boy at Ferdinand’s site on any number of issues as the writers blame if for all that is wrong with the world.  Never mind that no observant Calvinist, then or now, actually believes or advocates anything Ferd is attacking; it’s Calvin’s fault anyway because . . . well, I’m not sure, but something about how anything that Ferd doesn’t like is logically consistent with Calvinism by Ferd’s reckoning, and that’s enough.

Yet another example:  I’m pretty sure that any reasonable observer would agree that Christianity, especially the fundamental variety, stands foursquare against drunken orgies.  Yet, when those orgies turn out badly, sure enough we can find people who blame them on Christianity anyway.

Φ’s First Law:  Anything bad is going to be blamed on Christianity and Christians, notwithstanding any amount of actual Christian opposition to the bad thing.

Hoarding Social Capital

I wound up the last post thusly:

I speculate that the motivation behind a lot of the animosity that socially adept kinds of people show towards PCC is precisely that they lose a lot of their social status and power when the rules get written down for everybody to learn equally.

As I thought more about it, I was reminded of one of Steve’s posts:

I want to note a social trend, that's reflective of a general theme: that in contemporary society, a lot of the rules for successful living aren't spelled out for people the way they used to be. This means that people who are smarter and/or raised in better social settings and/or naturally inclined toward successful life choices will still pick up the messages, but lots of other people won't . . . .

[C]onsider single motherhood and the term "bastard." A century ago, single motherhood was deterred, among other ways, by heaping opprobrium on the children of single mothers. That was cruel, but also pretty effective. Today, the term "bastard" has lost almost all connection with its original meaning. Nice people today would be shocked by the notion that society should discriminate against a child just because his parents weren't married. That's hardly the child's fault, now is it?

In fact, society is now deeply uncomfortable with the notion that we should be impolite to single mothers themselves . . . .

Not surprisingly, this decline in "preemptive discrimination" to deter single motherhood means we now have far more bastards. On the other hand, we don't see many bastards in the upper reaches of society, outside of celebrity bohemian circles. In fact, upper middle class life is evolving in directions that quietly but effectively discriminate against not just bastards, but also against the children of divorce . . . .

I suspect that people of ornery and/or impulsive dispositions inherited from their screw-up parents are less likely to make it to the upper reaches of society than in the past. In older times, parents with screw-up inclinations were more likely to be deterred by explicit social pressures against bastardy and divorces.

The whole thing is worth the read.  But I want to open the subject of the ethic of “non-judgmentalism” by way of example.

The LCMS church we attend is, for the most part, solidly middle class.  We do have a couple of families that are well-to-do yet have a family history here that keeps them coming back, and we also have a couple of, judging by their appearance, a couple of poor families.

The teenaged (I assume) daughter of one of those latter families attends sporadically.  She’s never particular well-dressed – thus I discern her socio-economic status – but one Sunday about a year ago her attire was especially egregious.  She was wearing a pair of cut-offs cut off too high.  And by too high, I mean high enough that if my own daughter were to wear them at the beach, I would probably say something.  But this girl was wearing them to a worship service.

This display bothered me enough that I brought it up, first to my wife, and then a few weeks later in the context of our Sunday school class.  (The class is heavily participatory and the discussion ranges widely; you can take my word that it was in a relevant context.)  I was unwilling to embarrass the young lady by name, but it was recent enough that I believed anybody who had seen her should have been able to figure out to whom I was referring.

What bothered me was my inability to get buy-in that somebody – and here I mean specifically one of the women in the church, since I have a vague sense that it would be inappropriate for me – should speak to this young lady in private and explain to her the standards of dress for Sunday churchgoing.  What I instead got was – at least among those who bothered to respond – was a vague appeal to the importance of being welcoming to all comers.  This bothered me because I know the daughters of these families and I know that they know what respectful attire looks like because they make sure that their own daughters abide with those norms.

Yet confronted with the opportunity to share that cultural capital with someone who didn’t have it – I am reasonably sure that the girl dressed as she did from ignorance rather than malice – everybody took a dive, and dressed up their hoarding in the language of non-judgmentalism.

Teleportation Reconsidered

While reading Steve’s reflections on the pace and progress of technology, I was struck by an aspect of teleportation that never seems to get any play when it’s portrayed in the movies.

In the future, we will supposedly see the crew of the Enterprise replace conventional travel with “beaming” about.  As near as I understand it, transporter technology involves the disintegration of the traveler at the departure point, the transmission of either his atoms and molecular map or his molecular map alone, and the reconstitution of the traveler at the destination point, either from “his” original atoms or from from a stock of atoms kept at the destination for this purpose.

The problem is that I don’t see how the traveler’s consciousness thread survives this process.  Yes, a reassuringly lifelike facsimile of Capt Picard may appear in the transporter room, complete with his memory and personality.  But that will be of cold comfort to the original Capt Picard, who is . . . disintegrated, and presumably off to whatever the afterlife has in store for him.  In all the decades and re-imaginings of  Star Trek, I can think of only one episode in which this problem was even touched on:  when TNG crew discovers that a copy of Commander Riker that had reflected off the ionosphere (or something) during a beaming and stranded him for decades on some godforsaken planet.  Much sanctimonious moralizing ensues.  But never did anyone raise the matter that Riker’s original consciousness thread inhabited at most one of the Rikers.

This same problem bedevils efforts to copy a person (as in The Prestige) or download a person into a new body (as in Avatar).  Sure, this process helps everyone around the subject feel warm and fuzzy (or not) about having him around.  But I can’t think of a materialistic model by which our consciousness thread is other than bound to a specific instantiation of our physical brains.

Bonus problem:  does the post-transporter, reconstituted copy of a person have a soul?

As a traducianist, I would argue no.  Which pretty much explains the characters on TNG, come to think of it.  But I suppose a creationist could go either way on the question.

Conversion vs. Re-affiliation

Here is a tidbit that may surprise many of you, given what I have heretofore revealed about myself:  for the past 2+ years, ever since we moved from the Mountain West to the Upper Mid-West, we have been attending a Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod congregation.  Last week, we formally became members.

When we first moved here, we visited about six different churches, some of them several times.  For the first year, we divided our attendance between a small PCA congregation about 15 minutes away, and the smaller LCMS church only two blocks from our house.  But in then end, we decided to attend the LCMS church full time.

Why?

• Proximity.  Our community is very walk-able, and walking to church is really nice.  The SWPLs are on to something here.
• Format.  Our Sunday school class, taught by the pastor, was in a sit-in-a-circle, Bible-study format rather than a platform lecture format.  And while I can’t really claim to prefer one to the other, the Bible-study format makes it easier to meet people and build relationships.  Which brings me to:
• Friendliness.  While the PCA church wasn’t un-friendly, we were never able to turn our attendance there into any extra-church play-dates or get-togethers.  While the church did have some mid-week Bible studies that might have generated more social opportunities, my recollection is that most of these were men-only or women-only rather than for families with children.
• Involvement.  While the PCA church probably would have provided ministry opportunities, that doesn’t have the same draw as being recruited to (in my case) join the LCMS choir, which is really what put them over the top.  Not only is the LCMS church small, most (but not all) of its members are old, and they are eager for the elevated involvement of the following generation (or two).  The PCA, in contrast, never gave much indication that they needed us one way or the other.

These aren’t the only reasons. Truth be told, these events seriously undermined my institutional loyalty to the PCA.  It may not seem like a big deal – in and of itself, it isn’t – but the issue itself and the way it was handled brought into sharp relief a number of things that had been bothering me.  First, many PCA congregations seem to be drifting away from their theological moorings.  Locally, I had observed this in several minor ways, and while I originally written them off as anomalies, they now look like a pattern.  Nationally, the drift shows up in, for instance, the PCA’s initial support (since retracted) for amnesty.  And second, I began to wonder how well I was fitting in socially. This hadn't much bothered me before, especially since I had nothing to compare it to, but the LCMS church just felt warmer to us than the PCA did.

It could be argued that we abandoned one denomination over small political differences to join one with which we have large theological differences. The LCMS has something called the Book of Concord, which appears to play the same role in Lutheran theology as the Westminster Confession plays in Presbyterian theology. Although most of that theology is almost identical, the Lutherans and Calvinists hold subtle yet strenously debated differences in their understanding of the Lord's Supper. I will not bore you with those differences here, except to say that they were considered a Very Big Deal back in the day.

Yet, for my part, I couldn't invest those differences with enough importance to prevent me from participating in the Lord's Supper in good conscience. And when I explained to the him the Calvinist view, our pastor responded that it was "close enough" for membership purposes.

But I hope the LCMS doesn't become too heterodox in its membership standards. Their willingness to hold to their traditions, even when I disagree with them, is still one of the things I like about them.

Submission

In Sunday School this week, we studied Colossians 3:18-25. As is fairly typical of my experience, the group had a good discussion of the challenges couples face as they seek to love and submit, what these look like, and how best to be faithful to God's command.

Near the end, our pastor made an interesting observation. He said that in his long experience in ministry -- he is a "Boomer", while the rest of us are "Gen-X'ers" -- he has noticed a dramatic change in the attitudes of the couples under his care, both in group settings and in pre-marital counseling. It used to be, he said, that he could count on significant female opposition to the notion that they would be required to submit to their husbands. He would regularly struggle against the assumption that Col. 3:18 was somehow archaic, or didn't really mean what it said, etc. Whereas now, women are much more open to the principle of submission, more congnizant of God's sovereignty over marriage, and more hopeful that in this way their lives will bring glory to God.

I was considering why this change in attitudes occurred. I have three possibilities, not mutually exclusive:

• Younger women have learned from the mistakes of their Boomer forebears that a constant striving for "equality" does not a successful marriage make.

• Their larger socio-political victory complete, younger women feel freer to choose submission in marriage from a position of strength.

• Evaporative Cooling: the kind of women likely to object to God's order in marriage have long since dissociated themselves from the kind of churches that Φ would likely attend.

Thoughts?

Taxing Status

Megan McArdle and a liberal professor (I assume) at UCLA named Mark Kleiman have a bloggingheads discussion about a couple of issues. They began by discussing crime, and crime prevention. This appears to be Kleiman's field of expertise, and he shares a number of statistics and anecdotes about ways of reducing crime that are well worth the 86 minutes you spend listing to, especially if you're looking for an excuse to avoid working on your thesis, like, um, other people (yeah, that's it . . .).

Megan makes an important point about the effect of high marginal tax rates that I hadn't heard expressed quite this way before. It has been well understood that increases in marginal tax rates change not only the investor class's risk-reward calculations, but also the point at which people make trade-offs between work and leisure. At some sufficiently high level of taxation, the heart surgeon (for instance) decides that the after-tax income of an additional dollar in revenue isn't worth the X amount of time he has to put in at the office. So he arranges his life to work a shorter day, or he heads off to Florida for the last two months of the year. This inevitably reduces the supply of heart surgery in the economy, which raises its price for everybody, including people who weren't the intended targets of the higher rates. Plus, to the extent that the surgeon's activity employed ancillary services like nursing, the economic wellbeing of these workers is depressed.

But Megan makes an additional point. Not only do the tax rates affect the surgeon's tradeoff between work and leisure, but it affects his tradeoff between work and any other non-taxable activity. She gives the example of house painting. At market prices, the surgeon might rather be doing surgery than painting his own house, but after taxes, he may decide to use his "leisure" time painting his own house. This has immediate downstream affects: not only is the surgeon shielding himself from taxation, but he is doing something that he doesn't particularly enjoy and may do it poorly and inefficiently, reducing his overall wellbeing. The professional painter, meanwhile, is hit even harder: the surgeon's choice has cost him the income for doing something he does enjoy and at which he has a competitive advantage.

Consider restaurants. People eat out because they enjoy paying people to prepare meals for them, and restaurants presumably enjoy economies of scale and efficiency in food preparation. But this, too, is all taxable activity. The heart surgeon can reduce the activity he does well (surgery) in favor of an activity he does poorly (cook), at net loss to both himself and the restaurant, and greater in-efficiency all around.

Now, it is true that many professionals (my relatives among them) enjoy the mental relaxation that working with their hands affords them. And others, like me, are constitutionally averse to paying anyone to do anything for me that I think I can do myself (with a few exceptions). And indeed, few families would choose to eat out all them time, regardless of tax policy. But before the crunchy-cons among us wax lyrical about the benefits of "nutritious, lovingly prepared meals served at home," let me point out that for many families these days, "home-cooked" means Hamburger Helper or frozen pizza.

Obviously, government expenditures have to be financed, so taxation will always be necessary. And I am officially agnostic about what level of taxation results in a net social loss. But this is an important consideration.

One more thing. It's not every day that you can catch a liberal honestly expressing their worldview in all its repulsive glory. So I have to praise Kleiman's candid admission that his enthusiasm for high marginal tax rates has less to do with raising revenue for the government and more about hurting people who make more than he does. According to Kleiman, money buys social status, and status is zero-sum. Ergo, the wealth of someone like Bill Gates allows him to acquire status at the direct expense of . . . Mark Kleiman!

I suppose I could say that, whatever you may think of Bill Gates, he acquired his money, and therefore his "status", in the free market by persuading customers to buy his operating system and manufacturers to install it on their computers. He didn't do it by using the power of the state to take other people's status and give it to himself.

More on point, though, I would say this:

Q: Which is the tenth commandment?

A: The tenth commandment is, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."

Q: What is required in the tenth commandment?

A: The tenth commandment requires full contentment with our own condition and a right and charitable frame of spirit towards our neighbor and all that is his.

Q: What is forbidden in the tenth commandment?

A: The tenth commandment forbids all discontentment with our own estate, envying or grieving at the good of our neighbor, and all inordinate motions and affections towards anything that is his.

Meet Mark Driscoll

Meet Mark Driscoll, the man from Seattle who's "making Calvinism cool." (H.T.: H.S.)

Since I self-identify as Calvinist, and am known in our blogring as "that Calvinist dude," I need to make a couple of points.

First, I adhere specifically to the doctrines of the English Reformers as expressed in the Westminster Confession* and as presently institutionalized in the Presbyterian Church. While we emphasize our continuity with the core teachings of John Calvin, we do not necessarily give a blanket endorsement to everything the man himself said or did. Let me put it this way: I would consult Calvin's writings to better understand the Confession or to address matters on which the Confession is silent. I would not, however, substitute his writings for the Confession.

Second, in the context of Mark Driscoll's ministry, this distinction is most specifically relevant on the matter of church government. The NYT article -- fairly written for the most part -- tells the following story:

Nowhere is the connection between Driscoll’s hypermasculinity and his Calvinist theology clearer than in his refusal to tolerate opposition at Mars Hill. The Reformed tradition’s resistance to compromise and emphasis on the purity of the worshipping community has always contained the seeds of authoritarianism: John Calvin had heretics burned at the stake and made a man who casually criticized him at a dinner party march through the streets of Geneva, kneeling at every intersection to beg forgiveness. Mars Hill is not 16th-century Geneva, but Driscoll has little patience for dissent. In 2007, two elders protested a plan to reorganize the church that, according to critics, consolidated power in the hands of Driscoll and his closest aides. Driscoll told the congregation that he asked advice on how to handle stubborn subordinates from a “mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter, good guy” who attends Mars Hill. “His answer was brilliant,” Driscoll reported. “He said, ‘I break their nose.’ ” When one of the renegade elders refused to repent, the church leadership ordered members to shun him. One member complained on an online message board and instantly found his membership privileges suspended. “They are sinning through questioning,” Driscoll preached. John Calvin couldn’t have said it better himself.

First, for Molly Worthen to characterize the Anabaptist leaders executed in Geneva as mere "heretics" is misleading: these men were, in fact, political anarchists. While I would concede that state power should not be used to enforce religious conformity, it is a little naive to expect any 16th-century government to have tolerated political agitation under the guise of religious freedom.

Second, while I will need to research how Geneva's churches were actually run, Driscoll by this account departs dramatically from Presbyterian church government, which, like republicanism, is chock-a-block with checks and balances. In a typical Presbyterian church, a pastor has but one vote on the board of directors. (Presbyterians have their own words for this stuff, which I won't confuse you with at present.) It is the board, not the pastor, that wields authority in the local church, including the power to hire the pastor (though this is subject to ratification by the congregation). The board itself submits to yearly election by the members of the congregation: usually, the outgoing board chooses a slate of candidates for the incoming board, which the congregation votes up-or-down. (I've never seen a "down" vote, so I'm not sure what happens in that event.) Becoming a voting member of the congregation requires examination and approval by the board, and a public profession of faith. (This isn't as difficult as it sounds: my wife was admitted to membership despite not being particularly Calvinist in her own theology.) The board can also call a member to account for misbehavior, and even discipline him by withholding the sacraments, although I've only ever seen this done once; people so called to account almost always straighten up.

Local churches, in turn, are subject to the discipline of the denomination, whose leadership is elected by representatives of the local churches. And so it goes.

The issue of dissent is a little trickier. Dissent is not prohibited, but it is constrained by process. A member, and even a board member, is prohibited from subverting the authority of the leadership, but the notion that they are "sinning through questioning" would be alien to Presbyterian government.

These checks and balances are not without cost. A ministry such as Driscoll's, or like Dobson's Focus on the Family, would be much, much more difficult to get started, and in practice are vanishingly rare among Presbyterians. So I will stipulate that American religious life is made much more dynamic by the work of "religious entrepreneurs" who have an idea, put out a shingle, and thrive or perish on their ability to draw a following. But the point here is that Presbyterian Calvinists are not authoritarian; in fact, we actively resist the cults of personality from whence derive the authoritarianism of such as Mark Driscoll.

*I should make clear, and not just pro forma, that the Confession is a "subordinate standard" -- subordinate, that is, to the Scriptures.

On Abortion, Religion, and Proxy Issues

Trumwill has an excellent post on his mixed feelings toward parental consent laws:

The thing is, if I had a daughter that was pregnant and intended to have an abortion, I don’t think that I would want to be notified. A part of me thinks that if I could convince her not to, I would want that opportunity. I would want to be able to tell her that we would work with her so that she could go to college and establish herself. We’d (informally or formally) adopt the kid as our own if that would change her mind or help her place the child for adoption with an agency. I would want her to know that while I may be disappointed in what led up to the pregnancy that I understand that things happen and how we respond to the consequences of our mistakes says as much about us as the mistakes themselves.

The other part of me, however, fears that it would tear our family apart if she declined to go along. If the law were notification, it would be excruciating to try to talk her into having the baby and not being able to do so. She would know how vehemently I disapprove of her decision and I would know that she did something that I have strong moral objections to. It gets more difficult with parental consent laws because I would have a lot of difficulty consenting to it. If her mental health were obviously on the line, I would probably not drag her to court over the issue and so would consent. But such things are extremely difficult to judge. She may overestimate the mental health effects of having the baby or I might underestimate it. If I did not provide consent and she got a judicial bypass (most of which are granted, from what I understand), it could cause a permanent cut that’s never entirely sewn up.

In this case, I have to wonder if ignorance is bliss.

Trumwill's written enough that I feel comfortable making the generalization that his views on extramarital sex are more latitudinarian than my own. And for myself, my opposition to abortion is strong enough that I would seize at the opportunity to dissuade my daughter from aborting a child.

But the risks to the relationship that Trumwill identifies are very real. The scenario he describes, wherein my anti-abortion counseling is ignored, would engage mental modules that go beyond the narrow issue of abortion. I can specifically name two of those modules: first, my authority, and God's, over her behavior; second, her loyalty to her family and to the moral tradition in which she was raised. In this context, my daughter's abortion would have do premeditated violence to both authority and loyality. While in the abstract I could forgive abortion, I would have a much harder time forgiving this violence. Indeed, the context would make it difficult for her to genuinely seek that forgiveness.

I can imagine having a conversation with my daughters that goes something like this:

1. First, don't have sex outside of marriage. God says so, and I say so.
2. Second, if you choose to ignore this instruction, take whatever precautions.
3. Third, if you choose to ignore that advice, please don't get an abortion. Come to your parents. Yes, we will be disappointed and upset. But we will also work with you on the alternatives.
4. Finally, if you ignore all the above: never, ever tell me about it.

It occurred to me that this is not dissimilar to my attitude toward apostasy. As a Calvinist, I really don't have any stake in anyone's religion, or lack thereof: I did not choose my faith, nor you your unbelief, but God is sovereign over all. So I daily pray for the souls of my children and seek to nurture them in every way I know how; but, if in spite of this, they wander away, then I can only submit to God's perfect justice.

Think of this as "narrow-sense" religion, or "elite" religion as Razib once called it.

But there is also a broader sense in which religious faith is a measure of in-group loyalty: to family, community, and nation. And should my children, in the manner of some, become anti-Christian, and attempt to rub my nose in their new-found hostility, then there will be no refuge for them in a counter-claim that, really, they still want a relationship with me, for they will have rejected more than than just God.

Econ 101

From I John 2:

¹⁵Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

¹⁶For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.

¹⁷The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.

"The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life." Years ago, a Sunday school teacher summarized the ethic for me thusly:

I want it.

I need it.

I deserve it.

Is there any doubt that this describes the ethic that brought our economy to the edge of the abyss? From the borrowers who bought more house than they could afford and spent their inflated home equity on consumer goods to the politically connected Fannie Mae execs who greenlit dangerous risk while collecting seven-figure bonuses: all are implicated in the ethic of entitlement that will pass away with the world it governs.

I thought of this the other day while reading Bobvis' post on the minimum wage. Before it degenerated into name calling, commenter Biloo's defense of a minimum wage relied specifically on this ethic of entitlement: he wants it, therefore he must deserve it. Indeed, he can't imagine any other basis:

[I]f it's not about what people "deserve" or have a "right to" why have such an intervention in the first place?

I can't think of a better reply than Bostonk's:

You can't have a "positive freedom" without essentially entailing some other unnamed party(s) to provide it, probably free of charge.

I have, late in life, developed a Burkean skepticism of the rights-based paradigm as an approach to social philosophy; however, if there is such a creature as a "right", surely the "right of property in oneself and the fruit of one's own labor" must rank as the most fundamental.

But as I have said before, I am no libertarian. Since my blog is an unlikely hangout for doctrinaire libertarians, no thoroughgoing refutation of libertarian philosophy is necessary, but I will say this: rights may be possessed individually, but they are secured collectively, and that collective requires accommodations that in practice are worked out politically. If indeed a collective (by which I mean political community) is to be a bulwark of security rather than an engine of predation, it absolutely, with 100% certainty, must be composed, not of a random collection of individuals, but of a community with a shared sense of its own destiny. For the same reason that a buffalo has no "rights" enforceable against a lion, so too the members of a community only have "rights" to the extent that the rights serve the interests of all rather than some.

The reason I am much more sympathetic than I once was to calls for a minimum wage is that our governing elites have forgotten this. Through a combination of legal, regulatory, trade and immigration policies, they have systematically driven the demand for low-skilled labor overseas while importing massive numbers of low-skilled laborers. The result is exactly what the supply-and-demand curves would predict: "the fruit of one's labor" isn't nearly as fruitful as it once was for the lower end of society.

Thus has our community of interest been fractured, and nowhere is this more evident than in the assertion of "rights" against the labor of others. Indeed, such assertions are the antithesis of rights, but rather the demand that the political community become an engine of predation. The libertarian may yelp all he wants; so too may the buffalo. Both are powerless without a community.

On Definitions

I learned something new about the Ten Commandentments yesterday.

You may ask, what's new about them? Haven't they been sitting there in Exodus 20 for, roughly, ever?

The ten commandments are not specifically numbered, and in fact span 15-16 verses in chapter 20, depending on whether or not you count the introduction. Exodus 34, among other places, refers to them as "the Ten Commandments," so there isn't really any disagreement that there are ten. However, it turns out that not everyone divides the Ten Commandments the same way. Significantly, Roman Catholics combine the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have no other God's before me," with the Second Commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven (i.e. engraved) images," into a single commandment. They make up for it on the back end by breaking the 10th Commandment, "Thou shalt not covet," into two parts: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house," and "Thou shalt not covet they neighbor's [everything else]."

The Catholic division, while originally made by Augustine, wasn't made official until the Council of Trent, i.e. the high-water mark of the counter-Reformation. It is not hard to see the motivation. The prohibition against the use of images in workship presents a prima facie problem for Catholic iconography. Yes, properly schooled Catholics understand that they are not worshipping the statues and whatnot, but this is a pretty fine distinction with what they are doing, and anyway, not all Catholics are properly schooled.

This came up because my daughter, a well-catechized Calvinist, had an argument with her best friend, an evidently well-catechized Catholic. I found out about this later, but supposedly her friend was reduced to tears upon hearing that the Second Commandment was not "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."

The fun part is that when the adults were asked to resolve the dispute, friend's mom consulted a Catholic catechism. And guess what: it didn't say word one about graven images. I had a hard time believing this when I heard it, so I dug up my own Catholic Catechism from twenty years ago. Sure enough, not one word on graven images.

Now, this isn't the Catholic Church's final word on the subject. The Catholics have several catechisms. They tend to be quite lengthy, and they aren't "catechisms" in the proper sense of being in a question-and-answer format, but are rather confessions, or statements of faith and doctrine. The U.S. Catholic Bishop's online catechism does address the prohibition, though of course it gives a psss to the veneration of images. And at least two Catholic translations-in-good-standing of Exodus 20 contain the passage intact.

But evidently one can be a Catholic in good standing without ever actually, you know, reading the Bible. Friend's family, for instance, are very devout, yet friend's mom hadn't even heard about "graven images" and, upon not finding it in the catechism, said rather decidedly that it wasn't part of the ten commandments!

So . . . the point of this post wasn't to take a whack at Catholics. The point was to use this example as an illustration of how the power to set categories and definitions is also the power to control the discussion. In this instance, by submerging the prohibition on worshiping images as a mere application of the commandment to "have no other Gods," it becomes possible to have it ignored almost completely. So the categories influence the outcome.

This insight has all kinds of applications.

On Hagee

The television last night went on about John Hagee, and McCain's "rejection" of his endorsement. It's not hard to see what's driving this story: Obama has been embarrassed by his intimate 20-year association with a racist anti-American demagogue, so the media was out to find, or manufacture, a similiar association that would embarrass McCain. The appropriate analogy is that if I rob a bank, and you pick up a dime off the sidewalk, well hey, we both took something that didn't belong to us!

But my point here is how bogus the story really is. As I understand it, the particular controversy are Hagee's remarks about Hitler. Despite the efforts of some in the media to pull these out of context, it is apparent even from what they quote that the remarks don't mean what the media say they mean.

Is there really any doubt that the worldwide revulsion at the Nazi attempt at genocide was indispensible to creating the historical moment at which Israel was granted its statehood? I would be surprised to learn that there is much disagreement among historians on this point.

But it follows that, if you believe in a sovereign God, and if you believe that the modern state of Israel is the heir to God's Old Testament covenant and therefore destined to play a specific role in the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, you are pretty much obligated to believe that God used the Holocaust to accomplish his divine purposes. For my part, while I subscribe to the first of the above statements, I am no longer persuaded by the second, although I once was. So I would not tend to subscribe to Hagee's formulation in the way he intends it. But so what? Subscribing to the Left Behind narrative may be practicing sloppy theology; it may distort your foreign policy in irrational ways; but in an era in which our presidential candidates spend more energy swearing fealty to Israel than our own country, I don't see how any of this makes Hagee a bad person, or otherwise beyond the Pale.

The Huffington Post quotes the remarks (from a 1990 sermon) in full:

"Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said 'I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.' So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.

"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Two points about this. First, it is very difficult to read this as being motivated by hatred for Jews. The Huffington Post headline, "Hagee Said Hitler Was Fulfilling God's Will," only does justice to what Hagee actually said by narrow technical criteria.

My second point is theological, and aimed at those whose rejection of Hagee's beliefs is part of their broader problem with the nature of evil: why do bad things happen? I do not mean to make light of this question, for there is indeed much pain, suffering and death in this world, and no shortage of evil. And this doesn't even address those who, having rejected the Gospel of Christ despite years of hope and prayer by their loved ones, damn themselves to an eternity of torment.

I cannot do justice to these questions in the short time I have, so I must content myself with one question: what is the alternative? If you reject God's sovereignty, you are left believing either that God is watching our earthly plight, wringing his hands in powerless futility, or that God could do something to relieve our suffering but doesn't care enough about it. And frankly, neither of these alternatives is particularly comforting.

UPDATE: Half Sigma and his commenters make these points as well.