Gawd bless that stick!
•_God was with the miners
• The legal authority of the United States is derived from God
• God is on our side in a holy war against Islam
The name-dropping by the President also invokes certain constitutional issues; Bush can say, as a person, whatever he wants about God. But as the president, he has sworn (on a Bible, no less) to protect and defend the Constitution which maintains that the government shall not endorse religion.
By and large, though, I find the issue of God in this case to have two specific positions:
• That I will grant the miners whatever comfort they seek during that period; it is not within the scope of my human authority to reject that comfort-seeking.
• That the efforts of human beings in rescue circumstances amount to nothing.
On that second, which is obviously the harder to swallow--One of my cousins once married a nice but ineffectual man and both of them went on a born-again bender. He burned all of his rock and roll cassettes (Styx was of the devil) except for Lynrd Skynrd (Sweet Home Alabama was apparently a godly song). Predictably, Queensrÿche was idolatrous, as was Iron Maiden and Ozzy. DC Talk and Michael W Smith and Julie "Something-or-another" became the utmost testament to quality music he understood (this was predictable at the time). God help me if I ever have to listen to Carman again while blazing along the highway in a VW Rabbit.
On the one hand, for reference, he came to God as a teenager when he nearly drowned. He grabbed out for a dock-raft floating in the lake and caught hold of a stick that some kid had wedged between the boards and used this to pull himself up. It was God that put the stick there for him, and it was God through the saving miracle of Jesus Christ who kept the stick from breaking or coming loose from its mount as he pulled himself to safety. Counterpoint: he nearly drowned less than ten feet away from a dock. Counterpoint: all of his friends who were there agreed that it was a miracle from Jesus, thus fostering his conversion. None of them can be said, even in his telling of the story, to have helped him while he was in distress.
So the guy gets on a health bender after the premature birth of his first child into critical condition. Fair enough, I suppose. He starts running, eating better, and eventually takes up fun-runs and longer races. I remember one summer when he finished a marathon. "I'm exhausted," he said.
You should be, I told him. You've just run a marathon.
"No I haven't," he said. "Jesus just ran that marathon ...."
Forgive me if I spare you the thirty minutes of conversation which followed.
The sum effect is disgusting to me: a guy busts his balls, runs a marathon, and I'm not sure what gets more offensive to me there, that he would refuse credit for his efforts according to his brainwashed, born-again zeal, or that he would demean Jesus by pretending that the Lord and Savior had time to be running a marathon while ethnic cleansing, starvation, and rape scourged the face of the earth.
In a like manner, determination, ingenuity, and compassion drove the trapped miners' colleagues to work feverishly and unceasingly to save them. I won't necessarily take issue with an assertion that the rescuers' faith compelled them to such determination and compassion, but I find it ridiculous to demean the accomplishments of men in order to pay tribute to God.
If it's your time to die, you die. Well and fine. If not, you don't. Well and fine.
Help me out with an issue of God's will: Was it my dearest friend's time to be raped by her father for eight years before I knew her?
Or another friend of mine: Was it really her time to die and decompose in the woods so that the most famous serial-killer task force in the world had to be called in to remove her remains?
Two last notes:
• This is an evil "fallen" world: The presumption of sin is a standard in the Christian perspective. I have often been critical of such a perspective because of the division it leads to between people. The presumption of sin mandates a fundamental distrust of all people anywhere. I have to say that I find such distrust ludicrous, lunatic, and beyond excuse.
• Barring tragedy, our choices determine whether we navigate through it safely or not: Barring tragedy? That's like the old environmental report that said, "Barring volcanic eruptions and the years immediately following, the climate can be seen to be warming at X rate." Well, guess what? Volcanoes are real, and they're not going away. The planet's warming, you say? Why, then, adjust out the drop of as much as 4°C for a period as long as 10 years after an eruption? Because it lowers the rate of warming? Why, then, bar tragedies? The choices we make put us in the way of those tragedies. If there's an earthquake in Seattle and people die when the 99 Viaduct collapses (as it will, since it's made of wood and sustained damage in the last quake we had up here), we can say that their choices determined their safety. Around here, it is popular to live 30-50 miles from where you work, and to commute by car. If I'm coming, say, from Federal Way, and 509 drops me onto 99 to get to work, and I am driving along the viaduct when the earthquake hits, it can be reasonably argued that my choices put me in harm's way. These guys took jobs as miners; their choice, luckily, didn't kill them.
Why pretend on any level that tragedy doesn't exist? It only works to reduce preparedness.
Go ask anyone who lives near an active volcano. They know. They know.
thanx,
Tiassa
A fair assessment of the psychological rewards of having religion.
Bush on God, in general terms:
•_God was with the miners
• The legal authority of the United States is derived from God
• God is on our side in a holy war against Islam
The name-dropping by the President also invokes certain constitutional issues; Bush can say, as a person, whatever he wants about God. But as the president, he has sworn (on a Bible, no less) to protect and defend the Constitution which maintains that the government shall not endorse religion.
By and large, though, I find the issue of God in this case to have two specific positions:
• That I will grant the miners whatever comfort they seek during that period; it is not within the scope of my human authority to reject that comfort-seeking.
• That the efforts of human beings in rescue circumstances amount to nothing.
On that second, which is obviously the harder to swallow--One of my cousins once married a nice but ineffectual man and both of them went on a born-again bender. He burned all of his rock and roll cassettes (Styx was of the devil) except for Lynrd Skynrd (Sweet Home Alabama was apparently a godly song). Predictably, Queensrÿche was idolatrous, as was Iron Maiden and Ozzy. DC Talk and Michael W Smith and Julie "Something-or-another" became the utmost testament to quality music he understood (this was predictable at the time). God help me if I ever have to listen to Carman again while blazing along the highway in a VW Rabbit.
On the one hand, for reference, he came to God as a teenager when he nearly drowned. He grabbed out for a dock-raft floating in the lake and caught hold of a stick that some kid had wedged between the boards and used this to pull himself up. It was God that put the stick there for him, and it was God through the saving miracle of Jesus Christ who kept the stick from breaking or coming loose from its mount as he pulled himself to safety. Counterpoint: he nearly drowned less than ten feet away from a dock. Counterpoint: all of his friends who were there agreed that it was a miracle from Jesus, thus fostering his conversion. None of them can be said, even in his telling of the story, to have helped him while he was in distress.
So the guy gets on a health bender after the premature birth of his first child into critical condition. Fair enough, I suppose. He starts running, eating better, and eventually takes up fun-runs and longer races. I remember one summer when he finished a marathon. "I'm exhausted," he said.
You should be, I told him. You've just run a marathon.
"No I haven't," he said. "Jesus just ran that marathon ...."
Forgive me if I spare you the thirty minutes of conversation which followed.
The sum effect is disgusting to me: a guy busts his balls, runs a marathon, and I'm not sure what gets more offensive to me there, that he would refuse credit for his efforts according to his brainwashed, born-again zeal, or that he would demean Jesus by pretending that the Lord and Savior had time to be running a marathon while ethnic cleansing, starvation, and rape scourged the face of the earth.
In a like manner, determination, ingenuity, and compassion drove the trapped miners' colleagues to work feverishly and unceasingly to save them. I won't necessarily take issue with an assertion that the rescuers' faith compelled them to such determination and compassion, but I find it ridiculous to demean the accomplishments of men in order to pay tribute to God.
The ultimate surrender to fatalism.
If it's your time to die, you die. Well and fine. If not, you don't. Well and fine.
Help me out with an issue of God's will: Was it my dearest friend's time to be raped by her father for eight years before I knew her?
Or another friend of mine: Was it really her time to die and decompose in the woods so that the most famous serial-killer task force in the world had to be called in to remove her remains?
Two last notes:
• This is an evil "fallen" world: The presumption of sin is a standard in the Christian perspective. I have often been critical of such a perspective because of the division it leads to between people. The presumption of sin mandates a fundamental distrust of all people anywhere. I have to say that I find such distrust ludicrous, lunatic, and beyond excuse.
• Barring tragedy, our choices determine whether we navigate through it safely or not: Barring tragedy? That's like the old environmental report that said, "Barring volcanic eruptions and the years immediately following, the climate can be seen to be warming at X rate." Well, guess what? Volcanoes are real, and they're not going away. The planet's warming, you say? Why, then, adjust out the drop of as much as 4°C for a period as long as 10 years after an eruption? Because it lowers the rate of warming? Why, then, bar tragedies? The choices we make put us in the way of those tragedies. If there's an earthquake in Seattle and people die when the 99 Viaduct collapses (as it will, since it's made of wood and sustained damage in the last quake we had up here), we can say that their choices determined their safety. Around here, it is popular to live 30-50 miles from where you work, and to commute by car. If I'm coming, say, from Federal Way, and 509 drops me onto 99 to get to work, and I am driving along the viaduct when the earthquake hits, it can be reasonably argued that my choices put me in harm's way. These guys took jobs as miners; their choice, luckily, didn't kill them.
Why pretend on any level that tragedy doesn't exist? It only works to reduce preparedness.
Go ask anyone who lives near an active volcano. They know. They know.
thanx,
Tiassa
