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This Month's Scripture Verse:

1 But false prophets also appeared among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. 2 Many will follow their indecent behavior, and because of them the way of the truth will be maligned; 3 and in their greed they will exploit you with false words; their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep..
II Peter 2:1-3

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Showing posts with label President Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label President Obama. Show all posts

Monday, May 22, 2017

ONIM For May 22, 2017

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Tuesday, February 28, 2017

A Tragic But Real State Of The Union

If we think back to the election, we had a choice between two sides of Neoliberal Captialism. One side, Hillary's side, promised to put some curbs and taxes on the domestic businesses front while freeing up restraints that would allow more business freedom on the international level. The other side, the Donald side, saw a freeing of domestic businesses from their social responsibilities to the nation in the promises to reduce both taxes and regulations. While one candidate represented global side of neoliberalism, the other side promoted the domestic side of  neoliberalism. Neoliberalism here is the drastic reduction of government control over and taxes on businesses. And the businesses which stood to gain the most with either candidate were big businesses.

Increasing the control that business has over society is nothing new--this increase in control is often reflected in a reduction of governmental control over business. From the Obama Administration's failure to criminally prosecute those responsible for the 2008 economic collapse, to the writing of laws like Obamacare and to an extent Dodd-Frank, and to the attempt to fast tracking the TPP, big businesses were benefiting from Obama's Presidency. So while conservatives thought that government was the problem, big business has now gained an even greater control over our government with the election of Trump. Thus, the election was rigged. It wasn't rigged in the sense that either Hillary or the Donald was selected to win. It was fixed so that big business would gain more significant control over a government they already had decent amount of control of regardless of who was elected. Regardless of who was elected, any change in the status quo would further the position of wealth and power in society.
 
So while the Democratic Party suppressed its populist urges, Republican populism was merely a tool as its leaders exercised some slight of hand to make the public think that it was voting for a change in direction.

From Trump's appointments, to his promises to cut taxes and regulations made to the CEOs of major corporations, to his sabotaging of the EPA with Scott Pruitt, to his support of the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines, to his AG stating that the Federal prison system will return to relying on private prisons, and to his unnecessary plans to boost defense spending, Trump is championing the cause of big business while pretending to be concerned about the people who voted for him.

In the meantime, this President is giving unprecedented treatment of the press with him and some of his supporters claiming that the media is the enemy of the American people. Such  only plays to his base but it does so powerfully. We should note that many conservatives already form a strongly insular group. So that revelations by the press about Trump and his responses do nothing more than make his base more and more defensive. In addition, some of the conservative press is relying on promoting racial and religious prejudice to reinforce the belief among conservatives that all of their enemies are external ones--external in the sense that their enemies are either domestic nonconservatives or foreigners who do not share their religion and race.

The above is a description of the state of our union as far as I can see things.  And what is different between what the state of our union was under Obama from what it now is under Trump is not seen in the direction in which our nation is heading, the difference is seen in the speed our nation is traveling toward its final destination.



 
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Monday, February 6, 2017

ONIM For February 6, 2017

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Friday, February 27, 2015

Should We Be Proud Of Christianity And The West?


Pat Buchanan is on a rampage. Much anger he has. And his anger is due to President Obama's brief mentioning of Christianity's past sins during the National Prayer Breakfast (click here). What did Obama say? To put words into Buchanan's mouth, we could say that Obama acted like an Alabama student attending a home football game wearing neutral colors and booing instead of chanting "We're number 1!" To be more specific, during the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama, according to Buchanan, demonstrated that he prefers to belong to the world than to us (click here for Buchanan's article). 

A totally Christian oriented but extremely short response to Buchanan's article might appear in Wednesday's, March 4th, edition of Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs blogpost on this blog pending the Imaginative Conservative blogsite's decision to post my comment with the article. Stayed tuned. But here, this blogpost will take a more expansive look at Buchanan's complaints. 

Buchanan states his issues with Obama in the first paragraph. He claims that Obama doesn't love his own nation. Here, we should note that Buchanan's definition of the word 'love' has yet to be defined. The fourth paragraph gives a little clearer picture. Obama showed that he doesn't love his country because he ticked off Christians by reminding them of their past crimes which Buchanan described as being 'real or imagined.' The history of the crimes Obama briefly referred to matters not to Buchanan. It is the reminder of these dark times to which Buchanan is responding. Of course we can guess that Buchanan will later on whittle away at the real history to move more instances of real history into the imagined bin.

Buchanan's definition for what qualifies as loving one's own nation, that is if one is a Christian American, is revealed a few paragraphs afterwards. An American Christian's love for his/her own nation is determined by whether one believes in the superiority of their country over all others. And this superior quality of America comes from its Christian heritage. So this recognition of supremacy is not just attributed to America, it is bestowed on Christianity as well.

What we should note about claims of superiority is that they usually come with some baggage. The minimum baggage consists of a sense of entitlement and an embracing of an active authoritarianism. The sense of entitlement involves the perceived right to privileges which others do not have. The active form of authoritarianism assumes that one has merited the right to rule over others. There are degrees to which one chooses to so preside. One can act as a totalitarian or one can pick and choose when they will exercise control. And because we are dealing with authoritarianism here, anger naturally arises when one's authority is not recognized. That is because one's position of authority is believed to have been earned by meeting the qualifications which others did not.

That is at the core of Buchanan's reaction to Obama. For Buchanan, its bad enough when the inferiors do not recognize the prestige we've earned by not bowing to our supremacy; but when one of our own knocks us down a peg, it is considered to be almost tantamount to treason because of the self-sabotage being employed. Of course, all of that comes from an authoritarian position.

These delusions of superiority that dance in Buchanan's head while claiming that Obama, who btw is way too conservative for me, does not love our country can remind one of Emma Goldman's description of patriotism (click here). 
Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.

Now read Buchanan's main complaint against Obama and see how much, if any,  Goldman's description of patriotism applies to Buchanan:
He sees himself as a citizen of the world, who rejects the idea that our cradle faith Christianity is superior, or that our civilization is superior. For he seems to seize every opportunity to point out the sins of Christianity and the West and the contributions of other faiths and civilizations.

At this point, Buchanan switches from offense to defense. First, he tries to distance Christianity from slavery by noting its preexistence. The implication, of course, is that Christianity didn't own slavery. What Buchanan doesn't mention is how Christians in America still used the Bible to defend it.

Buchanan continues by stating that Christian teaching about the dignity of each person goes against the notion of slavery, but his view was not the view practiced by many Christians. And while Buchanan wants to assert Christianity's superiority over Islam because of when the practice of slavery ended for each religion, we should note that Jim Crow contained elements of slavery and was brutally oppressive and that was practiced and by many Christians who used the Bible to defend it up until the 1960s.

Then, though he admits that atrocities were committed by both sides,  Buchanan defends the Crusades by describing the participants as Christian Knights fighting to reclaim what rightfully belonged to Christianity. We should note that when wars are assessed, they must be measured on more than one criteria. We know from our own military ventures that our politicians often use the valor of our troops as a moral shield to defend their policies. So we need to assess the Popes and why they ordered the crusades. We should note that the promise of indulgences offered by the first Pope who ordered the Crusades. We should also be aware that Popes were increasing their political power. And we need to assess the participants by their stated motives as well as their actions. The fact that some of them committed atrocities, in many cases worse than what some Muslims did, should relegate their knightly position in society to a blurb in history.

Buchanan also comments on the Inquisition. He starts off with a comparison measurement. Others killed more people than the Inquisition did. He cited Lenin as an example.  BTW, what Buchanan seems unaware of were that some of Lenin's contemporary comrades opposed his tyrannical rule because such violated their socialist convictions. So here, we can't use Lenin and Stalin to compare Socialism with Christianity and the West. That is because like most other groups, Socialism is not a monolith.

Finally, while Buchanan wants to cite the surge in Islamic fanaticism, he is silent on the Western Imperialism that has been brutal at times and has installed artificial boundaries throughout the Middle East.

We should note that Buchanan does not deny the faults and sins committed by Christianity and the West. Rather, his strategy is to say that we are superior because we lag behind others in the  number of atrocities committed. And yet, Obama's point wasn't that the Christian civilization committed more sins than any other civilization. Rather his point was that we Christians can't afford to self-righteously judge others because we have committed sins ourselves. Obama wasn't concerned about superiority here and so he simply said that we need to pay attention to our own faults. 

Buchanan, on the other hand, seems obsessed with going beyond the pointing out of past sins to measuring the history of all groups in order to declare a winner, to give an award to the superior civilization. Here we should remember that to many authoritarians, to the winner goes the spoils. That is to the superior civilization goes the entitlement to exclusive privileges and the authority to rule over others.

There are a number of perspectives from which one can analyze Buchanan's reaction to Obama's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. The approach this blogpost will take is an attempt view Buchanan's response from a Christian perspective. What this post will attempt to measure is how well did Buchanan's response to Obama represent Christianity. 

Here, part of our work is already done. A blogpost on Obama's speech has already been posted on February 13 (click here). One of the points of that blogpost was about what makes Christianity special, or superior using Buchanan jargon. It isn't the actions performed or avoided by Christians that causes our religion to rise above the others; rather, what makes Christianity what it is is Jesus and who He is and what He did. What makes Christianity important is that it is based on incarnation of God's son. And God sent His son in that way to save us from our sins. Thus, Buchanan starts off on the wrong foot when trying to defend Christianity. For as he focuses on what past Christians have and have not done, the defining characteristic for Christianity is based elsewhere. It is based on Jesus.

But given Buchanan's bad start, is his intended destination consistent with Christianity? Is it Christian for us Christians to use the uniqueness and superiority of our faith to see others as being below us? And if others are below us, are we allowed or even commanded to rule over them? The need for answering this question is suggested by Buchanan's authoritarian approach.

Here we have to divide our answer into two parts. For it seems that the Church history shows that there are multiple, distinct sources we can use to define the Christian Faith. The actual history of the Church provides one source for defining our faith while the Scriptures yield some information that agrees with portions of Church history and disagrees with other parts.

We should note that much of Church history associates the Christian Faith with authoritarianism. This is true starting with the time of the Apostles. However, that authoritarianism was not applied outside the borders of the Church until around the time of Constantine who credited the Christian God with a military victory of his. Then on an on-and-off basis, Church authority was significantly exercised on society. Popes and many Protestant leaders practiced varying degrees of rule over the people directly and over civil authorities. The Church has sometimes used its power over civil authorities to direct them to carry out punishments for violations of Church laws and to protect the Church's prestige and control over people.

So since the Church owns a mixed record on being authoritarian, Buchanan can cite precedence for his reaction to Obama.

But when we look at the Scriptures, the waters become muddier for both Buchanan and ourselves. We should note here that the New Testament warns us against judging others. The warning is not because one person or group sins more than we do, but because the presence of any sin qualifies us for certain doom. This point is made in Jesus' parable of the two men praying (Luke 18:9-14) and in Paul's letter to the Romans such as Romans 2:1-6 and Romans 6:23. The issue for us in the New Testament isn't about how we compare with others, it is about how we compare with what God expects (see Romans 3:9, Romans 3:27-28, and Ephesians 2:8-9). Yes, the New Testament talks about a changed life, but that change does not imply that we can ever be either without the need of our Savior or that we have the qualifications to rule over others. 

And so this is where the waters become muddier for all of us. For Church History, whether we are talking about the Roman Church, the Protestant Churches, or even the Orthodox Church, has provided far too many examples of the Church assuming the right to rule over others. Implied in those examples are claims to superiority. But the Scriptures firmly fix the focus of our faith and qualifications in Jesus, not ourselves. And that, as the parable of the two men praying in Luke illustrates, we can never afford to let the new people we become through faith move us to act like the pharisee who went home condemned because he so favorably compared himself with the worst of sinners who, btw, went home justified.

Thus, as some of us are tempted to imitate Buchanan as he piled judgment after judgment on someone else by piling on him, we need to recognize that our faith some of the same roots part of Buchanan's schtick has. Those roots are Church history roots. And thus, in order to claim that Buchanan's reaction to Obama does not represent the Christian faith, as true as that might be, we must exercise great gentleness and the right nuance. That is because in pronouncing Buchan as wrong and guilty, we will be doing the same for many in Church history, which could quite possibly include some of our own heros. And we might even have to add ourselves to the list of the condemned. In addition, though disagreeing with Buchanan here is necessary, we must do so as equals for the same reasons why we must be gentle and subtle.

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Friday, February 13, 2015

What Was Obama's Sin At The National Prayer Breakfast?

A few days ago, Obama made some controversial remarks at the breakfast honoring the National Day of Prayer (click here for full speech, Obama should need no biography). How did Obama sin in what he said? That depends on whom you ask. For his comments have certainly upset a group of Conservative Christians who form an alliance between Evangelicals and Conservative Catholics. This blog will offer its own criticisms after discussing the criticisms of this group. Examples of Conservative Christians criticizing the President's remarks can be found here: Ben Carson's remarks, Ravi Zacharias' remarks, and Thomas Madden's remarks.

 What got Obama in trouble with the group mentioned above is that in addition to warning us not to use our religious faith as an excuse or camouflage for hatred and violence, we should not use the violence practiced by groups like ISIL to look down our noses at all Muslims. Why? It is because we should remember the violence our spiritual ancestors practiced in the name of Christ in such examples ventures as the Crusades, the Inquisition, and what was practiced in Jim Crow. Such, especially the implicit criticism of the Crusades and the Inquisition drew much criticism from the Christian group cited above. The criticisms of Obama and his comments centered on two themes: the questionable political wisdom of his statements and an alleged inaccurate assessment of the Crusades and the Inquisition.

 Criticizing Obama's political wisdom for making his statements is simply saying that his sin at the prayer breakfast was violating the greatest commandment for all Presidential speeches including the State Of The Union Address. That commandment says this: We must be praised. Only the we in this case was not the government, the nation, nor his fellow citizens. The we here are our spiritual ancestors: the Church. And when talking about the Crusades and the Inquisition, the reference to the Church is even more specific: it is the Roman Church and its Pope. And if we understand that many of those who are upset belong to above cited alliance, the reaction becomes understandable. Their response to what could be discrediting to an important institution of theirs shows a tribalism and an authoritarian mindset. Their anger at Obama's criticisms of that period of Christian history reveals the loyalty they have to the Church. Their anger also shows their authoritarian side in that Obama's criticisms could easily appear to threaten acceptance of Church authority now because of they sense a discrediting of the Church back then.

 We should also note one other point here. When one responds with anger because either that person or their authority figure has been rejected, it COULD  indicate problems with narcissism. We must be careful not to jump to conclusions here. There are nine indicators for Narcissism of which at least five must be present for the diagnosis to be made (click here and there). This is not to say that the individuals themselves who are angry must be narcissists. We should note, however, that there is such a thing as a group or collective narcissism where the group exists in the minds of its members and operates as if it has narcissism. And, collective narcissism can be related to the degree to which a group is idealized by its members (click here).

 Here, we might want to compare the defensiveness that these Christians are exhibiting with Obama's reactions to the past. While the group of Christians cited above were defensive and at least partially denied the significance of the past violence committed by fellow Christians, Obama was saddened and reflective. Obama used some of Christianity's past as a reason to exercise restraint in criticizing followers of another religion. At this point, it might be educational to reference Jesus' parable of the two men praying (click here) and ask, whose actions resembled the actions of the person who, in the parable, went home justified? At the same time, who more resembled the Pharisee from the parable?

 The ironic problem here is that those who are self-proclaimed champions of God's Word, at least in comparison with the President, seem to be more like the self-righteous pharisee by their reaction to the President's criticisms of the Church from the past. Of course,  we should have seen that coming realizing that the Pharisee, as Frederick Dale Bruner pointed out in his book A Theology Of The Holy Spirit (click here), were 'religious professionals.'

 So, especially when we look at history, Obama should be counted as being off the hook for his statements about some of the dark moments of Christianity's past. But does that mean that Obama made no major errors during his talk?

 At this point, we need to listen to when he talks about how faith starts with doubt and that no religion should think that they have a monopoly on God's truth. Here, some nuance is required.

 On the one hand, no faith has a monopoly on doing God inspired good works. All of Romans 2 (click here) testifies to this assertion in order to show those who believe in God that they have no right to judge those who don't believe. They have no right because they commit the same sins as the unbeliever (see verse 1ff).

 But at the same time, we also must do justice to what Jesus says when he claims to be the only way to the Father (click here). At this point, God's Word is clear concerning every faith. It is Jesus alone who leads us to the Father. It is Jesus who must qualify anyone to be acceptable to God. 

 Therefore, the nuance we need regarding the uniqueness of the Christian faith is this: it is Jesus who makes the Christian Faith what it is compared to the other faiths. It is Jesus who makes the Christian faith unique. It is Jesus who makes the Christian faith exclusive. It is Jesus, not His followers that gives the Christian Faith a monopoly on finding the way to God. This is something Obama failed to point out. 

 Why did Obama fail? Perhaps it was the setting. Or perhaps he was compromising his faith. Or perhaps he doesn't adequately understand the Christian Faith. Regardless of why, Obama failed to describe why the Christian Faith is above all other faiths. It isn't because of us followers. Us followers can easily make Christianity appear to be no different than any other religion.  But Jesus makes Christianity the way to God.

 That final point brings us back to the overly defensive reaction some Conservative Christians have shown to the President's remarks about our past. And the question that must be asked of these Christians is this: If Jesus is the one that makes the Christian Faith special, why should people finding faults with the Church make us feel so threatened?
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