Recovering Baptist

It makes a bit more sense now

Monday, May 5th, 2008

I’m coming to grips with the fact that I no longer identify myself as a conservative. While I agree with many conservative principles, the truth is that the gap between so-called conservatives (and worse, their evil cousins the neo-conservatives) and me is widening on a regular basis.

The topic of abortion came up this weekend while I was on a camping trip with a bunch of men. While I am pro-life, I don’t understand the obsession that some on the right have with this topic. One of the men gave an explanation that sheds some light on the subject. In short, he believes that God is going to judge “us” for the fact that “we” allowed this horrible sin to be legal. I’m hesitant to take on this man’s theology since he is an elder in our denomination, but I’m thinking it’s worthwhile.

There’s no doubt that God judges people. The Old Testament is full of genocide at God’s direction because some people group has harmed the Hebrews in some way. And the Hebrews found themselves a part of one empire or another due to them turning away from God. But I can’t find any clear indication of God judging the empire because His people didn’t stop the sin of other people groups within that empire. In fact, I can only think of two documented cases of God’s judgment against a people group for their internal sins (that is, for something other than poor treatment of the Jews) - the flood and Sodom and Gomorrah. In both of those cases, God preserved His people; he didn’t judge them because of everyone else’s sins.

So it seems to me that the problem is that the religious right has decided to claim responsibility for the entire nation. This feeling of responsibility feeds the paternalistic impulse of religious conservatives to support laws which restrict freedom for activities which some people can enjoy without problems but would tempt others beyond their capabilities to enjoy in moderation. And this is the fundamental difference between the religious right and the religious libertarians - we believe that God will judge the Church for its sins of commission and sins of omission, but He will not hold us responsible for failing to control the impulses of those outside the church.

Now, all of this being said, do I wish abortion were illegal? Yes. I’ve told my story before of how as an embryo I came a bit too close to the doctor’s knife. And as a libertarian I don’t see how we can say someone has basic human rights which must be respected only to ignore the most basic one. However, when it comes to choosing the person who sits in the Oval Office, I think the obsession over who a President might choose to fill a potential vacant seat on a court which might face a case on whether a woman has a right make a choice to murder her baby makes sense. Especially not when the same person will directly make a choice to send people to the front lines where certainly some of them will die and others (as a sad but unavoidable fact of war) will kill conscious human beings. If God is going to judge “us,” then we need to consider all of our actions.

Posted in Church, Politics, Friends, Religion, Self Reflection | No Comments »

Colliding worlds

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

I have a facebook page. I don’t know why. It’s the kind of timesuck that doesn’t appeal to me - virtual hugs, attacking zombies, or pretending to race. I just don’t get it. It would be a lot more fun to get together and play scrabble face to face over a real beer rather than spread the game out over days with a virtual opponent over a virtual beer…

I ran into someone at church last night, and I told her I was mad at her. Since we really don’t hang out that much, she was taken aback. But once I understood that my old church friends were suddenly able to find me, including an ex-girlfriend, she understood.

The ex-girlfriend and I left on good terms, and we’ve run into each other in the past without any awkwardness. But when I saw her profile I laughed. Her religious views are classified as “Born Again Christian” and her political views as “Very conservative.” Those phrases used to describe me.

Any orthodox Christian will tell you that Christ talks about being born again. But when someone describes themselves explicitly as a “Born Again Christian,” well, you know a lot about them from the start. It just seems that most of those people claim to cling to God’s grace while rarely exhibiting it themselves. My acquaintance and I laughed that our old friends from the megachurch where I once worked or the church where I grew up would probably say that we now attend one of those “liberal” churches since our pastor is handing out virtual beers and swearing online.

Liberals don’t go to heaven. At least, that’s what I used to think. I’d never say as much out loud, but honestly, the way “they” were demonized in my religious circles, it was a logical conclusion. I was an observer to an online conversation where someone stated that if conservatism were a country then anyone who claimed to be conservative but voted for Obama should be hung for treason. I guess I’m not a conservative.

My acquaintance and I agreed that we’re torn in how to handle our facebook friends from our old lives. On the one hand we really want to do something outrageous to throw our newfound freedom in their faces. On the other hand, we’re a little afraid. It turns out that I don’t want to be rejected by people who belong to the form of Christianity that I rejected. The human mind is a very strange thing indeed.

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So much for justice

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Let’s face it, every religion has at least one aspect that outsiders don’t like. Protestants don’t want a Pope (although some of them treat certain pastors as one). Jews don’t accept the whole Messiah aspect of Jesus. And I, for one, like pork too much to be either Muslim or Jewish. And this is why our country has the First Amendment. To some extent in our country, freedom of religion rises a bit above the law. There are legitimate times for the government to step in, but if the government is going to interfere with a religious institution, it had better do so on pretty solid grounds.

I was pretty suspicious of the “16 year old girl” who called in a tip to the authorities from the start. It’s as if the government was looking for an excuse to invade the FDLS compound in west Texas, because once they got an anonymous call they went in full force and took everyone out rather than find the one girl and her accused assailant. Now it has been revealed that the girl who made the call lives in Colorado and had nothing to do with the compound at all.

The stories from people who have left the FDLS are awful. I met one of these women years ago; I only caught glimpses of her story, and it wasn’t pretty. Take a look at the pictures of the women; the 32 year old ladies look closer to fifty. I see nothing good about the FDLS “church.” But let’s face it, children were taken away from their parents and put in state custody on false pretenses. The child custody hearings are impossibly complex and unworkable. And to what end? What will be accomplished when all is said and done? If the wives actually loved their husbands and retained their faith, as weird and seemingly wrong as it is, would the state actually take the children from them? Would the state then lay claim to all new children from those so-called marriages?

I would like to think that only the Clinton administration could screw up the justice department this bad, but alas. It appears that Washington has enough incompetence to go around…

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A big loss

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

Several times when I was home from college for Christmas or perhaps spring break I got a call that went something like this:

Hi. Can I speak with RB?
Speaking.
May I speak with you about your investments?
No.
OK.
Goodbye.

Finally one year I told him that I had no money to invest because I was a poor college student. He laughed and then said, “So I guess you don’t have a six figure salary or $50,000 in assets then, do you?” I never heard from him again. After a bit of thinking I realized that he must have received my name from some list, and there was only one way for him to make such a conclusion - I subscribed to National Review, and I had since my junior year of high school. Yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I was a strange kid. What kind of high schooler would read a magazine whose average reader earned over $100,000 in the early 1990’s?

I haven’t read NR for many years now, but I still have a fond respect for that publication and especially for its founder. William F. Buckley died this morning. The conservative and libertarian movements owe him a moment of silence; we would have no political voice if it were not for him. Our country could use more people like him - a man who could combine keen political insight with wit and an astounding vocabulary. May he enjoy his reunion with his wife and celebrate meeting his Creator.

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Bringing in the sheep

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Listening to Mike Huckabee tonight took me back over a decade to the last time I attended a Baptist church. I was just waiting for him to break from the political babble for an alter call. No surprise he trounced Romney and edged out McCain here in the Bible Belt, but does he really think he has a chance anywhere else in this country? I’m not sure that even a dead boy in McCain’s bedroom would end his march to November right now…

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My vote

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

This post is inspired by David’s recent post.

I recently saw a video by Donald Miller, the guy who wrote Blue Like Jazz. He’s a good writer and an even better speaker, and he was talking about the damage the Enlightenment has done to the world. So-called Enlightened people like to think that everything falls into logical categories and that there is little purpose for emotion or, for that matter, the arts. And yet, pure logic simply fails to describe some very basic and important aspects of life. Consider love, for example. I could try wooing my wife by saying something like “Honey, I love you. And see, here’s a list of reasons why. You have blond hair, you’re shorter than me but not too short, and you’re intelligent. Those are the things I wanted in a wife, so I love you.” Objective, logical things fail to describe or explain why two people love each other. And pure logic sometimes fails to explain why we choose to follow or not follow.

I’ve taken several online surveys which propose to tell me who I should vote for. And in every case I am most closely aligned with Ron Paul. After that come a smattering of Republicans, usually Fred Thompson followed by Romney, Huckabee, and McCain in a virtual tie. All of the serious Democratic candidates fall to the very bottom. And yet, this time, I very well may vote for a Democrat.

I’ve never made a difference in a presidential primary. Let’s face it; I’m pretty much a Libertarian, so I’m always voting for the fringe Republicans. I would vote my principles in hopes that a few votes for someone that I felt represented my views might help shift the party ever so slightly to the right. The problem is that instead the GOP has generally moved away from my views, not towards them. And the same has happened in the general election where I voted for Ron Paul last time around because not only am I a Libertarian, but my wife reminded me that I was against the war when it first started - I said that it struck me as a convenient political ploy which could be useful in 2004 (I wish I was blogging back then so I had proof of my prophetic nature). I voted for Ron Paul last time around, and there’s a strong part of me that wants to vote for him again, but what’s the use?

I have, however, made a difference in two Congressional elections when we defeated Cynthia McKinney. In both cases there were a lot of people who voted in the Democratic primary not because we were Democrats, but because we wanted to vote against Cynthia. And we did. And she lost. And it was a lot of fun. And what was also fun was getting behind a candidate in Hank Johnson who neither represented my political nor religious views. It was good to get behind a generally good man who we could be proud to call our representative, despite the fact that we differed on many issues.

And so, I just may vote for Barack Obama. According to one survey we only agreed on two issues. But policy surveys don’t tell the whole story. At some point we have to look beyond policies and ask whether we could follow a person should he or she become the President. How would we feel if his or her face were the one that people around the world mentally saw when they thought of our country? Would we be able to stomach listening to the annual State of the Union speech when this person gives it? When I look at the so-called viable candidates, Obama fits that bill. McCain and Romney don’t for me, and I believe that Hillary is the incarnation of evil itself. So hopefully voting for Obama will be as much fun as voting for Hank Johnson was.

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Leave Creflo alone

Friday, January 18th, 2008

There are few “Christians” that I distance myself from more than the likes of Creflo Dollar and Benny Hinn. About the only thing I have in common with them is that we claim the Bible as God’s word. I’m not even sure that my Jesus looks anything like theirs. They are the kinds of people that my denomination’s favorite patriarch might have had burned at the stake.

Fortunately for these charlatans, ours is a country of religious freedom. Even our ridiculous yet sanctimonious drug laws are on occasion put aside in honor of the First Amendment. Other than outright fraud or abuse, the government should avoid meddling in the affairs of faith. I’m a fan of the Fair Tax anyway, but this case puts more fuel on the fire. The government has been using the tax system to go after politically active churches, and the targets are rarely of the party in power. Getting rid of the tax system would mean that the government wouldn’t have a case to keep its eye on the non-profits and would then get out of the religious business. (And those of us who aren’t into prosperity gospel should keep in mind that if the government has power to go after them, then it has the power to go after any of our houses of worship, too.)

On the other hand, perhaps Creflo and the rest should just give up their non-profit status. After all, Jesus did give a pretty short (which these days with blowhard preachers means uninspiring) sermon on paying taxes. Oh wait, maybe that’s just my Jesus…

Posted in Politics, Religion | 1 Comment »

Drought

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

OK, so everyone’s talking about it. I may as well join the crowd. I’ve grown up watching the weather; whenever it rains here my mom says, “I hope we’re getting rain at the farm.” Even my four year old says that now when it rains here. I remember my family weighing the question of whether to buy hay or sell our cows because of the drought in the mid ’80’s. You have to really be from Georgia (and not Atlanta) to remember our debt to the Oklahoma farmers who sold hay to us one summer.

Many months ago an older friend of mine from Moultrie told me that we were in the middle of the first spring time drought in his lifetime. That caught my attention. If he’d never seen a spring drought, then the summer should be horrible. I figured that the state would impose watering bans by June, but it didn’t. Then we got a little rain and I figured that things must not be as bad as I’d first feared. Of course, now we all know it was worse than we imagined.

I’ve read some arguments that Atlanta has grown too large too fast and that it can’t support a large population. But then I think of other large, growing cities such as Las Vegas that have no water and yet somehow manage to continue growing. And of course, plenty of people and politicians are blaming the much maligned Army Corps of Engineers. They’re bound by law, and it is not their responsibility to change that law.

As best as I can tell, there is plenty of blame to go around our local government. For starters, there should have been a partial watering ban in May when we knew the rest of the state was in trouble. And it’s absolutely wrong that contractors paid by state money were watering in new sod on Tuesday. The State should have immediately shut down all excess watering under its control.

What I found interesting in last night’s news, though, is one reason why the Corps has to keep the water levels in the river so high. It’s not just that the mussels need fresh water, but the Corps also has to protect the quality of the water in the river. A ridiculous amount of raw sewage is dumped into the Chattahoochee River every day, and the corps has to ensure enough fresh water is flowing to offset that pollution. I’m generally a very laissez faire person (I usually vote Libertarian), but if what I heard last night is true, then the time has come for industries to be shut down until they can clean up their act. And if that sewage is coming from the city of Atlanta, then my home city (yes, the most important city in the state) should have its water cut off until the sewers are fixed. It is irresponsible for a city to have a double-impact on the resources upon which the rest of the region rely.

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Recovering Baptist

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

It makes a bit more sense now

Colliding worlds

So much for justice

A big loss

Bringing in the sheep

My vote

Leave Creflo alone

Drought

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