Guns and Tea

Given all the "Second Amendment remedy" rhetoric coming out of the tea party and its allies, I thought it might be a good time to discover the intent behind that most contentious of rights . Off to Wikipedia!

So the meaning and role of the terms "well regulated militia" and "keep and bear arms" are not as straight forward as some would have it but the surprising (and distressing) thing to me was that the original purpose of the amendment actually was to repel invaders, suppress insurrection and resist tyranny. The tea partiers were right. Who knew.

Before we all fish out the cups and saucers, there is more to this story. Along with the desire to resist the feds with our muskets and flintlocks was an adamant demand that the federal government not have a standing army. So, we have a little problem. No one in the tea party is demanding that we dissolve the 1st Division. In fact, these folks are as pro-military as you are likely to find. My first question is this: if the founding fathers' concept of no standing army has been cast aside, why do some insist that we hew to the original intent of the language that officially made it into the Bill of Rights?

Now that we have that wee inconsistency out of the way, I have issue with the amendment itself. Measures that made sense to a bunch of men who had just come through a successful revolution are not necessarily wisdom for us today. Calling up the National Guard in times of a crisis is a practical component to national defense. But let's consider the other two legs underpinning the Second Amendment tripod: insurrection and tyranny. The conundrum they present are two sides of the same coin. Would the Tea Party be the insurrection or would they be resisting tyranny? Who is the insurgent? Who is the tyrant? Every rebel claims God for his side. The farmers in the Whiskey Rebellion thought their cause was just and yet President Washington was ready to use troops to enforce the excise tax. Was he a tyrant? Are taxes a source of tyranny when each person has a voice in forming the government that levies the tax?

It was all very well for James Madison to claim the high ground after the fact but if the good people of the Tea Party actually took up arms against the foreigner usurper in the White House what would be the result? The Civil War? The Little Rock Crisis? The Watts Riot? What do Second Amendment remedies actually look like once the rhetoric is put aside. "Collatoral damage" (dead people) in Denver. Patriots dying for the glorious cause in Wichita. Death. Blood. Innocent lives. It is not a movie or video game. This why a believe that the Second Amendment has no place in a modern nation. We are not living on Daniel Boone's frontier. We have a national army and a well-established tradition of non-violent checks and balances. Glorification of the Second Amendment suggests a country in which every aggrieved party takes up arms and chaos rules. Baghdad? Kandahar? These are places where political conflict is reserved by force.

As Goes the Fourth Estate

Anyone who doubts the wisdom of the founding fathers in treating of the news media as a Fourth Estate, should read this report and despair.
The opening line:

Ninety percent of physicians surveyed said doctors overtest and overtreat to protect themselves from malpractice lawsuits.

Notice what it DOESN'T say: that 90% of doctors actually overtest for fear of lawsuits. This is the same kind of survey that discovered that the majority of people believe American schools are failing but a majority believed that their schools were fine. Its all those other doctors doing too many tests. Someone actually thought that it would contribute to our health-care policy debate to do this survey. To report this survey as a major headline on MSNBC. This is crap! This why our democracy is moribund. Can you imagine how many people will walk away from this headline with the "fact" that 90% of doctor really overtreat for fear of malpractice. The article waits until THE VERY LAST PARAGRAPH to point out that this survey does not say that! Couldn't that have appeared at the top where context would have been useful?

It gets better... the co-author of the survey report "noted that defensive medicine is estimated to cost the U.S. health care system billions of dollars each year" but not before relaying that she tends to order more tests, "particularly if it's a high-risk patient." Well, no shit! Of course you are more careful with high-risk patients. They are high-risk. You know, more likely to benefit from extra tests.

So this the kind of non-information that America is being subjected to as we navigate our way through rocky times. I suppose the media is now in the storytelling business. The news must fit the established narrative or the "audience" will be lost. Then again, I was never a fan of LOST.

The Blue Parakeet: Chap 8

All right, I goofed. Chapter 7 is not the so-called Boring Chapter. That would be chapter 8 which is a little boring. I am not at all certain this material deserved a whole chapter. It basically re-iterates that the words in the Bible are meaningless unless lived. Got it!

One thing chapter 8 does do is introduce another McKnightian tortured metaphor. This one pictures the Gospel as a water slide with one wall being the Bible, another wall being Tradition (trusted mentors?) and the water being... wait for it... the Holy Spirit. If you knock down one of those walls you fall off the water slide! Now, first off, a water slide doesn't really have "walls". It is typically molded as an open pipe. Next, the only experience most of has with people falling off water slides is reading about tragic accidents in the newspaper. This aspect distracted me from what I assume is McKnight's point: keeping a balance of forces in following the Gospel NOT bringing up images of bloody teenagers being loaded into ambulances. I guess the water/Holy Spirit carries you forward in this analogy. What happens if you pee in the pool at the bottom? :0

Two more observations: 1) Scot McKnight is a Paul guy, not a Jesus guy. I am leery of Paul guys. 2) McKnight seems to accept the tradition authorship of every book in the Bible. Paul wrote Colossians and 1 Timothy. Jesus' brother wrote James. Moses wrote Leviticus. Never so much as an "alleged to have written" or "traditionally attributed to." I treat people like this as having completely shut down there critical faculties until shown otherwise (I'm not a complete curmudgeon - yet)

The next chapter starts to examine in detail how we pick and choose which parts of the Bible we are going to obey. This bit was the reason I picked the book up in the first place. Upward and onward!

The Blue Parakeet: Chap 6->Chap 7

Part of the problem between Scot McKnight and me is that he is a gung-ho Christian and I am, shall we say, not. So when I hear the reflections of a man thousands of years old in the struggles of Job, Dr MvKnight hears God. When I hear Paul in of 1 Corinthians furiously trying to work out how early Christians should live, McKnight hears God.

Chapter six of The Blue Parakeet examines the difference between the Bible and God. This is a welcome message that most Christians need to hear. God is revealed through the Bible but the words on the page are not objects of worship. This is good ol' Bibliolatry. Now, if God is so beyond human kenning, can we learn anything of any value from the shadow of himself that He has left between the lines? But that is a discussion for another day.

Chapter seven is getting to the meat of the topic: why do people claim to believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God and yet do not do what it says to do? McKnight makes a useful distinction - one that is starting to come forward in public debate - that having the right believes about God is not the same thing as following Jesus, doing God's work, loving God's commandments. The author's wife called this chapter the "Boring Chapter." I would say that it is the pivotal chapter and I am glad he put it in.

There is a chapter coming up called something like "Living Jesus-ly" that I am curious to read. Perhaps next time.

The Blue Parakeet: Chap 3->Chap 5

In Chapter 3 of The Blue Parakeet , Scot McKnight lists out different ways that people read the Bible and, guess what? His way is the best! :) I suppose his slices are as good as anyone's. I liked his take on the distortion of a Daily Blessings Calendar and musings on a proposed "Wrath of God Calendar of Warnings".

Things pick up steam in Chapter 4. Here McKnight starts digging holes. First off I have to say that his concept of "wiki-story" seems really awkward to me. The Wikipedia to which he compares the books of the Bible is a collaboration of authors creating a unity. McKnight's wiki-stories are re-tellings of the same story (if I understand him). It would as if each Wikipedia contributor wrote a whole new article each time. Wiki authors may tussle over a subject but ultimately must collaborate. Wiki-story authors can ignore each other, take potshots or compete. The analogy doesn't bring anything to his point.

Chapter 5 attempts to map out the single story of the entire collection of books that make up the Christian Bible. Earlier in The Blue Parakeet, I appreciated the author's admonition that we must read each book as its own story. Unfortunately, the way we must read each story is circumscribed by a framework that is imposed from outside. When McKnight trumpeted reading the Bible along with Tradition, I got suspicious. My suspicions were justified. It just so happens the meaning of the Bible is... conservative evangelical theology! Surprised? We learn in this chapter (pg 77) that Jesus died to pay for our sins. I was hoping for insight and I got Substitutionary Atonement. What's more, McKnight informs us that the arch of the Bible is all about Oneness. We are treated to lines like this:

After splitting Adam into Ish [man] and Ishah [woman], God brings them back together in "One Flesh." [pg 70]

I suppose all the polygamy in the Old Testament is just a great big mistake that will be rectified in time for Mark 10:2 Oneness is slathered so thickly on the Bible that one wants to go read it cover-to-cover just to reassure oneself that the real Bible is still under there. I just feel that there is so much going on in each book of the Bible, so much behind each verse that boiling it down to such a pithy theme does violence to the many human lives presenting themselves to us across the millennia. I learned the word "noumena" from Carl Sagan, the deep wonder at a thing that is transcendant from everyday life. When I read Paul's letters or the Book of Job, I sense the gulf of time and share a oneness with those authors. When Scot McKnight wraps a thousand pages up with a nice, evangelical bow, I feel a loss.

I imagine Dr McKnight would say that he feels a sense of wonder when he reads each of his wiki-stories. Perhaps he even gets some of the flavor of wonder that I do. I fear, however, that his tether to Tradition keeps him close enough to Jesus that he is unable to explore the deeper shadows hinted at in each writing, the shadows where one encounters human nature unvarnished by theme or theology. Pity, really.

My overall take thus far would be:

• If we read the Bible along with Tradition and all we get out is a traditional view of the Bible, why am I reading this book instead of attended the Episcopal Church?
• If we are supposed to apply "that was then and this is now" liberally in order to justify ignoring the commandments that no longer fit our way of life, how are we better off than the people who get there Bible verses from calendars? Those who actually read I Kings end up in the same place.

My Sunday School class was reading 1 Corinthians' verses on divorce and marriage. We really struggled with how to deal with these and similar teachings and I hoped that this book would help put things in perspective. It doesn't sem to be moving in that direction. Let's see if it can redeem itself...

The Blue Parakeet: - Chap 2

In chapter two, McKnight lays out two ways of reading the Bible in a historical context, retrieving-it-all and retrieving-the-essence, with a pretty blatant disapproval of both. Then, on page 32 of my copy, he starts to let on that he is about to propose a middle way. He has set us up for a false-compromise where his solution will seem more appealing along side his (strawman?) extremes. My alarm bells are not yet ringing but they ARE humming a bit...

The Blue Parakeet: Chap 1

I'm not the kind to blog a book one chapter at a time. I'm more the type to drop sarcastic comments along the way... We'll just have to wait and see how this comes out. :)

I enjoyed the first chapter of The Blue Parakeet. I think Scot McKnight has setup his treatise nicely by taking on some low hanging fruit - Sabbath keeping, tithing, foot washing - with the promise of meatier discussions to come. In sharing his progression through his questions as a young man, the author displays a good deal of good humor and humility. Let's hope that it sticks!

Michael Spencer, 1956-2010

Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk has left us and will be missed. Rest in peace.

So Much More Tragic

"Many were at a loss for words over the discovery of a body believed to be that of 17-year-old Chelsea King, five days after the popular, straight-A student from San Diego County disappeared and two days after a registered sex offender was booked on suspicion of rape and murder."

Is her death more tragic because she was popular and a straight-A student?

Question of the Day

What if everything we think we know about psychology turns out only to apply to undergraduate students?