The Resurrection and the Life

I recently finished up re-reading the book The Resurrection: Myth or Reality? by Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong that totally consumed my “free” time over the last couple of weeks. Being that it’s Lent, I wanted to, as I got my ashes on Ash Wednesday, “turn away from sin and be faithful to the gospel.” Reading religious books (beyond The Good Book of course) is one way I chose to stop and reflect on my faith and what better book than about The Resurrection of Jesus Christ? Spong has always spoke directly to me and help me put words to a faith I find difficult to describe.

I realized that I never really confronted exactly what I positively believe about the resurrection and afterlife. I tend to dismiss literal interpretations of sacred history recounted in The Bible, but that’s a negative affirmation: what I don’t believe. As a Christian, I believe that Jesus is in fact risen and alive though not as I am. He’s alive in a way I’ve struggled to put in words beyond a vague spiritual description, but Spong does better.

It was as if scales fell from his eyes and Simon saw a realm that is around us at every moment, a realm of life and love, a realm of God from within which Jesus appeared to Simon.

As I expected, Spong confirmed that resurrection is not the sort of thing you film and playback on a DVD much less narrate.

Was it real? Yes, I am convinced it was real. Was it objective? No, I do not think it was objective. Can it be real if it is not objective? Yes, I think it can, for “objective” is a category that measures events inside time and space. Jesus appeared to Simon from the realm of God, and that realm is not within history, it is not bounded by time or space.

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Morass Authority

The crisis of episcopal governance in Philadelphia | National Catholic Reporter

If they can’t get the clergy sex abuse mess right, after all their protestations that they had taken steps to deal with the problem, and all their claims that the Catholic Church was now ahead of the curve on the issue, that our policies were such that the Catholic Church was the safest place for a child to be, nothing else matters.

The New Evangelization? Forget about it. Pro-life activities? Not a chance. Advocacy for the poor? It rings hollow. If the leaders of the Church cannot be trusted to keep their most solemn pledge to protect children, they cannot be trusted at all. If they fail to see this, their moral sensibility is not merely skewed, it is dead. It is not only that they cannot be trusted, it is that they should not be trusted.

They have succeeded in destroying the authority they were so obsessed in protecting.

The Racism of Frame

Wow.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Racism of Frame:

On Friday I joked on twitter, the other day, that biggest problem with attempting to write smart is that you end up attracting people who really are smart. And sometimes they write in to tell you you’re wrong. And sometimes, In such cases, your forced to acknowledge their point.

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Political Illusions

Political Illusions:

Tyler Cowen writes a column that is both good and bad. It is good for what it says: it debunks fiscal illusions. It is bad for what it does not say, and for what it does not say it tends to deepen our political illusions. You see, for some reason Tyler Cowen does not mention the obvious solution at the ballot box to the very real fiscal illusion problems he writes about. If we simply stopped electing Republicans–if we simply elected presidents who would choose policies designed by the technocrats of the Clinton and Obama administrations and elected senators and representatives who voted for them–we would be absolutely fine.

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When You’re Last Year’s News

You’re the Boss: A System That Encourages Small Businesses Not to Hire Older Workers:

“I have good reason to suspect that my costs and the costs of all of my employees are going to go up if I hire an older worker…

Our current system hides these costs, and I’m sure that this is a large part of the difficulty that older workers have in getting hired. Some of you will probably object that my system would result in lower wages for older workers. In some cases it might, but that beats no wages at all. As I said in my last post, it may be illegal to discriminate on the basis of age, but there’s always a way to rationalize hiring any given worker over any other one. If we can put a price on the insurance costs, then the skills and experience that older workers bring to the table can be properly accounted for.

Postscript: Yes, I know that a single payer system would solve this problem. But it ain’t gonna happen, so I’m not waiting for it.”

(Via Business and Financial News – The New York Times.)

Markets don’t make moral decisions.  They make economic ones.

Proud to Be Cynical

Proud to Be Cynical:

Mike Huckabee, in 2011, on Natalie Portman having a child with a man she’s engaged to, before they’ve actually married:

‘One of the most troubling things is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet that boasts of, hey look, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having children and they’re doing just fine.’

‘There aren’t really a lot of single moms out there that are making millions of dollars each year by being in a movie’

‘I think it gives a distorted image that not everybody hires nannies and caretakers and nurses. Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and would not get healthcare.’

Mike Huckabee, in 2008, on Bristol Palin having a child with a man she was engaged to, before they’d actually married:

‘It ought to be a reminder that here is a family that loves one another. They stuck with each other though the tough times and that’s what families do.’ … Huckabee said the surprise pregnancy announcement should not affect vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s support in the conservative and religious right communities. … ‘I’m grateful for the way she’s being supported by her family.’

There is a lot wrong here which I’m sure you guys can tease out. That last ‘most single moms’ sentence is heinous.

But again facts don’t really matter here. This is a strict ideology built on an alternate reality. You can’t reason with people who not only believe their president is Kenyan, but need to believe he’s Kenyan. The belief comes first. The casus belli of white populism is resentment of those not like us. Facts are mere materiel meant to be invented, discarded, smelted and recast in service of the cause.

It’s very hard to love these people.

Loud and Wrong

Proud Of Being Ignorant:

“What runs through Adam’s point, and Andrew’s point is one of the common threads of white populism–a rejoicing in not knowing things. It does not much matter to Huckabee that Obama wrote an entire book investigating the lack of a relationship between him and his father. It does not matter that Obama’s father and Kenyatta were ultimately of different factions. And most damning of all, it does not matter that every year on July 4th the country which Huckabee claims to love effectively throws national anti-colonial bash celebrating its liberation from the British.

The easy claim to make here is that the difference between American anti-colonialist and British anti-colonialist is skin color. Were it so simple. More likely, I think, Huckabee just doesn’t much care. A significant portion of the conservative base fundamentally believes Obama, not simply to be wrong, but to be an outsider to the American tradition.”

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)

Trains and Freedom

Trains and Freedom:

“Anyway, my experience is that of the three modes of mechanized transport I use, trains are by far the most liberating. Planes are awful: waiting to clear security, then having to sit with your electronics turned off during takeoff and landing, no place to go if you want to get up in any case. Cars — well, even aside from traffic jams (tell me how much freedom you experience waiting for an hour in line at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel), the thing about cars is that you have to drive them, which kind of limits other stuff…

So if trains represent soulless collectivism, count me in.”

(Via Paul Krugman.)

Count me in too, Professor.  Watching trains pass you by as you’re stuck in a traffic jam doesn’t strike me as freedom.

Pain without Purpose

Pain without Purpose:

“And here we reach the limits of my mental horizons as a neoliberal, as a technocrat, and as a mainstream neoclassical economist. Right now, the global economy is suffering a grand mal seizure of slack demand and high unemployment. We know the cures. Yet we seem determined to inflict further suffering on the patient.”

(Via Grasping Reality with Both Hands.)

Political ideology trumps technocratic know-how.  In other words, non-professionals think they know more than the pros.  And we know where that leads.

Family budgets aren’t economies.  The government is not our parent nor does it fund the workings of the economy.  Yet we keep repeating that damn fool “tighten our belts” meme.  The price of ignorance, sophomoric ignorance at that is high.

I Thought Tax Cuts were Supposed to Create Jobs

GOP spending plan would cost 700,000 jobs, new report says:

“A Republican plan to sharply cut federal spending this year would destroy 700,000 jobs through 2012, according to an independent economic analysis set for release Monday…

[This] report comes on the heels of a similar analysis last week by the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which predicted that the Republican spending cuts would cause even greater damage to the economy, slowing growth by as much as 2 percentage points in the second and third quarters of this year.”

(Via Grasping Reality with a Sharp Beak.)

Predictably, the GOP goes after the messenger when it can’t rebut the message.  It’s a surefire way to determine who’s lying or incompetent and who’s not, who’s got a grip on reality and who’s in denial.  And sure enough as I kept reading:

Republican leaders frequently claim that cutting government spending will create jobs by removing the fear of higher taxes from the minds of the nation’s business owners and entrepreneurs…

So far, the Republicans have been unable to marshal an independent analysis that reflects that view. [emphasis mine]

In other words, they are pulling this economic “theory” clean out of their ideological butts.