Vox Popoli

The results are in:

Hamas’ top official told Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday the Islamic militant group is ready for a partnership after defeating the ruling Fatah Party in parliamentary elections — a shocking upset sure to throw Mideast peacemaking into turmoil.

Isn’t it wonderful that we have spent billions of dollars bringing democracy to Iraq? Democracy is so wonderful that it doesn’t even matter who it brings to power, what’s truly important is that everyone was able to vote!

I understand that voting not only cures cancer but also increases one’s sexual satisfaction. Other benefits include societal stability, because nothing says stability like government by Islamic militants.

It’s not racist to insist that democracy is bad for Arab nations. It’s demonstrably bad for Anglo-Saxon nations too.

The video game industry’s 2006 E3 Expo trade show in Los Angeles is getting a make-over — banned are the swarms of sexy, semi-clad “booth babes” that in years past took the unveiling of new games and technology to titillating new levels.

Rules prohibiting the use of scantily clad young women to peddle video games are nothing new, but the handbook for this year’s show in May outlines tough new penalties, including a $5,000 fine on the spot for the booth owner if the “booth babe” is semi-clad.

“What’s new in 2006 is an update and clarification of the enforcement policies; as we do from time to time, we have taken steps to ensure that exhibitors are familiar with the policy and how it will be enforced,” Mary Dolaher, E3 Expo show director, said in an e-mail.

It would appear that the critical mass of women working on electronic entertainment has finally been reached. No wonder the big publishers’ games are mostly derivative trash remniscent of Hollywood-class originality these days. Things started going downhill fast when they moved the Computer Game Developers Conference from the Westin and the big money people got involved.

The lesson, as always, is this. Put a woman in charge and she’ll start acting like she’s everyone’s mother.

Gutfeld plays comedian on the Huffington Post:

Little Johnny goes up to his mother and says, “Is it true babies come from storks?” “Why yes,” says the mom. “Do storks ever have abortions?” he asks. The mother stops and laughs and then says, “Yes, but only the poor black ones.”

The funniest part isn’t the jokes, which are designed more to skewer abortion supporters than be humorous, but the reaction of the angry abortionettes and abortioneuters who are simply aghast that this should appear on their adored Huffer Puffer, which isn’t left-wing at all but is moderate and centrist, which is why this crazy and offensive Gutfeld guy should be thrown out into the outer darkness.

Remember when Arianna Hufferopolis said she was conservative? And remember when she was an egocentric jackass and no one took her seriously?

That was awesome!

Vegetious sees more than one way:

17For the law was given through Moses; God’s unfailing love and faithfulness came THROUGH Jesus Christ.

Not because of…. do you see the grammatical difference ?

5Jesus replied, “The truth is, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of WATER AND THE SPIRIT b] 6Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives new life from heaven. 7So don’t be surprised at my statement that you[c] must be born again. 8Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit.”

I do not see here where Jesus proclaims that he is the only way….

24For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”

Does not say only in Jesus as a human figure.

By now you are either getting the direction or are lost in your refusal and anger…..things Jesus warned would blind us from the truth.

You’re very quick to pull out the victimization card there, Vegetious. First, you are referring to “God’s unfailing love and faithfulness”, not salvation, so your point there, such as it is, is irrelevant. But let’s look at the grammar anyhow.

“I am THE way…. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Oxford: THROUGH = “by means of”

Therefore, Jesus Christ is clearly stating “no one comes to the Father except by means of me.” Which supports his assertion “I am THE way”, which cannot be considered merely “one of the ways” as you would have it.

It is difficult to get any more clear than that. As for your years of seminary, I don’t see that as terribly meaningful or impressive, given the blinkered products that one so often sees in the pulpits of America.

I’ve gotten a few emails requesting addition to the blogroll over the last six weeks or so. Since I’m not all that inclined to spend time digging through my inbox, if you have a blog and would like to be added to the list, please provide your blogname and the URL here.

JT seeks advice from the Voxologisti:

My wife and I are making plans to begin homeschooling our kids after this school year. I’d be interested in any resources/tips your community can recommend for parents just starting out with homeschooling — particularly for kids who were already in private Christian and public schools for 3-5 years. (We’ll be teaching 3rd and 5th grade at home next year).

You and your regular readers are consistent advocates of the advantages of homeschooling, and what I’ve read on your site has helped us reach this decision. Now we could use all the help we can get. Even knowing it’s the best thing for the kids, it’s still a daunting challenge to take this on.

Posting this feels rather like chaining a bleeding veal calf in a cage full of wolves… JT, I will simply leave you and your wife with the wise words of Douglas Adams. “Don’t Panic!” The point of homeschooling is not to design the ultimate curriculum and then begin, allow yourself instead to discover the right path through trial and error. Even the errors will almost surely be superior to the education your children were receiving previously.

A commenter to one of Unfogged’s posts on Gopnik, Lewis and Narnia makes a common error about Christianity:

I dunno about the Lion/Lamb business. It’s one thing to say that Christ was the Lion because he had the strength to sacrifice himself and was vindicated in the end. That’s one kind of strength. It’s another kind of strength that the lion of the jungle uses to kick ass all over the place. I took it that what Gopnik was objecting to was the absence of meekness and self-denial, which is pretty central to Christ’s message.

The problem here is that neither meekness nor self-denial is central – pretty or otherwise – to Jesus Christ’s message. I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE, NO MAN COMES TO THE FATHER BUT BY ME is the totality of his message, everything else is secondary.

Jesus Christ is not the Lion because of what he did, that is his aspect as the sacrificial Lamb. He is the Lion because he is the Alpha and the Omega, the Son of God, the rightful King who will return to claim his usurped throne. “kick[ing] ass all over the place” is a fair description of what John tells us is going to happen in his Revelation, after all.

Man is called to be meek before God, to be humble in the knowledge that we are nothing without Him, we can achieve nothing except through Him and we shall perish without His grace. God hates arrogance because pride is the main reason we refuse to acknowledge Him or our proper place in His Creation, and why we rebel against Him.

Like Aslan, Jesus Christ did not need to suffer and die. He chose to do so in order to pay the blood price necessary to redeem a traitor, Edmund in the case of Aslan, Man in the case of Jesus Christ.

As for Gopnik, his PARIS TO THE MOON has a spot in my most-favored bookcase, as it captures the American living abroad experience rather well. Having spent years living in Japan and Italy after growing up in the Midwest, I felt a real sense of the expatriate experience in reading that book that is missing in better-known works of travel porn such as UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN.

One need not agree with a writer on everything – or anything, for that matter – to like and appreciate his writing.

The Pan-Gargler on personal security:

The other night my dad and I were talkin’ in the kitchen… it was late… we are all about ready for bed… but home invasions had been in the news and were the topic of discussion. I was of course blowing it off. Dad looked at me and said, “hey… it happens everyday. It could happen to you. They could kick that front door down.” Now… here I am standing around in a bitch beater and a pair of boxers.

I took two quick steps, produced a firearm from no where and aimed at the front door. This happened in around a second. This of course suprised my Dad… but I have no idea why it would. You’d think he’d know by now.

Not bad really… but probly not as good as JAC… who simply carries a side arm at all times. Cut me some slack. I was ready for bed.

This reminds me of the time Big Chilly was going shooting and wanted to borrow my .38 revolver. I was reading in bed, so I leaned over to the left, tipped two books forward and handed it to him. He raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything as he unloaded it and slipped it in his case.

“Hey, do you mind if I take the Glock too?”

“Sure,” I said, then leaned over to the right, tipped two other books forward and handed him the Glock. This time he laughed while checking the chamber, then pointed up to the ceiling fan and wondered aloud what he’d find on the blades if he reached up there.

Now, I’ve told that part of the story before, but forgot to mention what happened next. When he asked if I had anything under the bed as well, I told him to look for himself. He was practically rolling on the floor laughing by the time he pulled the seventh and last rifle out.

Adam Gopnik – a writer I rather like – writes a nice piece about CS Lewis, wherein he also demonstrates why non-Christians should think twice before attempting to write seriously about Christianity or historical Christians:

The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure….

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

This is, quite simply, a howler. Jesus Christ is the sacrificial Lamb, to be sure, but he is also the Lion of the tribe of Judah. Revelations 5:5: The Scroll and the Lamb: Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.”

6Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. He had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits[a] of God sent out into all the earth. 7He came and took the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne. 8And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. 9And they sang a new song:

“You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased men for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation.
10You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
and they will reign on the earth.”

In short, the Lion is the Lamb. It is staggering that Gopnik should have missed this, much less tried to use it as grounds for a religious criticism of the Aslan analogy. The beauty of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion is that he was the Lion throughout, his sacrifice was entirely voluntary. “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”

But unfortunately, it’s clear that for all his true appreciation for creative greatness Gopnik is, like most secular writers, simply clueless on matters spiritual. He goes on to compound his error in the very next paragraph:

Though Tolkien was certainly a devout Catholic, there is no way in which “The Lord of the Rings” is a Christian book, much less a Catholic allegory.

Well, except for the “Servant of the Secret Fire” bit, the transformation of Gandalf the Grey into Gandalf the White, the basic theme of the Return of the King, and then, this small quote from Tolkein himself describing the Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”

That’s simply embarrassing. And it detracts greatly from an article that otherwise appears to be surprisingly well-informed. I was particularly pleased to note how he credited George MacDonald, the first fantasy great who is all but unknown outside of Christian circles these days.

NB fails to notice what is obvious to the serious observer:

“Being susceptible to demagogues, dependent upon the ever-changing emotions of the majority and inherently unstable”

Vox, what planet are YOU experiencing things on? In case you never happened to notice it, the US Government is, instead of being unstable, the oldest continuously functioning governmental body in charge of a major state (thus excluding, say, “Lichtenstein” or others from consideration, for an example). There are NO other major nations which have not gone through a radical restructuring during the USA’s short existence (I exclude interregnums as a result of nearby wars, too) – England? Pure monarchy to a figurehead monarchy with a parliament. Germany? Didn’t exist in its current form. Italy? Same. Spain? Revolution in 1930s. France? Innumerable revolutions in the 1800s. Brazil? Argentina? China? Russia? Nope. Australia, Canada, India? Did not exist, per se, in 1850. Eastern Europe? Duh.

I pointed this out long ago in your blog, but apparently you failed to grasp it. If it is constructed properly, and the people themselves support it actively, democracy is one of the MOST stable forms of government, since it allows for a continuous, smooth answer to THE critical question at the heart of political stability: Who shall rule: Who shall succeed the predecessor?

Hell, the strength of the system, along with our belief in it, was shown in 2000, with the signal swamped by the noise. In most other nations, the solution would have been for both sides to fight for it – instead, there was a lot of legal jockeying by both sides, until they ran out of arguments, and one side became the winners by default. The reason why no one picked up a gun to resolve it was obvious: The American People would not have accepted such a solution, and those in the race knew that was so.

This need not be uniquely American. It may well not apply in Iraq, but if you don’t try, it damned sure won’t. You can be against the US’s actions, but at least get basic points right. Democracy is not inherently unstable, and the continued existence of the USA is blatant proof of it. It’s the underlying people in question who make any governmental system work or not work.

Let’s see… if we ignore longer-lived governments which happen to be smaller, forget about a violent civil war which transformed the nation from a peaceful voluntary union to a continental quasi-empire imposed by force at the will of the central government, then pretend that the English parliament hasn’t reigned supreme since beheading Charles I in 1649, we can use the “stability” of the American form of government as a foundation of our argument.

NB presents an appallingly weak case throughout. First, the American system is overtly anti-democratic, as it is full of numerous laws and institutions designed specifically to weaken the will of the people. There is not even a possibility for a national referendum, and in states which permit them they are readily overridden by legislatures and courts. The American government is not in the least democratic, indeed, the British House of Lords has been known to have a higher turnover rate thanks to the quiet machinations of the bi-factional ruling party in creating safe Congressional districts where the only question is which party creature will be anointed to win the “election”.

The transformation of the U.S. government from a strictly limited and small central government subject to state and individual sovereignty to the all-powerful imperial state with pretensions global jurisdiction is a far greater one than the exchange of King Log for King Stork in an African nation. The fact that the nominal figurehead is still called the President – even if he upholds UN resolutions instead of the US Constitution -–and meaningless elections are still held does not mean that the political system is the same as it was before. While the symbolism is there, the substance is completely altered to an extent that very few are capable of understanding.

The Founding Fathers knew that democracy was inherently unstable, but they were insufficiently skeptical about how easily it would destroy the Republic they created. The reality is that America has known three systems of government:

1. The Free Republic 1789 to 1861 (72 years)
2. The Northeastern Empire 1862 to 1945 (83 years)
3. The Global Satrapy 1945 to present (61 years)

My observations indicate that the USA is rapidly heading towards a fourth system of government, likely one where the federal government will be made openly subordinate to a supernational entity such as the American Union. Using the timeframe of the EU’s establishment as a guide, this will be accomplished by the year 2040 at the latest.