Wheat and Chaff

More on the situation in Iran here, and on the UN Human Rights Commission role in the situation. The claim of the article is that not only does the UNHCR do nothing at all to help, it makes problems worse.

You know, it's not that I really care about this stupid story at all, but it seems like if anyone knew what was safe to do around a crocodile, it would be Steve Irwin.

This sort of thing has the feel of religious fervor, like what Steve Irwin really did wrong was to use an object of worship in a frivolous manner. It's been said before that our society worships children, and I believe it, and so the fact that a child was used in this manner is a matter of religious offense. But there's not this much outcry from the media over the babies slaughtered by abortion every day.

Kofi Annan has declared that the peace process, the new constitution and the new election in Afghanistan are jeopardized by terrorist attacks.

But of course, he knows, doesn't he, that THIS IS EXACTLY THE INTENTION OF THE ATTACKS???

I wouldn't trust that guy to lead a parade, let alone the UN.

Sunday's Sermon is up. It's called "Abiding in Christ". and it's a sermon on the topic of what it means to be a branch of Jesus' vine. Link's on the sidebar.

It's going to be another pretty slow blogging week. I have a week-long seminar-style class starting today, so I'm going to be in Colorado Springs most of the week.

Fitzcarraldo is the story of a man who wants to build an opera in the jungle. He is an Irish entrepreneur (his real name is Fitzgerald, but that was hard for the locals to pronounce) in the jungles of Peru who has had a few different schemes, none of which have really been profitable, but he has a dream, a passion, and a burning ambition to make it happen.

He had tried to build a railroad over the Andes, and then got into ice production, and finally tries his hand at the rubber trade. All of the best tracts of land have been taken up, and so his plan is to buy a tract of land that is thought unreachable due to impassable rapids on the river that leads to the tract. So Fitzcarraldo's plan is to get a steamboat, sail it up a parallel river and then portage the boat over the hills to the other side, sail back up the river and exploit the rich rubber region. He needs the help of the local natives to do it, which they offer for reasons which only become clear by the end.

It's a beautifully shot and directed movie. The shot of the steamboat being dragged up the side of the mountain, almost sailing up it, is the shot that will stick with me. The jungle is gorgeous.

Klaus Kinski is the lead, and he plays the role like a maniac. He has an extremely expressive face, one that communicates the obsession in his heart, for the opera. Fighting against all odds, you really want him to win out and be successful in his venture so that he can have his opera.

Fitzcarraldo is an excellent movie, if for no other reason that it will show you in graphic detail the meaning of the existentialist philosophy, that pervades the world we live in.

4/5 stars.


Rent the DVD free from Netflix!

*SPOILERS AHEAD- Don't read, unless you never plan on seeing the movie, have already seen the movie, or, like my mother-in-law, won't be hurt by reading the spoilers since you will forget it by the time you see the movie.


































But in the end, it's all pointless. It's an existentialist movie at heart, which teaches its viewers that nature is random and capricious, that forces outside of our control can and do destroy all our plans, and that the only thing in the end that matters is the expression of self- the defining act that shouts to the world, HERE I AM! Even if Fitzcarraldo wastes all his money, and that of his investors, just so he can engage in that one act, that one moment of transcendental joy, it's all worth it.

But even if Fitzcarraldo achieves his moment, what then? How can he continue after that? His business is ruined, cannibalized for his opera, his moment. After the moment is over, what then? But of course, to ask the question is to compromise, to become the slave of nature. Just as to live, to make all the compromises and to do all the service for others that is necessary just to live in this world, all is to be the slave of nature, and the only way out is suicide. Indeed, suicide is the only act that can truly define the individual, the only true act of rebellion and defiance possible. All else ends in defeat.

And so, Fitzcarraldo is a movie about suicide. It never says that it is, of course, but it is. Just like so many of our teen movies, our romances, our dramas, are all movies about suicide. Every American Beauty, every Fight Club, every movie where the villian is the establishment, and the hero is the guy who always does whatever he wants and never lets anyone tell him what to do- all end in self-destruction. It's inevitable. Nature is our enemy, you see, whatever the environmentalists say. Nobody goes back to nature, nobody. They war against nature, against society, against all the requirements just for living. For those who view this world as all that there is, this world is the enemy, but this world cannot be defeated. It will enslave you, it will require, as the price for your survival, your soul, your individuality. You can spend your life in drudging slavery in a factory or a cubicle or a welfare line, or you can defy the world, rebel against your slavery and kill yourself.

People kill themselves through drink, through drugs, through the mindless pursuit of sex or money or some other pleasure. Some actually do the deed.

Of course, there's another option. The Christian knows that this world is not all that there is, and that there is life after this world. Further, what's going on now is for the purpose of training us for the future, and so our existence is no longer pointless, and events are no longer our enemy. We have a benevolent God who, by the grace of Jesus Christ and for the sake of His blood, nurtures and cares for us, and use all things for our good, to conform us to the image of His son.

Brazil is going to fingerprint US visitors to get back at us for fingerprinting their citizens, by order of one judge who compared the act to the worst Nazi horrors.

I just don't even know what to say... of course, on the one hand, I don't care in the slightest whether or not Brazil fingerprints me if I ever go there (no plans right now), but are people really that ridiculous? Does this judge actually think that us fingerprinting Brazilians is the moral equivalent of us torturing millions of Brazilians to death?

Hard to imagine.

This is interesting.

A shift in tactics indeed- but it proves the weakness of the terrorists. If they are unable to go after hard targets and start bombing civilians, well, I'm very sorry for the civilians, but it proves that we're winning. They're losing firepower and manpower and money, so they have to go after easier targets. It seems like that's the only way to read this.

This will turn the Iraqi people more and more against Islamofascism, and more and more in favor of the Americans who are protecting them. That will make it harder for the insurgents to operate, who have to depend on locals to hide and support them.

You can look at how Israel has turned over the last three years from being willing to give up almost anything for peace with the Palestinians, to being highly supportive of more and more aggressive tactics to contain and destroy the terrorists who were bombing them, as a model for what's going to happen now with the Iraqis, to the extent it hasn't happened already.

But naturally, the media that is committed to our failure will highlight the human sufferring that this causes. And it is, in fact, very sad, but they were sufferring far more before we got there.

Pop over at Basket of Figs has a post on the fragility of life, and how it's not quite as fragile as many would have us believe.

Yep, it's a wonder any of us is alive. Some of us aren't. I remember a boy I went to school with who burned himself up about 50 years ago while stealing gasoline from a farm vehicle. Another boy drank himself to death. They didn't listen to their mothers or fathers, but that generation seemed to surrender without a struggle to the Nanny State, buying into the propaganda that bureaucrats know what is best. They hated their mothers and fathers and surrendered liberty without a peep to governments. After all, they were an enlightened bunch who were assured that they were the first to walk the earth who knew what was wrong with the world and that they would fix it up to be safe for everyone, especially for those who didn't seem to care much about the Ten Commandments.

Read the whole thing.

Well, we've gotten through yet another major event with no terrorist attacks. My wife flew recently, and she said she was so impressed with the security people. They were thorough, efficient and polite, and made her feel very safe. Instapundit quotes Brian Doherty saying that teenagers armed with Soldier of Fortune magazine could do more damage to us than we've seen since the big one, making one think that Al Qaeda really has been mostly rounded up in this country and the ones that haven't are in deep deep cover. Everyone thought there would be another attack by now.

It's kind of a new experience for me, to observe my government doing something really tricky and complex, and apparently succeeding brilliantly, beyond all expectations.

Haha, take That, arrogant Apple evangelists! Take that, Lileks! Pay twice as much just to make sure your case is cool-looking, and see what you get!

So, last night, Andrea and I watched a movie (Confidence). I had a little Scotch (Cutty Sark) and Andrea drank her tea. Then Andrea put Katie to bed. I played a few games of Age of Mythology and then I went to bed too. In other words, it was almost exactly like every other night. No Champagne at midnight, no dropping ball or Dick Clark or Times Square.

I didn't miss it even a little bit. Life's just too good right now to wish anything was different.

Confidence wasn't very good. Too much totally gratuitous nudity, too little interesting character development, totally predictable plot twists. Dustin Hoffman was very creepy, Andy Garcia was interesting, Ed Burns was fine, but they're just fiddling while Rome burns. It's impossible to care about anyone in this movie, or about what happens. Even the surprise plot twists come exactly where they're supposed to come, surprising no one. So I'd recommend it only if you're big fans of the grifter genre, have no children and no delicate Christian sensibilities, have seen all the other much better movies of this genre like The Grifters and House of Games, and are really bored. On second thought, skip it anyway.

Blogger was down for a big part of the day. It made me mad and I wanted to blog about it, but I couldn't because... Blogger was down.

Discoshaman posted a mention of a review of the book Wild At Heart over at Le Sabot Post-Moderne (no, I don't really know what that's about). I read that book about a year ago, and kept meaning to write a review of it but never got around to it. Modern Reformation does a great job anyway, so it saved me some time.

Instapundit has an uncharacteristically long article summing up various aspects of the Iraq war. Sounds like there's cause to be cautiously optimistic. It sounds to me like there's not much of a local resistance left- the violence is mostly coming from foreign sources, which will be very difficult to maintain over time, with the locals increasingly against them and their money drying up.

People keep looking for a single storyline here, but there's a lot going on. The ultimate storyline, of course, is that if we don't chicken out, things are likely to turn out well -- and if we do chicken out, things are certain to turn out very, very badly.

Our biggest potential enemy here is ourselves.

Lileks has some thoughts on the Iranian earthquake, and on US aid.

I wonder if this disaster might be the Iranian Chernobyl. (Or the 21st century equivalent of the Lisbon earthquake, if you remember your Voltaire.) Just as that catastrophe laid bare the lies and the failures of the Soviet system, so might a horrible earthquake call into question the Mullahs’ claim to rule at the behest of the Almighty. It’s hard to insist that Allah wants Israel destroyed but never gets around to leveling Tel Aviv with natural disasters.

He didn't do a very good job of taking the month off. But I won't complain.

This post is in blatant disregard for my own sometime tagline above- "Just because it happened to you, doesn't make it interesting." I am about to tell you things that happened to me over the last week or so and they may or may not be interesting. There'll be some good bits about issues of more universal appeal coming up, so if that's more your speed, go read Instapundit for a while and come back here in a few hours. Otherwise, read on, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Last week we had our Christmas program at church. It was the first one I'd organized, so I was a little nervous about it, but I had lots of very experienced help, so it all went well. Kids reciting verses and singing songs, and the big adult choir and all that. It was fun and uplifting, and a great way to celebrate Christmas. It being church and all, there was no Rudolph, or grandma getting run over by a reindeer or anything of the sort. But there was a lot of beautiful music. The two churches I pastor seem to be blessed with a disproportionate amount of musical talent. We had the big pot luck after that, a holiday classic.

We spent Christmas in Wyoming with Andrea's family. It was nice. The food was great, and there were just entirely too many presents. Katie must have gotten thirty packages. She got the hang of opening them, which was fun, but it's a little sad to see her just tearing through one and setting it aside immediately to move on to the next one, because there were so many.

My nephew Sean was there with his family (Jason and Jenny) too. Sean (14 months old) is about three months younger than Katie and it's interesting to see the differences between them. It is so obvious that he is a boy and she is a girl- he hits things, plays with something for a second and then bangs it on something, and he yells. He doesn't scream, he yells. And he grunts and frowns and throws his food. All boy. Katie on the other hand, plays very delicately and carefully with most things, is much more cautious than Sean with people or with aggressive play (Sean loves to be thrown in the air by his daddy- Katie hates it), speaks in a delicate voice, and throws hissy fits when she's mad, screaming like some superhero with the power to shatter glass with her voice.

The feminists of course would say that they've been conditioned by their surroundings to behave in these manners. And that might be true, if we were animals or robots. If that's true, then nothing we do matters because we're totally slaves to our environment. If babies can be so conditioned by the time they're one year old, then why are the social scientists even bothering to tell us about it? We're all on a course of behavior set for us by an impersonal uncaring world, and nothing could change that. How could you live in a world like that?

No, Sean and Katie were created very differently, and part of that is the fact that one's a boy and one's a girl. It's amazing to see God's creation taking shape in them. It's also sad to see the curse of sin at work in them already, but that's the world we live in. It's a beautiful world, but a deeply flawed one too. But then, that's why we've got Christ.

I guess that turned out to be a little more universal in appeal than I expected.

I'm back, and had a great time. I'll tell you about it later, but for now I've got the new sermon up. It's called "Members One of Another" and it's on Romans 12 and the necessity of belonging to a church and being involved.

One last thing before I leave- Sunday's sermon is up. It's titled King of Kings, and addresses Jesus as the king and deliverer, the Horn of Salvation. Enjoy. It's short, because we had a Christmas program. The link's on the sidebar.

Merry Christmas to everyone. I will not likely be blogging much for a week or so, since I will be out of town. Enjoy the archives, and I'll see you later!

The Purpose-Driven Life

I picked up the wildly popular book The Purpose Driven Life because a few folks in my congregation have relatives who are reading it and telling them how great it is. So I figured I’d better have an opinion.

Actually, I already had an opinion. I hated the book before I even read it. This is largely the case any time a Christian book gets on the NYT bestseller list- I assume that it’s garbage. This is totally unfair, I know, but there it is.

The first part of the book, the introduction, did nothing to dispel my pre-formed dislike of it. Mr. Warren’s got some great marketers working for him, or he’s just a great marketer himself. But then you don’t turn your church into a successful, well known brand name (Saddleback) without knowing a few things about marketing. And so, The Purpose Driven Life presents itself as A Vital Book, so much so that you need to read it one chapter at a time so that you have plenty of time to think about each chapter you read. And you will have plenty of time if you only read one chapter, because each chapter’s around five pages long in about an 18-point font, of very easy reading material. Most people could read one of these chapters in ten minutes.

And there are forty chapters. So this means that you’ll be reading it for forty days. And, Mr. Warren tells us, we will then be transformed, just like forty days of flood changed the world, or forty days on Mt Sinai transformed Moses, or forty days in the desert transformed Jesus. See, this is a life-changing book.

And Mr. Warren wants us to sign a contract to read the book in this manner, and if possible to find a friend to read it with, or better yet get your church to read it with you. Of course if you go through with this, as any good marketer can tell you, you’ve achieved buy-in, emotional commitment. Now the reader wants to be transformed by the book, to validate all of the emotional commitment he’s already invested in this book by going through the process and signing the contract, etc. And, Mr. Warren assures us, he has been praying for us, individually, the reader of the book.

See what I mean about good marketing?

So, what’s the purpose of your life? Well, he takes a few chapters to get there, but the purpose of our lives, it turns out, is to glorify God. Not to please ourselves, not to acquire wealth or even to be happy, but to serve and glorify God. He takes a week to give us the introduction to the theme of the book. He then gives us five purposes (sub-purposes, I guess) spread over the next five weeks, although he only takes five days on the last one so that he can fit it all into the “spiritually significant” forty days. These purposes are: “You were Planned for God’s Pleasure”; “You Were Formed for God’s Family”; “You Were Created to Become Like Christ”; “You Were Shaped For Serving God”; and “You Were Made For A Mission”.

The actual content of the book isn’t so terrible, apart from being totally Arminian, of course. For how does Rick know I was created to become like Christ? What if I’m actually a vessel of destruction, created for the purpose of glorifying God by my everlasting punishment?

But leaving such impolite questions aside and assuming that it’s elect Christians reading this, the book makes some good points and teaches some solid basic truths. As I said before, I went into this wanting to hate this book, but I have to admit that there’s a fair amount of good substance in it. It is true, and a lesson that all Christians need to remind themselves of, that we are here to serve and glorify God, and not ourselves. He teaches us that we need to belong to a church, that we need to love that church and serve it, that we serve Christ by serving His body. He talks on Day 20 about the need to restore broken fellowship and not let divisions fester, but address them lovingly as soon as possible.

I was perhaps most impressed with what he says on Day 13 about worship. He says, p. 128:

God is pleased when our worship is accurate. People often say, “I like to think of God as …,” and then they share their idea of the kind of God they would like to worship. But we can not just create our own comfortable or politically correct image of God and worship it. That is idolatry.

And a little later:

Today many equate being emotionally moved by music as being moved by the Spirit, but these are not the same. Real worship happens when your spirit responds to God, not to some musical tone.

This is all good stuff, and badly needed today.

But this is about as far as it goes. This is all baby Christian stuff, really. There's nothing life-transforming except in the basic sense that being converted is life-transforming. But nothing you wouldn’t hear constantly from the pulpit of any decent church, especially any Reformed or Presbyterian church.

Mr. Warren's hermeneutic is a major problem. The way he uses Scripture is simply scandalous. He is proud of the fact that he has over a thousand Scripture references, and that they come from many different paraphrases (to help us think more about them, he says), but Scripture to him is simply there to support the point he has already made. He makes his point, and then says, “The Bible says, …” and quotes some verse from some translation to add authority to his statement. He almost never even provides a reference in the text, but buries it in endnotes. Thus, the reader is not directed to Scripture in any meaningful sense. Passages are never examined according to context or interpretation, but simply are said to mean what Mr. Warren says they mean, which is always just the same as whatever Mr. Warren just said. Scripture therefore serves his purposes, rather than the other way around. It’s a terrible use (or abuse) of Scripture, but it is a very typical one, I’m afraid. Rather than his thousand references, I’d much rather he took ten and actually dealt with them in a meaningful way. It’s just classic proof-texting and is a big turn-off. You could strip every Scripture reference out of this book and lose nothing.

So, apart from the fairly shallow content, terrible hermeneutics and the extreme hubris of saying that you have written a book that God wants to use to transform someone’s life, this really isn’t a bad book. I’m not sure how much more would be added by also reading The Purpose Driven Church, doing The Purpose Driven Workbook and buying The Purpose Driven CD, but I’ll leave that to the reader to explore.

What, no "Purpose Driven Weight Loss Plan?"

Volokh has comments on Padilla vs. Rumsfeld. He agrees with the dissent. The ruling was that a citizen can't be detained except by an act of Congress. The Joint Resolution authorizes the President

"to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

The government argued that this is the act of Congress which authorizes it, but the majority opinion was that this did not explicitly authorize detention of citizens clearly enough. Seems like a silly opinion to me. I hope Volokh's right, and it gets reversed in the Supreme Court.

I've added some new sites to my blogroll, and taken some off. The ones I've taken off are mostly the big sites that everyone knows about already, and added some less well-known sites that I think ought to be checked out. Perhaps you agree, perhaps not, but check 'em out.

OpinionJournal is running an editorial by sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card going after his fellow Democrats on their current message, or lack of it. It's great. I'd be a lot less likely to think Democrats were a bunch of America-hating wussy morons if there were a few more of them like Card apparently is.

Thanks to InstaPundit for the link.

The Claremont Institute has a great article on the loss of true manliness in our culture. I recommend it.

It seems to be to be self-evidently true that we are raising a generation of males that does not know how to be men. The extremes are either whining and an inability to commit, or barbarity, vulgarity and stupidity.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the link.

My Sunday sermon is uploaded. It's on the subject of peace. and the angels' statement that Christ's coming would bring peace.

Critics of Christianity sometimes say that this statement proves Jesus was not the Messiah since His coming did not bring peace. Many Old Testament prophecies said that the coming of the Christ would bring peace (shalom). So the sermon is about that idea, shalom, and just what it was that they were promising with the coming of Christ.

I am in favor of the death penalty in general, and for Saddam in particular.

He ought to be dealt with humanely. The image of God must always be honored. But it is precisely because the image of God must be honored that he must die. To deal with him in any way less than death is to dishonor the millions of images of God that he tortured and twisted and broke, including his own.

"He who sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." These words were spoken by God to Noah, as part of what's often called the Covenant of Preservation. It was the mechanism that God put in place to restrain the wickedness of man, so as to avoid the need for another worldwide flood until God's redemptive plan was complete. We can see how that mechanism would work when we imagine the effect that hanging Saddam would have on every dictator in the world. It would send a message that there are a few countries in the world that are willing, if you get too far out of line, to invade you and hang you. This would be a wonderfully bracing message in a world where Yasser Arafat wins a Nobel Peace prize and Robert Mugave is treated like an elder statesman instead of the cheap thug that he is.

And I hope that he is tried by the Iraqi people. As long as we could make sure that it wasn't Saddam loyalists trying him (and that shouldn't be too hard to ensure), we wouldn't have to worry about justice being done. Everyone who's ever lost a loved one to crime wants the perpetrator brought to justice. And the Iraqis have lost millions. So I hope they try him, and I hope they hang him, and I hope they do it all in public.

They say that if God never judged anyone on earth for their crimes, we might not have reason to believe that God judged at all. And if God punished all crimes here on earth, we might not have reason to expect any future judgment. So a lot of people get away with things for a while. Some people get away with it their whole lives, and die in peace (like the elder Kim of North Korea) to go to be judged by the Almighty in eternity. And God in His mercy shows us some people getting judged right here and now, for all to see, that there is a God in the heavens, and He does care what we do to each other. Thank God, and praise Him for this victory.

Yeah, They Caught Him, But It's Still a Quagmire and Everything Still Sucks and Bush is Still a Liar So Don't Give Him or the Americans An Inch of Credit For Anything- Reuters Headline

To support this story, Reuters rounds up a half-dozen or so unhappy Iraqis to complain, and then calls it "Iraqi Ire" as if they had just scientifically sampled the mood of the country with a handful of interviews. Well, they are Iraqis, I guess, and they did have some ire.

Let the media and the lefties cry. They know they just lost the 2004 election, and any number of other contests as well.

Saddam Hussein's been captured!

Read, well, practically anything on it. Instapundit's got tons, of course. So does Fox News. The Command Post has a great roundup of stories.

I can't imagine what it would be like to live under the fear of a monster like that for thirty years, so I also can't imagine what the people of Iraq must be feeling now. But I understand there's a lot of celebratory gunfire in Baghdad right now.

Good for them.