Love Your Neighbor With Your Vote

Voting and the 10 Commandments

This is the great commandment, you shall Love the Lord your God will all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. And the second is like unto it: Love your neighbor with your vote.

I would like to vote for a Christian. However, I would quickly vote for a small-government non-Christian over a Christian socialist. The former is more considerate of your neighbor than the latter.

6. Does he honor the life of his neighbor? This applies to abortion, as well as gun rights; it even applies to defense issues. Pacifism often loves the neighbor abroad at the expense of the neighbor next door. "Speak softly and carry a big stick" means that we show respect for sovereign nations but that we will intervene to protect our people.

7. What is his stance on obvious public sexual sins? How about his personal life? There's only so much you can do here. You don't know if the wife is photo-shopped in and the mistress or male lover has been photo-shopped out. Opponents will run smear campaigns and we are better off in the long run if we do not accept charges of wrong-doing too quickly. And the media hubbub may shout down the contrary testimony of friends.

8. Do not vote for someone who intends to steal from your neighbor's paycheck or wallet. Not even for charity. (Especially not for charity. Give it voluntarily. Don't be a Warren Buffet hypocrite on this one.)

9. Examine his words and his actions throughout his past career. Are they consistent? Are there good reasons for inconsistency. Is it truly an inconsistency? Does he explain himself? Does he just back away and deny his past publicly stated opinions? He's trying to paint a particular picture of himself.

10. We can't search his heart. But we can examine the rhetoric: is he appealing to envy and covetousness in you? Note: capitalism wants self-interest to motivate you to get off your butt and work. The rhetoric of class warfare and envy wants you to ask the government to serve you.

I'm for Newt Gingrich in this election. I know that many of my fellow Christians are hesitant to vote for him because of his past infidelities. But here's the thing. He's been faithful to Callista for over a decade. He's publicly repented. We cannot refuse to extend grace lest grace be denied us. He's been faithful to all of his other principles. (I think the consulting thing is BS. Getting paid for advice is not evil. Advising stupid companies is not evil. Frank-Dodd is a much greater evil.)

I've overheard a couple people say that they're voting for Ron Paul "to send a message." What message is that? Is it really what you think it is? Even if he is marginalized and misunderstood, is your message going to get through? Paul seems to be spending more and more time tearing down his fellow candidates than really espousing a message. His main message seems to be: "distrust everyone--except me!" He preaches the Constitution but doesn't teach patriotic love or loyalty. The loyalty of the Ron Paul club is directed towards a person, not principles. What is going to happen to you when he dies?

Foreign policy has become a much greater issue for me in the last year with my brother in the USAF. Paul's isolationist stance leaves our country and our people vulnerable. Do you remember when T.R. sent the "great white fleet" around the world? He intended it as a demonstration of strength, but it turned out to be a goodwill tour and a great marketing event. People thronged to see the ships and welcomed them with joy. We must rebuild our reputation internationally. America has long been a refuge for the nations: the tired, poor, the masses yearning to breathe free. I want her to continue so.

On the Giving of Gifts

Excerpts from "Forced Merriment and the True Meaning of Christmas," an essay by Christopher Hitchens printed posthumously in the December 24 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

First of all, Mr. Hitchens takes a swipe at the Protestant Church:

The original Puritan Protestants regarded Christmas as blasphemous.

Yet this is hardly subversive at all. Religious sermons against the "commercialization" of Christmas have also been a staple of the season ever since I can remember. A root-and-branch resistance to the holiday spirit would have to be a lot tougher than that. It's fairly easy to be a charter member of the Tom Lehrer Club, which probably embraces a fair number of the intellectual classes and has sympathizers even in the most surprising families.

But the thing about the annual culture war that would probably most surprise those who want to "keep the Christ in Christmas" is this: The original Puritan Protestants regarded the whole enterprise as blasphemous. Under the rule of Oliver Cromwell in England, Christmas festivities were banned outright. The same was true in some of the early Pilgrim settlements in North America.

Last year I read a recent interview with the priest of one of the oldest Roman Catholic churches in New York, located downtown and near Wall Street. Taking a stand in favor of Imam Rauf's "Ground Zero" project, he pointed to some parish records showing hostile picketing of his church in the 18th century. The pious protestors had been voicing their suspicion that a profane and Popish ceremonial of "Christ Mass" was being conducted within.

Now, that was a time when Americans took their religion seriously. But we know enough about Puritans to suspect that what they really disliked was the idea of a holiday where people would imbibe strong drink and generally make merry. (Scottish Presbyterians did not relax their hostility to Yuletide celebrations until well into the 20th century.) And the word "Yule" must be significant here as well, since pagans of all sorts have been roistering at the winter solstice ever since records were kept, and Christians have been faced with the choice of either trying to beat them or join them.

However, that said, Mr. Hitchens rather sympathizes with the Puritanism's reputed objection to merry-making. He throws in his lot:

You would have to be religiously observant and austere yourself, then, to really seek a ban on Christmas.

However, his Real Objection to Christmas is the gift giving:

But it can be almost as objectionable to be made to take part in something as to be forbidden to do so. . . . . One of my many reasons for not being a Christian is my objection to compulsory love. How much less appealing is the notion of obligatory generosity. To feel pressed to give a present is also to feel oneself passively exerting the equivalent unwelcome pressure upon other people.

I don't think I have been unusually unfortunate with my family and friends, but I present as evidence my tie rack. Nobody who knows me has ever seen me wear a tie except under protest, and the few that I do possess of my own volition are accidental trophies, "given" to me by the maitre d's of places where neckwear is compulsory. Yet somehow I possess a drawerful of new, unopened examples of these useless items of male apparel.

Nobody derived any pleasure from either the giving or the receiving, and it's appalling to see what some stores feel they can charge for a tie. Do I blush to think of some of my reciprocal gestures? Sure I do. Don't pretend not to know what I am talking about. It's like the gradual degradation of another annual ritual, whereby all schoolchildren are required to give valentines to everybody in the class. Nobody's feelings are hurt, they tell me, but the entire point of sending a valentine in the first place has been deliberately destroyed. If I feel like giving you a gift I'll try and make sure that (a) it's worth remembering and (b) that it comes as a nice surprise. (I like to think that some of my valentines in the past packed a bit of a punch as well.)

It seemed odd to me that a bachelor would give so much grief over "forced generosity." Except that I did my research and found that Mr. Hitchens' has been married twice. At any rate, he has been free to make his own traditions and his friends should know him sufficiently well enough not to expect him to follow convention. But a further absurdity than that: consider the irony of a man who has made a career out of independence from, and not caring for, silly cultural conventions now objecting to being forced into anything.

Here's a fun counterpoint from Dan Ariely:

Is It Irrational to Give Holiday Gifts?

Many of my economist friends have a problem with gift-giving. They view the holidays not as an occasion for joy but as a festival of irrationality, an orgy of wealth-destruction.

Giving comes in many forms, including lending a hand, donating to charities or buying gifts. WSJ's Christina Tsuei looks into their health benefits in the latest installment of the "Is It True?" series.

Rational economists fixate on a situation in which, say, your Aunt Bertha spends $50 on a shirt for you, and you end up wearing it just once (when she visits). Her hard-earned cash has evaporated, and you don't even like the present! One much-cited study estimated that as much as a third of the money spent on Christmas is wasted, because recipients assign a value lower than the retail price to the gifts they receive. Rational economists thus make a simple suggestion: Give cash or give nothing.

But behavioral economics, which draws on psychology as well as on economic theory, is much more appreciative of gift giving. Behavioral economics better understands why people (rightly, in my view) don't want to give up the mystery, excitement and joy of gift giving.

In this view, gifts aren't irrational. It's just that rational economists have failed to account for their genuine social utility. So let's examine the rational and irrational reasons to give gifts.

If your goal is to maximize a social connection, don't give a perishable gift like flowers or chocolates.

Some gifts, of course, are basically straightforward economic exchanges. This is the case when we buy a nephew a package of socks because his mother says he needs them. It is the least exciting kind of gift but also the one that any economist can understand.

A second important kind of gift is one that tries to create or strengthen a social connection. The classic example is when somebody invites us for dinner and we bring something for the host. It's not about economic efficiency. It's a way to express our gratitude and to create a social bond with the host.

Another category of gift, which I like a lot, is what I call "paternalistic" gifts—things you think somebody else should have. I like a certain Green Day album or Julian Barnes novel or the book "Predictably Irrational," and I think that you should like it, too. Or I think that singing lessons or yoga classes will expand your horizons—and so I buy them for you.

A paternalistic gift ignores the preferences of the person getting the gift, which tends to drive economists crazy, but it may actually change those preferences for the better. Of course, you might mess up by giving a paternalistic gift that someone hates, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

A holiday gift can straddle these categories. Instead of picking a book from your sister's Amazon wish list, or giving her what you think she should read, go to a bookstore and try to think like her. It's a serious social investment.

The great challenge lies in making the leap into someone else's mind. Psychological research affirms that we are all partial prisoners of our own preferences and have a hard time seeing the world from a different perspective. But whether or not your sister likes the book, it may give her joy to think about you thinking of her.

My final category of gift is one that somebody really wants but would feel guilty buying for themselves. This category shouldn't exist, according to standard economic theory: If you really liked it and could afford it, you'd buy it.

For me, fancy pens meet this description. I don't use pens that much, but I'd be pleased to get a really nifty one (a Porsche 911 would be OK, too). When my students defend their dissertations, I ask everyone on the Ph.D. committee to sign the required forms with an expensive pen, and then I give the pen to the student. It's a prototypical good gift, because it's something that they would probably feel guilty about buying for themselves, plus it has positive associations as a memento of the day.

Behavioral economics has one more lesson for gift givers: If your goal is to maximize a social connection, don't give a perishable gift like flowers or chocolates. True, people enjoy them, and you don't want to impose by giving something more permanent. But what are you trying to maximize? Is your goal to avoid imposing on them or for them to remember you?

For a durable impression, better to give a vase or a painting. Even if your friends don't like it that much, they'll think about you more often (though maybe not in the most positive terms).

Better yet, give a gift that gets used intermittently. A painting often just fades into the attentional background. An electric mixer, when used, gets noticed.

I like to buy people high-end headphones. They get used intermittently, so I can imagine that every time you put them on, you will think of me. Also, they're a luxury—the kind of thing that people have a hard time buying for themselves. Best of all perhaps, they're intimate: When I give someone headphones, I can think of myself whispering in their ears.

And maybe, when they use the headphones, they'll remember you whispering to them or even kissing their ears. Has anyone ever thought of a kiss after you hand them cash?

We have reproduced here in full "Is It Irrational to Give Gifts?" by Dan Ariely from the Wall Street Journal. We have an online subscription, so I don't know if you can access it. (I don't have the password, so I'm not logging out to see! Our subscription lapses soon, so I'm taking advantage of whatever I can.) I imagine that you can find both Ariely and Hitchens' writing somewhere.

But don't you love it when you are inscrutable to computers, logarithms, mathematical models and scientific explanations? Oh yes, humans are cool.

Keep your eyes open

and no telling the little pieces you'll pick up.

The Wall St Journal discusses Vera Wang . . . and we find out that Michelle Obama wore Vera Wang last week. Remember how Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich got in trouble for their spending? "Beyond Bridal: Vera Wang's New Look," Christina Binkley. December 15, 2011, Wall Street Journal.

And who are John Huntsman's daughters hanging out with?

One evening early this year, a red Ferrari pulled up at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Beijing, and the son of one of China's top leaders stepped out, dressed in a tuxedo.

Bo Guagua, 23, was expected. He had a dinner appointment with a daughter of the then-ambassador, Jon Huntsman.

The car, though, was a surprise. The driver's father, Bo Xilai, was in the midst of a controversial campaign to revive the spirit of Mao Zedong through mass renditions of old revolutionary anthems, known as "red singing." He had ordered students and officials to work stints on farms to reconnect with the countryside. His son, meanwhile, was driving a car worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and as red as the Chinese flag, in a country where the average household income last year was about $3,300.

"Children of the Revolution," Jeremy Page. Nov 26, 2011, The Wall Street Journal

Die before you die. There is no chance after.

Lewis' quote out of Till We Have Faces has been echoing in my head all morning since learning of the death of Christopher Hitchens.
I followed the debates between Doug Wilson and Hitchens, watched "Collision," and was once privileged to hear Peter Hitchens live.

Hitchens' last piece for Vanity Fair
Read Hitchens' reflections on his cancer--they are harrowing, horrifying and heroic. He was intellectually honest--to the point of self-immolation. Just the headshot of Christopher's chemo-swollen face, bald head, the skin aged 10 years in only one year, makes one grieve for the strong voice in the quickly slackening body. He knew Who he was fighting--the Mighty God, the Judge of all the earth Who does rightly, the Ancient of Days, the I Am, the Creator and Maker and Sustainer. He denied all those titles, but he did not belittle them.

Pastor Wilson's obit for Christianity Today
"[Hitchens] He was fully aware of the authority an enfant terrible could have, provided he played his cards right, and this was a strategy that Hitchens employed very well indeed. One man who delivers a terrible insult is banned from television for life, and another man, who does the same thing, has people lining up with invitations and microphones. In case anyone is wondering, Christopher was that second man.
"Ironically, the branch of the faith most interested in getting the 'cultured despisers' to pay us some respect is really not that effective, and this is a strategy that can frequently be found on the pointed end of its own petard. Respectability depends on not caring too much about respectability. Unbelievers can smell accommodation, and when someone like Christopher meets someone who actually believes all the articles in the Creed, including that part about Jesus coming back from the dead, it delights him. Here is someone actually willing to defend what is being attacked. Militant atheists are often exasperated with opponents whose strategy appears to be 'surrender slowly.'"
A very Wilsonian bon mot:
"He wanted to carry on the grand tradition of doubting what had been inherited from Christendom, and to take great delight in doubting it. This worked well, or appeared to, for a time. But skepticism is a universal solvent, and once applied, it does not stop just because Christendom is gone." . . . and then he quotes the Moody Blues: "I think I am, therefore I am. I think."

Obit from his friend Christopher Buckley

Peter Hitchens' obit for his brother honoring his courage:
"Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it. . . . Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to."

Christopher Hitchens demonstrated an intellectual honesty and courage for a false cause. How much more should we be courageous and intellectually honest for the Truth?

Interesting thoughts from Alan Jacobs, a.k.a. @ayjay, via Twitter:
Hitch was a great journalist and a fine critic, but he's not being celebrated for that. The outpouring of grief is for a lost mythmaker.
Hitch's primary myth was himself, and that's the kind of myth late modernity most craves and celebrates.
By contrast, the death of Russell Hoban, whose mythmaking was vastly creative but not centered on himself, was barely noticed.

Russell Hoban was half of the Russell-Lillian duo who wrote Frances the Badger. So now I need to rediscover one of my favorite childhood authors (Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs was my favorite). Wikipedia tells us that he wrote magic realism.

More Fun with HTML

Debussy
my nutty cat

Is there a simpler recipe for a photo?

Hipster Christianity: the intersection of Church & Cool

Travis Cooper's book Hipster Christianity has a website: http://www.hipsterchristianity.com/index.php. The website also features a free chapter (actually intro & first chapter) in pdf. I appreciated Cooper's handling of the nuances of this relationship between two cultures and loved the questions he raised. I will pursue this book for future reading. Good questions to think about.

Catalyst or Catastrophe

by Steve Watters

When I was a kid, I had an electric racetrack. I’d line up my racecars in the little track grooves and zoom them around the track over and over again. After a while, I got bored with just circling the track. I took the track apart and built ramps. At the bottom of the ramp, I would hold a car in place, letting the engine rev a little and watching the tires spin before releasing it and watching it fly over the ramp. Sometimes the car would land safely, but often it would fly off and hit my bed or dresser and get banged up. What ultimately totaled my racecars, however, was the way I was holding them in place while the engine was running. I didn’t realize that was stripping the gears. The car wasn’t meant to be held in place while its engine ran. It was supposed to go somewhere.

I thought about that old racetrack recently in the context of romantic love — a powerful force driven by the twin engines of a desire for companionship and the sex drive.

This force of romantic love, I worry, is too often underestimated and misunderstood in the Christian community. It has been the driving force that has led many into the dangerous course of sex outside of marriage or many others into the destructive course of sex outside of their marital commitment. For this reason, singles are often counseled to just stay focused on growing closer to God and to avoid the temptations that could drive them to the catastrophic ends of sexual sin, childbirth outside of marriage, STDs and affairs.

But the drive is still there. You can follow the wisdom of not prematurely stirring or arousing love (Song of Solomon 2:7) and still struggle with a drive that doesn’t go away. God created us body, mind and spirit. The physical and earthy aspects of our body include hormones that produce emotions and sexual desire.

We cannot underestimate this drive. God designed it for a purpose — to move us beyond ourselves and into other-centered relationships. God doesn't call us to kill this drive. Instead, He calls us to be transformed by the Gospel in order to kill the evil desires distorting our drive (Colossians 3:1-17). All the cautions about sexual sin in the Bible are in recognition that something so powerful needs guardrails and direction.

In his book Romantic Love, Dr. James Dobson shows how the sexual drive of individuals can be constructive when it's directed toward God’s design for marriage and destructive when it's not:

Sexual drives urge a man to work when he would rather play. They cause a woman to save when she would rather spend. In short, the sexual aspect of our nature — when released exclusively within the family — produces stability and responsibility that would not otherwise occur. When a nation is composed of millions of devoted, responsible family units, the entire society is stable, responsible and resilient. If sexual energy within the family is the key to a healthy society, then its release outside those boundaries is potentially catastrophic. The very force that binds a people together then becomes the agent for its own destruction.

The sexual drive is not neutral; it’s a force that can build or destroy. According Kurt Bruner, a pastor and author who worked with Focus on the Family for 20 years, the same is true of the emotions behind romantic love.

"Our attraction to one another is intended to yank us out of self-focused isolation into the kind of intimacy that reflects God’s communion with His beloved," writes Bruner in his book The Purpose of Passion. "That’s why the desire for romantic union is imprinted on, programmed into, and seeded within our very souls. It’s the reason we yearn to meet and marry that special someone." Bruner goes on to describe how this desire can either be a catalyst or lead to catastrophe:

Whether we find true love or ache from its absence, whether we treat sex as a gift or a game, our love life drives us toward or away from God. The forks encountered along love’s path literally lead to heaven’s highest joys or hell’s deepest miseries, a dream come true or a living nightmare.

It turns out that romantic love, dating and relationships are a lot more spiritually significant than Christians often realize. We shouldn’t minimize the power and goodness of the drive God has given us for connection that can lead us upward toward Him. And we also shouldn’t overlook how our spiritual enemy will go after us at this point. Satan understands the link between romantic love and God's love for His people better than we do.

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy," Jesus told His disciples, "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly" (John 10:10, ESV). Satan can’t create. He can only counterfeit, twist and distort what God has created. And so he seeks to drive our desires in deceitful and sinful directions, like a racecar taken off the track and steered toward a dangerous cliff. What was meant to drive us beyond ourselves and toward others, he seeks to drive toward isolation, selfishness and manipulation.

This is one of the reasons the Apostle Paul so often warns about sexual immorality. His first letter to the Thessalonians is especially instructive in this area:

For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you (1 Thessalonians 4:1-8, ESV).

Paul is saying, "be sanctified — don't let sexual immorality de-sanctify you." And notice how the last part of this text goes to the issue of our relationship with God: "whoever disregards this disregards not man but God." The ESV Study Bible commentary on this verse says, "To reject the giver of the Holy Spirit is to cut oneself off from the sanctifying power that enables the Christian to be blameless in holiness."

Sex and relationships propel people to the crossroads at which they determine they will trust God’s good plan for them or at which they will disregard God and trust Satan’s distorted offerings. In his book Souls in Transition, researcher Christian Smith shows just how practical this point of decision is for young adults:

[E]merging adults who are serious about their faith and practice have to do one of three things: choose to reject heavy partying and premarital sex; dramatically compartmentalize their lives so that their partying and sexual activities are firmly partitioned off from their religious activities in a way that borders on denial; or be willing to live with the cognitive dissonance of being committed to two things that are incompatible and mutually denying. Not many emerging adults can or will do any of these things, so most of them resolve the cognitive dissonance by simply distancing from religion.

This is a great catastrophe — a turning point of eternal significance. Without guardrails and direction, you are vulnerable to the catastrophic ends Satan intends.

Christian singles who recognize the reality of their drive toward companionship and sexual fulfillment as well as the reality of an enemy seeking to manipulate that drive are left with only one option: to give their bodies as living sacrifices, to hold their desires for companionship and sexual fulfillment up to God, and ask that He use them for His purposes. Doing this will push them outside of themselves and into meaningful relationships with those around them, into fruitful life in the church body and as God leads, into fruitful marriages.

Reprinted in full from Boundless.org: www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0002493.cfm#share