Why We Must Try

The uncertainties of war and the hope of history.

March Madness!

Upset after upset. Is it too late to jump on the Patriot bandwagon? All of my other teams are gone...I've got to cheer for somebody!

In completely unrelated and more important news, Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who was on trial for converting to Christianity has had charges against him dropped. Good to hear!

Religious Freedom?

By now, you have probably heard about the man in Afghanistan who is being tried for converting to Christianity. If convicted he'll be put to death. The testimony this man has is amazing...or is it ordinary? Is the faith of this man, Abdul Rahman, the kind of faith that is natural of a Christian? I digress. To learn more about Rahman and Afghan Christians, check out this site. The US Commission on International Religous Freedom has weighed in with President Bush as well.

Of course most of us know that this is not the first time nor will it be the last time that a Christian is persecuted for his/her beliefs. It happens everyday across the world. This current situation dovetails with recent talk in the media regarding words spoken by Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson. Both men essentially stated that Islam was a wicked religion. Several in the media and liberal Christianity have questioned those thoughts, stating that they incite violence...even calling Graham and Robertson warmongers. Albert Mohler was on O'Reilly the other night speaking on this topic...O'Reilly wasn't too pleased with Mohler's belief that Islam is indeed an evil religion (after all, isn't anything that leads people away from Christ evil?). To watch a portion of this interview, click on over here (of course, this particular blogger is critical of Mohler). Another blogger, who disagrees with Mohler on just about everything, claims Mohler is bigoted for following the teachings of the Bible with regards to other religions. Needless to say, it is not a popular thing in our culture to speak against Islam. I'm waiting on condemnations of the belief system that advocates the death of those who choose to believe differently. I don't think it's a coincidence that Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan are both Islamically governed countries and make it illegal to either convert to other religions, practice other religions, or both practice and convert to other religions.

Finally, think politics and government are boring and shouldn't be your concern? Have a look at this article written in 2003 when the Afghan constitution was being drafted. Paul Marshall sounded the alarm bells early. Had the Afghan constitution been written differently, this trial might not be going on today.

28 Gold Eiffel Towers

So a Republican controlled Senate voted this week to raise the debt ceiling to $9,000,000,000,000.00. Yep, $9 trillion. Strangely, I'm not surprised. After all, this epitomizes our culture--we Americans love to spend, and we spend what we don't have (average American credit card debt: $8562). But I digress.

Was it a good thing that the Senate passed this raise? Had the Senate not passed this, then America would have defaulted on its loans, and the government would have shut down. Now that wouldn't have been good. However, we should not have gotten here in the first place. Sadly, a Republican President, Republican Congress, and Republican Senate brought us to this point.

In the past, Republicans would criticize "tax and spend Democrats." After all, conservatives called the Republican party home. However, Republicans have turned into "cut and spend Republicans"—cut taxes and spend like there was no tomorrow. I understand that we are fighting a war and we had a terrible hurricane season, so we need to spend money. But we can't continue spending at this rate without raising taxes (yes, I just advocated raising taxes) rather than cutting taxes OR we must cut programs. Yet the leadership is not present in Washington to get this done. It is true that we have noble Senators like Tom Coburn (R-OK) and John McCain (R-AZ) who are willing to stand up to out of control spending. But most elected officials would rather avoid confrontation than make tough decisions.

It is imperative that reckless deficit spending ends! When we borrow, we must borrow from other countries, which makes us less independent. The top two lenders to America are Japan and China. The Bible makes it clear that the borrower is a servant to the lender (Prov 22:7). I'm not feeling too good about being a slave to Japan, let alone communist China or ANY country for that matter.

Of course the inevitable question must be answered: should we care? I believe we should. So often, Americans become very apathetic or disinterested in political issues. Sure things like abortion and war will get us worked up, but when a question like deficit spending comes up, most people tune out believing it is "just politics." Yet I believe this attitude is a detriment to the country. Elected officials respond to their constituents, after all, they want to be elected. I mean look what happened with the Dubai ports issue. Washington was flooded with calls against the deal, and Congress responded appropriately. The citizenry must speak up about such issues.

Let's stop placing the country on a shaky financial foundation. Let your elected officials know how you feel about the issue (it only takes a phone call--nothing elaborate--just tell them your name, where your calling from, and that you don't support deficit spending—it’ll take you about 5 minutes). This is an important issue for the whole country. Let those in Washington know how you feel. Let's stop buying gold Eiffel towers!

The White Man's Burden

Take up the White man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden --
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times mad plain.
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden --
The savage wars of peace --
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden --
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper --
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!

Take up the White man's burden --
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard --
The cry of hosts ye humour(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: --
"Why brought ye us from bondage,"Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden --
Ye dare not stoop to less --
Nor call too loud on freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden --
Have done with childish days --
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
--Rudyard Kipling

This poem was written for Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, as it reflected much of his thoughts concerning foreign policy. Whle I won't go into detail about what I think about this poem (except to say I like it), I will provide this book review of The White Man's Burden that ran in Foreign Affairs Magazine this month. It's long, but provides some good insight about two conflicting viewpoints concerning foreign aid.

Superb

From the Social Security Advisory Board investigating Social Security's response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita:

It has been said that a crisis reveals the true nature of an individual or
an organization. In its performance in response to the hurricanes of 2005,
the Social Security Administration showed that it and the people of SSA are
models of service to the public. As Representative Jim McCrery of Lousiana
said, 'In spite of the personal trauma caused by these hurricanes, Social
Security employees have been hard at work to ensure that eligible evacuees
received and will continue to receive their Social Security payments....
[Social Security] employees have exemplified excellence in public service--going
far and beyond the call of duty to serve those in dire need.'

Pleading Their Cause

Nicholas Kristof deemed conservative, evangelical Christians the new internationalists. This is true. American evangelicals have been at the forefront of fighting for peace and justice from the African continent to Southeast Asia. A new article in the Christian Science Monitor takes a closer look at evangelical foreign policy activism. A Christian woman from Midland, Texas brought the genocide in Sudan to the attention of the White House. Numerous groups including International Justice Mission (founded by evanglical Gary Haugen) fight sex-trafficking. Evangelical Christians including Charles Colson and Richard Land worked with others to bring about the landmark International Regligous Freedom Act of 1998 which protected the millions who are persecuted and stand to be persecuted for their religious beliefs. And then there is the response of conservative Christians to tsunamis and earthquakes--bringing in millions of dollars worth of food and supplies. Allen Hertzke, director of religous studies at the University of Oklahoma, wrote a well-respected book titled Freeing God's Children. In it, he discusses how evangelical Christians have formed ties with unlikely allies, including feminists and Jews, to help secure global human rights for the oppressed.

The point of this is not to trump up evangelicals. Rather the point is to defend a worldview that has come under scrutiny by the media and the Religous Left. Critics sometimes claim that evangelicals only care about forcing a theocracy on America or oppressing gays and thus don't care about the poor or the sick (for a glimpse of these critiques read Talk2Action**warning, there is rampant paranoia on that site**).

The facts tell a completely different story. For example, liberal Christians in America denied reports of persecution in China, because they had believed the government line that as long as Christians registered with the government, they would be free to worship. These liberal Christians justified registration as a legitimate national security measure for China. A blind eye was turned from the persecuted in China by the Religious Left. Similarly, the NCC aligned itself with the state operated church in North Korea. The government used the NCC to defend its human rights record. North Korea sent a letter to the NCC thanking the organization for its support of an international effort toward peace and denouncing the unfair and unjust actions of America. Hertzke writes,

“when many liberal Protestant leaders took a left turn on foreign policy from
the 1960s anti-Vietnam effort onward, they mirrored views of the secular
Left. The National Council of Churches, for example, moved from a position
of publicly criticizing the purges and religious persecution in the Soviet Union
and it satellites in Eastern Europe in the 1950s to a posture of rather
benevolent ‘silent diplomacy’ toward totalitarian regimes” (Hertzke 100).

The NCC demonstrated further ineptness toward human rights when it praised the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution as having won a “Communist victory” and applauded the Chinese government for “working for the interests of the ordinary people” (Hertzke 100). The NCC saw the movement of the Religious Right to help persecuted Christians as a “muscular Christianity” and an “attitude of Christian superiority that not only led to the Inquisition but eventually to the Nazi Holocaust” (Hertzke 101).

Evangelicals should take heart in knowing that much is being done in Jesus' name to wipe out injustice throughout the world. Evangelicals also ought to take this as a call to do more "to act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God."

In Lieu Of...

I was almost finished with a post about the new internationalists: evangelical Christians. Then Internet Explorer decided to mess up...so that post is gone. So, I thought I'd post a funny video of laughing babies. It is refreshing to hear babies laugh. Enjoy!