#189 Freedom and Democracy

Here in America, we are accustomed to equating freedom and democracy. I've always had a difficult time distinguishing the two and have thought it strange when intelligent, otherwise classically liberal people have criticized the democracy as a form of government. Then I saw a quote from Immanuel Kant that cleared it up for me. As his Wikipedia entry states, he opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated,

"…democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide."

All who are not quite all are merely a majority who has the power to restrict the freedom of the minority. The ideal solution to this quandary, of course, is a constitutional democracy, similar to that in which we live today. This is not democracy in the "direct" sense that Kant knew but a representative democracy of course.

But even here the individual liberty or freedom of the minority is restricted by the majority. Think for example of the laws against drugs, gay marriage, gun control, four letter words on television, etc. So the spread of democracy does not necessarily mean the spread of freedom as President Bush found out when Hamas was democratically elected in Palestine. And in a direct democracy, the kind which Kant referred to, individual liberty is in danger unless protections are in place for the individual. As he says, democracy is just another form of despotism unless the rights of the individual are enshrined and even paramount.

#188 Stewart on Crossfire

#187 Basil on Communion

Michael Spencer found a remarkable quote by Basil the Great on communion or more specifically church membership. First of all it jibes with what I've said about a community-wide non-denominational fellowship meal in my post A Model for Church. But Basil, goes further than that and proposes a standard about who should be allowed membership in the church and who should not.

"Let us then seek no more than this, but propose to all the brethren, who are willing to join us, the Nicene Creed. If they assent to that, let us further require that the Holy Spirit ought not to be called a creature, nor any of those who say so be received into communion. I do not think that we ought to insist upon anything beyond this. For I am convinced that by longer communication and mutual experience without strife, if anything more requires to be added by way of explanation, the Lord Who works all things together for good for them that love Him, will grant it."

Reading through the church fathers, two common themes consistently stand out to me. First, community and the importance of keeping it together. Second, the condemnation and warning against all kinds of heretical teaching. These are actually two sides of the same coin and they fathers often end up coming across as a quite parochial bunch. Thus my surprise at the quote. Notice what Basil is saying here. His proposition is that there should only be two requirements for joining the church. One, they must assent to the Nicene Creed. Two, the Holy Spirit shouldn't be called a creature. I had never heard of this second requirement but apparently it was a well-known problem in his time (4th century) because Ambrose mentions this form of blasphemy in his book On the Holy Spirit (Book I, chap. 10.)

Can you imagine the modern conservative evangelical church ever adopting such a liberal vision of church membership? Is it even appropriate given the repeated warnings in Paul about removing sin and even sinners from the community? It is surprising that, as concerned as the fathers were about preserving orthodoxy, one of the chief among them suggest this practice.

Though most denominations aren't ready to take a step so bold, this more limited set of criteria could at least provide the basis for a middle ground practice between the interdenominational fellowship meal I've suggested in A Model for Church and Basil's more radical suggestion of opening up the boundary lines of church membership. What is the middle ground practice I'm thinking of? It's communion or more specifically the Eucharist. For a lot of people, this could be pushing the envelope. But it's exciting for me to see a similar and even more radical idea of inclusion as early as the 4th century church.

#186 Interesting Links XXI

I've got way too many links starred in my Google reader and have to purge.

Michael Bird has a 12 step plan for becoming familiar with the Graeco-Roman sources.

Here's where your taxes are going: entitlements, debt, and war. Ain't America great!

YouTube has powerful and plausible theory on the origins of Amazing Grace.

Sullivan has a must read on what he calls McTruthyism. It's like McCarthyism but when you know your accusations not to be true. There's a lot of it going on during this political season.

YouTube has an inspiring video of a virtual Ron Paul. Viva la revolution!

Sullivan asks if the U.S. has now become a non-Geneva state.

We continue to hear the bullshit line of "they hate us because of our freedom." Because we are intellectually bankrupt that's the best explanation we can come up with for terrorism. It's makes us feel good about ourselves and answers our question of why. Pictures like this of a child shelled by Israeli forces going after a Palestinian gunman tell us otherwise. Now that I have a child of my own, it hits especially close to home.

Burma: Why we call it that, while the junta calls it Myanmar.

Awesome music video about moving a 100-year old church. Made me smile throughout.

P.J. O'Rourke via Greg Mankiw asks his daughter if she really wants things to be fair.

#185 More Boumediene v. Bush

Scott Horton at Harper's has an in-depth analysis of the decision. He starts by drawing the battle lines:

"For the dwindling but stout-hearted band of Bush loyalists, the creation of concentration camps and introduction of torture techniques never presented much of a problem—morally or legally. On the legal side, they reasoned, the president exercised commander-in-chief powers, and in wartime that let him do pretty much whatever he wanted. There were some limits, of course. One might be that his freedom of action had to be outside of the United States. Another that it couldn’t involve U.S. citizens. But with those two points resolved, Torquemada had better get out of the way.

For the critics, that was never right. The president was an actor in a constitutional system, they argued. He was constrained by the law, for that limitation—rule by law and not by a king—was the essence of the nation’s self-identification. In times of war, the constraints were certainly relaxed, but that didn’t mean there were no constraints."

To reiterate what I said in the last post, today was a small victory for the critics. Thank God for checks and balances. The whole article is worth the read.

#184 Landmark Decision

As the post title indicates, a major case of constitutional law was decided today right under the noses of most Americans: Boumediene v. Bush. In a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal court. The ruling essentially restores habeas corpus, overturns parts of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and may spell the beginning of the end of Guantanamo as a detention center. This is due to the fact that one of the major reasons for keeping prisoners off of our shores at the base was to skirt habeas corpus. Today SCOTUS rejected that whole line of argument and checked the Bush/Cheney dictatorial power grab. It was buried in the headlines of CNN.com but it was, I think, a test case for our country's respect of the rule of law.

Various bloggers are reading through the decision. Here are some of the key snippets they have come across.

Sullivan quotes part of the majority opinion written by Justice Kennedy:

"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

That's something apparently Bush hasn't been aware of over the past 8 years. Kennedy goes on:

"To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on and off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say what the law is... Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers ... Within the Constitution's separation-of-powers structure, few exercises of judicial power are as legitimate or as necessary as the responsibility to hear challenges to the authority of the Executive to imprison a person."

Tim Lynch at CATO notices the following passage:

“The test for determining the scope of this [habeas] provision must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain.”

Today was a victory for the rule of law, the Constitution, and it's provision for checks and balances by the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Today was a victory for conservatism. Interestingly enough, the dissenting opinions came from Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito. While I agree with those four on the issue of abortion, I am disgusted by their dissenting opinion today.

#183 Ignatius Calls Out Osteen

A long time ago Ignatius, one of the early Christian fathers, anticipated what would become of the Christian media and the prosperity gospel when he warned the Trallians in a letter to them:

"Keep off foreign fare, by which I mean heresy. For those people mingle Jesus Christ with their teachings just to gain your confidence under false pretenses. It is as if they were giving a deadly poison mixed with honey and wine, with the result that the unsuspecting victim gladly accepts it and drinks down death with fatal pleasure."

If that sentence I italicized doesn't precisely describe Joel Osteen, then I don't know what does. On second thought, I don't know if he even bothers to waste time mentioning the name of Jesus.

#182 Fundamentalism

In response to a comment on another blog which posed the question of what theological beliefs qualify someone as a fundamentalist, I stated that I think fundamentalism isn't necessarily about theology at all. To me, fundamentalism is a mindset and it can be religious or not religious at all. Certain theological tendencies tend to more commonly grow out of a fundamentalist mindset, it is true, but off the cuff, I defined fundamentalism with three important characteristics.

To me it is an mental attitude wherein 1) a person "knows they are right" and tend to be irrational when handling objections, 2) they do not have a healthy sense of doubt in their own ability to see truth, and 3) a mentality that what's right for them is right for everybody and if necessary, verbal, mental, or even physical force is sanctioned to make things right.

By this more broad definition, Hitler was a fundamentalist. His fundamental belief was that Jews were the scourge of the German people. Regardless of the absurdity of this claim, he had no doubt of his rightness, he could not be talked out of it because of his certainty, and this certainty justified any means necessary to achieve what he perceived as the ultimate good of the German people.

It has been common to call Fascism a right-wing ideology while at least one contemporary author, NROs Jonah Goldberg, has written about Liberal Fascism. But I think it's important to note that genocide can be perpetrated by anybody convinced of the justness of their own cause. In fact, a lot of bad things far short of genocide can be perpetrated when someone has certainty, has no sense of doubt, and believes that consequences dictate morality.

As a reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog writes,

"To properly understand religious fundamentalism it is necessary to realize that 'fundamentalism' has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with mindset. A quote on your site by George Orwell states 'to see what is in front of nose needs a constant struggle', this is indeed very true, and the fundamentalist mindset is in the relinquishing of that struggle. One no longer needs to learn the basic realities of life and build from those as all of those assumptions have already been assigned to you."

Andrew responds,

"For me, fundamentalism is not just a distortion of faith but a negation of it. Faith, in my view, should not be blind. It should have the widest eyes imaginable. Nothing that is true should stand in the way of faith, unless one has already conceded that one is believing in a lie. And so science is not to be feared but embraced. And historical scholarship is to be plumbed not ignored. And debate is to be welcomed, not policed. It is only through this process of doubt and questioning that real faith emerges."

Amen to that.

#181 Interesting Links XX

First, 2 bloggers that you should check out:

Michael Bird at Euangelion: There are a lot of biblical studies scholarly bloggers out there but Mike Bird has, by far been consistently the best over the course of my few years of sifting through the offerings. He knows his stuff and has the ability to apply what he knows in a practical and engaging way. Add him to your reader

Daniel Larison's Eunomia at The American Conservative: As I said in a previous post, Larison may be the smartest, most perceptive blogger on the web. He always seems to notice the nuance of everything he reads, all the way down to the individual words that are used. Rather than trying to push an ideology for its own sake and risk straining the evidence, he focuses on rather on the quality of arguments themselves. He makes other writers look lazy by comparison. This is the reason he may be the best blogger around. He blogs on politics and occasionally Easter Orthodoxy.

And ten other links:

The Time the British Tried to Conquer Baghdad - T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, sounds prophetic in the quote at this link.

It's OK To Live Together Before Marriage - I've been saying this for a long time. And now a new study is backing me up. Just like I was way ahead of my time in saying that violent video games do not cause violence, violence causes violent video games, I am way ahead of my time on cohabitation before marriage, though I did not go that route myself.

Michael Bird and then Ben Myers on the Peter Enns dismissal from WTS.

The Bearded Font - The entire alphabet made up of different beard styles!

Here's a couple great posts on the superiority of baseball. My mind is always debating which one I love more, baseball or college football. By the way, if you haven't seen Ken Burns' baseball documentary, you need to watch it.

• John Rawls, one of the most influential American philosophers of the 20th century, on the superiority of baseball.
• Kim Fabricious, who does great guests post on various theology blogs, with 10 reasons why baseball is God's game.

After seeing so many garbage books trying to hold Jesus up as some kind of model for business leadership, Ruth Tucker smells what I'm stepping in by acknowledging Jesus as a failed leader. Amen, I'm glad somebody finally spoke out.

Michael Spencer on what gays and lesbians hear from evangelicals.

Here's the first post wherein Greg Boyd (famous for open theology and God vs. devil war rhetoric) examines the Old Testament texts sanctioning violence. If you can find the rest, go for it. I'm not going to take the time to link to all of them.

Ryan Holiday on how to master what you read.

#180 Twain on History

In a quote often attributed to Mark Twain an important correction is made a common phrase. "History doesn't repeat itself, of course, but it sure does rhyme." This is an important distinction because were history to repeat itself, we could easily avoid the same mistakes. However, it takes greater discernment when linking precedent with current event isn't quite as straightforward. Below is a London Daily Express cartoon from December 1922. How much do you know about the 20th century history of Iraq?