Geoff's Miscellany

When I was in college, I went to a mewithoutYou concert and the band played this song for, if I remember what they said properly, the first time. That version used to be posted online. Seems to be gone. But it's a great song

If I had written it back in the days when I wrote a lot of poetry, I'd have probably included some lines about Amnon, Absalom, Joab, Jonathan, and Saul. But it's not my song. Nevertheless, it is a marvelous work of art. There's a weird thing with the timeline of David's life in the song, but that's okay. It's worth a listen and then ten more. I hope you enjoy it.

In response to efforts of the American leaders in the United Methodist Church to influence Africa's Methodists to reject the Biblical teaching on homosexual marraige, they did not budge:

I thank God for His precious Word to us, and I thank him for you, my dear sisters and brothers in Christ.
As the General Coordinator of UMC Africa Initiative I greet you on behalf of all its members and leaders. We want to thank the  Renewal and Reform Coalition within the United Methodist Church for the invitation to address you at this important breakfast meeting.
As I understand it, the plans before us seek to find a lasting solution to the long debate over our church’s sexual ethics, its teachings on marriage, and it[s] ordination standards.
This debate and the numerous acts of defiance have brought the United Methodist Church to a crossroads (Jeremiah 6:16).
One plan invites the people called United Methodists to take a road in opposition to the Bible and two thousand years of Christian teachings. Going down that road would divide the church. Those advocating for the One Church Plan would have us take that road.
Another road invites us to reaffirm Christian teachings rooted in Scripture and the church’s rich traditions...

Beauty, according to the Thomists, is rightproportion, brilliance, and integrity. Evolutionary theorists have tried, and in some cases managed, to find biological grounding for our concepts of beauty. For instance, they at least seem to grasp the relationship between human beauty and reproductive viability, but even these relationships are associational rather than necessary.

But it is more ineffable than that. David Bentley Hart is more expansive:

Steinem argued in the 1980s that opposing abortion is actually a secret form of Nazism, and she repeats the argument in an interview below:

Well, the new generation of reader is instructing me by saying that these essays are still relevant …. on a more serious note, to put it mildly, is why Hitler was actually elected, and he was elected and he campaigned against abortion. I mean, that was — he padlocked the family planning clinics. Okay, so that is still relevant in the terms of the right wing. So there were very few things, actually, that I had to take out.

No man is an island, even conceptually.

We see ourselves enmeshed in multple layers reality:

1. Family
2. City
3. Nation
4. Sport teams
5. Religious groups
6. The physical world
7. Etc

There are certainly more elements to this and many of our social selves instantiate precisely to fit into these groups. So we behave differently at work than at home, in a forrest than at church, at a restaurant than at a friend's house, etc.

More and more articles on the standard Christian websites and highly read blogs have articles that follow this pattern:

1. I used to believe idea 'X.'
2. After agonizing, recognizing how bigoted the church was, and really following the Holy Spirit [God told me!], I realized I was wrong about 'X.'
3. Now that I believe 'Not X,' many evangelicals seem to disagree with me and it hurts.

Belief 'X' is almost always something like traditional Christian sexual ethics, the Biblical restriction on divorce, being pro-life, believing that God is real (not even kidding), or believing the Bible is inspired or even accurate at all.

Mike Heiser makes a compelling case against referring to the rabbinical authors uncritically when trying to understand the Bible:

You have to realize appealing to rabbis means nothing. Rabbinic thought and biblical thought (and academic work) are miles apart. Hey Christians enamored with rabbis: The rabbis can’t even get the messiah right (or, to be more charitable, the two powers in heaven doctrine right — that belief they used to have in Judaism until it became uncomfortable due to Christianity). If you’ve ever listened to Ben Shapiro (I’m a fan of the show) you know what I mean. He often does “Bible time” on his podcast. But what you get isn’t exegesis of the text in its ancient context. What you get is rabbinic opinion (with all the contrarian rabbinic opinions shelved to the side). Rabbinic interpretation (think Talmud and Mishnah) contradicts itself over and over again. That’s what those works do — they fling opinions at each other. That Hebrew food fight got codified into the Talmud and Mishnah. And Judaism is fine with that. We shouldn’t be. Most of what you’d find in rabbinic writings bears little to no resemblance of exegetical work in the text understood in light of its original ancient Near Eastern worldview. Not even close. They’re frequently making stuff up (they apply biblical material to situations in which the community found itself in; the work of the rabbis was responsive to community circumstances — it’s very applicational or situational).

A great deal of "the literature" about ancient Sparta includes the citizens of that great city in the numbers of those ancient Greek perverts who practiced pederasty.

Paul Cartledge is among the many academicians who have accepted this myth:

One particularly striking instance of this displaced or surrogate fathering was the institution of ritualized pederasty. After the age of twelve, every Spartan teenager was expected to receive a young adult warrior as his lover – the technical Spartan term for the active senior partner was ‘inspirer’, while the junior partner was known as the ‘hearer’. The relationship was probably usually sexual, but sex was by no means the only or even always the major object. The pedagogic dimension is nicely brought out in the tale of a Spartan youth who made the mistake of crying out in pain during one of the regular brutally physical contests that punctuated progress through the Agoge.

Conservatives rarely conserve anything. This is well known.

What they like to do is make conservative cases for making society worse. For instance:

henever you find an article that begins with the title, “The Conservative Case” for or against something, lock your door, check your wallet, and grab your gun. You know what’s coming is an unadulterated sell-out of everything “conservatism” purports to hold dear.

I've wondered this for a while. Why do folks with doctoral degrees, who look down on others for their stupidity, nevertheless reject the value of IQ tests? Why do academics who believe in the power of ethnic solidarity and identity politics also believe that human beings are born as blank slates? Why do academics who oppose fascism, support larger government all the time? Why do academics who believe in the sexual revolution decry rape culture which is essentially the direct result of that revolution (devolution)?