Mozilla Labs’ new Ubiquity product looks very, very cool. Watch the video:
I’ve already installed it.
Terrific opening, and it doesn’t let up:
Let me put my cards on the table right from the outset. I am sick and tired of hearing Christians who have something at stake in the status quo of economic, social and political systems of injustice appealing to Romans 13 to legitimate unswerving obedience to oppressive and deceitful regimes.
I generally hold that Thomas Friedman is an idiot. His unwavering, utopian support of globalization and “free” markets causes me to wonder whether he is evil or just plain stupid. However, this op-ed had some good things to say:
After appointments here in Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day here. If I lived in a city that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the airport, I’d go to work that way, too. It means less traffic, less pollution and less obesity…
Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)
…“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil.”
I live in a city which is still debating whether or not rapid transit is a good idea and is making some very sincere but half-assed motions in the direction of supporting cyclist commuters. Perhaps we should send our mayor and city councilors to Copenhagen for a working holiday.
Yes, you read the title correctly. I’ve followed a fairly typical trajectory of being brought up with “I’m a lowly worm” theology towards an understanding of humans as essentially good, if marred by by sin. I was always under the impression that this was the “right” trajectory, but I’m having second thoughts, partly due to Scot McKnight’s series on original sin, and partly because of the following passage from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.
Taylor looks at our seeming fundamental recognition — no matter our beliefs — that something is wrong with us and in the world. Christians explain this wrongness in terms of evil as embodied in original sin, while the materialist-humanist notions of wrongness tend towards the category of sickness. Taylor goes on to make come interesting comparisons (some of which I anticipated in an older post, Demons and Germs):
So the difference is this: evil has the dignity of an option for an apparent good; sickness has not. This dignity is conceded, even in the discourse of conversion that purports to show evil up as false good, and hence really empty, really only a kind of alienation. It is conceded not in the text, but in the context, in the manner of address, which recognizes the power of the oponent.
Now the pathos involved in the triumph of the therapeutic is this: One reason to throw over the spritiual perspective [of] evil/holiness was to reject the idea that our normal, middle-range existence is imperfect. We’re perfectly all right as we are, as “natural” beings. So the dignity of ordinary, “natural” existence is even further enhanced. This ought to have liberated us from what were recognized frequently as the fruits of sin: impotence, division, anguish, spleen, melancholy, emptiness, incapacity, paralyzing gloom, acedia, etc. But in fact hese abound.
Only now, as afflictions of beings destined for middle-range normalcy, they must be seen as the result of sickness. They must be treated therapeutically. But the person being treated is now being approached as one who is just incapacitated. He has less dignity than the sinner. So what was supposed to enhance our dignity has reduced it. We are just to be dealt with, manipulated into health.
From another angle: casting off religion was meant to free us, give us our full dignity of agnets; throwing off the tutelage of religion, hence of the church, hence of the clergy. But now we are forced to go to new experts, therapists, doctors, who exercise the kind of control that is appropriate over blind and compulsive mechanisms; who may even be administering drugs to us. Our sick selves are even more being talked down to, just treated as things, than were the faithful of yore in churches.
A Secular Age, 619-20.
Here’s a video from Taylor Mali, responding to the query of “what do teachers make?” It’s a brilliant rebuttal to a world of crass materialism where success is measured by your pay stub rather than by who you are.
(HT: Robbymac)
William T. Cavanaugh’s seminal 1995 essay “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State” seeks to dismantle the myth of the modern secular state as the peacemaker who stepped onto the scene a few hundred years ago to quell religious violence. Instead, Cavanaugh argues, the so-called Wars of Religion were in fact the birth pangs of the modern state. The peacemaker narrative was simply a solid bit of early PR to cover up the violent ambitions of the nation-state. He adds that
to call these conflicts “Wars of Religion” is an anachronism, for what was at issue in these wars was the very creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs without direct political relevance. The creation of religion was necessitated by the new State’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects. (399)
But the truly quotable part of this essay comes in quite a bit later, when Cavanaugh compares the state to the mob:
In an article entitled “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” sociologist Charles Tilly explores the analogy of the State’s monopoly on legitimate violence with the protection rackets run by the friendly neighborhood mobster. According to Tilly “a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer services to willing customers, the idea of a society whose shared norms and expectations call forth a certain kind of government.” States extort large sums of money and the right to send their citizens out to kill and die in exchange for protection from violence both internal and external to the State’s borders. What converts war making from “protection” to “protection racket” is the fact that often States offer defense from threats which they themselves create, threats which can be imaginary or the real results of the State’s own activities. Furthermore, the internal repression and the extraction of money and bodies for “defense” that the State carries out are frequently among the most substantial impediments to the ordinary citizens’ livelihood. The “offer you can’t refuse” is usually the most costly. The main difference between Uncle Sam and the Godfather is that the latter did not enjoy the peace of mind afforded by official government sanction.
This analogy not only works well, it penetrates to the heart of the matter. We’re all victims of extortion. The only way out is to cease to fear the (very real) threat of violence on the part of the state. And I can think of no more powerful way to do so than to be radically identified with the death and resurrection of Jesus, where we no longer fear the ability of the state to destroy our bodies. This is what 1 Jn 4:18 is talking about when it says that “perfect love drives out fear.”
(When quoting above, I am using the page numbers in the original Modern Theology article. Jesus Radicals has a Cavanaugh resources page where you can grab this essay [minus page numbers, unfortunately] along with a few others by him.)
