I’m on a posting binge this morning. I caught up on some old Planet Money blog posts, and I saw this one TED presentation.
The speaker was introducing gapminder.org, which is a new online service to visual trends in the types of statistical data that governments and NGOs have been ferreting away since the 1960s. The idea is to be able to see the changes that have happened, and challenge many of the myths that define how we think about the world. This stuff is seriously awesome.
“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?” he said.
“Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?”
“Absol–well, okay.”
“Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?”
“All right, I’ll grant you that, but–”
“Saving civilization from a horde of–”
“It doesn’t do any good in the long run is what I’m saying, Nobby, if you’d listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply.
“Yeah, but in the long run, what does Sarge?”
I’ve spent the better part of the last year trying to figure out exactly what Twitter is good for. I think I might be getting an inkling.
Saving civilization from a horde of black-robed Mullahs?
We’ll see.
Twitter seems to be what newsgathering will look like in a post-Journalism world. CNN was 24 hours behind twitter in picking up on the brewing crisis after the election. And Twitter re-scheduled maintenance on their server farm to not interfere with Iranians using it. As wired put it recently, when commenting on the MySpace loosing ground to Facebook:
When your server farm’s service schedule has an impact on Middle East Peace you are onto something big — much bigger than which garden-variety walled garden has more members.
I’m being hyperbolic (at least slightly), but it does seem like a pertinent question when you juxtapose the new release of the “Patriot’s Bible” from Thomas Nelson with comments made by some prominent Republican politicians at the “Rediscovering God in America” event that was broadcast over the web on God.tv
Some select quotes from Gingerich and Huckabee re-posted on Hamptonroads.com
Huckabee told the audience he was disturbed to hear President Barack Obama say during his speech in Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday that one nation shouldn’t be exalted over another.
“The notion that we are just one of many among equals is nonsense,” Huckabee said. The United States is a “blessed” nation, he said, calling American revolutionaries’ defeat of the British empire “a miracle from God’s hand.”
The same kind of miracle, he said, led California voters to approve Proposition 8, which overturned a state law legalizing same-sex marriages…
“I am not a citizen of the world,” said Gingrich, who was first elected to the U.S. House from Georgia in 1978 and served as speaker from 1995 to 1999. “I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator.”
(emphasis mine)
I’m not horribly surprised to hear this type of blather coming from Huckabee, but it’s hard to believe that Gingerich is engaged in anything other than pandering to the religious right. The belief in American Exceptionalism is an old one in the United States, but it seems like Americans are more interested in worshiping at the altar of Nationalism. Are we being led down the same road as the Church was in Germany, where the voice of the Church will be so bound to the State that it will compromise our ability to preach the Gospel? Or do the evangelical churches in America even have a message besides coddling the sensitivities of middle-class American suburbanites?
So, the other night on Faceblah, Darin was getting rather apoplectic about “the Patriot’s Bible” recently released by Thomas Nelson publishers. Greg Boyd, author of “Myth of a Christian Nation” gives a highlight tour of some of the more egregious sections here. And this is the advertising video posted on youtube:
Boyd, of course, is rather upset by wrapping the Bible up in a flag. Now, I have to agree that this stuff is, to put it very mildly, a bit of a stretch. At the end Boyd makes the comment;
I’ll end by simply noting that the very fact that there’s a sizable market for this Bible (why else would Thomas Nelson Publisher’s publish it?) is a sad commentary on the state of the church in America.
So, is there a “sizeable” market for this type of Bible? Quite simply, yes, there is. Mashing up the Biblical text with a commentary pushing a certain, perhaps questionable, theology is a hallowed tradition in American Evangelicalism (see the Scofield Reference Bible for instance), but is early twenty-first century America reaching an even newer low? To quote from the introduction to Stephen Prothero’s “Religious Literacy”:
Pop psychology has elbowed biblical exegesis out of many born-again pulpits (including some of the most successful megachurches), self-help books outsell theological works in most Christian bookstores and loving Jesus has replaced affirming the Westminster Confession as the soul of evangelical piety. Despite their conviction that the Bible is the Word of God, evangelicals show scant interest in learning what scripture has to say or wrestling with what it might mean. “I have watched with growing disbelief as the evangelical church has cheerfully plunged into astounding theological illiteracy,” writes evangelical theologian David E Wells. Even in the Bible Belt, the Good Book is fast becoming as another evangelical puts it, “The Greatest Story Never Read.”
In an effort to get evangelical youth to read that unread story, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson initiated in 2000 a series of ‘Biblezines,” which reprint the entire New Testament in a format guaranteed to attract American teens. The glossy magazine Revolve (for teen girls) looks like a Christian Seventeen complete with beauty secrets, a feature called “Are You Dating a Godly Guy” and fashion tips (”Just make sure you look like a child of God”). Refuel (for guys) has the frenetic feel of ESPN: The Magazine and offers tips on such “practical” matters as wrestling an alligator and handling a jalapeno. (”Man, it’s like dealing with the burning problem of sin. You need to grab the right solution. Get Jesus.”) Real— for hip-hoppers—offers “Dope Christian Rhymes” and a series of articles by ex-cons called “Jail Ain’t No joke” The concept here is simple: young people don’t read the Bible because it’s too imposing, too hard to understand, too square; but if you put it in a friendly format they’ll eat it up. This concept has been a huge commercial success. Thomas Nelson claims that Revolve “became America’s #1 selling Bible in less than 3 months after it was originally released” in July 2003, It is doubtful, however, that these godly glossies arc doing much to wipe our biblical ignorance among American youth. When I assigned Refuel one week to students in a seminar on the Bible in American culture, many admitted that they skipped entirely over the New Testament text, reading instead the “extreme” side- bars, which gyrated around the edges of each page, demanding attention like a hyperactive child. One student was convinced that Refuel was an Onion-style parody. In either case the biblical message was literally lost in translation.
The simple fact is that Americans, especially Evangelicals, have stopped reading the Bible. Thomas Nelson has hit on the fact that to sell bibles to a market that is completely saturated with, and largely uninterested in reading, the Bible, you have to wrap it up in something else - a “Biblezine” targeting a segment of youth culture or a themed package like the Patriot’s Bible. Thomas Nelson would probably make the argument that they are simply giving the consumer what they want. The problem, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is that the medium is the message. It started out rather innocuously with “African” and “Womens study” Bibles, that offered commentary highlighting the role of marginalized groups within the biblical text, but we seem to be moving towards Bibles that are more human opinion about the Word of God than the actual Word of God.
Wall Street mogul was arrested today by the FBI after his sons turned him in for what is possibly the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme. From the Wall Street Journal:
Ms. Leavitt said she recently discussed her investment with a friend who told her he was suspicious about the firm’s ability to generate such profits amid the economic crisis. “I thought, ‘He’s probably just jealous,’Â ” said Ms. Leavitt. “We’ve been with [Mr. Madoff] for 15 years, and it’s grown every year at 10%.”
If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom of this economic crisis. It’s going to take more than Washington throwing money at the Street like drunken salarymen at a strip club to restore confidence in the financial sector. This was a company managing 17 billion in assets, and the whole thing is going into receivership. According to the article, Madoff told his sons he lost around $50 Billion in investor money, paying the older investors dividends with money from the newer investors. He got caught out because the liquidity in the market dried up and he couldn’t raise enough capital to keep the ball rolling.
In a report to the Army last year, Dr. Arkin described some of the potential benefits of autonomous fighting robots. For one thing, they can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness, Dr. Arkin wrote, and they can be made invulnerable to what he called “the psychological problem of ‘scenario fulfillment,’ †which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.
His report drew on a 2006 survey by the surgeon general of the Army, which found that fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents. More than one-third said torture was acceptable under some conditions, and fewer than half said they would report a colleague for unethical battlefield behavior.
In 1564 French Huguenots set up Fort Caroline in Spanish-claimed lands near the St. John’s River in Florida. In 1565, these religious dissenters were massacred by a Spanish expedition:
I’m not sure why exactly, but this doll disturbs me.
Buy Talking Jesus
https://www.buytalkingjesus.com/?cid=544908
Maybe it’s the “authentic” linen robes (as opposed to the faux linen that all the plants rights activists are sporting these days?), the “coarse shawl” (Jesus wore a shawl?) or possibly the rope belt (but is it authentic hemp?), but there’s something that bothers me.
Oh, yeah, it’s probably that we’re supposed to believe that somehow a child will “Create a personal connection with Jesus our Savior” via a talking doll that recites “key” verses from the bible.
But wait! There’s more! You can get it from the same place that will sell you “beer tubes” which, they claim, will keep your beer colder than regular pitchers because of their marble conic base.
