People who don’t believe in God are constantly disparaged as immoral by those who do. Many conservatives believe that most of what they perceive to be wrong with the world can be traced to secular humanism, a phrase they can barely utter without spitting. For them, secular humanism is a…
When my friend Doug wrote that “God loves us like an abusive parent,” it sounded so very harsh, but it then reminded me of that most troublesome of concepts: hell.
I was raised Catholic, where hell was portrayed to be a very bad place to go. Many Catholics, however, and many liberal Christians, don’t believe that hell is a place where people are literally tortured. Check out today’s conservative Christians, however, on your local AM radio station. You’ll hear them fervently arguing that the version of hell taught by moderate Christians is way off the mark. Hell is not a metaphor or a mere figure of speech. Here’s what it is:
The reality of hell is the most horrifying, terror striking, fearful truth known to man. It encompasses the worst possible fear and the meanest conceivable existence, continual never-ending torture. “And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever (Revelation 20:10).”
Therefore, many fundamentalists believe that someone sent to hell will be (literally) tortured (literally) forever. It will be like being forced to go to Dachau, the Rape of Nanking, Abu Ghraib or worse, for eternity.
When did careful planning and execution become un-cool in real life? Probably about the same time it became un-cool in Hollywood.
Think how the American hero has evolved. He used to be smart, principled and disciplined. Not anymore. Where we used to have student-of-the-game Ted Williams, we now have Barry Bonds. Where we used to have Atticus Finch, Rick Blaine and Jefferson Smith we have hot-headed Lt. Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise). Planners and careful executers include heroes as diverse as Rocky Bilboa and Gandhi. Heroes-who-plan include soldiers from starkly different backgrounds, such as the soldiers in The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen.
Modern television and movies don’t offer heroes who intelligently plan and collaborate with others to save the day. A television show offering this in the 60’s was Mission Impossible. The Impossible Mission Force was a group of specialists who actually sat down to plan their mission at the beginning of each show.
Modern heroes rarely sit down to plan their missions. They bristle at the thought of collaborating. Modern protagonists are reactive, not planners. Think of Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Terminator II. These are individualistic hot headed rejecters of collaboration. When they succeed in the end it is because they got lucky at that last desperate moment, not because they pondered contingencies before setting out. Interestingly, if you want planning and execution, look to Hollywood’s villains, people such as Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader or Batman’s Joker.
Salon.com offers a review of Mike Davis' distressing new book: "Planet of Slums." According to Davis, most of Earth's growth "is occurring in shantytowns and tenements stretching from Karachi, Pakistan, to Lima, Peru, where people live crowded together in densities that sometime dwarf those of such notorious 19th century human…
Three years ago, my 96-year-old grandfather was dying and he was upset. But he wasn’t upset about dying. He approached his own death with great inner strength. What made him upset was that his government had needlessly invaded Iraq. Because Iraq was not a threat, he said, we were squandering precious resources better used at home. The Iraq invasion was an alien idea to my grandfather’s conservative values. Until his death in May of 2004, he lamented that the invasion would result in an intractable mess with no palatable solution.
His assessment has proven correct. Every day, we are paying 200 million more dollars to prolong this bloody occupation. That’s $100,000 per minute. That’s a lot of money. St. Louis baseball fans who revel at the near completion of the new stadium for the St. Louis Cardinals might appreciate that this war effort is the financial equivalent of buying a new major league baseball stadium every two days. The cost of the Iraq war so far could have paid for 32 million children to attend a year of Head Start.
The $350 billion we will have spent on this war (by the end of 2006) amounts to more than $3,500 for each American household. There is also a more precious resource to consider; the occupation is killing more than sixty American soldiers every month, almost 2,400 troops killed to date. This is the equivalent of crashing a packed airliner every other month. Nor must we forget that this …