God's injustice, or ours?

Pastor Ken Klaus' Oct 29 Devotion was entitled "Maybe, Maybe Not."

In it, he spoke of how the story of Anne Frank deeply touched his heart. He spoke of how he saw a dramatic production of her diary where Anne is portrayed watching a wedding. Pastor Klaus says this image deeply tore at his heart, because he knew how her story ends. Then Pastor Klaus immediately launches into a religious lesson.

Good, he should do so, I say. If our religion isn't influenced by or has an answer to the worst horrors around it, how can it be either useful or from the divine? I myself was thinking, yes, I remember hearing about Corrie Ten Boom's sister was bald, naked, miserable, and lice-covered in an concentration camp. How can we think that anyone deserves such treatment, even today? (We do have our own concentration camps. Even liberal TV personalities joke about how something awful-sounding ought to be played to Guantanamo captives; Alabama prison officials are dreaming up new ways to torture inmates. )

The problem is that Pastor Klaus spoke of the injustice of God and not the injustice of people. He said that the holocaust that awaits unbelievers in hell is far worse than the holocaust of the Nazis. Again, he speaks of the injustice of God and not the injustice of people. This is the conservative heresy.

On the contrary, I say people are unjust and God is just. Suppose:

A nut on the street were to tell you a giant space dragon is angry at you, YES YOU, in that you are complacent with the torture and sexual humiliation of detainees at Guantanamo, but that he sent his only baby dragon to earth, and it too was tortured & killed at Guantanamo, and if only you believed in the dragon, he'd forgive you.

This is entirely different from what we have seen from Pastor Klaus:

There's a space dragon that has prepared a living hell for all the inhabitants of earth and the only way to survive is to pay tribute to its baby dragon.

I imagine you'd have an entirely different reaction to our two hypothetical nuts. Heaven and the promise of salvation are for people who are in hell because of their sins. For those who know they are living decent lives, you're not going to get very far with such a brick to the head. Carlton Pearson, a former evangelical preacher featured in a "This American Life" episode, said he used to turn to the person sitting next to him on airplanes and say, "You're going to hell." This is essentially what Pastor Klaus has done.

The order for Confession of Sins found in the red hymnal of the Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod says,

I confess unto Thee all my sins and iniquities with which I have ever offended Thee and justly deserved Thy temporal and eternal punishment.

This is a basis of witnessing.

As I've said before, in certain evangelical circles, Damnation is the primary problem and the Act of Believing is the primary solution. In a Theology of the Cross, Sin is the primary problem and the Cross is the primary solution.

High Fives

High Fives, originally uploaded by rofreg.

Did you know this was what the true meaning of those traffic signals?

Originally seen at the blog of Jason Eppink.

Demoscene: Orion's $21

This is an incredibly imaginative and captivating animation from demoscene. It kind of makes fun of the materialism of shopping channels or perhaps indulges in it. I ran across this years ago, and was just delighted to find it at youtube. I'd pay big bucks for more music made by the people who made this. It's ultra cool.

xkcd comic

This xkcd comic was pretty inspiring:

Cute and Cuddly, Boys

bay 055, originally uploaded by pterandon.

The penguins at the Central Park Zoo were very active. I'd never seen these birds this active and personable. It was eventually apparent that they thought we might have had fish.

11SecondClub Draft

I'm working on a new animation for the 11SecondClub October 2009 round. I usually like to work on the lip syncing first. I still have a little bit of work to do on this yet.

Hudson River Walkway

Hudson River Walkway, originally uploaded by pterandon.

Photo taken with a Google Android T-Mobile cell phone.

From the new walkway over the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie.

"Racism" and the paucity of spiritual language to describe mean-ness

There's a lot of buzz these days about racism and the off-the-wall protests against President Obama. At these rallies we see signs that are outright mean, to the point of calling for the President's assassination. In this culture, there's also a disconnectedness from reality-- from "death panels" to the false controversy about whether he is a citizen. This crowd has been called "birthers" because they doubt Obama had a U.S. birth.

Now the talking heads, religious and secular, are talking about the issue of racism in these rallies. Are the birthers inherently racist, or is race merely a factor among some of them, the talking heads ask. I think that this is ultimately a flawed approach, because I am sure that all the birthers can point to a black politician they admire, or a personal friend who is black and shares much of their culture and political aspirations. We have this litmus test that if you don't hate EVERY black man, then we call off the karma police and leave you alone. That is the problem.

Take South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson. Before he shouted "You lie!" at the president, he was involved in the following:

• Fomenting resentment at illegal aliens,
• Defending the flying of the Confederate Flag over the state capitol,
• Not only supporting the invasion of Iraq, but also getting really upset, to the point of questioning a man's patriotism, when someone pointed out we'd sold weapons to Saddam Hussein.

Now ladies and gentlemen, there's nothing wrong with being a Republican in order to advance a libertarian point of view, but what Joe Wilson does are simply things that good people do not DO.

Everyone knows what liberals do when they are evil-- they do drugs, spread venereal disease through promiscuity, then have an abortion as birth control. (Republicans might do these things, too, but these things are understood by the public to be the immoral "extremes", the fruit, of liberalism.) At the rallies against President Obama, and in the work of Joe Wilson, we are seeing the evil extremes of conservatism. We need better language to describe this than the word which means hatred of every person with a different skin color. We need to go back to the old social statements of the church.

A political "sanity check" from Spiro Agnew's assessment of the anti-Vietnam-War left

These words are from a speech by then Vice President Spiro Agnew about the anti-Vietnam War protesters. It was used as a backdrop for a song by electronica musician Professor Kliq.

This speech could be an anthem of the political right at the time. I find it a bit comforting to listen to it (at least in the form of the song) even though I've taken liberal positions on wars from Nicaragua to Iraq. I think Agnew was ultimately on the wrong side of history; I am on the side of church movements that opposed his wars. What is comforting is that it is so well-thought out. This speech might be the result of taking one of your nuttier political adversaries after the their mother, pastor, and university professors forced them to boil down their position to one based on reason and reality. There's comfort in remembering that there could be sane reasons driving the political disagreements around us. There's also comfort in looking at yourself in an uncloudy mirror, to see where you need to shape up.

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