Some thoughts and questions in light of the George Zimmerman verdict:
The American judicial system is our judicial system. If we want it to change, it’s up to us to change it. Are we willing to do so?
Despite the apparent miscarriage of justice in this case, do we really want to conduct trials in the court of public opinion? Should trials be turned into a reality TV show where we collectively vote for people’s guilt and innocence?
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In a recent online discussion regarding the Bible and homosexuality, one participant brought up the fact that Jesus never directly addressed the issue of homosexuality. To my surprise, another participant claimed that Jesus most certainly did condemn homosexuality in Matthew 15.19: “For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.” (NRSV)
This person claimed that “fornication,” or πορνεία in Greek, specifically includes homosexuality and cited Thayer’s Greek Lexicon as defining πορνεία as: “adultery, fornication, homosexuality, lesbianism, intercourse with animals etc.”
Actor and musician Yasiin Bey, aka Mos Def, recently released a video in which he undergoes the force-feeding procedure that hunger-striking prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are being subjected to. You can read a first-hand account here, or watch the video yourself:
Bey has been applauded for drawing attention to the plight of the prisoners as well as criticized for using his celebrity to sensationalize and over-simplify a complex issue. Emily Greenhouse discusses some of the controversy in her blog piece for the New Yorker.
But whether you think Bey’s contribution to this cause is substantive or not, let’s not forget the real issue regarding the situation at Guantanamo. Every attempt to marginalize or discredit Bey’s message amounts to little more than a call to ignore these facts:
The World Medical Association, in its Declaration of Tokyo, says:
Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially. The decision as to the capacity of the prisoner to form such a judgment should be confirmed by at least one other independent physician. The consequences of the refusal of nourishment shall be explained by the physician to the prisoner.
This declaration has been endorsed by the American Medical Association. AMA President Dr. Jeremy Lazarus, in a letter Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, cites the Tokyo declaration and adds:
Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions
The WMA also declare, in their Declaration of Malta, that:
Forcible feeding is never ethically acceptable. Even if intended to benefit, feeding accompanied by threats, coercion, force or use of physical restraints is a form of inhuman and degrading treatment. Equally unacceptable is the forced feeding of some detainees in order to intimidate or coerce other hunger strikers to stop fasting.
In light of the declarations from the WMA, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has said that:
treating a competent detainee without his or her consent — including force feeding — is a violation of the right to health, as well as international ethics for health professionals.
and
force-feeding of detainees on hunger strike must be assessed as amounting to torture as defined in article 1 of the Convention against Torture.
These declarations are all well and good, but they merely formally confirm what should be patently obvious to any person with a sense of morality: what’s happening at Guantanamo is deeply wrong.
The real problem with this issue is not its moral ambiguity or political intricacies, the problem is that the plight of the Guantanamo prisoners is far too easy to ignore. It doesn’t affect our lives. We don’t see it in front of us. We go about our day in a self-absorbed haze and are, generally speaking, far more concerned with what we’re going to have for lunch than with the fact that people are being strapped to a chair and forced to have lunch. We eat a hamburger while prisoners have tubes shoved down their noses.
Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away and doesn’t make it any less serious. If we claim to care about people, to care about their rights and their lives and their freedoms, then we can’t sit idly by while the very government that purports to stand for those freedoms blatantly abuses them. Every human life has value and until we recognize and protect that value — for all people, not just those that look like us and think like us and believe like us — we, as a country, as a culture and as a world, are settling for a second-rate society that simply isn’t sustainable. Until we properly acknowledge the importance of these issues and directly face the consequences of our national policies, we’ll continue to sacrifice the sanctity of life for selfish interests.
In the words of Mos Def from Fear Not of Man:
from my understanding people get better
when they start to understand that they are valuable
And they’re not valuable because they’ve got a whole lot of money
or ’cause somebody thinks they’re sexy
but they’re valuable ’cause they’ve been created by God
And God makes you valuable
The prisoners at Guantanamo, regardless of how they got there or what they believe, were created by God and have inherent value. When we deny that value we not only devalue them but also devalue ourselves — and, ultimately, we devalue God.
For more information, visit reprieve.org.uk and standfastforjustice.org.
The American Atheists unveiled a public monument in Florida today and have plans to build more around the country.
When I first heard this story I wondered, a monument to what? To no-god? To non-belief? Monuments usually stand for something, not for not-something. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to erect a monument to science, or to reason, or to humanity or to nature? This is part of the problem with modern militant atheism: it all too often defines itself not with positive truth claims, but rather solely in opposition to vague and stereotypical notions of religions belief. Sure, “secular humanism” and “metaphysical naturalism” don’t have the same firecracker snap of “atheism,” but for a movement that purports to value truth over ideology, it seems like you’d want to make it explicitly clear from the outset precisely what you stand for. To borrow a trick from the atheist playbook: erecting a monument to atheism makes about as much sense as erecting a monument to non-stamp collecting. (more…)
The title of this post is an honest question that I’d like to hear your answer to: why are you or why aren’t you an evangelical Christian?
What does the term “evangelical Christian” mean to you? Is it a useful distinction that clarifies theological positions, or is it merely a word that furthers divisiveness?
If you don’t consider yourself to be an evangelical, what does it mean to you to be a Christian? How do you define your Christianity in a way that excludes evangelical distinctives but still holds true to positive statements of faith?
If you do consider yourself to be an evangelical, how do you understand your faith in relation to non-evangelical Christians? What makes you different? What makes you the same?
I think that all Christians are (or should be) evangelical … and the more I think about it, the less I see a way of being a Christian that isn’t evangelical. But I understand that term means many things to many people and is often encumbered by an enormous amount of baggage. And, when it is used to label a particular “brand” of Christianity, it is often entirely unhelpful in delineating essential differences. It either becomes a pejorative used to marginalize someone on the far right of the theological spectrum, or it is little more than synonym for “true, Bible-believing” Christian, as opposed to the so-called “Christians” whose liberalism destines them to hell.
So, for all three of my readers, what are your responses to these questions?
*Also see my follow-up post: Some thoughts on evangelicalism.
Help Me Be: Praying in Poems by Dale Fredrickson is a thoughtful collection of modern psalms. Fredrickson takes inspiration from Walter Brueggemann’s Praying the Psalms, dividing this collection into three parts: Orientation (Or, Life is Good), Disorientation (Or, Life is Not Good) and New Orientation (or Life is Good Again). The poems function as prayers and laments to God, praising and glorifying him, crying out to him in despair and contemplating the mysteries and beauty of our relationship with him … exactly what the Biblical Psalms do. (more…)
It’s summer and I’m taking a bit of a hiatus from the blog. I’ll be back in a few weeks with some very big announcements! Till then …
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped
Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Pope Francis has garnered quite a bit of attention for his comments last Wednesday regarding atheists and his claim that everyone is redeemed by the blood of Christ. He said, in part:
The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! “Father, the atheists?” Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all!