Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 444
December 11, 2012
Countdown to Mayan apocalypse on December 21
Harold Camping’s end of the world prediction did not take place, but now we are approaching the New Age equivalent. The calendar of the ancient Mayans has time running out on our December 21, 2012. A range of New Agers, including flying saucer cultists, have picked up the theme. And in those secularist bastions of Europe, Russia, and China, panic is spreading. From the London Telegraph:
Ahead of December 21, which marks the conclusion of the 5,125-year “Long Count” Mayan calendar, panic buying of candles and essentials has been reported in China and Russia, along with an explosion in sales of survival shelters in America. In France believers were preparing to converge on a mountain where they believe aliens will rescue them.
The precise manner of Armageddon remains vague, ranging from a catastrophic celestial collision between Earth and the mythical planet Nibiru, also known as Planet X, a disastrous crash with a comet, or the annihilation of civilisation by a giant solar storm.
In America Ron Hubbard, a manufacturer of hi-tech underground survival shelters, has seen his business explode.”We’ve gone from one a month to one a day,” he said. “I don’t have an opinion on the Mayan calendar but, when astrophysicists come to me, buy my shelters and tell me to be prepared for solar flares, radiation, EMPs electromagnetic pulses … I’m going underground on the 19th and coming out on the 23rd. It’s just in case anybody’s right.”
In the French Pyrenees the mayor of Bugarach, population 179, has attempted to prevent pandemonium by banning UFO watchers and light aircraft from the flat topped mount Pic de Bugarach.
According to New Age lore it as an “alien garage” where extraterrestrials are waiting to abandon Earth, taking a lucky few humans with them.
Russia saw people in Omutninsk, in Kirov region, rushing to buy kerosene and supplies after a newspaper article, supposedly written by a Tibetan monk, confirmed the end of the world.
The city of Novokuznetsk faced a run on salt. In Barnaul, close to the Altai Mountains, panic-buyers snapped up all the torches and Thermos flasks.Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian prime minister, even addressed the situation.”I don’t believe in the end of the world,” before adding somewhat disconcertingly: “At least, not this year.”
In China, which has no history of preoccupation with the end of the world, a wave of paranoia about the apocalypse can be traced to the 2009 Hollywood blockbuster “2012″.
The film, starring John Cusack, was a smash hit in China, as viewers were seduced by a plot that saw the Chinese military building arks to save humanity.
Some in China are taking the prospect of Armageddon seriously with panic buying of candles reported in Sichuan province.The source of the panic was traced to a post on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, predicting that there will be three days of darkness when the apocalypse arrives.One grocery store owner said: “At first, we had no idea why. But then we heard someone muttering about the continuous darkness.” Shanghai police said scam artists had been convincing pensioners to hand over savings in a last act of charity.
Meanwhile in Mexico, where the ancient Mayan civilisation flourished, the end time has been seen as an opportunity. The country has organised hundreds of Maya-themed events, and tourism is expected to have doubled this year.
via Mayan apocalypse: panic spreads as December 21 nears – Telegraph.
What I want to know is, how are the Mayans supposed to know when the world will end? What inside information are they thought to have? At any rate, it is remarkable that people and societies that consider themselves too sophisticated for Christianity can nevertheless embrace New Age irrationalism.
So will there even be a Christmas this year? Some people will presumably wait to do their shopping, or perhaps max out their credit cards because they won’t have to make the payments once the world ends.
We have to worry not only about the country going over the fiscal cliff but about the whole world and maybe the whole universe going over an existential cliff into the void.
But, in the words of the great Merle Travis, if we can make it through December we’ll be fine.
How to interpret “kill Americans”
The South Korean rapper Psy–whose “Gangnam Style” goofy dance moves have become the top YouTube video of all time–was once virulently anti-American. In 2004 at an anti-Iraq war concert, he rapped these lyrics written by a South Korean metal group:
“Kill those f—— Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captive / Kill those f——- Yankees who ordered them to torture / Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers / Kill them all slowly and painfully.”
Now he is apologizing:
“While I’m grateful for the freedom to express one’s self, I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted. I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused by those words.”
My interest is not in Psy’s anti-Americanism or his violent lyrics. I’m sure his apology is sincere. But what gets me is his reference to “how these lyrics could be interpreted.” He says to kill Yankees and the girls and women in their families. In what sense is that statement in need of interpretation? How else could those words be interpreted, other than as an exhortation to kill Americans and their families?
The notion that all language statements and assertions stand in need of interpretation and may be interpreted in many different ways–including those that contradict the explicit meaning–is wreaking all kinds of havoc. Especially when treating the Bible. Theology has often become an exercise in interpreting away Biblical statements that the theologian does not agree with.
To be sure, some language calls for interpretation, but other language is clear on its face. Some of the controversies involve questions about which is which. But even interpretation is supposed to help us understand what has been said, rather than undoing what has been said.
via Heat is on South Korean rapper Psy for anti-American rap – The Washington Post.
Short sellers’ fiscal cliff
The Bush tax cuts aren’t the only measures that expire on New Year’s Day. So will the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007. Without that law, homeowners who have negotiated a short sale–that is, have part of their mortgages forgiven by the lender because they are so far underwater when they sell their home–will have to count the amount chopped off their mortgage as income for tax purposes.
Say a person owes $200,000 on his house but it’s only worth in today’s market for $100,000. If the mortgage is held by the federally regulated lender Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, there is a federal program that makes it possible for the underwater amount to be forgiven when the home is sold at market value. So in a short sale, the person might be able to sell the home for $100,000 but be clear of the mortgage. But after New Year’s Day, he will have to declare the $100,000 that Fannie Mae wrote off as if it were money that he actually received. And then pay taxes on it!
Various bipartisan bills have been proposed to extend the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, but no votes are scheduled, and it isn’t part of the package that either side is proposing in the fiscal cliff negotiations.
via Short sellers may be hit with big income tax bills if Washington doesn’t act – The Washington Post.
December 10, 2012
Supreme Court to rule on gay marriage
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases that may settle the legal status of gay marriage in this country. The court will rule on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage in federal law as being between one man and one woman. It will also rule on Proposition 8, the referendum in which California voters rejected gay marriage, only to have the vote stricken down by a federal court.
Supreme Court to hear same-sex marriage cases – The Washington Post.
What do you predict will happen?
Our legal system has long been tinkering with what marriage is supposed to be. For example, the definition of marriage as a permanent, for-better-or-worse estate was changed by no-fault divorce laws, but I don’t recall anyone complaining much.
Gutting literature from the curriculum
Educational reform efforts in the public schools are generally well-intentioned, but once they are taken over by the educational bureaucrats they often achieve the opposite of what was intended. A commendable concern to ensure that students have learned something from the classes they take, that they achieve certain “learning outcomes,” gave us the dumbing down of “Outcome based education.” The “No Child Left Behind” program left behind whole schools.
The latest reform program being foisted on all public schools is “The Common Core.” That derives from a great idea, having students learn a basic foundation of material, including reading key books. In practice, though, the Common Core is resulting in literature being gutted from the English curriculum.
The Common Core State Standards in English, which have been adopted in 46 states and the District, call for public schools to ramp up nonfiction so that by 12th grade students will be reading mostly “informational text” instead of fictional literature. But as teachers excise poetry and classic works of fiction from their classrooms, those who designed the guidelines say it appears that educators have misunderstood them
Proponents of the new standards, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, say U.S. students have suffered from a diet of easy reading and lack the ability to digest complex nonfiction, including studies, reports and primary documents. That has left too many students unprepared for the rigors of college and demands of the workplace, experts say.
The new standards, which are slowly rolling out now and will be in place by 2014, require that nonfiction texts represent 50 percent of reading assignments in elementary schools, and the requirement grows to 70 percent by grade 12.
Among the suggested nonfiction pieces for high school juniors and seniors are Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” “FedViews,” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2009) and “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” published by the General Services Administration. . . .
“There’s a disproportionate amount of anxiety,” said David Coleman, who led the effort to write the standards with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Coleman said educators are misinterpreting the directives.
Yes, the standards do require increasing amounts of nonfiction from kindergarten through grade 12, Coleman said. But that refers to reading across all subjects, not just in English class, he said. Teachers in social studies, science and math should require more reading, which would allow English teachers to continue to assign literature, he said. . . .
In practice, the burden of teaching the nonfiction texts is falling to English teachers, said Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University: “You have chemistry teachers, history teachers saying, ‘We’re not going to teach reading and writing, we have to teach our subject matter. That’s what you English teachers do.’ ”
Sheridan Blau, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, said teachers across the country have told him their principals are insisting that English teachers make 70 percent of their readings nonfiction. “The effect of the new standards is to drive literature out of the English classroom,” he said.
Timothy Shanahan, who chairs the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said school administrators apparently have flunked reading comprehension when it comes to the standards.
via Common Core State Standards in English spark war over words – The Washington Post.
So the idea is that science and other subjects would include reading in those areas. Great idea. But because the administrators also are not very good readers and because no one but English teachers want to require reading, the burden of requiring 70% “informational” reading is falling on English teachers,who must make room for it by cutting out literature. So instead of reading Old Man and the Sea, students have to read “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management.”
A prank turned grim
You have probably heard about those two Australian radio hosts who called the hospital where Kate Middleton, pregnant with a future monarch of England, was being treated for severe morning sickness. They imitated the voice of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles, the grandparents, and managed to get their call transferred to the hospital room. Very funny. But now the nurse who took the call and was bamboozled felt so humiliated and ashamed that she has apparently committed suicide.
Anger at Australian radio station over royal hoax – Houston Chronicle.
December 7, 2012
This blog’s next step
I started blogging when I wrote small posts for World Magazine’s blog back when blogs were new. Then I had a blog of my own under World’s auspices, and then, after World changed the way it was doing its website, I signed up with a hosting company and started my independent site. Thanks to you loyal readers, the blog has grown and grown until we typically get over 2,000 visits a day and some 90,000 page views per month. Recently, I was approached by the mega-religion site Patheos and invited to let them host this Cranach blog.
If I did, they would pay me for each page view. No longer would running this blog cost me; rather, it would actually bring in some income. Not enough for me to quit my day job, but enough to be felt in our monthly budget in these hard times. (Patheos, with all of its blogs and resources, gets over a million page views a day, which enables them to attract big advertisers and thus to pay their writers.) Not only that, this blog would be on a server with vast capacity and round-the-clock tech support at my beck and call. No more crashes! No more quirky dropping of comments!
And yet, I hesitated. Patheos is a multi-faith site. I’d be on their “evangelical channel.” (That’s all right, since we Lutherans are the first evangelicals. In fact, just as Calvinists are more properly termed “Reformed,” Lutherans were always more properly termed “evangelical.” Then other groups claimed the title. But it’s a good word, referring to the centrality of the evangel, the Gospel.) There is also a Catholic channel and a “progressive Christian” channel. But there are also channels for Mormons and Buddhists and Muslims and just about every other world religion. Even atheists have a channel (which is a neat trick, making atheists admit that atheism is a religion). But I was assured that Patheos is NOT “inter-faith.” That is, it does not pretend that all religions are the same and equally valid, squishing them all together into some syncretistic new religion that would be unrecognizable to any actual religion. Patheos instead thinks of itself as a religious marketplace, an arena for different beliefs to battle it out, as well as a place for people to learn about the different traditions. Surely, I reasoned, confessional Lutheranism needs to be in this mix. I know about altar and pulpit fellowship, but I don’t think there are rules about blog fellowship. The internet, by its nature, jumbles everyone together, and it won’t really be any different if my blog happens to be on the Patheos server. (Here is more about Patheos and still more.)
I also worried about some of you loyal readers thinking I’ve sold out to the big corporation, which will take over what was once a down-to-earth small business, whereupon it would change the original recipe and make the gravy taste like wallpaper paste. (I think what happened to Colonel Sanders.) But the corporation is not taking over anything. It’s still my blog. I will still post whatever I want to. The hosts exercise no control. Nothing is really going to change in the way I run things.
So after some prayer and agonizing, I agreed to move the blog to Patheos.
There will be some cosmetic changes. Patheos will re-work and update my site and its design, something that’s been needed for awhile anyway. The familiar Cranach banner will remain, though probably tweaked. The winged dragon, crowned, bearing a ring (Cranach’s seal) will be there as our logo. (Which some of you, I know, find too scary and would just as soon it fly away. But I’m trying to hold onto tradition right now.) The biggest change will be a Patheos banner at the very top. Also ads, but instead of the pathetic and sometimes embarrassing Google adsense ads for Mormon matchmaking services and the like, there will be advertisements for real products, like cars and hotels. Also, the comments will be nested; that is, when you reply to someone else’s comments and then someone replies to what you say, the comments will be indented and placed next to each other accordingly. This will allow digressions and rabbit trails to wander off as people have interest in discussing them, but those who don’t can concentrate on the main thread. Most blogs have that feature today, and I think this will serve well our particular kinds of discussions.
We will all probably notice the visual changes and complain about them for a few days, but then we’ll stop noticing them. Your bookmarks should still work. When you click on the old web address, you’ll be automatically re-directed to the new one. Your RSS feeds should still work, but if they don’t, they can be easily set up again by clicking a button on the site. Same with Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.
I don’t know exactly when the change will happen. Probably next week some time. But when you see the new look, you’ll know what has happened.
We’ve got a quite extraordinary little community of discourse here. I don’t want to lose that. I do want to share it with other people and draw more people in. I’ll depend on you to make Patheos drifters feel welcome. Are you all right with this?
Death of a Christian jazzman
Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck died at age 92. The man and his quartet showed sheer genius. My old guitar teacher once sat in with him and it was one of the highlights of his life. Brubeck was a Christian who composed a great deal of sacred music. From David A. Anderson:
“I approached the composition as a prayer,” jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck said of his “To Hope! A Celebration,” a contemporary setting for the Roman Catholic Mass, “concentrating upon the phrases, trying to probe beneath the surface, hoping to translate into music the powerful words which have grown through the centuries.”
Probing beneath the surface marked all of Brubeck’s music, from the revolutionary 1959 polyrhythmic album “Time Out,” to his oratorio, “A Light in the Wilderness,” and his setting of Thomas Aquinas’ hymn, “Pange Lingua.”
Brubeck is best known in the secular jazz world for his startling compositions using different time signatures, such as 5/4 time in the classic “Take Five,” or the mixture of 9/8 time and the more traditional 4/4 rhythm of “Blue Rondo a la Turk.” Both pieces are on the “Time Out” album, the first jazz album to sell 1 million copies and still one of the best-selling.
Religious faith, however, was never far from Brubeck’s creative mind. . . .
In a 2009 interview with the PBS television program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, Brubeck said his service in World War II convinced him “something should be done musically to strengthen man’s knowledge of God.”
That experience gave him the idea of an oratorio based on the Ten Commandments, particularly the “Thou shalt not kill” part.
But he did not act on the idea of writing sacred music until 1965, when he wrote a short piece, “Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled,” to comfort his brother, Howard, whose son had died of a brain tumor at age 16.
That piece was incorporated into 1968’s “A Light in the Wilderness,” his first full-scale sacred composition.
That was followed by a series of pieces including 1969’s “The Gates of Justice,” a choral work using words from Martin Luther King, Jr.; “Truth is Fallen,” in 1971; “La Fiesta de la Posada” in 1975; and “Beloved Son,” in 1978.
“When I write a piece, a sacred piece, I’m looking hard and trying to discover what I’m about, and what my parents were about and the world is about,” he told Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.
Raised a Protestant although never baptized, Brubeck became a Roman Catholic in 1980 after completing “To Hope!”, a Mass setting commissioned by the Catholic periodical, Our Sunday Visitor.
via The sacred ran through jazz legend Dave Brubeck’s music – The Washington Post.
Brubeck shows that it’s certainly possible and desirable to have contemporary Christian music, even to have it used in worship–if it could only be rich and complex and artistic and in accord with the Christian sensibility, unlike much of what passes for that genre today.
Here is his “Celebration” Mass. It’s just over 10 minutes, but keep listening for the choral parts and for when his quartet breaks in (around the 4 minute mark).
Here is “Take Five,” Brubeck’s most famous piece. (Pick out the 5/4 time.) Brubeck right now is taking five before the Resurrection.
Pearl Harbor day
Today is the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into World War.
See Attack on Pearl Harbor – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Do you think we will ever again have a world war; that is, war on a global scale?
December 6, 2012
The Mormons’ Heavenly Mother
Mormon author Warren Aston writes about that religion’s other deity:
It is Gospel Doctrine 101 that we are the children of God. Our spirits are the children of a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother in the most literal sense possible. We have within us the genes of Godhood, the potential to develop and grow into the glorious, exalted beings they are. We lived with them before coming to earth to gain physical bodies in their likeness, male and female.
God’s whole work is to bring to pass our immortality and eternal life, bringing us back into God’s presence, redeemed and sanctified through our obedience and discipline. The laws and covenants that mark our progress on that journey home comprise the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The framework for that journey, and much-needed support, is provided by the Church.
When Elder Neal A. Maxwell of the Twelve spoke some years ago in General Conference about the heavenly home-coming that the obedient can look forward to, he noted that our Mother in Heaven would surely have a role.
Mr. Aston goes on to criticize some of his fellow-Mormons for not emphasizing the Heavenly Mother as much as she deserves. Notice the other Mormon doctrines we see here: We have the genes of Godhood and will grow into deities ourselves, just like our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. We are redeemed and sanctified by our “obedience and discipline.” The Gospel of Jesus Christ consists of laws.
Does any of that sound like Christianity? But notice the potential for popularity today. Postmodernists would love the notion of a Heavenly Mother and the promise that we get to be gods ourselves.
