Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 294

The “Quality Of Life” In New Jersey

Chris Christie explains:

For the people who are enamored with the idea with the income, the tax revenue from [legalized marijuana], go to Colorado and see if you want to live there. See if you want to live in a major city in Colorado where there’s head shops popping up on every corner and people flying into your airport just to come and get high. To me, it’s just not the quality of life we want to have here in the state of New Jersey and there’s no tax revenue that’s worth that.

What you have here is not an argument, but a prejudice. Why is a head-shop somehow bad for a neighborhood? Why is tourism for casinos fine but for smoking a joint such a terrible thing? Why is legal pot worse for New Jersey’s reputation than the popularity of Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey?

And why, pray, is it a better quality of life to have less personal freedom rather than more?

The African Way To Bank

Noting the widespread use of mobile payments in Africa, Bright Continent author Dayo Olopade thinks through whether similar efforts could succeed in the US. She sees need for the technology because “the poorest 30 percent of Americans were, to use an industry term, underbanked—unable to access credit and financial services within their means”:

Exporting mobile money to the United States, however, entails a slew of challenges that its creators did not face in Africa.

Need drove the invention of M-Pesa and its counterparts, but regulatory ambiguity ensured it could scale. Even today, mobile-banking laws in Africa are evolving slower than the technology itself. One hazard, regulators believe, is that mobile payments can be used for money laundering. While much of this risk is diffused by ID cards, PINs, and caps on transfers, it was not until 2011 that Kenya legislated capital requirements for mobile banking, and only in 2013 did the government begin to tax mobile transfers. Other countries in Africa have been stricter about which entities can serve as mobile financial institutions, but since telecoms are not traditional banks, they fall into a regulatory gray area.

In the United States, however, banking laws are much less malleable, and any activity that smells like banking is subject to a significant burden of compliance with post-crash policies designed to protect consumers. Allowing telecoms or tech companies to act like banks may involve new legislation. Given this headache, mobile money in the U.S. might end up looking different than it does in Africa, perhaps involving partnerships among wireless carriers, hardware companies, and banks. But the bar has been set, and the West now finds itself in the unfamiliar position of looking to Africa for technological inspiration.

Dayo’s “Ask Anything” series is here.

Mental Health Break

This could have worked on 4/20 as well:

Birds from ZEITGUISED on Vimeo.

A Spark Of Suffering

Parul Seghal considers Scottish novelist Muriel Spark’s distinctive take on human misfortune:

Spark was fascinated by suffering – and even tried writing a critical study of the Book of Job – but it was an active, robust kind of suffering that she liked, whereby hunger whetted one’s wits. Her women are not enamored of their anxiety, of their moods and wounds. If they’re poor and powerless, it’s in the way of a junkyard dog, with a restless, scavenging instinct, a loyalty to no one and breathtaking cunning. Spark simply seemed to find no romance in female abjection, the fashion for which Susan Sontag describes in Illness as Metaphor. “Sadness made one ‘interesting,’ ” Sontag writes. “The melancholy creature was a superior one: sensitive, creative, a being apart.” …

Compare that to these most Sparkian of sentiments: “He actually raped her, she was amazed”; “Filthy luck. I’m preggers. Come to the wedding.” Or, from Spark’s own description of her brief marriage to the much older and very violent Sydney Oswald Spark (she called him S.O.S.), who went insane: “He became a borderline case, and I didn’t like what I found on either side of the border.” Spark is being glib, of course, but in that glibness is a kind of laconic dignity and an instinct for privacy.

Forever Pop

Today is my favorite brother’s bday ;) Happy happy birthday Bryan!

Was Jesus God?

I’m in the home-stretch of the book, Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God, the first selection for the Dish’s resurrected (!) Book Club. I know many readers are, as well. We’ll start the conversation this week – so hold your emails for a bit. I’m going to try and structure debate on the book into some clear, distinct questions, rather than trying to grapple with it all at once.

But as an appetite-whetter and encouragement to finish reading, here are some early reviews. First up, Fr. Robert Barron attacks the core of Ehrman’s thesis – that “explicit statements of Jesus’ divine identity can be found only in the later fourth Gospel of John, whereas the three Synoptic Gospels, earlier and thus presumably more historically reliable, do not feature such statements.” Barron calls this idea “nonsense”:

In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus addresses the crippled man who had been lowered through the roof of Peter’s house, saying, “My son, your sins are forgiven,” to which the bystanders respond, “Who does this man think he is?  Only God can forgive sins.” What is implied there is a Christology as high as anything in John’s Gospel.

And affirmations of divinity on the lips of Jesus himself positively abound in the Synoptics.  When he says, in Matthew’s Gospel, “He who does not love me more than his mother or father is not worthy of me,” he is implying that he himself is the greatest possible good.  When in Luke’s Gospel, he says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away,” he is identifying himself with the very Word of God.  When he says in Matthew’s Gospel, in reference to himself, “But I tell you, something greater than the Temple is here,” he is affirming unambiguously that he is divine, since for first century Jews, only Yahweh himself would be greater than the Jerusalem Temple.

Perhaps most remarkably, when he says, almost as a tossed-off aside at the commencement of the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard it said, but I say…” he is claiming superiority to the Torah, which was the highest possible authority for first century Jews.  But the only one superior to the Torah would be the author of the Torah, namely God himself.  Obviously examples such as these from the Synoptic authors could be multiplied indefinitely.  The point is that the sharp demarcation between the supposedly “high” Christology of John and the “low” Christology of the Synoptics, upon which the Ehrman thesis depends, is simply wrong-headed.

Another critic is Michael Bird, one of the contributors to How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature – A Response to Bart D. Ehrman:

[W]hile Ehrman insists that there was a continuum between gods and humans in the ancient world, I contend that Jews and Christians held to a strict monotheism that delineated God from the rest of the created order. And when they mapped out where Jesus belonged on this ledger, he was clearly on the God-side – not semi-divine or quasi-divine, but identified with the God of creation and covenant.

And whereas Ehrman thinks that Jesus was a prophet who proclaimed God’s judgment of this world, I argue that the historical Jesus saw himself as proclaiming and even embodying God’s kingship. Jesus believed that, in his own person, Israel’s God was becoming King, which is why Jesus spoke and acted with a sense of unmediated divine authority, why he identified himself with God’s activity in the world, why he believed that in his own person Israel’s God was returning to Zion as the prophets had promised, and why he outrageously claimed that he would sit on God’s own throne.

Meanwhile, Greg Carey criticizes the way some Christians have engaged the book, arguing that “it doesn’t help to dismiss Ehrman for being an agnostic, as if agnostics have nothing to teach Christians about the Bible, Jesus, or faith”:

[T]here is a live conversation among biblical scholars about how most Christians came to regard Jesus as divine. In other words, Ehrman’s book raises questions that should interest us all. This is not about liberals and secularists attacking the church. It’s an ongoing debate that crosses the usual party lines. …

Most Christians, however, have no idea that Ehrman’s book represents a genuine conversation among informed scholars. This is unfortunate. Nothing Ehrman is saying would surprise a biblical scholar at even the most conservative theological school. This knowledge gap constitutes a failure of educational ministry in the churches. We Christians should be learning to engage legitimate public conversations about Jesus, about the Bible, and about our faith. And we should attend to spiritual development that equips us to enter those conversations with humility and love.

I might as well state one core reason I picked this book. I strongly believe that Christians need to absorb all we can about the origins and debates over the texts that have come to form our faith. We should have nothing to be afraid of but the truth.

And the theological truth and the historical truth – while constructed in different terms and according to different criteria – must be compatible. No religion founded on untruths can or should survive. Which is why the meaning of the Incarnation and the Resurrection must be addressed squarely within the bounds of history and scripture properly understood – if we are to respect Christianity as a modern faith. This project, of course, is as challenging for a Christian as it is for a non-believer like Ehrman. And it’s worth remembering Ehrman’s reasons for being “obsessed” with Jesus, despite being an agnostic:

Without that declaration [of Jesus' divinity], Jesus’ Jewish followers would have remained a small sect within Judaism. Probably a very small sect indeed. Converts would not have flocked to their cause — especially Gentile converts, any more than they flocked to the cause of the Pharisees or of John the Baptist.

If Gentiles had not started converting, eventually at an impressive rate, Christianity would not have grown exponentially over the next three hundred years. If Christianity had not been a sizable minority in the empire by the early 4th century, Constantine almost certainly would not have converted. If Constantine had not converted, the massive conversions in his wake would never have occurred. The Empire would not have become predominantly Christian. Theodosius would not have declared Christianity the state religion. Christianity would not have become the most powerful religious, cultural, social, political, and economic force in our form of civilization. We would not have had the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, or Modernity as we know it.

All of that history and culture hinges on the belief that Jesus is God.

So was he? That very question is what we’ll be debating this coming week.

Update from a reader:

Yay! I found myself bitter and cynical about this Easter. I was able to articulate it to my wife after freaking out about the volume of sugar and artificial dyes going into our young children: “Why do we celebrate the birth and death of Jesus, and not his actual accomplishments?”. To me, he represented a transformational shift in thinking about love and power that is at least as important as his divine status. Or maybe not? Both major holidays are all about worshiping Jesus’s divine status, rather than his deeds as a living man. Aren’t his teachings and example central to Christianity? How do our major holidays represent the core values demonstrated through Christ’s living, if at all? He did offer a bit more than his own claim to being the One True God, right? That’s what’s getting me down.

Anyway – I’m gonna load Ehrman’s book on my Kindle. I’m psyched you brought this up.

Sex In Transition

“I fucking hate my penis,” Molly at The Toast freely admits, reflecting on the “Before Times” of her sex life before beginning the process of sex reassignment surgery:

[A]t no point did sex ever come naturally or easy to me as a man, because I found it really hard to stay erect when with a woman. I sustained almost no pleasure from sex, and if my ex had been the kind of woman to watch Archer she’d have spent a lot of nights telling me I was pushing rope. The thing seemed to be a mystery to me. I was attracted to women (mostly), but it did not react to them in a way that was consistent with that attraction. I started to believe that at some point every other penis-owning humanoid had been given a manual on how to operate their dicks, but mine had been lost in the post. It made me feel like shit, every time it failed me – and it failed me a lot.

Over time me and my ex figured out tricks to make it work, but they were just that – tricks.

They all seemed to rely on telling stories, and my ex became really great at making up erotica on the spot while actively engaging in erotica. She’d tell a story about some dirty schoolgirl, or herself in a compromising situation, and looking back I can pretty clearly see what was going on and why they worked so well. The actual physicality of sex, the mechanical aspects, became static as she told the stories, and I was able to put myself not in the role of the male aggressor, but in the role of her, or the schoolgirl, or whatever. Anything but me. Anyone but a man. That’s what it took.

In quiet moments back then I would allow myself to hate my penis like I hate it now; imagining universes where I’d been born female or timelines where I’d come out of the closet years ago and had finished all the surgeries and hormones and everything else already. I knew what was going on, in my mind, but I did not want to give a voice to it, not then. It was easier to live a lie and go through a performance for the outside world while suffering immeasurable mental anguish than it was to be honest with myself.

Ask Dave Cullen Anything: How The Media Failed Columbine

Yesterday, on the 15th anniversary of the massacre, the Columbine author explained the lessons we still haven’t learned from it – namely, the dangers associated with overexposing the killers. Along those lines, it’s always worth revisiting Charlie Brooker’s epic video rant about post-shooting news coverage, many tropes of which originated with Columbine. In today’s video, Cullen highlights the biggest misconceptions about Columbine that cable news helped propagate:

In a followup, Cullen addresses the question, “How could the media get the Columbine story so wrong?”

More about Cullen:

Dave Cullen is the author of the New York Times bestseller Columbine, a portrait of the two killers and their victims that he spent ten years writing and researching. The book won the Edgar Award, Barnes & Noble’s Discover Award, the Goodreads Choice Award, and was declared Top Education Book of 2009 by the American School Board Journal. He has also written for New York Times, Newsweek, Guardian, Washington Post, Slate, Salon, and Daily Beast. Dave has additionally been a frequent television and radio analyst, appearing on Today, NBC Nightly News, PBS Newshour, CBS This Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, The Rachel Maddow Show, Hannity, and Morning Edition. He is currently working on a book about two gay colonels, who he has followed for twelve years.

Watch his previous videos here.

(Archive)

Quote For The Day

“This is the story of our political journalism. It’s like Hollywood journalism now. A lot can be traced back to when the press decided that its job was to find out who these people are as characters. And essentially that means catching them in lapses, contradictions, ignoring what fills the Theodore White presidential campaign books, which is issues and places. It didn’t seem like a genius idea to write about rural Virginia in doing a piece for The New Yorker on Obama’s first year. It seemed like, of course that’s what we’ll do. We’ll go to southern Virginia and see how it’s playing out in terms of works projects and people’s attitudes. But hardly anyone else did that. It shows that our political journalism has become kind of a hot house world. It’s a very powerful world. TV magnifies it in a big way, distorts it. But I think most political journalists have forgotten what politics is,” – George Packer.

What’s The Deadliest Sin?

The wonderful magazine, Intelligent Life, is having a symposium. The indispensable Ann Wroe (see her astonishingly good biography of Pontius Pilate) considers the deadliest sin ingratitude, “a sin against charity, which otherwise warms the heart and, in the truest sense, makes the world turn”:

The incidents seem trifling. After the dinner party, no note is sent. (Well, you were busy, and the dinner wasn’t that elaborate.) The solicitous e-mail gets no reply. (Again, you’re busy, and don’t feel like chatting.) A driver gives way to you at a place where there is no clear priority; you don’t acknowledge him. A fellow pedestrian steps into the road for you, or holds a door; you breeze on by. On holiday, you give your smallest and most worthless coins to the woman who has carefully cleaned your room. …

No blood is spilt in any of these cases. Nothing is stolen. No one’s life is ruined. The prick of pain passes soon enough. Yet a tiny seed of ice has been sown, formed of arrogance on one side and, on the other, a sense of worthlessness. That ice spreads, and creeps into the veins and crevices of life: so that on the next occasion the door is not held, the room is cleaned carelessly, the car does not give way and the e-mail is never sent. As the opportunity for kindness is ignored, so the chance of reciprocal kindness, in the form of thanks, never comes to be. What is never given can never be repaid.

I have to say I love that insight. One of the great curses of fundamentalist Christianity is its obsession with sexual sin above all others. I recall the great Malcolm Muggeridge’s line about why lust may be the least un-Christian of the sins: because lust is so often about “give, give, give!” But the small acts of mutual disregard, gracelessness, and distancing from the other – which we all do every day – can be far more corrosive. Passion is more forgivable in my book than indifference.

Will Self thinks pride is worse: “While you can perfectly well be proud without being avaricious, or slothful, or covetous, it’s absolutely impossible to transgress in these ways without first being proud.” But for Richard Holloway, no sin is deadlier than envy:

Every other sin offers some gratification, if only in its early stages, but envy is an empty and desolating experience from beginning to end. It is the meanest sin in the book, which is why few people ever own up to it. François de La Rochefoucauld captured its joyless secrecy in 1665: “We often pride ourselves on even the most criminal passions, but envy is a timid and shame-faced passion we never dare acknowledge.” Virginia Woolf thought it was the besetting sin of writers, and Gore Vidal agreed with her. Whenever a friend succeeded, he wrote, a little something in him died; for him it was not enough to succeed—others had to fail. Vidal’s spleen captures both aspects of envy: sorrow at another’s good and satisfaction at another’s misfortune, what the Germans call Schadenfreude, shame-joy, pleasure in the distress of others. …

Is there any remedy for this nasty little sin? There are two steps we can take to get it under control. The first is to acknowledge its presence and admit our own meanness of spirit. The other step is to recapture our capacity for sharing the joy of others.

So much easier to say than do – especially in that crowded, talented island off the north of Europe. My favorite poem on modern literary envy is by Clive James: “The Book Of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.” It’s from his fantastic poetry collection, Opal Sunset.

(Image via Wiki: “‘The Seven Deadly Sins’, medieval wall painting in the nave of the parish church of Crostwight, Norfolk. Date c.1360-80″)