Palin and the Prochoice Problem

It seems that an OBGYN in Canada is concerned about ArchVillainess... I mean, Republican VP Candidate Gov. Sarah Palin's decision to give birth to Trig, her youngest who also happens to have an extra chromosome. His concern is not about her ability to do the job, or the impact on the family. It's not even about Sarah or Trig's health and well-being.

He's concerned that such a prominent role being given to a woman in this situation might reduce abortions.

You just can't make some stuff up.*

Thankfully, some Canadians actually think it's not so bad an idea to let children with Down Syndrome live. Now Trig has become, literally, their poster-child.

If you've known a person with Down Syndrome, you could probably attest to their near-angelic nature. While I can't say I've had extensive experiences, I will say that each encounter has led me to experience something more of the mysterious love that God has for me in Christ Jesus. Their utter openness, compassion for others, and gentleness....

It puts most Christians I know to shame. Since last Sunday's epistle was on letting your love be genuine, let's ask God how he might be giving us another chance to learn a lesson we desperately try to forget.

*p.s. It's still better than uber-moonbat Wendy Doniger is able to manage. I think her work on androgynes has confused her about what actually makes a woman. "Pretense of a woman", indeed!

Spare Change

Everybody is talking about Change these days.

Especially reverent tones regarding change are used when speaking of The One.



Well... at least this lady can count on some change.

Why? Because it turns out that Barack Hussein Obama only pays the ladies pennies on the dollar. That's right...

Barack Obama pays his women campaign staff less than he pays the men on his campaign staff.

Palin Facts

Look at it this way. One VP candidate could protect you from zombies. The other... well, he looks like one.

Even Chuck Norris is running scared.


h/t PalinFacts

Help Hurricane Vicitims

Rev'd Bill Crawford at First Presbyterian of Thibodaux has set up a PayPal account where the church can process donations for immediate relief of hurricane victims.

Please help if you can.

Imminent Domain

Does it bother anyone else that the government now holds close to 90% of all mortgages? I refer, of course, to the $200 billion dollar bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Before bailing out mortgage companies, the United States government had direct ownership of nearly 30% of its total territory. These federal lands are used as military bases or testing grounds, nature parks and reserves and indian reservations, or are leased to the private sector for commercial exploitation (e.g. forestry, mining, agriculture). They are managed by different administrations, such as the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US Department of Defense, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Bureau of Reclamation or the Tennessee Valley Authority. This map details the percentage of state territory owned by the federal government.

The top 10 list of states with the highest percentage of federally owned land looks like this:

1. Nevada 84.5%
2. Alaska 69.1%
3. Utah 57.4%
4. Oregon 53.1%
5. Idaho 50.2%
6. Arizona 48.1%
7. California 45.3%
8. Wyoming 42.3%
9. New Mexico 41.8%
10. Colorado 36.6%

Notable is that all these states are in the West (except Alaska, which strictly speaking is also a western state, albeit northwestern). Also notable is the contrast between the highest and the lowest percentages of federal land ownership. The US government owns a whopping 84.5% of Nevada, but only a puny 0.4% of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The lowest-percentage states are mainly in the East, but some are also in the Midwest and in the South:

1. Connecticut 0.4%
2. Rhode Island 0.4%
3. Iowa 0.8%
4. New York 0.8%
5. Maine 1.1%
6. Kansas 1.2%
7. Nebraska 1.4%
8. Alabama 1.6%
9. Ohio 1.7%
10. Illinois 1.8%

Even the 10^th place is still below the two percent mark.

Where's that right to private property when you need it, if the government can now exercise fiscal controls to get you out of your house WITHOUT having to go through eminent domain payments?

h/t StrangeMaps

The Bullwinkle Stops Here

The Dennis Miller show was discussing Palin's acceptance speech. Miller asked a middle aged female caller "Are the Democrats scared?" She replied "They woke up with a moose head in their bed this morning!"

Abstinence Education and Its Consequences

Some low-lifes have taken a couple of punches at Sarah Palin's position on abstinence based sex-ed because of what happened to her daughter, Bristol.

Well let me show you what choice we're really making.


So much for HOPE overcoming all things.

I'll take a woman living up to her principles, even when it isn't expedient, to a bloviating pro-abort ANYDAY!

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Does your denomination require its ministers to affirm the doctrine of the Trinity?

What difference does it make?

In a series of blog posts, I'd like to consider what is at stake when we discard orthodox theology. I hope my readers will join me in this effort to "put wheels on" our proclamation.

And Now for some good news

Help a wounded vet today!

Forty-five years later

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

-- The Rev'd Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
August 28, 1963

Ask your local Obama supporters what they know of the content of his character. Ask them if their presidential candidate believes that little children have a right to life. (Obama opposes every sensible restriction on abortion/infanticide - protections that are granted the preborn in the most liberal of European democracies!)

Live the dream of looking beyond skin color - either to assume guilt or to be absolved of guilt. And recognize that all who are created in God's image - male and female, black and white and brown and red, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, preborn and postborn, intellectually gifted or developmentally retarded - ALL WHO BEAR GOD'S IMAGE have a fundamental right to life. And no government on earth can condone the taking of that life without due process for God's laws writ large in nature.

In the word's of Dr. King, "Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."

Putting the MESS in Messiah

Would somebody please sic the Americans United for Separation of Church and State on these guys?

Oh wait...they're only concerned if someone believes that Jesus is the Messiah.

If You Thought They Messed Up the Olympics

This little gem is from the English (Engrish?) subtitles on a Chinese-made hack of Star Wars Ep III.
Believe it or not, Anakin Skywalker would be an improvement over some of the folks I know that got "made" [ministers] by the Presbyterian Church.

Indecision 2008

I'm having trouble.



I'm not sure if this gets tagged under politics, humor, or zombies....

Was Spong Wrong?

For some reason, people are still reading John Shelby Spong. His recent article in the Washington Post is titled "Good Show, Poor Theology."

When I first read the title, I thought: "He must be talking about a rather up-the-candlestick Anglo-Catholic parish in TEC." You know the kind. Appareled amices and albs on every server. Chanted Psalms, sung gospels, and solemnities abounding. A priest that enters in cassock, surplice, hood, tippet, cope, zuchetto and biretta, then changes during the anthem into alb, amice, crossed stole, silk cincture, and chasuble. Lot's of bells, smells, bowing and wowing - but the sermon is about the latest episode of 60 Minutes or the View.

No such luck. Instead, Mr. Spong was talking about Dr. Rick Warren's forum for Obama and McCain. He went on to say this:

Homosexuality is no more a choice for gay and lesbian people than heterosexuality is a choice for straight people. It takes a while for that knowledge to trickle down to the masses. Prejudice lives only in the untrickled down gaps. The condemnation of homosexuality as a sin or as a distortion by the hierarchy of the Vatican or the leaders of evangelical Christianity is simply a sign that both groups live in the backwaters of knowledge and education. As this knowledge spreads, those groups will look like what they are - dated people similar to the members of the Flat Earth Society.

Tell you what, Spong... I'll publicly acknowledge that "homosexuality is no more a choice for gay and lesbian people than heterosexuality is a choice for straight people" if you'll publicly acknowledge that there might be a reason other ignorant prejudice for resistance to homosexual acts.

My Brother's Keeper?

Obama has been spending plenty of time finger-pointing and telling Americans that we're not living up to the Bible's social ethic - that we just pull it out when it's convenient, then tuck it away. His stab at Saddleback Church showed how out-of-touch he is with most people whose behavior reflects a high degree of Christian devotion.

But little shows his own grasp of the faith "with its boots on" than his rhetoric being held up to his own action. For instance, he chides America for its wealth, though he is raking in MILLIONS each year in book sales. I don't begrudge him his cash, but I'd appreciate if he would practice giving away more than 1% of it before he asks me to give him another 10-15% of my income.

Secondly, if you want to talk about personal ethics, just consider the case of George Obama. What... haven't heard of him yet? Just hearing more and more about McCain having seven or eight houses (even though several of them are investment properties owned / managed by his wife's estate)?

George is Obama's little brother. He lives on $1 / mo, eking out an existence in a violent urban ghetto outside of Nairobi, Kenya. Now when I was a little kid, we sent $18/mo to a child in Haiti and $22 /mo to a child in Niger. That money came from the meager support my father paid...but we felt we had plenty compared to the rest of the world. It provided food, clothing, medicine, and education so that the children could pull themselves (and hopefully their family) out of crushing poverty. I don't know what happened to them because we lost touch after middle school. But I do know that for a while, our meager American funds were able to make them rich.

Nairobi is one of the least expensive cities on earth. It would cost very little for Obama to send cash to his half brother - who has ambitions of higher education - and it would dramatically improve George's life. So why aren't we hearing about this as an example of Christian virtue?

1 Timothy 5:8 might have something to do with that.

Before Obama opens his mouth again about McCain's money (which is mostly his heiress wife's) or American avariciousness, he needs to look to another one of those conveniently ignored passages from the Sermon on the Mount.

When Believers Don't Believe

I'm increasingly troubled by the unbelief encountered every day in the church.

Yeah... there's the lib'rals that don't believe the stuff that the Church has always believed (on the authority of the Scriptures). That's dangerous.

But equally dangerous are those who do believe all those things, and for whom it does not make a difference. I-Monk's recent jab gets at the heart of this problem.

One of the good things about having a systematic exposition of the Scriptures (at least a lectionary) is that you are held accountable for public reading and preaching on the breadth of biblical teaching. That's also what I love about systematic theology.

Each of us - right, left, up, down, and centrist-as-all-get-out have a tendency to narrow our field of vision. We need the latitude of our normative patterns (Scripture and Sacred Science) to even out our peculiarities.

Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief.

Archaeological Affirmations

Since turnabout is fair play, here's an interesting archaeological tidbit.

It seems the seal of one of the enemies of Jeremiah has been unearthed. The Paleo-Hebrew script reads Gedalyahu ben Pashur, who served as minister to King Zedekiah (597-586 BC).

Gedaliah (as we know him in the English transliteration) petitioned King Zedekiah to shut Jeremiah up. They won their case and threw the prophet into a cistern.

What's the takeaway?

1) Just because you occupy a place of influence with people who have power does not mean you are with people who have authority. Zedekiah and his advisors had all kinds of power...but because they refused to listen to the one man who had God's authority to speak, we hold them in no esteem. Indeed, we'd scarcely know or care about them except that they have a part to play in the life of the man who spoke with authority - the man who spoke God's words.

2) If you want to be part of a faith tradition that makes a real difference in the world, make sure your faith tradition has actually interacted with the world. All kinds of New Agers and non-realists in religion insist that faith is an entirely subjective experience. The only "objective" element is what happens when you act like a better person or some such.

Well, while I can't disagree that changing us changes the world, I would say that it's difficult to see the difference between that sort of religion and a philosophy of life.

There is a God...someone out there, who also chooses to make a dwelling place with humankind. If you know that you can't make it on your own, then you just might need something more than your own inner reserves. And if you're going to trust in that something, you'd better make sure that something can act.

Christianity affirms that God acts in history, pointing to the incarnation of Jesus Christ as proof that God does indeed choose to be with us and for us, rather than against us or apathetic towards us. And we have the Scriptures which detail how God has stepped into historical events and changed their course or guided the people.

If your faith can't make that claim and have it backed up by rational evidence, may I have the privilege of pointing you from the shifting sands of life to a faith built on bedrock? A faith that consists of loving relationship with the Rock himself?

Like R.E.M. said

Everybody hurts....sometimes.

Zombies and Hockey

Yet another surprisingly [ahem] tasty mix. PUCKer up!


If this doesn't make sense to you, Monroeville Mall is the site of George Romero's 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead.

You can buy'em on hockey jerseys here.

Putting the Red In Blue State

It looks like Obama's chickens are coming home to roost.

Obama's campaign finally admits that his mentor Frank (referred to in Dreams From My Father) is none other than Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis.

Thanks, comrade!