Rebane's Ruminations

HE IS RISEN!

George Rebane

Hearing that strong assertion, the Christian answers joyfully, ‘He is risen indeed!’

For us, Christmas is the promise, and Easter its fulfillment.  The summation of all Christianity is Christ’s covenant in the promised transcendence of Man, all concentrated into one simple declaration – ‘He is risen!’  Without this, our faith is a fraud; with it, Christianity promises Man to become an unending part of God’s love of all of Creation.

Secular humanists need religion too, but …

George Rebane

There was an interesting essay in the 18/19feb12 WSJ adapted from Alain de Botton’s latest book Religion for Atheists: a Non-believers Guide to the Uses of Religion.  It is really a lament about all the things that atheists are missing out on that come to people of faith who gather to worship their God.  Everything from “reclaiming community” to finding commonly shared purpose in life, and all the trimmings that go in between for folks in a faith-based organization.

It seems that atheists are somehow not fulfilled in their flirtations with environmentalism, productivity seminars, yoga, moral relativism, and endless group and individual analyses by various therapists and psychological ‘rent-a-buddies’.  There seems to be an emptiness underneath it all that is not only perceived by the hard-working career climbers, but is made more stark in the built-in loneliness that comes from attempting to connect with people with whom there is really no common connection.

Well, according to M. de Botton, there is a solution at hand that can bring our secular humanist friends into a chummy communion with other similarly searching souls (which really don’t exist).  It turns out that atheists can join with each other just like the bible thumpers, but without all that God baggage.  And the solution lies in starting an institution, or is it really a franchise, called Agape Restaurants (I’m not making this up).

The Agape Restaurants would become the locus of congregations following the Book of Agape prescribing a liturgy that is cobbled together from the essential essences of the Catholic Mass, the Jewish Seder, the Zen tea ceremony, … you get the idea.  People would assemble there to go through the warm and bonding formalities that bring and hold together people of faith.  They would even get to ceremoniously consume the moral?, ethical? equivalent of the Eucharist.

In his ‘Religion for Everyone’ de Botton tells us of the glorious gemütlichkeit of such venues –

Thanks to the Agape Restaurant, our fear of strangers would recede. The poor would eat with the rich, the black with the white, the orthodox with the secular, workers with managers, scientists with artists. The claustrophobic pressure to derive all of our satisfactions from our existing relationships would ease, as would our desire to climb ever higher in social status. …

The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. Like the famous questions that the youngest child at the table is assigned by the Haggadah to ask during the Passover ceremony ("Why is this night different from all other nights?" "Why do we eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs?" and so on), these talking points would be carefully crafted for a specific purpose, to coax guests away from customary expressions of pride ("What do you do?" "Where do your children go to school?") and toward a more sincere revelation of themselves ("What do you regret?" "Whom can you not forgive?" "What do you fear?").

So there you have it.  You should be able to embrace it all without having to consider any of the aggravating absolutes that come with a religion that teaches transcendence as the gift of grace from a supreme intelligence who created all that IS, and through love and compassion is willing to share all with His critters.  None of those things need to divert us from creaming the good parts of 'TAT TVAM ASI!'  From a thorough analysis of religions, the secular humanists have finally figured out how to fill their emptiness and enjoy it all. For it’s now or never – remember, oblivion awaits.

And yet, and yet …

Happy Thanksgiving 2011

‘Thank you God for this day, and for this food.’
Traditional Rebane family grace.

A Reader’s Complaint Answered

George Rebane

Mr Ben Emery is a regular RR reader who vigorously defends his Left/liberal ideology in these pages.  He recently issued a complaint about the content, viewpoint, and perhaps the form of this weblog.  His general lament is that RR’s scope of topics is too narrow and doesn’t cover the substance of the ideas discussed.   I believe his comments deserve a more extended answer that may also be of interest to other readers of this weblog.  This follows BenE’s complaint repeated below, which is also his ‘8nov11 09:12 AM’ comment to ‘The Liberal Mind – How much socialist, before being a ‘Socialist’?’.

The Morass of Morals and Morality

George Rebane

The ‘morality’ of capitalism, of empire, of wealth redistribution, and many other things are much on the minds of people these days.  Yet, as with notions like race, prejudice, government subsidy, censorship, socialism, …, almost no one comes to the debate with a coherent, let alone operational, definition of the terms they glibly sprinkle into their arguments.  Such ignorance has reached unheard heights that now call for books – e.g. philosopher Jamie Whyte’s Crimes Against Logic – Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders (2005) - that have been published on the rising incomprehensibility of public babble.

To this semantic morass I now wish to add an understanding of the notion of morals and morality since it is often brought up in the comment threads of RR, usually as part of an indictment of fellow readers or their wayward beliefs.  This contribution joins a growing list of other terms on RR (see ‘Critical Thinking and Numeracy’ category) I have defined, many at the request of readers.  The intent of such definitions is to make my commentaries and comments more understandable, and hopefully invite others to appreciate the offered semantics.

When free speech goes …

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 September 2011.  Podcast here.]

Please accept my apologies for the extended respite you have enjoyed over the last weeks from hearing the outrageous thoughts of KVMR’s lonesome conservetarian commentator.  August got unexpectedly busy with all kinds of matters involving travel and grandkids.  So let me try to make up for it here and now with some thoughts on God’s hand and free speech.

On Rebane’s Ruminations a regular reader, who also happens to be Nevada County’s beloved cartoonist of Village Idiot fame, pointed out that Michelle Bachmann had joined the hand of God to the hurricane Irene.  The point being that here we saw exposed a possible primitive superstition in a candidate who wants to be President of the United States.  And the imparted conclusion being, what modern civilized American would ever accept someone as the nation’s leader, someone who thinks God can and does mess with weather.

Let me quickly qualify that this is not a secular humanist observation held only by locals, but is a longstanding assessment of the national left.  ‘We can’t have those bible-thumpers anywhere near the Oval Office.’

The inconvenient truth here is that God messing in the affairs of this universe and Man is a robust and fundamental tenet in all the world’s religions.  And this includes the belief systems of over 200M Americans who claim residence in the Judeo-Christian, Islamic, and Native American faiths.  Modern history overflows with national leaders publicly beseeching the Lord to intervene in their personal and their country’s behalf when faced with portents of manmade and natural disasters.  In recent times we didn’t sacrifice virgins; but then again, if that would have helped … I don’t know.

Islamophobia – a rational response? (updated 1sep2011)

                        Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.  R. Clay Reynolds

George Rebane

As these pages long attest, for me the answer to the title question is a resounding YES.  And our western governments aid and abet that as being the reasonable response.  The progressive tsunami of proscribing anyone who evinces fear of Islam ranges from Mayor Bloomberg banning any and all inclusion of religion in the upcoming commemoration of 9/11 at Ground Zero, to Canadian police giving Muslims a pass on physically assaulting non-Muslims in public.  (Read this piece in the 2aug11 Toronto Sun by David Menzies)

A more compelling and terrible look into the mind of Islam is the tragic story of a young Palestinian woman who lived in Gaza.  She was severely burned in a propane cooking accident about a year ago.  Requiring more treatment than available in Gaza, she and her care givers pleaded with Israeli officials at the border checkpoint to be allowed to seek help at a nearby Israeli hospital.  She was given a compassionate pass, proceeded to the hospital where she received treatment for her burns, and after recuperating she was released to return home.

A year later, she arrives with three small children at the same checkpoint in hijab (nearby picture), looking obviously pregnant, and requesting to revisit the hospital to be checked for how her healing has progressed.  The Israeli border guards sensed that something didn’t add up, and took her into custody.  She was placed into a now standard interrogation/isolation compound nearby and asked to disrobe.  Thereupon and in great distress, she confessed that she was a suicide bomber with a mission to go into the same crowded ward where she received her treatment, and then, surrounded by medical personnel and patients, she would detonate herself.

The Israeli video here shows the last moments of her interrogation and her detonating the twenty pounds of high explosive she had strapped to her belly.  It is a devastating record of a dedicated and determined servant of Allah willing to kill without mercy the very people who showed her kindness and compassion, and all for the sole purpose that they were the most proximal infidels that in her zeal she could reach.  That consideration overarched everything else in her life.

'He is Risen!'

 

 

Happy Easter from our family to you and yours.

George and Jo Ann

On the Equality of All Cultures

Ruminations - 10dec2010

George Rebane

Yes, the ‘rich’ can pay more taxes.  But when you make them do that, they will make fewer wealth generating decisions and take the attendant risks that make those increased government revenues possible.

- British students riot for more OPM
- The religious give more than the irreligious
- Nevada City protects its downtown businesses
- Where to put the new courthouse?
- Rep Boehner pulls a boner
- They tax you first, and during, and after you die

The ‘little darlins’ of Great Britain are tearing up London protesting Parliament’s decision to hike the costs of education.  These costs have gone up for all the reasons that we know.  However, the always remarkable response from the mis-educated brats is that their expenses should continue to be covered by other people’s money.  Their socialist curriculum somehow missed the part about how those monies are earned, and what motivated the earners to work hard for the cash to which they feel entitled.  They also have no clue that the more socialist economies don’t generate all that much to redistribute.

Years ago the WSJ reported on a study of charitable giving that measured how much more voluntary gifts generate than the charitable receipts from government mediated distributions.  More importantly, it was reported that the left-leaning secular humanists were pretty niggardly when it came to contributing their own bucks to worthy causes.  This has not gone down well with the people claiming the moral high ground.  Today DE Campbell and RD Putnam do an update on that (‘Charity’s Religious Edge’).

It turns out that people of religion give significantly more than those not so encumbered.  When controlling for all kinds of factors like giving to their own church/temple/mosque, the religious “actually give more money to secular causes than do secular Americans.”  The explanation is still the same old one – the seculars are mostly left-wingers who see the needy being provided for by a government that takes money from the greedy rich and redistributes it accordingly.  Given that, why should they worry?