Daily Archives: April 7, 2009

Beating the Body?

Posted by on April 7, 2009 8 comments

Paul’s thoughts on the role of physical bodily discipline in his letters often seems a bit on the contradictory side. Consider on the one hand:

I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified. (1 Cor 9:27)

On the other:

Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism . . . these have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. (Col 2:18; 23)

While, I suppose we could take the easy way out and just assume that Colossians was the product a later development of the Pauline tradition, the canonical question still remains for those who consider the New Testament to be the church’s Scripture. What are we to think, biblically speaking, about the role of physical discipline in Christian sanctification?

Polygamy is Coming to Canada…

Posted by on April 7, 2009 10 comments

Interesting op-ed piece in the Ottawa Citizen:

Looks like a historic legal battle is shaping up over polygamy, the outcome of which will surely be determined by the Supreme Court of Canada.

I understand why, for political reasons, the government feels compelled to fight polygamy tooth and nail, but I suspect the government will lose. The polygamists have what seems to be an unassailable constitutional position. If polygamy is an expression of their religion, and if the participants are all consenting adults, then I don’t see how the state can say no.

Note the words “consenting” and “adults”. No court would allow you to take a child bride, commit sexual assault or practise kidnapping simply because you say your religion allows you to do so. But a three-way marriage between consenting grown-ups? That’s different. Sure, it strikes many people as a weird arrangement, but so did gay marriage — which is now legal. Again, it’s about consenting adults. A marriage between, say, a 20-year-old man and an 80-year-old woman would strike me as weirder and even more unappealing than a marriage involving one man and two wives, but that’s not sufficient grounds to make such marriages illegal.

The government is going to argue that polygamous marriages violate Canadian values such as equality of the sexes. But go into some religious communities right here in Canada and you’ll find traditional marriages (one man, one woman) that do not uphold what secularists would consider sexual equality.

I’m not championing polygamous marriages. I’m just saying that in a free society, especially a constitutional democracy, it’s probably impossible to prohibit them.

Adults sure do tend to consent to a lot of insanse stuff. Alas for the day adulthood and consent became the bedrock of  democratic ideology/ethos. Or was that day one?

The Conservatism of Obama

Posted by on April 7, 2009 7 comments

From George Packer in the New Yorker:

What underlies so many of Obama’s decisions is an attachment to the institutions that hold up American society, a desire to make them function better rather than remake them altogether… [Obamaism]’s also a pretty good description of what used to pass for conservatism—a sense that social relations and institutions are fragile things, and that, while government can’t create wealth or impose equality, at moments like this it has to establish a new equilibrium between individuals and huge economic forces, so that society doesn’t crumble. But modern conservatism has grown into exactly the opposite of its origins, in Burke’s respect for tradition and Madison’s promotion of countervailing checks on concentrations of power. Instead, like any revolutionary creed, it is abstract, hard-edged, and indifferent to experience and existing conditions.

H/T: Andrew Sullivan

Debaptism?

Posted by on April 7, 2009 1 comment

Horstkoetter points us to a rather fascinating report from the BBC about a fellow who, baptized as an infant into the Anglican Church and now a committed atheist, has been issues a certificate of debaptism.

What I found particularly funny is that, according to this report, the Catholic Church is agreeing to remove those who wish to be debaptized from their records as members of the church, while the church of England will not do so. The reasoning: baptism is simply a matter of public record in England. Read more »

The New Atheism and the Cost of Secularism

Posted by on April 7, 2009 12 comments

“Can one really believe–as the New Atheists seem to do–that secular reason, if finally allowed to move forward, free of the constraining hand of archaic faith, will naturally make society more just, more humane, and more rational than it has been in the past? What evidence supports such an expectation? It is rather difficulty, placing everything in the scales, to vest a great deal of hope in modernity, however radiantly enchanting its promises, when one considers how many innocent lives have already been swallowed up in the flames of modern ‘progress.’ At the end of the twentieth century–the century when secularization became an explicit political and cultural project throughout the world–the forces of progressive ideology could boast an unprecedentedly vast collection of corpses, but not much in the way of new moral concepts. At least, not any we should be especially proud of. The best ideals to which we moderns continue to cling long antedate modernity; for the most part, all we can claim as truly, distinctively our own are our atrocities. One could, I suppose, argue that the secular project had somehow been diverted from its proper course at the dawn of the twentieth century, just as the new ideologies were assuming concrete political forms, or had been stalled or subverted by certain intransigent forces of unreason. This would be a more credible claim, however, if the twentieth century’s horrors were demonstrably aberrations within the larger story of the modern world. But, in fact, the process of secularization was marked, from the first, by the magnificent limitlessness of its violence. One does not have to harbor any nostalgia for the old order of Christendom, or of the church’s degrading association with the state, to be conscious of scularity’s cost. . . . In purely arithmetic terms, one cannot dispute the results. The old order could generally reckon its victims only in the thousands. But in the new age, the secular state, with all its hitherto unimagined capacities, could pursue its purely earthly ideals and ambitions only if it enjoyed the liberty to kill by the millions. How else could it spread its wings?”

~ David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, 222-23.

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