Animated films

Another list. Joe Carter selects "The 15 Best Animated Films." I've seen all but the last one [I own DVDs of eight of the fifteen - which I have bolded], and it's a good selection, although I might make a substitution or two - the original One Hundred One Dalmatians, for instance, instead of Mary Poppins, and I found The Lion King a bit too PC for my taste. Carter's "15 Best":

The fifteen, listed in order of release, are:

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
2. Pinocchio (1940)
3. Bambi (1942)
4. Alice in Wonderland (1951)
5. Peter Pan (1953)
6. Mary Poppins (1964)
7. The Jungle Book (1967)
8. Beauty and the Beast (1991)
9. The Lion King (1994)
10. Toy Story (1995)
11. Toy Story 2 (1999)
12. Monsters Inc. (2001)
13. Finding Nemo (2003)
14. The Incredibles (2004)
15. Cars (2006)

Honorable Mention: Wall-E (2008) / Up (2009)

Not surprisingly, all of the selections are from Disney and Pixar—the unrivaled masters of cinematic animation. .... [more]

Carter goes on to list just about every animated feature film made, indicating which ones he has seen. He has seen far more of them than I have, but, as a conservative, I would recommend to a conservative that he really ought to seek out the 1954 version of Animal Farm.

The 15 Best Animated Films » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog

The Kingdom of Heaven

Dorothy L. Sayers:

"The Kingdom of Heaven", said the Lord Christ, "is among you." But what, precisely, is the Kingdom of Heaven? You cannot point to existing specimens, saying, "Lo, here!" or "Lo, there!" You can only experience it. But what is it like, so that when we experience it we may recognize it? Well, it is a change, like being born again and re-learning everything from the start. It is secret, living power—like yeast. It is something that grows, like seed. It is precious like buried treasure, like rich pearl, and you have to pay for it. It is a sharp cleavage through the rich jumble of things which life presents: like fish and rubbish in a draw-net, like wheat and tares; like wisdom and folly; and it carries with it a kind of menacing finality; it is new, yet in a sense it was always there—like turning out a cupboard and finding there your own childhood as well as your present self; it makes demands, it is like an invitation to a royal banquet—gratifying, but not to be disregarded, and you have to live up to it; where it is equal, it seems unjust, where it is just it is clearly not equal—as with the single pound, the diverse talents, the labourers in the vineyard, you have what you bargained for; it knows no compromise between an uncalculating mercy and a terrible justice—like the unmerciful servant, you get what you give; it is helpless in your hands like the King's Son, but if you slay it, it will judge you; it was from the foundations of the world; it is to come; it is here and now; it is within you. It is recorded that the multitude sometimes failed to understand.

Dorothy L. Sayers, The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, 1963, as quoted in A Matter of Eternity: Selections from the Writings of Dorothy L. Sayers, Eerdmans, 1973, pp. 19-20.

"There are none so blind as those who will not see"

David Mills writes that as a "secular-minded young man," he was put off by the dogmatism of secularists:

.... A secular teacher or friend or a secularist writer of note would declare that God did not exist or that a particular belief was incredible, and I would wonder how he could be so sure. Friends and teachers would sweep away the supernatural with all the confidence of the Fundamentalists they laughed at, and with fewer arguments than the Fundamentalists offered.

They would declare, for example, that the rational man simply couldn’t believe the claim that a man rose from the dead. When you’re dead, you’re dead. But since most people can’t live with this reality, they invent the idea of life after death, and in the first century this wish was attached to a particularly popular preacher and was developed into what we know as Christianity. You don’t want to die, claim that someone rose again a long, long time ago, and that he’ll save you too.

This seemed to me likely, but still, I always wondered, how could they know? How could they be so sure that they knew the universe so intimately that they could rule out life after death? How could they know that the idea of an Incarnation and a Resurrection was intrinsically impossible? How could they be so confident that the religious didn’t sense something they didn’t sense, like the possibility that we hope for a next world because we were made for that world?

I saw, as did many of my friends, that if God existed, he might not make himself known in the ways they required. How could we predict what God would offer us and why? If he existed, he didn’t come to you on your terms. He came on his, and he might prove somewhat indifferent to your demands.

And even then I saw that he might make himself known in ways the secularist would refuse to see, and that the atheist may have made himself unable to see the evidence, no matter how clear it is. I had no confidence that my atheist friends and teachers wanted to meet God, because God was likely to prove excessively disruptive. I wasn’t excited by the possibility of meeting Him. ....

Believers at the Net » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog

Sabbath rest

In "Human Flourishing," an essay directed primarily to university students, Danielle Sallade commends the importance of a Sabbath:

.... I believe we would be greatly aided in living out our actual dependence upon God (which, like the Israelites in the wilderness, we all too easily forget) if the body of Christ today would make Sabbath-keeping a priority. Most of the Christian students I work among and most of my Christian peers do not take an intentional Sabbath, nor have they been taught much theology undergirding the practice of Sabbath-keeping. And one reason is that our society as a whole has lost any notion of one day a week being set apart for something different than all the rest (with all stores and entertainment venues open, recreational sports leagues in full swing Saturday and Sunday, etc., so that our societal striving and consuming continues seven days a week). Many students attend a service on Sunday morning, but the rest of the day is for school work. On our campus the libraries are the most crowded on Sunday, with Saturday being taken up by social events and extracurricular activities. So outside of the time spent in a service, the cycle of hard work and maxed-out activity does not stop.

For students who are preparing for an unknown career in an unknown place, it is such a challenge not to think that you have to work hard to craft your future by working in the present. But with a weekly day of rest, we can take the focus off of ourselves and place it back, rightfully, on God. Marva Dawn writes,

In our twentieth-century spirituality we easily lose the notion of God’s provision for us because of our advanced civilization and its distance from the actual processes that provide material goods. A major blessing of Sabbath keeping is that it forces us to rely on God for our future. On that day, we do nothing to create our own way. We abstain from work, from our incessant need to produce and accomplish, from all the anxieties about how we can be successful in all that we have to do to get ahead. The result is that we can let God be God in our lives.

We can train ourselves, like the Israelites feeding on manna, to be confident that God is providing for us today and will surely provide for us tomorrow.

Attending a worship service on our Sabbath-day also reminds us that our identity is rooted in Christ and not in our work. “In our culture, which attaches such a grand importance to work and productivity, our weekly ceasing reminds us that the value of work lies not in itself, nor in the worth it gives us, but in the worship of God that takes place in it.” So worship lifts our gaze toward God and reveals our sins that we let creep into our work. And we can recommit ourselves to working with God and for God as the new week begins. Corporate worship on the Sabbath also brings us into physical contact with our other family members in the body of Christ. So we are visibly reminded of our place in the community and our responsibility for helping take care of the needs of those around us. Again, our focus is drawn outward and we can see the sins of self and repent. .... [more]

Christ on Campus Initiative - The Gospel Coalition

'Peace, peace,' they say, when there is no peace

We are the folk song army,
Every one of us cares.
We’re all against poverty, war and injustice
— unlike the rest of you squares.
Tom Lehrer

Walter Russell Mead quotes the lines above in the course of giving a history lesson with a contemporary [and perennial] application about the consequences of failing to face up to reality:

Of all the mass murderers, genocidaires and enablers of the twentieth century, one group of collaborators does not get its fair share of condemnation and moral loathing. Unfortunately Americans have never really come to terms with the terrible things they did, we have never really named and shamed them, and we have never diagnosed and exposed the bad ideas that led to some of America’s most fateful and costly blunders. Until we do, our society is at risk of repeating these errors.

The people I have in mind are the ‘goo-goo genocidaires,’ the willfully blind reformers, civil society activists, clergy, students and others whose foolishness and ignorance was a necessary condition for tens of millions of deaths in the last hundred years. Unreflective, self-righteous ‘activists’ thought that to espouse peace was the same thing as to create or safeguard it. As a result, tens of millions died. Unless this kind of thinking is exposed and repudiated, it is likely to lead to as many or more deaths in the 21st.

We all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; this turns out to be particularly true when it comes to the road to foreign policy hell. Over the years good people or at least people who wanted to be good or thought they were, motivated by what seemed to them to be the highest of motives, have taken political stands and made policy proposals that helped mass murderers gain power in their own countries and launch themselves on international careers of conquest and mayhem. At other times, fortunately, they’ve failed to change policy; still, they wasted a lot of people’s time and made life significantly more difficult for those whose plans to help the world ultimately worked.

The most notorious example is the peace movement of the 1920s and 1930s. This movement enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of college professors, idealistic students, respected journalists, the union movement, and the mainline clergy. If you didn’t join in, you were criticized as a warmonger, a throwback, someone lacking the broad social vision and high sense of ideals that modern times required. ....

The American peace and disarmament movement almost destroyed human freedom. The peace movement gave intellectual and moral respectability to the cause of isolationism: the belief that the United States could safely ignore the unraveling of the world’s fragile economic and political order as British power waned after World War I. But these idealistic professors, students, preachers and general all-around-good-guys were naive, self-righteous, and smugly sure that arms cause war.

Armed with a set of wrong headed prejudices (they called them ‘convictions’ and ‘ideals') that made it impossible for them to recognize deadly dangers staring them right in the face, they minimized the difference between imperfect friends (like then-imperialist Britain and France) and flamingly wicked mass murdering thugs (like Stalin, Hitler and the militaristic governments of Japan). Worse, they used all their considerable intelligence, power and media access to prevent Franklin Roosevelt from taking effective action to support the western democracies and China until it was far too late to prevent World War Two, and almost too late to win it. Even then, because the pathetically and self-righteously foolish and irresponsible ‘peace activists’ of the 1930s let the Axis get so far, we could only beat Hitler with Stalin’s help; the oppression of central Europe and the Cold War were the fault of the clergy, professors and civil society activists of the 1930s as well. ....

Understand and sympathize with their legitimate aspirations: that, the professors and preachers constantly told everyone else, was the sophisticated, modern and enlightened way to deal with these problems. Before the war it was the poor Germans, so shabbily treated by the Treaty of Versailles that Hitler represented a necessary phase of Germany’s search for self-respect. Before and after World War Two they said it about Stalin: communism was simply payback for the excesses and crimes of capitalist greed. Yes, they sometimes went too far: but surely that was ‘our’ fault for having permitted these terrible conditions to occur in the first place. ....

If the Nazis and the Communists between them didn’t overrun the whole world in the terrible 1940s, it was not because the international peace movement didn’t do everything in its power to leave the democracies trembling and helpless before the totalitarian threat. Had these people wised up and supported moderate programs of rearmament in the early 1930s and insisted that the western democracies take a stand against Hitler early on, there would have been no Nuremberg Laws, no Holocaust, no mass terror bombings of European cities, no Stalinist occupation of central Europe — and no Cold War.

Morally of course this was nowhere near as bad as what the Nazis and Communists did. The peaceniks didn’t will the slaughter of millions of innocent people: out of ignorance and conceit they merely created the conditions which let it happen. But while the peace movement wasn’t as evil as the dictators, the dictators could never have achieved their goals without their sanctimonious and timorous enablers in the western world. .... (more)

Read it all before commenting.

Goo-Goo Genocidaires: The Blood Is Dripping From Their Hands - Walter Russell Mead's Blog - The American Interest

"They are...lovers of truth, when they are not heated with political debate."

Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings, is given one of those good reviews that in itself broadens understanding and makes its subject more interesting by providing context. Two selections:

One also learns from Johnson that the false premise of our time is the belief that man is justified, not by his behavior, but by his opinions. What one does is of little consequence so long as one holds the right views. Disdain for that assumption runs through all Johnson’s writings on manners and morality. “There are men,” he writes in Rambler 28,

who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice, and who believe themselves mild and moderate, charitable and faithful, because they have exerted their eloquence in commendation of mildness, fidelity, and other virtues. .  .  . Having none to recall their attention to their lives, they rate themselves by the goodness of their opinions, and forget how much more easily men may show their virtue in their talk than in their actions.

Accordingly Johnson’s most acerbic criticisms are usually reserved for those “men of letters”—intellectuals is our term—who pay scrupulous attention to the morality of “society” but none to their own. “Be not too hasty,” says Imlac, the prince’s wise instructor in Rasselas, “to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: They discourse like angels, but they live like men.” ....

Both these predispositions—his refusal to countenance any belief that oversimplified the human experience, and his dim view of man’s benevolence—made him skeptical of the claims of politics. The mental vulgarity of politics robs men of good cheer, and gives them the moral license to say things they know to be untrue. In Idler 10, Johnson discusses two of his friends. “They are both men of integrity,” he says, “where no factious interest is to be promoted; and both lovers of truth, when they are not heated with political debate.”

Politics usurps the mind, and tempts its participants to exaggerate the importance of government policies beyond all rational bounds. ....

Dr J.’s Sampler | The Weekly Standard

Truly humble

Kevin DeYoung writes today on "One Simple Way to Demonstrate Love and Humility," and that way has to do with the nature of your conversation — not so much about you [that is to say, about you, not me]. His thoughts were inspired by what he remembered of something C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:

…Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call “humble” nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all. If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

One Simple Way to Demonstrate Love and Humility – Kevin DeYoung

Building believers the old-fashioned way

Melinda Penner, at Stand to Reason: "Recover an Ancient Practice: Catechism":

One of the significant omissions of evangelicalism is teaching Christianity to Christians. "Catechizing" is the old-fashioned word for it. .... [T]he result is that many (most?) Christians have the thinnest idea of what Christianity is, how it's different from other religions, and an appreciation for the importance of doctrine.

Doctrine is another of those words that has a bad reputation. But it's nothing more than believing correctly all that the Bible teaches. And that's an excellent and worthy goal, even a God-given duty. ....

I think one of the keys to the vitality and effectiveness of the church and individual Christians is better educating Christians in the substance of the faith. That's why a new book by J.I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett is an excellent resource that every church leader should read. It's very comprehensive offering a rationale, a history, and a plan for "building believers the old-fashioned way." It's called Grounded in the Gospel, which is the goal of catechism.

The point of catechism is to better understand what the Bible teaches. It's not a substitute for the Bible. But the Bible means so much more when we come to it with more insight. Catechism is meant to help us know God better, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and what He has done and continues to do. And to know Him is to love Him more. ....

Stand to Reason Blog: Recover an Ancient Practice: Catechism

Assassins

HistoryNet.com presents "Holy Terror: The Rise of the Order of Assassins," an article describing the origin of the word "assassin," interesting information about historical divisions in Islam, but most of all the account of an important period in the history of terrorism with significant parallels today.

For almost two centuries, from 1090 until 1273, the Order of Assassins played a singular and sinister role in the Middle East. A small Shiite sect more properly known as the Nizari Ismailis, the Assassins were relatively few, geographically dispersed, and despised as heretics by both the Sunni Muslim majority and even by most other Shiites. By conventional standards, the Assassins should have been no match for the superior conventional military power of any of their many enemies. But near the end of the 11th century, the charismatic and ruthless Hasan-i Sabbah forged this small, persecuted sect into one of the most lethally effective terrorist groups the world has ever known. Even the most powerful and carefully guarded rulers of the age—the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphs, the sultans and viziers of the Great Seljuk and Ayyubid empires, the princes of the Crusader states, and emirs who ruled important cities like Damascus, Homs, and Mosul—lived in dread of the chameleonlike Assassin agents. Known as a fida'i (one who risks his life voluntarily, from the Arabic word for "sacrifice"; the plural in Arabic is fidaiyn, or the present-day fedayeen), such an agent might spend months or even years stalking and infiltrating an enemy of his faith before plunging a dagger into the victim's chest, often in a very public place. Perhaps most terrifying, the Assassins chose not only a close and personal manner of killing but performed it implacably, refusing to flee afterward and appearing to welcome their own swift death. ....

Today, 750 years after the Mongols crushed them, the Assassins' pioneering use of suicide terrorism, of murdering systematically though at times indiscriminately to achieve political ends, finds chilling echoes in the tactics of terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda. But for Hasan-i Sabbah, acts of terror were a legitimate means of self-defense precisely because they focused on high-ranking enemy military, political, and religious leaders who had taken hostile actions against the Ismaili community. There is little doubt he would have viewed the tactics employed by modern Middle Eastern terrorist groups—particularly their targeting of unarmed civilians—with incomprehension and disdain. ....

.... They never engaged in the wholesale slaughter of civilians. Many of the Sunni notables who fell to the daggers of the fida'is had encouraged pogroms against Ismailis or ordered military expeditions against their enclaves. Hasan considered these leaders legitimate military targets in a life-and-death struggle. Innocents were spared. Over time, the increasingly fearsome reputation of the Assassin fida'is, coupled with the Assassins' successful defense of their main bases, increasingly deterred Sunni leaders from taking action against the sect. By the mid-12th century, the result was a grudging live-and-let-live relationship between the Persian Assassins and their Sunni enemies that lasted until the coming of the Mongols a century later. .... [more]

[the picture is of the ruins of Alamut, the Assassin stronghold]

"Holy Terror: The Rise of the Order of Assassins"

Top fifty Christian movies

Anthony Esolen offers his list of "The Top Fifty Christian Movies" which he defines as not meaning "that the movie is explicitly religious, but rather that a Christian view of the world informs the whole."

Lists are made to be argued about. I've seen almost all of the films on this list and, even if I can't always discern what is "Christian" about one or another of his choices, it is a list of very good older movies.

Here are a few good ones that you may have missed:

6. How Green Was My Valley

9. You Can't Take It with You

24. Tender Mercies

25. The Trip to Bountiful

26. The Straight Story

38. Sergeant York

41. Witness

44. The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Each of these, and all the others, are worth a rainy afternoon. Borrow them from the library, buy them, or put them on your NetFlix list.

The comments after the list add a number of other good movies.

Ben Dueholm calls my attention to this: "The Arts & Faith Top 100 Films."

Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: The Top Fifty Christian Movies

June 6, 1944

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

SIGNED: Dwight D. Eisenhower

Ike's D-Day Message (Speech): General Dwight D. Eisenhower: :June 6, 1944 General Order: Allied Expeditionary Force

Gay and celibate

I recall a conversation with a gay friend—a Christian—in which I argued that whether or not homosexuality was inherent for some, the requirement of Christian morality is that sex is reserved for marriage. So, whether gay or not, if you're not married, celibacy is the expectation. His response — I am heterosexual, never married — was that I was condemning him to a hopeless life, and that at least I had the possibility of sexual fulfillment.

Friday The New York Times published a profile of a thirty-something young woman, who, I gather from another source, may have grown up in Madison: "A Gay Catholic Voice Against Same-Sex Marriage".

...Ms. Tushnet can seem a paradox: fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate. She does not see herself as disordered; she does not struggle to be straight, but she insists that her religion forbids her a sex life.

“The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants,” Ms. Tushnet wrote in a 2007 essay for Commonweal. While gay sex should not be criminalized, she said, gay men and lesbians should abstain. They might instead have passionate friendships, or sublimate their urges into other pursuits. “It turns out I happen to be very good at sublimating,” she says, while acknowledging that that is a lot to ask of others.

Marriage should be reserved for heterosexuals, whose “relationships can be either uniquely dangerous or uniquely fruitful,” she explained in an e-mail message. “Thus it makes sense to have an institution dedicated to structuring and channeling them.”

But same-sex marriage, she wrote in The New York Post in 2007, “can bring one of three outcomes: A two-tiered marriage culture, where heterosexual couples are asked to do the hard things (sex only within marriage, marriage for life in most circumstances) and homosexual couples work out their own marriage norms; reshape marriage into an optional, individualized institution, ignoring the creative and destructive potentials of ‘straight’ sex; or encourage all couples to restrict sex to marriage and marry for life, and hope that gay couples accept norms designed to meet heterosexual needs.” ....

None of us manage to live out our moral obligations. That is why we Christians need confession, and repentance, and assurance of forgiveness. But surely Ms. Tushnet has got the expectations of biblical faith right and the fact that its demands are difficult hardly means that they should be abandoned.

Beliefs - A Gay Catholic Voice Against Same-Sex Marriage - NYTimes.com

"Be of good cheer!"

Peanuts rivals Calvin & Hobbes as my favorite ever comic strip. I grew up with Peanuts and when, in 1964, The Gospel According to Peanuts appeared I was enormously pleased. By then I was Christian by conviction not just culture, and happy to find that one of the most popular phenomena of popular culture could be associated with the faith. The book was written by Robert L. Short and illustrated by selected panels from Charles Schulz's strip. Frankly, I've browsed the book looking at the cartoons far more often than I have read Short's text. The example below is from page 11, and although it isn't used in the book to illustrate the passage from James, it seems to me obvious those verses are what Schulz had in mind.

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
(James 2:14-17, ESL)

"I will give to you...."

Helen Thomas, still holding an honored seat at every Presidential press conference, thinks the Jews should get out of Israel and go "home" — to Germany and Poland!

Jews do have a reasonably ancient claim to be at home in Israel, even apart from this:

And God said to him, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. .... And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God. (Genesis 17:3-4, 7-8, ESV)

"A chaos of conflicting ideals"

Michael Oakeshott, on why the pursuit of personal  perfection, although bound to fail, may be a virtue, but why that pursuit on behalf of society is folly:

The pursuit of perfection as the crow flies is an activity both impious and unavoidable in human life. It involves the penalties of impiety (the anger of the gods and social isolation), and its reward is not that of achievement but that of having made the attempt. It is an activity, therefore, suitable for individuals, but not for societies. For an individual who is impelled to engage in it, the reward may exceed both the penalty and the inevitable defeat. The penitent may hope, or even expect, to fall back, a wounded hero, into the arms of an understanding and forgiving society. And even the impenitent can be reconciled with himself in the powerful necessity of his impulse, though, like Prometheus, he must suffer for it. For a society, on the other hand, the penalty is a chaos of conflicting ideals, the disruption of a common life, and the reward is the renown which attaches to monumental folly. A mesure que l'humanité se pefecttonrte l'homme se degrade. Or, to interpret the myth in a more light-hearted fashion: human life is a gamble; but while the individual must be allowed to bet according to his inclination (on the favourite or on an outsider), society should always back the field.

Michael Oakeshott, "The tower of Babel," Rationalism in politics and other essays, Liberty Press.

The real problem: Jews defending themselves

I titled this post "The real problem: Jews defending themselves" but the more I read about the world's reaction to the blockade incident I am tempted to conclude that, for many of the critics, the real problem is Jews. A. Barton Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch explains the reason that Israeli behavior causes notably more outrage than that of anyone else:

What's the real problem with Israel's assault on the Gaza flotilla? It's not the loss of life. Almost nobody cares about that. It's not the suffering of Palestinians. When Palestinians suffer, the world shrugs

Remember the worldwide condemnations, the protests across Europe and Asia, the stern rebukes from the world's high councils in January of last year — when Hamas militants executed 54 members of the Fatah party and tortured 175 more for (allegedly) collaborating with Israel? You don't? That's because the killing and torture went on with almost no notice or comment.

How about the world's outrage in November 2007, when Hamas gunmen killed seven civilians and wounded 80 more during a rally memorializing Yasser Arafat in Gaza? If you don't remember the outrage, the marches in the street, the scathing U.N. resolutions, that's because there weren't any. ....

Two wrongs don't make a right, and none of the above is meant to excuse Israel's clumsy, ill-orchestrated boarding of the Mavi Marmara. Nor is it meant to offer an unequivocal defense of the blockade, a legitimate point of contention. ....

The point is simply that those professing to be so broken up about the blockade and Israel's enforcement of it have been remarkably subdued whenever suffering is inflicted by someone other than Jews. ....

Nor did the world object as more than 10,000 rockets rained down on Israeli civilians over the course of several years. It was not until Israel finally had had enough and began going after those firing the rockets in late 2008 that the world sat up and began to insist the fighting stop. On one side, anyway. Across Europe, protesters and vandals went after Jewish synagogues, neighborhoods, and congregations. Attacking Jews in the West, in other words. As if it were somehow their fault.

Nor have there been any marches in the street to protest the behavior of those who organized the flotilla and assaulted the Israeli commandos. There has been equally little objection to the footage from al-Jazeera of men on board the flotilla, the day before the fiasco, chanting "[Remember] Khaibar, Khaibar, oh Jews! The army of Muhammad will return!" Khaibar was the last Jewish village taken by the Prophet Muhammad in 628. These are peace activists?

So what's the real problem with Israel's assault on the flotilla? Not the loss of life. Not the suffering of Palestinians. The real problem is that Jews defended themselves. That is the one offense in the Middle East the world simply will not forgive.

Hinkle: Israel Committed the One Unforgivable Offense | Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Have mercy upon us ...."

Bob Spencer at Wilderness Fandango "On Default Positions":

Have you ever noticed that holiness is not the Christian's default position? In other words, sin is not an occasional lapse for us born agains, who are otherwise strikingly moral and righteous to the core.

For example, you decide you're not going sit in the seat of scoffers any longer. You do pretty well with that for a day or too, and give yourself a little pat on the back, informing your friends of another holiness echelon you've just achieved. But then, well, a day comes when, without even noticing, you slide back into the old patterns. Easy as sipping milk.

Or, on a more positive note, you commit yourself to letting your light so shine before men that they praise their Father in Heaven. By the end of the week, taking stock, you have to admit that no one has praised their Father in Heaven because of your little light. What happened?

This problem . . . you'd think it would garner more attention among us than it does. Sin remains the default position of the flesh. .... [more]

...Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.

But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.
To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
(1 Timothy 1:15-17, ESV)

Wilderness Fandango: On Default Positions

"Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!"

Richard Cohen, the liberal Washington Post columnist, having reviewed the most recent crime statistics, wonders "Did liberals get it wrong on crime?":

The good news is that crime is again down across the nation — in big cities, small cities, flourishing cities and cities that are not for the timid. Surprisingly, this has happened in the teeth of the Great Recession, meaning that those disposed to attribute criminality to poverty — my view at one time — have some strenuous rethinking to do. It could be, as conservatives have insisted all along, that crime is committed by criminals. For liberals, this is bad news indeed. ....

...[I]t now seems fairly clear that something akin to culture and not economics is the root cause of crime. By and large everyday people do not go into a life of crime because they have been laid off or their home is worth less than their mortgage. They do something else, but whatever it is, it does not generally entail packing heat. Once this becomes an accepted truth, criminals will lose what status they still retain as victims. ....

A good deal of social policy was predicated on such an outlook. It made victims of criminals and criminals of victims (all wealth comes from theft, etc.) — and in so doing, insulted the law-abiding poor who somehow lacked the wit to appreciate their historic plight. This ideology was mocked by Stephen Sondheim in his lyrics for the "West Side Story" song "Gee, Officer Krupke": "Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, you gotta understand, it's just our bringin' up-ke that gets us out of hand. Our mothers all are junkies, our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!" In other words, all the gang members were the unavoidable products of their environment.

Common sense tells you that the environment has to play a role and the truly desperate will sometimes break the law — like Victor Hugo's impoverished Jean Valjean, who stole bread for his sister's children. But the latest crime statistics strongly suggest that bad times do not necessarily make bad people. Bad character does. [more]

Richard Cohen - Did liberals get it wrong on crime?

"Self-esteem should be earned"

From an interview with Angela Duckworth at In Character:

Educators for some time now have put a premium on self-esteem. Schools strive to help kids develop self-esteem on the theory that other good things such as achievement will flow from increased self-esteem. Which is more important, self-discipline or self-esteem, for being successful as a student?

Ah, how great to be asked this question! We did a study in which we followed kids for four years. We took their self-control ratings from parents and teachers and the kids themselves. We tracked them every year, and we kept their grades from school records, not from their own reports on their grades. We pitted self-control and self-esteem - we also took measures for both - against each other. Here's what we found: When kids increase in self-control, their grades go up later. But when kids increase their self-esteem, there is no effect on their grades. The bottom line is that our research shows that self-control is more important than self-esteem in determining achievement. People have been studying self-esteem for a long time, and this allows you to compare the self-esteem of kids who grew up in the nineties with, say, those who grew up in the seventies or eighties with regard to self-esteem. Self-esteem has gone up in the United States; achievement has not. If anything, compared with other countries, we have done worse, but our kids feel really good about themselves on average. What seems particularly interesting, and there is an article by J.P. Tangney on this, is that there is an uncoupling between your perception of your own competence and how much you like yourself. Many American kids, particularly in the last couple of decades, can feel really good about themselves without actually being good at anything. This is the problem with the "self-esteem at all costs" message. Self-esteem should be earned. I find that parents today, at least those in a high socioeconomic bracket, never want to say anything critical of their children. Everybody has to be a winner. You take your children to a soccer game, and they don't keep score anymore. They don't want anybody to lose. Well, it's a good thing for kids to lose sometimes. They see what it's like to get up again. They realize it's not the end of the world. The scholar Roy Baumeister began believing in self-esteem as a predictor of success, but he did studies and it isn't. Self-control is. (emphasis added) [more]

The Nitty Gritty: Self-Esteem vs. Self-Control — Observation — In Character, A Journal of Everyday Virtues by the John Templeton Foundation

No man is an island

An article from Psychology Today notes a distressing study and, among other suggested causes, indicts once again the perverse educational emphasis on "self-esteem":

College students who hit campus after 2000 have empathy levels that are 40% lower than those who came before them, according to a stunning new meta-analysis presented to at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science by University of Michigan researchers. It includes data from over 14,000 students. ....

Why might today's students be less empathetic than their elders? One of the culprits...is the way that they spent most of their time early in life. Today's kids play outdoors much less—and they spend far less time in unstructured activity with others than prior generations.

Without unstructured free time with playmates, children simply don't get to know each other very well. And you can't learn to connect and care if you don't practice these things. Free play declined by at least a third between 1981 and 2003—right when the kids who hit college in 2000 and later were growing up. ....

Another factor is the "self esteem movement" and its pernicious notion that "you can't love anyone else until you love yourself." Today's kids grew up with parents who were taught by therapists and self help groups attended by millions that caring too much for other people or having your happiness tied to theirs was "co dependence,"—and that people should be able to be happy on their own, needing no one. .... [more]

Shocker: Empathy Dropped 40% in College Students Since 2000 | Psychology Today