You will be made to care

“ You Will Be Made to Care Vanderbilt University has decided student groups on campus cannot determine their own leadership. Consequently, a muslim can run the Christian group, a global warming skeptic can run the Earth First group, a Republican can run the College Democrats, etc. You get the idea. The rule came in part because, as you will not be surprised to learn, a Christian fraternity “had expelled several students for violating their behavior policy. One student said he was ousted You will be made to care. You’ll be made to care about gay marriage. You’ll be made to care about killing kids. You’ll be made to care about the influence of a secular culture on your children as they grow. You’ll be made to care about a host of issues. because he is gay.” Tish Harrison Warren wrote about this at Christianity Today. Her Christian group allowed anyone to be a member, “but it asks key student leaders—the executive council and small group leaders—to affirm its doctrinal statement, which outlines broad Christian orthodoxy and does not mention sexual conduct specifically. But the university saw belief statements themselves as suspect.” The first bit of Tish Harrison Warren’s column is really the most relevant part for my purposes here. I thought I was an acceptable kind of evangelical. I’m not a fundamentalist. My friends and I enjoy art, alcohol, and cultural engagement. We avoid spiritual clichés and buzzwords. We value authenticity, study, racial reconciliation, and social and environmental justice. A lot of Christians have long thought they could sit on the sidelines. Only the icky evangelicals they don’t much care for and the creepily committed Catholics would have to deal with these issues and the people who hate those deeply committed to their faith. They, on the other hand, could sit on the sidelines, roll their eyes, and tell everyone that they didn’t think it was that big a deal. They were, after all, on birth control or watching whatever trendy HBO series is on or having a cocktail or perfectly willing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Nonetheless, the secularists at Vanderbilt kicked her Christian group off campus “for being the wrong kind of Christians.” My friend Matthew Lee Anderson has some thoughts on it. In part he writes, “if we do not grasp the joy of the martyrs, we do not understand them at all.” I tweeted out Matt’s post yesterday, but was reminded of it again today by my friend Nick. He sent me Rod Dreher’s piece on the whole thing. Folks, this is precisely why I started the saying “You will be made to care.” It all stemmed from a diarist here at RedState who took the position that gay marriage did not affect him, he did not care about it, and he would never care about. But, of course, you will be made to care. It is a larger issue than just gay marriage and many comfortably naive, living at the margins of faith, Christians, think they have a comfortable path through life in the United States. Put bluntly: if you do have a comfortable path through life with no fears at all of persecution, you probably are not a Christian. Islam may be about submission, but Christianity is about suffering.1 The suffering may not be major. It may be an accumulation of small sleights over time. It may be the loss of a friend or just the expulsion of your Christian group from your private school. But Christianity is a religion of suffering and persecution.  You may think you can sit on the sidelines. You may think you can opt-out of the culture war. You may think you can hide behind your trendy naked Leena Dunham t-shirt while you sip trendy drinks talking about trendy shows and writing columns demanding Christians be forced by the state to bake cakes, provide flowers and farms, and offer up photographs of gay weddings. But not only will you one day be called to account to your God for how you advanced his kingdom, but on this Earth you will be made to care. That does not mean you have license to be bitter or angry or hateful. You should love others and help others. Just do not expect anything in return. [Full Article] This blog is, and has been for 12 years, about whatever I'm into at the moment.  Politics mostly.  I've eschewed discussing religion except to ponder things like, "who do atheist turn to ... " sort of thing.   Now, I have been made to look deeper into the state or our culture, and the reasons why ... why all of it?   I won't evangelize, but it has become impossible for me to ignore.  Metzger summarized nicely with  "I'm not a practicing Christian, but ... as a strong believer in custom and tradition and ritual as the glue that keeps a culture intact .."  With the loss of those guardrails came this, today. Ten million words will not beging to summraize.  But, you know; you feel. War is declared against the Judeo-Christain ethic. Monsters have been embraced. Last week the ubiquitous "Anonymous" challenged a Tailgunner Dick comment with,   "But if you want to prove Mr. Dawkins is wrong it's necessary to prove that God does exist (which no-one has managed to do to date). I responded, but quicky deleted; it was the stuff of a range war.  On reflection though, my answer is that I am proven that God exists.  My suggestion to Anonymous would be to read ( to make it easier) Saint Thomas Aquinas's  Shorter Summa (or the even the more concise pony), and we can take it from there. But it's a sterile challenge,  for the same reason it's impossible to discuss, say, the 984 outrages against our rule of law perpetrated by this Liberal/Obama government:  Obamunists have their own media, their own history, their own wise men, and most importantly, their own statist religion and pope.  By the by, if Anonymous, or anyone else,  would like to know why I know God exists, I will be happy to answer  via e-mail,  for whatever that's worth.  I am of average intellect, and no match for the godless philosophers that  Dawkin's camp will utilize,like, say, Friedrich Nietzsche. “ After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands. Friedrich Nietzsche The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. Friedrich Nietzsche ” Huh? JMJ ”

Buying Parochial Schools on the Cheap

Liberal Plantation                        De Blasio’s Prekindergarten Expansion Collides With Church-State Divide                                                         “ [...] The biblical story of Noah’s Ark will be taught, without mention of who told Noah to build it. Challah, the Jewish bread eaten on the Sabbath, will be baked, but no blessings said over it. Some crucifixes will be removed, but others left hanging. These are the kinds of church-state gymnastics that New York City and some religious schools are performing as Mayor Bill de Blasio expands government-funded prekindergarten. Because of inadequate public school capacity, the de Blasio administration has been urging religious schools and community organizations to consider hosting the added programs. But the push is raising fresh questions for civil libertarians concerned about church-state issues, and for the schools themselves, which want to help the city and qualify for its roughly $10,000-per-student tuition payments while preserving some of the faith-based elements that attract their main clientele. The city is now asking those schools to consider converting their government-subsidized programs to a full day, or six hours 20 minutes, of secular instruction. Richard R. Buery Jr., the deputy mayor in charge of the prekindergarten expansion, said the shift was part of the mayor’s push “to create a single, unified, high-quality system.” The concerns crystallized in a one-page document the city issued in May to religious schools weighing whether to host full-day prekindergarten classes. Rather than state simply, as other municipalities have, that all religious instruction is prohibited, the city’s guidelines say that religious texts may be taught if they are “presented objectively as part of a secular program of instruction.” Learning about one’s culture is permitted, city officials say, but religious instruction is not. [....] Religious symbols are not permitted in areas used by city-funded prekindergarten students. A mezuza on a doorway would generally be allowed, but if it had a Jewish star on the outside, it would have to be evaluated in context: If it was small, it would probably be fine, said Maya Wiley, the counsel to the mayor who helped develop the guidelines. City officials point out that there is nothing new about religious organizations’ housing publicly funded prekindergarten programs; Catholic schools and other faith-based organizations already host half-day versions. But those programs present fewer potential legal problems, because the schools can deliver secular education during one half of the day and religious instruction during the other, when parents, not the city, are paying. The city is now asking those schools to consider converting their government-subsidized programs to a full day, or six hours 20 minutes, of secular instruction. Richard R. Buery Jr., the deputy mayor in charge of the prekindergarten expansion, said the shift was part of the mayor’s push “to create a single, unified, high-quality system.” [Full] According to data, New York spent $19,076 per student in the 2011 fiscal year, as compared to the national average of $10,560. Washington, D.C., spent the second-most per pupil ($18,475), and Utah spent the least ($6,212).  Bishop of Statist Church of St. Marx, de Blasio,  sees a Honey Trap  opportunity ...  ”

Rationing

Rationing By Any Other Name

"We already ration food; we just let the market do the rationing." "We already ration gasoline; we just let the market do the rationing." "We already ration cigarettes; we just let the market do the rationing."

Megan McArdle blows me away with her essay on rationing by fiat v. rationing by price, a concept, evidently, as elusive to statists as free markets and national defense. " “ But there is also a real difference between having something rationed by a process and having it rationed by a person.  That is, in fact, why progressives are so fond of rules.  They don't want to tell grandma to take morphine instead of getting a pacemaker.  It's  much nicer if you create a mathematical formula that makes some doctor tell grandma to take morphine instead of getting a pacemaker.  Then the doctor can disclaim responsibility too, because after all, no one really has any agency here--we're all just in the grips of an impersonal force. But this won't do.  If you design a formula to deny granny a pacemaker, knowing that this is the intent of the formula, then you've killed granny just as surely as if you'd ordered the doctor to do it directly. That's the intuition behind the conservative resistance to switching from price rationing to fiat rationing.  Using the government's coercive power to decide the price of something, or who ought to get it, is qualitatively different from the same outcome arising out of voluntary actions in the marketplace.  Even if you don't share the value judgement, it's not irrational, except in the sense that all human decisions have an element of intuition and emotion baked into them. ” The whole thing.  (H/T Chicago Boyz)

Same thing tata's made lots of things sick ...

What killed Michael Jackson?

Whoa! Could be.

Today's Mommy State-ment

Please turn to hymn HR 7762 in your annotated code book ...

Say Amen

A powerful method of indoctrination is to link Christian principles with negative events in order to divert thinking from the truth.

Apropos the post on "THE ACLU's WORST NIGHTMARE!," and by happenstance, our own schoolmarm Mary had just finished reading "Anti-Christian Bias in Education"  by Michael J. Chapman. A little intro dirge, Maestro. “ For more than a dozen years, I have been working to expose anti-Christian bias within America’s popular curriculum. But it wasn’t until I ran across a copy of Curriculum Standards for Social Studies,[1] published by the National Council for the Social Studies under a US Department of Education grant, that I realized the force of law was now driving the agenda. According to the NCSS standards, “[I]t is clear that the dominant social, economic, cultural and scientific trends that have defined the western world for five centuries are rapidly leading in new directions.”[2] The dominant trends that defined Western civilization are of course, the Judeo/Christian worldview. So what does this mean for social studies? The NCSS explains, “The United States and its democracy are constantly evolving and in continuous need of citizens who can adapt… to meet changing circumstances. Meeting that need is the mission of the social studies.”[3] ” Oh, there is more to it ... . We now pretty much have set in place all the preconditions Eric Hofer described (True Believer) for the formation of a  secular state modeled after Mr. Schickelgruber's National Socialist Party, and Mr.  Ulyanov's version of the same.   That is, one with archbishops named Waters, Waxman and Boxer, and a Bible titled "Annotated Code."