A couple of weeks ago we noted how a local minister was thinking that we could use our technology to help God out with his kingdom building. Now the same kind of thinking has reached all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Last week, President Obama told a group of rabbis, “We are God’s partners in matters of life and death.” Besides being a devastating way to refute Sarah Palin’s death panels argument (that’s sarcasm, Albert), it prompted this fine bit of theologizing from Andrew Klavan.
I would like to make a subtle theological point: No, we’re not. For those of you who aren’t versed in the finer points of theology, let me try to simplify that for you: No. We’re not. Or to put it even more simply: No. We. Are. Not.
…When God tells Jeremiah (1:5), “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” or when he sarcastically asks Job (38:17), “Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?” does that sound to you like a guy discussing matters with his partners? To me, God really seems to be suggesting there that we humans know sweet suffering goose-egg about the greater mysteries of life and death. Indeed, he seems to feel that the understanding of those mysteries is reserved for him alone and their disposition in his sole power. It’s possible, if properly understood, he might include even Barack Obama in his list of people whose partnership he is not soliciting in these matters.
A while back we were discussing the wisdom of attacking Satan, and after three posts I thought I had dealt with the issue. Not quite. Consider this the fourth in that series.
One of the points I made in the first post was that a defining characteristic of false teachers is that they disrespect Satan and his horde of celestial beings. At the time, I referred to the idea as counterintuitive, which got me thinking. Why is it that contrabiblical teachers also tend to be anti-Satan?
I think we can find part of the answer in Iran. If you have the courage and bad fortune to attend a state-supported public rally there or in several other Muslim countries, you’re very likely to hear the leaders exhorting the crowd in chants of “Death to America” or “Death to the Great Satan” (same thing). For a while, George W. Bush was the face of the Great Satan, and Barack Obama came to office hoping to change the satanic perception of America. Some may have been surprised when two weeks before his inauguration, Obama had become the newest incarnation of the ever-threatening Great Satan. As Mark Steyn observed, “Meet the new Great Satan, the same as the Old…”
Here was a diplomacy-loving, Muslim-raised new leader who had promised to remake our relationship with the Muslim world. Why, then, was Obama Satanized?
It’s simply because the leaders of countries like Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and North Korea need an all-powerful enemy to blame for the basketcases that they’ve turned their countries into. Iran, one of the world’s most important suppliers of oil, would be crippled if we cut off petroleum imports, such is the country’s economic disrepair. To prevent the public from turning on the mullahs and “elected” leaders for causing the problems that they live with every day, it’s more convenient to blame the Great Satan. If it were ever known that the United States was not a threat and was, very often, a source of important humanitarian aid, leaders would lose the ability to rally public anger against the imaginary foreign devil.
Here’s the key point: enemies create unity and passion that is independent of a leader.
George Orwell understood the point as well, and illustrated it in 1984 with his description of the Two Minutes Hate.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.
The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even – so it was occasionally rumoured – in some hiding-place in Oceania itself…
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen…
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic…
At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration.
And that’s the key. If I can get you to hate an enemy I rage against, perhaps I can get you to love me without having to offer you any good reason to do so. That’s why false teachers need a Great Satan.
If you can focus my attention on fighting an enemy who doesn’t need to be fought, you can distract me from worrying about the veracity of your teaching.
If you can make me join you in facing down what appears to be a common enemy, I might not ever wonder if you might also be my enemy.
And if you make a habit of denouncing every other church in town, I might conclude that yours is the only source of truth and salvation.
Barack Obama’s thin skin was apparent again at his press conference last night as he complained about Republicans who criticized his one trillion dollar stimulus bill.
Shut up, he explained. You Republicans can’t criticize me because you were as fiscally irresponsible as I am trying to be:
Obama repeatedly reminded a national television audience that federal spending and deficits soared under George W. Bush’s presidency. He used the point to undermine GOP lawmakers opposing his plan and calling it too costly and wasteful.
“It’s a little hard for me to take criticism from folks about this recovery package after they’ve presided over a doubling of the national debt,” Obama said. “I’m not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.”
Fair enough. At least he’s not being hypocritical, just a little too sensitive.
No, actually he was being hypocritical, and illogical.
“What I won’t do,” he said at another point, “is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place.”
What failed theories would that be, Mr President? You mean the bloated federal spending and the growing national debt.
This is Obama’s change. Same wrong direction, just much faster.
George W. Bush has been mocked for years for continuing to read a book to school children in the moments after he had been told about the attack on the World Trade Center. Forget the kids; focus on the nation’s business, the conventional wisdom said.
The same rules don’t apply to the new president. Yesterday, Obama took time off to seek out some kids to read to. It’s not as if he had better things to do (cabinet appointment scandals, Iranian satellite launches, stimulus bill shenanigans, etc).
With little notice, the president and first lady Michelle Obama bolted the gated compound of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in their tank of a limousine on Tuesday. They ended up at a Washington public school, greeted by children who could not care less about the collapse of a Cabinet secretary nomination.
“We were just tired of being in the White House,” the president candidly told the gleeful second-graders at Capital City Public Charter School.
If he’s tired after just two weeks, might I helpfully suggest he not run for a second term?
This story is not a great surprise. After spending the past year appropriating the name and image of Abraham Lincoln, Obama is trying to prevent anyone else using his.
White House lawyers want to control the use of the president’s image, recognizing the worldwide fascination about Obama’s election, First Amendment free-speech rights and easy access to videos and photos on the Web.
“Our lawyers are working on developing a policy that will protect the presidential image while being careful not to squelch the overwhelming enthusiasm that the public has for the president,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
Obama’s calls for change and his “Yes We Can” campaign mantra are being evoked to sell assembly-required furniture in Ikea’s “Embrace Change” marketing campaign, bargain airfares during Southwest Airlines Inc.’s “Yes You Can” sale and “Yes Pecan” ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. shops.
The problem is that most courts recognize that the president gives up most right to control his image when he’s in office. One other problem is that if you’re using government lawyers to enforce this, will enforcement be content neutral? If they allow favorable depictions, they’ll have First Amendment problems if they try to shut down people who use his image in critical or crass ways.
You would think that after years of comparing Bush to Hitler, that these folk would draw on their nuanced knowledge of history to think twice about swearing oaths of allegiance to the great leader.
This blog is mine alone and does not necessarily–or very often–represent the thinking or sentiments of anyone who disagrees with me, my wife, my employer, my friends, my family, my pastor, my brother, my church and, almost certainly, God. After I hit the Publish button, it doesn’t always even reflect my own thinking. It does seem to often reflect the thinking of Tommy F, Twit Conway and some guy in Minnesota, however.
