Nate Knows Nada

I think most readers here will agree that I’m pretty committed in terms of religion and in my commitment to the American project. However, this just depresses me.

That Bill O’Reilly is a hypocrite’s hypocrite.

From Inside Higher Ed

On Monday, as part of his Fox News “O’Reilly Factor” show, O’Reilly aired video of a 750-person party at Brown University that ended with around 20 students being taken to the hospital. O’Reilly lambasted the shindig, calling the Brown administrators a bunch of “liberal pinheads” for allowing such behavior on campus.

O’Reilly called the “Sex Power God” party, an annual event sponsored by Brown’s Queer Alliance, a sign of the times on liberal campuses. Colleges “don’t care what these kids do,” he said on his radio show the day after the video aired on his television show. “You wanna’ have sex with 18 people? Go ahead.”

I refer the ladies and gentlemen of the court to The Smoking Gun:

81. During the course of Defendant O’Reilly’s sexual rant, it became clear that he was using a vibrator upon himself, and that he ejaculated. Plaintiff was repulsed.

This is hardly a man to lecture any of us about sexual ethics. Or anything else, for that matter.

Frankly, I would rather have the Brown LGBT group watching my goddaughter than Bill. Bill O’Reilly impresses me as the sort of guy who would eat children, if “liberals” (anyone to the left of Attila the Hun) declared that eating babies was reprehensible and must stop.

Would that we all believed that there is no God.

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around….

Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

I love the paradoxes of life, where the best of belief and unbelief look remarkably the same.

Brad DeLong, Berkeley economics professor blogs about the new Narnia film. The film has raised lots of controversy among a certain brand of conservative Christian (the ones who, even at this apex of their power, complain of the anti-Christianness of American life and politics and culture).

(If you want to see an example of this carping, see an extended conversation at GetReligion, a blog I find pedantic and deceptive about its own objectivity, but which I read to get an idea of what those who disagree with me think.)

I just haven’t seen DeLong talk so directly (and Knowledgeably, on some level)about religion before. Or even to imply that there is a Christianity that has a sort of claim on him: “…but that Narnia is a kind of Christian that he (and I) do not like very much.”

The Revealer posted this the other day:

All, All, All
14 November 2005
‘Jesus did not say, ‘If I be lifted up I will draw some.’ Jesus said, ‘If I be lifted up I will draw all, all, all, all, all.” Desmond Tutu, speaking in California, called upon the Anglican Church to embrace its gay bishop, Gene Robinson, and lamented the state of the Communion which instead seemed ‘hell-bent on excommunicating one another.’

However, we Christians have been altogether too good with “some, some, some.” Take a look at Diarmid MacCulloch’s well-reviewed and regarded history of the Reformation.Or read any history of the earlier Church, in its conciliar phase.

After the above development, matters progressed. First, we see the Global South primates attacking their first among equals.

The Times newspaper reported that the opposition came from 14 “Global South” primates headed by the ultra-conservative Nigerian archbishop, Dr Peter Akinola.

There are 38 primates in the Anglican Communion.

The letter, published on the Global South Anglican website on Wednesday night, urged Dr Williams to rethink his personal liberal views on homosexuality.

The letter said his “personal dissent” from the consensus of the wider Church that “same-sex sex is unacceptable” had stopped him from taking necessary steps to confront the US and Canadian churches.

And now, we see them not attacking the ABC.

But yesterday a number of those whose names appeared as signatories of the letter when it was published on the conservative Global South website reacted angrily to its appearance.

A number said that they had seen a draft of the letter when they met earlier this month at a Global South conference in Egypt, but had expressed unease with its threatening tone.

…other conservative primates are understood to be furious that the letter was released without their knowledge.

One questions, then: If we can’t agree on whether we agreed to agree to a letter, then why is it so unfathomable that we might disagree on matters of greater weight?

“Five email tics I’d love for you to lose” from 43 Folders

I’d like to add one to the list. Complaining about receiving “non-germane” message over a list that clogs up one’s e-mail box, but sending it to the whole list, thereby creating the very traffic one is whining about.

Use a *$%*@!^ filter.

TNR Online discusses the Catholic intellectual backing of the evangelical movement in America.

There’s
a bargain of the devil oyu don’t know here.  For Catholics of a
certain bent (they’d refer to themselves as “orthodox”, although by
that term they indicate that they prefer the theology of the
post-Reformation over that of the patristics and the unified church of
the first millennium [in general]), the agreement means that they get
footsoldiers for the culture wars.  Evangelicals get a language
that doesn’t require the quoting of a scripture and interpretation that
few people are willing to accept.

But for each side, there’s a danger.  Both sides don’t really
think that the other is of the same faith community and therefore not
fuly Christian.  For the Catholics, those of the conservative bent
would say that the true church can only be found most fully in that
which is in communion with the bishop of Rome; that is, Protestants are
part of a church that is a church, but a defective one.  For
evangelicals, the tradition of referring to “Christians and Catholics”
is a long one, and one which I heard used even as recently as this week
in my department.

It’s a tenuous alliance and one which exists mostly for expediency, I
think.  And perhaps one way to decrease the power of the religious
right is to separate evangelical muscle from Catholic minds.

This is us with the president of the university, Dr. Controversey, Larry Summers.

The poor guy didn’t seem to get the joke of the costume.

I’m getting lots of comment spam today, so I’ve turned off comments for a while.  I’ll try them again in a couple of days.

EDIT (12.19 AM, 3 November): Comments are back on.  Hopefully the
changes I have made will keep the spammers at bay for a little while.