A discussion of voting

Is taking place in parts of the Catholic blogosphere:

But I am not, nor have I ever been, an absolutist when it comes to voting. I find both positions problematic: to insist one has a duty to vote or to insist that Christians may never vote is to elevate voting to a level of importance that it does not deserve. Indeed, voting is mostly just a game. Rhetoric of “change” is simply that: rhetoric. As the saying (sometimes attributed to Phillip Berrigan) goes, if voting could really change anything, they would make it illegal.

And they point us to an interesting book on the political theory of Not-Voting

Oil Policy

NPR reports this AM on the effects of oil pricing on global policy actions (by various countries, not just the USA). While the reporter remains vaguely impartial her biases show as she hits on several important issues without discussing them: The current cost of oil is robbing the USA of pride of place in several areas. China, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria… these places are becoming more important as money flows out of the USA - both real money paying for oil and the virtual money of reputation, market power and production.

It’s worth a listen.

Can it be done?

What would a truly Incarnational, Communitarian, Anarchist and Liturgical revival look like? What would it look like if a group of Christians, desiring only to live the teachings of Jesus, pooled their resources (a la the Early Church and the modern Urban Kibbutz Movement) and set out to totally ignore the state, in favour of the kingdom of God?

More

Sic Transit Gloria America

“Jesus is Lord” is Revolution in Creed. It is the assertion that the secular, non-Christian state is, in fact, irrelevant. The real gov’t to which one owes allegiance is the Kingdom of God. It is an assertion of the reality of that Kingdom over and above any experience to the contrary.

“Christ is Risen” is Revolution in Creed. It is the assertion that the social understanding of things is refuted. The cultural ways of doing things - of propitiation, of superstition, of darkness and terror - are all meaningless.

“Jesus is Lord” is not a creed coupling religion and politics: quite the contrary. It unhitches the church and the state. It makes the Church an embassy: and as with any embassy, when one is on the grounds of the embassy the laws of the host country do not matter. The embassy is the political realm of the sending state.

“Christ is Risen” is not a Creed that divides the secular from the spiritual. Quite the contrary: the two are forever more than “linked” they are the same. If the Church is the embassy, this creed asserts that the “grounds of the Embassy” are everywhere.

Props to the Street Prophets, it seems that, once again, there is no difference of import between the parties, as Obama Supports FISA Legislation:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) today announced his support for a sweeping intelligence surveillance law that has been heavily denounced by the liberal activists who have fueled the financial engines of his presidential campaign.

In other words, there is no hope offered by Obama of the staying the transformation of AmeriKKKa into an ever-stronger police state.

There is no hope offered by McCain, either.

We are screwed. And you know what they say, once you go black…

Or…

• We can remember that no state is God’s kingdom.
• We can stop trying to make the world over in our version of God’s image and we can simply live it.
• We can stop pretending that either the stupid party or the evil party (pick one) is going to be better at doing God’s will.
• We can live as if God’s justice is the only justice needed.
• We can live as if God’s peace is the only peace possible.
• We can live as if God’s freedom in Christ is the only real freedom available.
• We can remember that “Jesus is Lord” is the most politically radical thing ever said; that “Christ is Risen” is the most poetically anarchistic thing ever said. Ever.

And we can live as if it is true.

Paul suggests that we follow the Emperor in as much as the Emperor’s law does not contravene the will of God. Paul wrote that at a time when both the public and private virtues as understood by the state were in nearly complete accord with Christian teaching. Paul may have been right then, but he hasn’t been right since Constantine - as the Church has confused politics with God. The triumph of the state over the church has nearly destroyed any semblance of the Revolutionary Anarchism of Jesus. If we try to recapture it (which we must) today, I think we shall have a harder time than ever; and we shall be killed for more violations than just impiety.

Under a dictatorial state which forbids liberty, how do we live the liberty of Christ?

Through Death and Resurrection.

Jesus is Lord, Christ is risen: the revolution has already happened and we need only live it. We don’t need to live as if it were true. we need to live it as Truth.

Don’t get me wrong: it will mean taking stands which may be seen as political stands. But there is a difference. We don’t need to legislate our Kingdom into being. It already exists. This will mean disagreements. Some people will say X is the way of the Kingdom and others Y. I think we can overcome those differences as long as we live into the Radical Inclusion of the Eucharist.

Jesus dined with sinners, prostitutes and those in positions of political power. Their lives changed, yes: but after they had been included in his life.

If coming to Christ is a death then let’s live the radical message: “Kill them all and let God sort them out!”

We have a world to overthrow - one in which there are enemies and outcasts. We need to live into the Eucharistic Kingdom that we’ve been proclaiming - but failing to live in - for much of the last 1500 years. There are no enemies and no outcasts anymore. Anywhere.

Time to get busy.

Reminder to my CA readers

You don’t need a minister to marry you in California. You don’t need a state official to do it either! Anyone can witness your vows to each other and sign the document as witnesses (you need two). It is the signatures of the witnesses that makes it legal. It is a community act - not a minister or the state - that makes your marriage real.

Get your license, get your friends together, and get married!

Mazel Tov!

Right Wing Whingers

It was predictable. When I read of the Supreme Court’s recognistion of the legal rights of our illegal prisoners, I needed only to click into the Right Wing side of my RSS feeds to find a blogger (two, actually) who says the court should be ignored by Bush. Ah yes, no rights for anyone, thanks, unless we like you.

The rights of Americans are based on the odd idea (from the founders) that these rights define justice and are from Our Creator - not from the state. It’s not within the State’s powers to take them away.

I see that some on the right are appealing to some mythical “absolute power” of the president “in wartime”. Just Freakin’ Great. Like I’ve said: there’s a reason I don’t think there will be an election this year - and I imagine it will be people who believe in Bush’s “Absolute Power” (and who delude themselves that we are “in wartime”) that will most support that action.

You can agree or disagree with the Founders if you wish: but you need to rewrite the entirety of US constitutional law if you wish to “so deem a class of persons a stranger to [our] laws”. That is because, as I said, our rights are not imagined to come from the state, but from a higher source - not the Christian God, per se, but an agnostically defined “Creator” and “Nature’s God”.

That’s why we had to wrestle with the personhood of the slaves: if they were human persons, they were not to be chattel. We had to deny their personhood to remove their rights. And we have to do the same to Muslims in Cuba.

The court was not willing to do that.

Thank God.

Trophy Bride

Ruth reports that the Roman Church thinks the West ‘held hostage’ by Islam. Apart from any political issues B16 and his ilk might have with people of a different faith (and don’t force it on the rest of us, thanks), there’s this sentence in Ruth’s article:

The Catholics and other Christian leaders are understandably concerned that Muslims expect equal treatment here while in some Islamic countries, Christians are not allowed to worship openly.

And there’s the link that I’ve not had. Translation: Ruth (and the Vatican) say, “Because some countries act like asses, we should act the same way in our countries.” They continue to tie the Church to the state. As if the state was at all part of what the Church was supposed to be.

More importantly they miss the reality. Christianity’s marriage to the Western State is coming to a slow, painful death. Why? Because the new power is Islam. The political union of Church and State only served the State. Now that the Church is weak - and Muslim nations control oil and populations with vast income - we should expect the western state to divorce the church and go looking for a decent trophy bride.

That betrayal comes because the Church should never have married the state in the first place: she already had a husband and she’s been playing the whore since Constantine - sucking up to power, cozying up to war, sleeping with soldiers and wining military victories so that she could say, “Look, I’m the state religion now…”

I love this line:

‘You really don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Here is a government minister endorsing the sidelining of the founding faith of her country by an aggressively colonising religion whose adherents are determined that it should supplant that founding faith – and boasting that she is giving it British taxpayers’ money to do so in the name of defeating religious extremism.

If you’ve read Geoffrey of Monmouth or Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, you know that’s exactly how Christianity got into place in England: various kings saying, “Oh, my wife is of this new faith, I’ll let her build a church here… the people will support me.” Note to the writer: the founding faith of England was not Anglicanism. It was either (according to whom you read) Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism or else Druidism.

Naturally the Muslims expect some concessions to Sharia. Why not? The Church managed to get her religion codified when she was the popular choice. Now that she’s in the minority, another religion should have a shot, no? And, given that the western states claim to function on democracy, I’m betting that there will be a lot more Muslim leaders elected in the West in the coming 50 years.

Granted: the state will just want to dilute Islam as well.

Baby Steps

By TIny - stupid - baby steps, the police state advances. TSA outlaws flights to those who refuse to show ID: but you’ll be fine if you only “forgot” your ID.

Telling a lie is fine: asserting the rights of any American… not.

Out In Force

The Democrats were out in force today, registering voters. I know they were democrats because as they asked me, over and over, “would you like to register to vote” they all flashed their Obama stickers at me. I still feel that we’ve set up the Republican Son of Cain to win the White House. And that’s pretty much how I feel about him.

But I also feel, over and over, that the large swath of Americans get exactly what they deserve. And, if one of the most intelligent men to run for the White House in living memory is an “elitist” because he went to college - what does that make the wife of a Rhodes Scholar who, upon leaving the White House, retired not to her rural home in Arkansas, but rather to New York City?

And do we want to vote for a man who says he can’t disown his close friend any more than he can disown his own grandmother… Who then latter disowned his close friend?

Ah, well.

We’ll all be stupid until November - and then, maybe, for a couple of years, we can get back to fearing for our rights before the 2012 election cycle kicks in.

And maybe, just maybe, the Christians in the room can find a way to live a little bit more like the Kingdom and not confuse it with the White House.

Zinn on election madness

For all that he gave me a rash in College, I begin to think Howard Zinn understands more about our Clear and Present Danger than most of the rest of us will ever guess.