Bottom Line: For those concerned that Al Gore’s concert is over, that a long dead atheist may ban religious broadcasting, that the United Nations has passed too few resolutions this year, that Congress has established too few days celebrating important vegetables, or that too few Christians are joining Internet campaigns against bad things, I have found the answer.
Recognizing that as we enter the political season there will soon be a multiplication of academic position papers and petitions “bearing witness” against, well, evil things, I have decided to short circuit the entire process by collecting signatures opposed, utterly and firmly opposed, to all sin and evil.
This petition and organization will make all other petitions and organizations unnecessary, saving time and money for academics to earn tenure, write monographs, and other globally important activities. At more enlightened schools this effort itself may lead to the immediate positive good of tenurable activity!
A new day is dawning as traditional Christians join in the production of endless position papers with such globally effective and powerful groups as the World Council of Churches. We too must oppose those things that are opposed whenever we go to our mainstream organizational meetings.
This new organization (Lovingly Opposed to Sin and Evil) should unite all people of faith against all bad things that harm the world.
We have an immediate and realistic five year plan with five parts:
1. First, the Secretary General of the United Nations must denounce evil from the podium of U.N. headquarters.
2. All the peoples of the world should unite in the first United Nation’s sponsored concert against Bad Things.
3. During the concert, the Secretary General should ask the people of the world to take a “one minute break from evil.”
4. We ask the American Congress to pass a resolution signed by the next President firmly opposing evil.
5. We ask that business and families voluntarily refrain from evil on May 1 each year.
As people stop being evil for one minute and then for one day what will follow? The habit of not being evil may spread as people realize:
“Isn’t a day just a collection of minutes, let’s make the Minute of No Evil permanent!”
We have a dream!
We call on the United Nations and all the governments of the world to give more of their time and money to things that are not evil.
We are non-partisan and tied to no single agenda. For too long the traditional Christian community has failed to sign enough petitions written by academics. When you compare the faith based Christian community to secularists it is embarrassing how little attention is paid to the important business of doing studies clarifying exactly what the American government should be rebuked for this year.
Now some of you in the world outside of academia may question whether dictators in places like South Korea or Iran will read our position papers. Might our bold stance be useless where it is most needed?
You might question whether the time spent writing such position papers (overwhelmingly unreadable except to those academics generally lacking the energy to do the thing being condemned) could not be better spent fighting evil in more effective ways.
We will not allow our voice to be silenced or anyone to co-opt our prophetic voice by suggesting that such petitions risk almost nothing and persuade nobody. We hear us. More important to us, the media may hear us and so increase our profile in discussions on topics regarding sin and evil.
We will no longer be single issue voters, but shall only vote for candidates who promise to try not to be evil.
Evil is bad. It is very, very bad. In fact, evil is so bad that we have decided to hold an academic conference on it, write academic papers about it, and have a vote of our faculty condemning it in no uncertain terms.
It has become obvious to us that much of the faith based community has become captured by opposing sins people are actually committing and failing to speak boldly about sins that everyone agrees are wrong. It is time we took a bold stand against evils that are already being opposed by the non-religious academic establishment.
Whatever such boldness might cost our academic careers, this organization is willing to move forward with this petition and organization. Nor are we leaving the definition of evil vague. That would be to shirk our duty. Based on a paper presented at last years Academy of Religion meeting about which many in the theology of semiotic and theological game theory working group are still talking, the following definition has been adopted:
an act is evil if and only if it is construed to be necessarily base in the meetings of relevant professional organizations or causes harm greater than any possible good or is the subject of widespread condemnation in the academic community
We may not end evil this year, but with your help we will work hard to get a government grant to study doing so. Our very ineffectiveness will be a sign of our servant-leadership that dares not limit the Other by making the attainable an idol.
Our first project is to get blogs on the record opposed to Sin and Evil. Will you join us by posting our call on your blog? In this way, we can show the culture that the faith based community is neither Republican or Democrat or effective!
L.O.S.E. so We Can Win!