MSNBC - ‘Precious’ Suffering: “‘The pope must suffer so that every family and the world should see that there is, I would say, a higher gospel: the gospel of suffering, with which one must prepare the future.’”

This is so powerful and so true that I am in awe at this man’s testimony. Christianity is about the cross. It is the religion of suffering and of the suffering. Secularism tries to avoid suffering and so never grows. Christianity heals what it can, but then allows what it cannot change to help it grow toward paradise.

Beirut’s Berlin Wall is Falling: “The leader of this Lebanese intifada is Walid Jumblatt, the patriarch of the Druze Muslim community and, until recently, a man who accommodated Syria’s occupation. But something snapped for Jumblatt last year, when the Syrians overruled the Lebanese constitution and forced the reelection of their front man in Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud. The old slogans about Arab nationalism turned to ashes in Jumblatt’s mouth, and he and Hariri openly began to defy Damascus.

‘It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq,’ explains Jumblatt. ‘I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.’ Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. ‘The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.’”

Bush was right. People want to vote. They want freedom.

Let’s face it. War and reconstruction are messy things. War itself is a necessary evil in a fallen world and is horrid. However, there are worse things, including a brutal, life-destroying dictatorship.

When will liberals begin to see that Bush has potentially changed the Middle East forever? What will they do when the Iranian mullahs fall to a popular Revolution and people on the streets of Tehran openly credit Bush?

It will happen. It is just a matter of time.

Man who secretly recorded Bush says he regrets publication: “An old friend of President Bush who secretly recorded their private conversations and released them to the media said he has regrets and is turning the tapes over to Bush.”

I was hard on Wead, justly I think. He has said he was sorry and done the right thing. It cannot have been easy to do this and his actions were the correct ones. As far as I can see, this certainly puts the public portion of the issue to rest. Oh that Bill Clinton had acted this way in his own time of troubles!

Wead is to be commended for acting well. Everyone deserves a second chance, heaven knows I have needed more than one, and so here is to a future where Wead does even better work than he has done up to now. Here is to healing, hope, and reconciliation.

WorldNetDaily: Bill Maher: Christians have neurological disorder

This is my favorite fun read for the day. My comments in italics.

Bill Maher: Christians have neurological disorder
Says parents ‘drill’ religion into kids’ heads using biblical ‘fairy tales’
Posted: February 18, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

Bill Maher

Television personality Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” says Christians and others who are religious suffer from a neurological disorder that “stops people from thinking.”

Following this Maher pulled out a copy of Al Plantinga’s latest work in epistemology. “Look at this,” he said. “I was reading this last night and Reformed Epistemology is simply a joke!”

Appearing as a guest on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country” this week, Maher told host Joe Scarborough:

“We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think that religion stops people from thinking. I think it justifies crazies. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder. If you look at it logically, it’s something that was drilled into your head when you were a small child. It certainly was drilled into mine at that age. And you really can’t be responsible when you are a kid for what adults put into your head.”

Maher somehow “escaped” his childhood “indoctrination.” Why didn’t I? It could be that my Dad and Mom taught me to think. They let me read Isaac Asimov and then we discussed it. We were taught critical thinking skills which meant we did not get to “rebel” against everything our parents believed. We had to think about whether they were right. In my head the uncomfortable question would come (unbidden!), “You wish they were wrong. But what is the truth?” Some folk get trapped in being the mirror image of their parents, which they confuse with thinking, because they conflate teen rebellion with thinking.

The former host of “Politically Incorrect” said the lack of enlightenment of so many Americans means the nation actually has more in common with its enemies than one might think.

Arguments that rely on “guilt by association” are an example of Maher’s critical thinking skills.

Said Maher: “When you look at beliefs in such things as, do you go to heaven, is there a devil, we have more in common with Turkey and Iran and Syria than we do with European nations and Canada and nations that, yes, I would consider more enlightened than us.”

It is good to know that Turkey, Iran, and Syria are bad places because they are religious. I thought it might be because Turkey embraced an insane secularism that tried to stamp out their religious culture and only recently got rid ot it. I guess I did not know the dictators of Syria (Baathist) were religious extremists. Must of missed it.

Iran? Iran proves that religious people can be wrong. But wait! That is just like secular theories! Some religion are false! Some versions of religion are also harmful! However, perhaps other religious beliefs are true. One form of Islam might be harmful and another helpful to a culture. Or Islam might be false and Christianity true. Or in reverse! Such distinctions require critical thinking skills. . .

Maher’s comments on Europe are equally amusing. I guess the Christian heritage of Europe has vanished. All those beautiful objects of art and culture in Europe were created by secularists in Maher’s mind. Notre Dame? Secular. The lady referred to? Madonna. You know the one who sings. Newton, who wrote more on the Bible than science, must have actually been a secularist! Bach? Just acted religious to avoid being burned as a witch.

Maher must be hoping that we too can stop having babies, stop developing as a culture, and embrace the secularist European culture of death. Hurrah!

Maher explained that he was not singling out evangelicals, but was targeting all “religious” people.

In a related story, sure to comfort African-Americans, a leading Klansman noted he was willing to stereotype Jews and other minorities as well.

“I think the vote in Missouri [rejecting same-sex marriage] and a lot of other states is because people are religious,” Maher said. “They don’t have to be evangelical, but they’re religious. They believe in religion, which as – I think it was Jesse Ventura who had that quote about religion is a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.”

Atheism was developed to avoid fear of gods. Check out the Epicureans for more information. So?

Religion is a comfort to many people, some of whom are weak minded. That is a strength of religion, not a weakness. It also appeals to strong minded people. “Strength in numbers” used to be called voting.

The television host told Scarborough he was convinced evangelicals’ influence will wane.

Said Maher: “When people say to me, ‘You hate America,’ I don’t hate America. I love America. I am just embarrassed that it has been taken over by people like evangelicals, by people who do not believe in science and rationality. It is the 21st century. And I will tell you, my friend. The future does not belong to the evangelicals. The future does not belong to religion.”

Later, Maher noted this same prediction had been made by secularists since the nineteenth century. “We are just another day closer to a secular America,” he said, “I live by faith in the decline of religion. It is not happening, but I know it will. Clarence Darrow tells me so.”

Later in the interview, Maher returned to the childhood-religion theme, comparing fairy tales to Bible stories:

“When you were a kid and they were telling you whatever you believe in religion, do you think if they had switched the fairy tales that they read to you in bed with the Bible, you would know the difference?

“Do you think if it was the fairy tale about a man who lived inside of a whale and it was religion that Jack built a beanstalk today, you would know the difference? Why do you believe in one fairy tale and not the other? Just because adults told you it was true and they scared you into believing it, at pain of death, at pain of burning in hell.”

The host could have noted that stories invented by secularists, like some science fiction, sound a good bit like secularism. Since Christians invented the genre of fairy tales it has a strong relationship to Christian truth in terms of themes.

News flash for Maher: fairy tales, in their modern forms, are not as old as the New Testament. They may be similar because one is based on the other! Maher might also note the great truths within fairy tales that give them cultural staying power. He has confused historically false with useless. . . in which case there is nothing to learn from Tolstoy or Dickens books.

As C.S. Lewis (another person without critical thinking skills) noted Christianity is the myth that turns out to also be historically true. It inspires other myths and some great music. Maher can blame us for fairy tales and Handel, if he will take responsibilityDan Barker’s music.

In the days of Trollope, men who sold their friends down the river for money would have received a good caning by the gentlemen in the community. (Says Trollope in one of his books, “But she felt that if Bernard would thrash the coward for his cowardice she would love her nephew better than ever she had loved him.” ) Of course, that was wrong and justice cannot be a private affair, but what is to be done with such men now?

In the days of Trollope, men who deceived their friends and betrayed private confidences would have been cut from their clubs for life. Of course we are all equal now, men do not go to clubs, but what is to be done with such men now?

In the days of Trollope, men who leaked personally damaging information on the King in war time for gain would have never been spoken to again by any decent Englishman. Of course, we have no King and men have a right to say what they will, but what is to be done with such men now?

In the days of Trollope, gentlemen did not behave thus. Of course we are better than that now. We sell our friends for money and then whimper that we could have sold them for more. (”‘This book could have been released before the election, driven by partisan sales,” Wead said. “The publisher wanted it. I wouldn’t let it, and my publicist told me at the time, “That cost you a million dollars.’”) Thank God, Anthony Trollope did not live to see such times. He is safely dead, leaving only our modern trollops behind.

A simple gentleman would not have acted like this fellow. A mere gentleman would have known better. But what of a Christian? Shall we have a lower standard than some Victorian gentlemen?

A Christian believes that friendship is a high thing. If a gentleman knows it because of Cicero, then a Christian knows it because His Lord laid down His life for His friends.

A Christian believes that confidentiality is a sacred thing not lightly breached. If a gentleman knows it because of club rules, a Christian knows it because His God rewarded a woman who risked her life to save a stranger, a guest, who trusted her.

A Christian does not deceive his friend. If a gentleman knows it because of personal honor, a Christian knows it because of God’s law.

This man claimed to represent us. Is it any wonder that even our friends think us doltish, if our self-professed leaders cannot behave less boorishly than a man playing cards with his buddies?

There is one thing a modern Christian and gentleman can do. He can demand an apology for the wronged President who cannot defend himself against such betrayal. He can refuse to buy this book. He can cut off any conversation about it. He can shun the cad until he is sorry. Why should Christian radio interview him? Why give him the time of day?

There is always, thank God, room in the Church for healing, hope, and restoration. All of us have needed it. But this man should send President Bush his tapes, apologize in private and public to his friend, and pull any material gained through breach of confidence from his book. Why? I hope because he is a gentleman and a Christian. We trust it is so and stand ready to forgive.

Why the TNIV Bible is Important

Here is the argument, such as it is, supplied by Zondervan (note: I have edited a book with Zondervan and think they are swell folk.) for why we need a new translation. My comments are in italics.

Zondervan says:

Part of the reason for this mass exodus is that today’s generation thinks differently than previous generation.

I dispute this as a generalization. What do we mean by a different way of thinking? There is not a different way of thinking. An equally possible hypothesis: There are students who are badly educated, post-literate, and unable to make good arguments. There is a tiny group of post-modern scholars in evangelical circles, pushing ideas passe in most of the Academy, who provide a wash of academic respectibility for this disaster because it suits their desire to change the proposition sof theology. Of course it has nothing to do with translation any way. The Bible is what it is: it is not going to get more “story like” or less propositional to please today’s young adults.

For example, they’re more likely to relate to stories and personal experiences than to traditional expressions of propositional truth. For them, authentic religion is a much about HOW they live as WHAT they believe.

Well, good. Both ideas are important. I seem to recall people saying this about my generation as well. Why not teach them the value of both?

While older forms of English may not present a problem for some readers, they can present barriers to understanding and fully engaging the Bible for today’s generation because they’ve grown up using more contemporary English.

When was this not true? Why suddenly does this common place (language changes) demand a new translation? Every generation of young people has their own jargon and identity. Yet in American history, when the Bible was most respected and read, there was actually a giant gulf between the language of the Bible and that of the youth. This was true of every generation in the USA up to recent times. No one demanded their Bible speak as they did in order to go church. No one demanded a Bible in West Virginia dialect. No one demanded a Bible written in Flapper-speak.

In addition, the TNIV translators were mindful of what they were working on: Today’s New International Version. It is intended for English-speaking readers no matter where they live.

English usage keeps changing – between 1993 and 2003, Merriam-Webster made 100,000 changes and added more than 10,000 words and phrases to its collegiate dictionary. Thirty years have passed since the NIV was released.

*

This is a bizarrely irrelevant factoid. The question is: have the relevant words of standard English changed much? How many of these “new words” are in areas not related to anything appearing in the Bible (blog, wok)? Fundamentally, isn’t this about one major change: gender use? Wouldn’t the rest of the changes amount to a small modification of the old translation?

A 2004 Harris Interactive Poll showed that 59% of 18-34 year-olds (churched or un-churched) said the Bible was relevant to their lives, yet more than half (53%) said they never read the Bible or read it less than once a year. Clearly there is a need to reach this audience.
*
Key question: how many of these kids read any book, let alone a book as hard as the Bible? Is there any evidence here, at all, that translation gets in the way of their reading the Bible? Does anyone who finds the NIV too hard or too dated really want to read the Bible really. . . though like learning a second language everyone says they do? Or have the ability? These questions are not answered.

There are 32 million “spiritually-intrigued” 18-34 year-olds open to Christianity.
*

There are 8 million twenty-somethings on the verge of disengaging from the church.
*
Barna Research Group found that 40% of churched children stop attending church as adults.
*

77% of 18-34 year-olds prefer the text of the TNIV; 72% of 18-34 year-olds find the TNIV text easier to understand.
*
I would love to see the controls on this study! I have heard that 72 percent of people prefer New Coke.

In any case, would these people actually READ the text when it is released? Is the translation any good or overly paraphrastic? I assume 100% of my students would find a comix version of the Republic easier to understand, and even preferable, to a standard work, but I doubt they should go that way. The opinions of the market are simply not relevent, even if true. If the translation places too much “of our culture” between the reader and what is, after all, a very old book, then it is perhaps worse that useless to them.

According to JET Market Research, 85% of 18-34-year-olds surveyed said they would like a copy of the full TNIV when it is released in 2005.

Who said “no?” I am not a fan of the translation, but I will buy a copy. What exactly does this question prove?

HughHewitt.com

I may or may not have tapes of Hugh Hewitt speaking candidly to me about many subjects. I am preparing a book on the topic (”Flogging Bloggings Best Blogger: the Book on Hugh Hewitt.”)

Hewitt has mere days to respond in order to suppress these tapes which may include, though not necessarily, revealing tid bits that may or may not include shocking information that may or may not prove HUGH HEWITT IS A REPUBLICAN (!!!) and has a LOW OPINION OF HILARY (!) CLINTON.

On the other hand, maybe it is unethical to tape your friends. Maybe no Christian should betray a friend for money, not even a sum exceeding thirty pieces of silver. Maybe no Christian should let out “damaging” information to his friend’s foes while his friend is trying to save the world.

Yes, that’s right. No traditional Christian would behave that way: ever. Except here. Forget it Hugh.

markdroberts.com

Dr. Roberts continues his helpful (and on the whole) excellent series on Bible translation.

However, I find his case for relevant language change almost totally unpersuasive. Of course, English changes, but standard English changes very, very slowly. The kind of English that a good translator will use has not changed that much at all in thirty years. Doubt this? No one has yet shown why we were served well for three hundred years by essentially one translation, but now suddenly we need new ones every few years.

Confusing technological change (rapid) with linguistic change (in some ways rapid and in some ways not rapid) is not helpful (A new Bible for the Atomic/Computer/Internet/Blog Age!) We are the first generation to demand our books sound like us or we will not read them.

Note the vanishing regional accents and dialects in the USA. My great-grandfather did not demand a West Virginia Bible, though his jargon was so different from “standard” English (his sweet Shakespearian West Virginia tones!) that folk from the culturally deprived Mid-West might not have understood him at all! Dr. Roberts may have colleagues that say, “Hey” instead of “Hello,” but that was as nothing to the difference between Old West Virginian and the accent of the South Bronx. A common Bible and standard business English allowed them to communicate. No one thought that translation should kow-tow to the demands of their little group, including the Flappers, the Soxers (et al). Young people are just a little group, and not the most important, after all.

What are the Roberts’ examples of linguistic change?

First, we are presented with cases of computer jargon or other techno-speak (and verily Moses did blog to the people. . .) which Dr. Roberts admits are not likely to impact a translation of the Bible.

Second, almost all the examples we are given could be viewed as linguistic sloppiness on the part of co-workers or as trivial changes in jargon/accent which no Bible translation will ever keep up with.

Of course, adults used to help young people move on to more grown up speech. This is a job I, at least, intend to keep on doing. I don’t care if folk use “cool” or “hip” or “sweet” (so dated my college students claim!) or “pick-your-favorite-jargon” in daily discourse. However, I am sure Dr. Roberts and any translation he would recommend have no intention of becoming like the teacher in high school who tried to relate to the “kids” by keeping up with their groovy talk. Romans is written in Paul’s “best Greek.” Here is hoping that young adults are taught to read and speak our most formal English.

Third, most of us who grew up in the church remember the remarkable liberation of some new more “with it” translation or singing group. (Dated thing I actually said: “The Imperial’s Higher Power just rocks, Mom!”) I recall swaying at the Joshua Tree concert with evangelicals and transvestites all at the same Rochester concert thinking, “This is so cool.” And then next week something else was cool.

And it all amounted to essentially nothing. Lives were not changed. Church people who joined the “Church of What is Happening Now” soon tired of trying to keep up. The great secret of life is that all “sweet” twenty years olds are thirty and forty somthings longer than they are young. Like all young people who must grow up, my generation began to move to sound doctrine, great books, and ancient liturgies that did not try to satisfy us or relate to us or come to our level. Instead we were asked to come to their level.

I do not sit with my son and make Christianity relate to him. I ask him to relate to the Truth. Because I love him, this communicates to him comes across as a good thing. Next to the great God, all of us are small. My teen age son is taught to bring God the best he can offer including best music and best English. That may not be much, but it should improve with time. God honors our simple offerings, but anticipates our growth as any good Father would do.

Bluntly, I am tired of the Church “listening to our young people,” who are mostly badly read and inexperienced, instead of teaching them to seek higher things. I care more for the opinions of the old saints of God in the pews than in the feckless and reckless youth. I want older men, books, and ideas to teach them (and me!) as the Bible urges. The thought of endlessly repeating the pattern of new translations, new music, new games, new marketing to “get the youth” seems a hopeless accommodation to the worst features of our culture. The hundreds of young people I know (and who are in my home often!) do not want to be on that treadmill. That is (oddly enough) old in the bad sense of the term. We tried it in our generation and the best of today’s youth sees it did not work.

Of course, this part of my cry of the heart is not directed really at Dr. Roberts even toned (and mostly uncontroversial) comments on Bible translation, but to a sort of Christian who might use Dr. Roberts’ fine work in ways not intended.

Fourth, linguistic change in the area of pronouns and gender did not come from the people. It came from academics or activists who have attempted to force their offense and ideas on the rest of us. By and large, they have done their work well in official places. Government schools by and large bow the knee to the new order. However, good English is good English and fine students still have to read Shakespeare. Unless we are going to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence for our allegedly hapless youth, the fact that all men are created equal will remain standard English for the educated.

All old documents in English are infected with standard English. It will now be claimed that standard English has changed. This may be true, though I see evidence that folk under thirty in the church are more likely to snarl at earnest thirty or forty something gender correctness than the reverse. Traditional English is still the patrimony of every English speaker. To fail to learn this English and to demand that all our books use it or we will be offended is to cut ourselves off from the very best English poetry and prose.

Linguistic Greek, like traditional English, views mankind in a patriarchal way. I, for one, think patriarchy is good, even necessary for happy human living and a stable culture. There is not space to defend that point of view, but the vast majority of the world’s Christians are in church structures that reflect some degree of patriarchy. It is an old and honorable position.

Without arguing for patriarchy, even assuming it to be bad, it seems important that a reader of the Bible know that the language of Scripture is not politically correct. Make of it what you will, but New Testament Greek is not what feminists and egalitarians wish it was. To present a Bible that removes linguistic patriarchy that formed the background to whatever the writers were saying about gender (whatever that was) is to build an argument for a contentious point of view into the very fabric of the translation. All translators do this unintentionally, but it is inexcusable to do it intentionally.

The status of patriarchy in the church is a hot debate at the moment. This is not a neutral time. Messing about with the Bible in this area is bound to be seen (whether rightly or wrongly) as bias in translation.

The counter will probably be that in such translations are good to remove unnecessary stumbling blocks if we can. Of course that assumes that the young feminist in church should not find her feminism getting in the way of her reading of the text.

The main problem is that fixing the Bible for feminist readers is hopeless. Jesus picked twelve male disciples. The law given by God to Moses assumes a patriarchal structure. I know how offensive all this is. This was deeply troubling to me when I was a feminist. God sent his Son. The Father is not the divine mother. There is no end to it and good folk like Dr. Roberts are of course not advocating such horrid changes. As a result fixing patriarchal Greek and traditional English seems like tokenism.

I still believe the key is to stop accommodating linguistic drift in the direction of post-literacy and limited vocabularies. As a quick viewing of any magazine (try Sports Illustrated) will prove words are the foe and not some form or another of English. It is time to begin an education program in the Church and teach people to read. Most of Dr. Roberts’ young people read less of anything than his generation did. That is the main issue and no amount of marketing (in magazines! how quaint!) will change that. The literate will go on understanding context and best English and the post-literate will go on not reading anything at all.

Virgil forces the reader to visit the place of the dead. Homer did the same. Dante begins his trip that ends in Paradise with a journey through Hell. Plato begins and ends the Republic with visions of a downward journey, the last to the place of the dead.

Why do so many great writers take us to Hell? They do so, because it is in the place of the dead that the scales of justice are righted. No one will be sent to Hell for the evil done to them. Eveyone in Hell will have chosen to be there. It will be their response to the offer of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. Humanity is such that we know some men will choose to keep their pain, which is at least theirs, than to lose it in the face of God. We know some men will be in Hell, though we wish them to be few.

By God’s grace, though we might deserve it, we trust to avoid that fate. We release the pain done to us and pray God’s pardon for the pain we have caused. For the pain we caused others, there is a price both in this life and that which is to come, but for finite actions against the finite there is, thank God, only finite retribution. As Plato notes in his Republic, even unpunished crime is punished in the soul of the man who did it. How true this is! How great is our need for forgiveness and mercy! For our crimes against the Divine, infinite and great, we are blessed to have sinned against a being full of mercy.

Pain cannot be ignored and it cannot be wished away. With our minds, we must acknowledge the true limits of human reason. Where our passions are concerned, we must admit the folly they so often generate in even the highest emotions. And every human being must own up to the fact that even his best intentions can lead to evil. Head, heart, and hand we are are imperfect. We cause pain to ourselves and must devastatingly to others.

How can we live? That is the good news. We can live because we can be forgiven. We can give up our desires that we gnaw at like Gollum over his lost ring. We can give up our misery that we sometimes wear proudly. We can be born again, fresh and innocent as any child. We can begin again without sin. God’s grace is daily available to fill us. When we bow at the alter to receive His Body and Blood, when we are made clean in the waters of Baptism, when we pray the simple prayer of the sinner, when we hear the reading of His Word, we we can receive a cure for our suffering.

God does not take away our pain, but He heals it. He does not serve as apirin, but as the cure. God can make our pain meaningful, even the pain He would not have wished on us caused by the evil of this present Age. The evil that comes to us is not His will, but it is His opportunity. He can, if we allow it, make even our self-inflicted scars beautiful.

Is the TNIV Good News?

Mark Roberts is, in many ways, the model pastor. He is very well educated, even better read, and has a heart for his people. I am enjoying his series on Bible translation a great deal.

However, I wonder about one assumption running through it: young people need a new translation to help them read the Bible.

My grandfather, with his eighth grade education faithfully read his black King James every day of his life. He used helps and was able to follow the message of the “good old book.” He knew the Bible was important and that its message was profound. He was happy to do the work it took to understand it.

Does anyone believe the linguistic gap between a rural West Virginian in the twentieth century and the court of the Stuart James is less than that between an Orange County college student and a (gasp!) thirty year old translation?

My grandfather could read that Bible, because he valued reading. With almost no help, he taught himself to read. With lots of help our culture encourages young people to live in the forever-slavery of idea consumers: people who could have learned to read but do not.

The simple explanation for declining Bible reading would seem to me to be declining literacy skills. People are post-literate. We know what to do with people who cannot read hard books in the Church. We teach them to read. Otherwise, we will always be standing between them and God’s message. Wouldn’t it be better to do the hard work of educating young adults than to delude ourselves into thinking that people who never read anything very difficult will suddenly read and understand Paul’s message to the Romans?

The problem is not a changing language. Home educated young people (who somehow never count as modern youth) are taught to love books. They can speak to secularly educated peers meaningfully. The problem seems simply that most Americans have limited vocabularies, use very few works, and have not been taught to think well. They cannot follow the message of the Bible, because the level of literature in it is too complex for them. Compare the amount of print in a magazine fifty years, or even twenty years ago, to the amount today. Compare the number of words used. Kids who cannot say anything other than “like whatever” to their pain need help. A new translation is not it.

We are people of the Book. We cannot accept a post-literate culture anymore than we leave pre-literate cultures alone. We must teach all God’s people to read. Media other than books cannot contain arguments. Media other than books cannot transmit the kind of information on which modern science and culture is based. If we allow evangelical young people to stop reading, we doom them to follow the readers. On the other hand, if we keep reading in high numbers and secularists stop, they may be trendy, but we will end up with all the money and power. It is an old lesson.

Making a new translation with hip new ads is easier than teaching kids to read. It is cheaper than supporting our local public school literacy programs. It is simpler than opening reading classes, poorly attended at best, for those students we can help escape post-literacy. But ask yourself this: what is a more Christian activity than teaching a young man or woman to read God’s Word?

Majestic, timeless language will always be more attractive to real readers than dated trendy language that being up to date is forever dated. Trying to get non-readers to read books with new covers or marketing schemes reminds me of Disney’s California Adventure: an attempt to get people who hate Disney theme parks to go to a Disney theme park. California Adventure was a bad Disney park and too much a Disney park to please Disney haters. That left a market of, well, exactly no one for the new theme park. Good readers are going to be able to read any of the vast number of translations already out there. People who don’t read will not read any translation.

Generations of English teachers have tried to make Shakespeare “cool” with limited success to say the least. However, Shakespeare lives. Where? In the minds of those few who get a good education and learn enough English to appreciate matchless depths. Everyone else has to pretend that U2 (my favorite childhood group) is “just as deep” or that thinking about the modern classics, like the Beatles, is just as mentally helpful as thinking about Spencer. But the Pixies simply use fewer words, have less complicated things to say, and leave their listeners in the cultural shallows. We need Dante to climb to Paradise.

Personally, I find young adults prefer the King James to market driven Bibles. Why? Once they know reading is important, the grasp that the KJV is written in the best English ever produced. Where biased, it is biased in ways not common to our culture. Where a bad translation, modern speech versions easily correct. They follow Mark Roberts advice and use many Bibles. They start making their own translations as they learn the joy of being multi-lingual. This is yet another linguistic skill vanishing in the “educated.”

Young people can be taught to read books.

I have done it. It is not easy, but it is the real solution.

WSJ.com - The Sick Man of Europe — Again: “Turkey could easily become just another second-rate country: small-minded, paranoid, marginal and — how could it be otherwise? — friendless in America and unwelcome in Europe.”

I cannot understand the anti-Turk bias in some of our media. I hardly ever read a good story about Turkey. Americans are right to condemn things in Turkish culture and politics we dislike, but there is hardly ever balance. As one of the few fairly functional republics in the area and a faithful friend of the USA, Turkey should be given help in addition to condemnation. Turkey is not heaven on earth. Heaven knows I belong to a Church with no reason to be sanguine about Turkey. I am well aware of religious persecution there. The public approval of horrific anti-Semite material is disgusting. Until the Ecumenical Patriarch can function in the city that his office helped build, then relations with Turkey are bound to be strained. Tough talk and even action amongst friends is fine.

However, the Turks are a Republic. They are struggling with deciding a direction and that is messy. Turkey remains a member of NATO who wishes to be part of the European Union. The Turks allow a fairly free press which is messy. They also allow people to vote and Americans will not always like the persons that this ancient and great people choose. That is the right of the sovereign Turkish nation. We must speak up against religious persecution and anti-Semite behavior. Persecution of minorities cannot be tolerated. Still, we must also allow the Turks to find their own way.

If I were able to control everything, Constantinople would still be a Christian city and the Turks would be Christian. The good news for everyone is that I am not king of the world! God in His wisdom has not given me my wish that the Turkish people be saved and so I must accept His righteous judgment to allow freedom of choice. The first lesson of the Garden is that God allows people to choose, even choose badly.

Sometimes secular Americans sound as if they cannot respect the freedom of the Turks to find their own way. In this sense, conservative religious people of both faiths, who think the other wrong, must allow for religious freedom. We must respect the fact that God has allowed people to be wrong. My Islamic neighbor does me the honor of wishing me to be Moslem and so long as he allows me to return the favor, and everyone is allowed basic human rights and the right to vote, then all will be well.

Until the Turks are Christian, we should pray that they are the sort of thoughtful Moslem who allowed Christians to live in peace for centuries in their lands. We must not impose an American solution on the Turkish Republic so long as they forsake genocide and allow minorities rights. At least officially, Turkey is committed to such a good path. We should work with the folk committed to such a republic.

Turkey wishes, rightly I think, to integrate religion into life. They know that secularism is a false god that has failed Western Europe. Islam needs a reformation and I have Islamic collegues who claim this is possible. They should be encouraged and believed until we are sure they are wrong.

We will not help Turkey by urging them to become France. Instead, we should begin to promote sensible Islamic persons who can lead Islam into a better political course than the heretics and madmen who lead the terrorist groups.

Turkey has been a faithful ally to the U.S. They are trying to decide what path to follow. Let’s encourage Turkey, and her new neighbor Iraq, to become free, religious, pluralistic states.

Milton famously describes Eve as having “heaven in her eye.”

As a young adult, I loved that line, because it seemed such a perfect description of the beloved when I found her. She would have heaven in her eye. Her gaze would promise paradise in the raptures of two folk in love.

Of course, this was a crude and foolish misreading. Milton is picturing Eve as an image of Paradise. Her very look is up lifting to Adam. Her intense physical and spiritual self are untainted with sin or wrong desire. She is good for Adam, because she is herself and points him to something even better for Adam than she. She has heaven, and not herself, in her eye.

Lately, I have realized that this is what I would like to be to Hope and to all the people I meet. Like Eve, I hope they see heaven in my eye and not ambition or self. My great blessing has been to have a wife with heaven in her eye, even when I did not want to see heaven. My great calling is to become that to Hope and to all the folk I meet.

God give me heaven in my eye.

HughHewitt.com: “‘Are there people of a particular faith (Jewish, Baptist, Catholic, other) who feel ignored? What if media organizations gave them blogs and let them reflect religious life in the community, under your banner? Are there people who believe your news report is too liberal? What if you gave them a blog and let them reflect conservative life in the community? Are there environmental groups upset that you don’t spend enough time addressing a particular issue of importance to them? Same solution.’”

If the LA Times wants a traditional Christian, I am here for the taking. I promise to be puckish.

We are about to get good news in Iraq and North Korea! I have developed what I call the New York Times Rule.

Here it is:

Just at the moment that the Times says a problem cannot be solved, then it is within ten months of being solved.

This particularly applies to dealing with communist dictatorships. If the Times thinks a dictatorship is here to stay, then it is doomed. See for example the Soviet Union. (”Bush must realize that the Soviet Union is here to stay. . . blah, blah, blah.”) Based on this rule of thumb, and a belief in the instability of personal dictatorships, I predict that North Korea will be a free nation within ten months.

There is also the New York Times Solution Rule:

Just at the moment that the Times says that a problem is solved by a liberal solution, it will become obvious that the solution is a failure to everyone within ten months of the Times announcement.

Examples include the War on Poverty, affirmative action, and other liberal nostrums that everyone but the Times knew were failures when the Times was proclaiming their great success.

I never liked going to funerals. In my childhood, they were sad affairs and fairly formal. Later they became full of false cheerfulness and endless speeches about the departed. Secular funerals were the worst of all. Such events are full fo courage, but not much else. Death is a bad thing for a secularist, or at least the decline that leads to death is, and no amount of stiff upper lips can deal with it.

No one likes thinking about death. Life insurance is a good idea, but few people buy it. Why? They have to admit that someone will eventually use it. Death is the one thing no person can escape.

Science will never deliver us from it. For if old age were defeated and death postponed until the sun died and all the other stars died in the cold death or in the great fiery crunch of matter that are the tales that secularism gives us for the End of All Things, it would still be an end in death for individual persons. Science itself cannot help us survive the End.

Secularism must either avoid the truth of death or pretend to be brave. Most secularists don’t think about death very much. They create their own meaning in life. The difficulty is that their life has no higher meaning however much meaning they create for themselves. A meaning I create is a meaning that falls apart as I do. Even a love that moves my own personal cosmos cannot defeat death. I might be able to create some meaning for my own story, but I cannot create it for the one I love and as she slips away in death, my own personal meaning will seem the cruel, hollow thing it is. Every secularist is isolated since if secularism is true, then every man dies alone. Secularism avoids death, but it cannot give it meaning. In the end, it must face the fact that every individual life does not matter. There is no Grand Scheme of things.

This is simply not good news. Hope is no virtue since death cannot be cheated. The boys who die to defend us from terrorism are simply dead. There is no eternal reward and no possible meaning to their sacrifice other than the one we assign to it for ourselves. However, that personal assigned meaning does not help them. It is hard to see why any atheist would wish to be in a fox hole. Some do go, but it is not clear that they are being wise. In the end, there is no hope. Every secularist believes he will lose.

Hope is a Christian virtue. Only the great monotheistic religions can believe in the face of death. Christianity does not avoid death for it contains a God who dies. Instead, Christianity recognizes that death is part of a larger pattern that gives meaning to death and to life. If this meaning can be rationally sustained, and it can, then such meaning is to be preferred. Now and at the hour of their death, the Christian is surrounded by a great cloud of angels, saints, and a loving God. Death is a journey

This is why, though we do not view it as a good, a Christian need not fear death. I once did, I do much less now. Death is the last lesson in a hard school, never to be repeated, graduation from which will lead to life forever. Or perhaps this earthly death is just the first of many greater deaths we will experience in paradise as we grow from life to life in the presence of God. No man can say. But divine revelation tells us that the sorrow of death will be no more on the other side. Bad pain will pass away. Life, more fundamental than death, will be forever.

All the losses will be made whole. All the pain made meaningful. Mercy will govern with justice. We will live in Light with a God who loves us.

At this point, the mocking begins. Isn’t that sweet? Well, yes, it is. It is a sweet tale that can be rationally defended by philosophers. Why not adopt it? Courage practiced that is not needed is wasted. Let’s save our courage for the hard moral decisions of this life that prepare us for the life to come. I don’t want to believe a comfortable falsehood instead of the truth, but most of our intelligentsia look like they are willing to believe a comfortable truth in the face of an uncomfortable idea.

You are going to die. I am going to die. What will we make of it? Will I try to give meaning to my life myself? Or shall I find a higher meaning that makes sense of both our deaths and so allows for a true community?

When I die, I plan not to die alone. I will close my eyes and see Jesus Christ. What a noble tale! All things being equal, I choose to believe it for my experience and reason say that Beauty is deeper and more true than the ugly, Truth than error, and Life than death.