What’s Wrong with a Well-Regulated Militia?

The courts have ruled that the second-amendment upholds the right of individuals to “keep and bear arms.” Originally all adult, white male “responsible and law-abiding” citizens were members of the militia; therefore they had a right to keep and carry weapons, and use them when necessary. Individuals have a right to defend their own homes and families, the right to join together as part of the common defense, and the right to resist tyranny.

The framers of the constitution understood that all individual citizens (as defined above) were part of a well-regulated, trained, and disciplined militia.

The original drafts of the second amendment included a provision exempting persons with religious scruples from being required to own and maintain weapons. Any adult white male citizen not so exempted was expected to maintain his own supply of weapons should he be called up by his state militia.

Switzerland has a national militia. Anyone deemed “fit for service” between the age of 18 and 34 is required to purchase and keep at his home military weapons. They first go through a period of training.

A system like that would be better than what we have.

What would be wrong with a mandatory course of training, following high school graduation, say a six-week course? It could include firearms use and safety, first aid training, emergency and disaster relief training, legal matters, non-lethal self-defense strategies, anger management, and other issues. There would also be psychological testing and background checking (including juvenile offenses).

Conscientious objectors could be exempted or allowed to skip the weapons-part of the training.

This would not be a military draft; no further service would be required, but successful graduates would be allowed to own weapons and participate in the well-regulated militia as they chose.

Gun owners would be required to keep their weapons secure from use by unauthorized persons.

In effect, this would mean giving a license to possess firearms. Unlicensed possession could be prosecuted, in the same way that unauthorized possession of drugs is prosecuted.

The pro-gun lobby has been so powerful that politicians have been afraid to do anything to try to control gun violence. There are reasonable steps that can be taken to outlaw gun possession by irresponsible persons while protecting the rights of responsible citizens.

More to Come on Ephesians

Well, my class got ahead of me in keeping their journal on Paul’s Letters from Prison.  I will get back to Philippians, but right now we are studying Ephesians, so I will post a few briefer notes on that Epistle before returning to Philippians.

What’s It All About? (Phil 1:20-26)

Paul has such faith in Christ that he is sure he will “dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” and that he has no reason to fear death. Death is gain because he will see the one who gives his life meaning face to face.

But until then Paul finds meaning in life here and now. He finds meaning in his work and in his relationships. Paul’s work is spreading the Gospel, planting churches, and providing continuing pastoral care and leadership for the churches. He is confident God still has work for him to do, and he will continue to find meaning and joy in his work.

Most of us are not apostles, but if we are Christians two things are true: One we all have a part in sharing God’s love with those who cross our paths, especially those for whom we have a responsibility. Second, any honest work can be a holy calling, a vocation through which we may benefit others and glorify God.

Paul’s work involved people whom he came to love deeply. He found meaning in those life-long relationships with fellow believers in cities all around the Mediterranean world.

He also found a sense of satisfaction in what God had accomplished through him. Paul often speaks of boasting and pride in a paradoxical sense. He knows pride is a sin that is associated with arrogance and jealousy. But he also understands that one can boast in the Lord, and so he is proud of what the Lord has accomplished through him.

Notes on Philippians

I haven’t been too active lately on this blog, but I decided to get back into it by posting my notes on Philippians, which I hope to begin doing tomorrow. I’ve started several projects that I’ve never finished–I’ve kept them on the back burner though, and someday I will get back to it–due to interference from my day job. But this time I think I will complete the project, because I’m doing it for a class I’m teaching this semester and have to keep up.

It will be something in between a full-scale commentary and random notes. I have a few insights and opinions on the epistle that I think may be helpful to others. Anyway, it is helping me to clarify my understanding of this little jewel of an ancient Christian letter.

Religious Cults

There are cults in religion too. The word cult comes from the same Latin root that brings us culture and cultivate. The Romans cultivated both their fields and their gods.
In religious studies the words “cultus, cultic, cult” refer to formal rituals or acts of worship. All religions have cultic aspects, in this sense of the word. Ritual movements, words, and the handling of sacred objects, among other things, make up the cultus of a religion.
Practitioners of a religion believe they achieve some sort of contact with the divine, sacred, or transcendent during the enactment of the cult. Outsiders might call it magical thinking. In a catholic or orthodox liturgy the “cultic” elements (in the academic sense) are obvious: sacred vestments, incense, and the transformation of ordinary bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
In pentecostal church services believers speak in heavenly languages and receive divine healing. In a baptist service lost sinners recite a sinner’s prayer and are born again, transformed forever by the power of God.
When I was a student, back in the seventies, the word “cult” was being used in the sense of a new, unorthodox, and dangerous religion. The primary emphasis was on the deviant beliefs and practices of these religious cults.
In the nineteenth century, several new religions emerged in America as the young country was expanding westward: Christian Science, the Watchtower Society of Jehovah’s Witnesses, various Mormon sects, and Seventh Day Adventists sprung up. These were groups that were usually considered cults back when I was a student. They had in common the complete rejection of traditional Christianity and new revelations and sources of authority.
But in the 1970s and ’80s we began to become aware of newer religious cults, many of them splitting off not from Christianity but from Eastern religions. People became more concerned about the sociology of these groups than their theology.
Cults became religious groups that exerted extreme control over their members. The greatest fear of parents of college-age students was that their kids would fall victim to a cult.
The most gruesome example of the extreme social control practiced by cults was mass suicide of the followers of Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana.

. . . more to come

Another Cult

The cult that is currently trying to draw me in is the cult of speakers of ancient languages. They don’t just study ancient Greek, they have conversations in it and argue over how it should be pronounced.

I first became susceptible to the thinking of this group nearly thirty years ago. I was learning two languages at the same time: biblical Hebrew and German.

In fact, I was in my second semester of Hebrew when I started my German class, and about six weeks into the German class I felt more confident in that language than in Hebrew.  If someone asked me to say something in German I could blurt out, Guten Tag! or Wie Geht’s.  If asked to say something in Hebrew, I might mutter, bereshith bara or something like that.

So I thought to myself, what if we could reconstruct ancient Hebrew conversation and learn the language conversationally?

A couple years later I found myself in a graduate program in classics and started asking the same questions.  Since the dialogues of Plato were already conversations, I thought, they might be a great place to start.

Then I found out it wasn’t a new idea, in fact, folks had already been doing it with Latin.  Not only had it been done, but up until just a year or two previous it had been done at my university.  They taught Latin conversationally and continued their Latin conversations outside of class.

The program had been discontinued because the university officials thought it was becoming a cult!  The students began to imagine they were medieval monks living in medieval monasteries, and evidently some of the students had evidently converted to medieval Christianity, and the university was threatened with lawsuits for advocating a particular religion.  All this I learned through the grapevine.

Soon after learning about this I found myself teaching Latin, strictly by the book, not by immersing myself and my students in Latin conversation.  I had a few students in the class who had learned Latin via vocis viventis by the conversational method.  I was impressed with them the first few weeks.  Their pronunciation was excellent and they had a pretty good head start.  But I also noticed that by the sixth or seventh week of college Latin they had reached the limits of their high school students, and from then on no one had an unfair advantage.

More to come . . .

Are You a Slave to Jesus?

Christians have always understood the paradox: in the service of God is perfect freedom.  John MacArthur’s sermon and promo for his book Slave doesn’t seem to appreciate subtleties like paradox.  He recognizes that the δοῦλος – κύριος metaphor is a metaphor; but he doesn’t seem to recognize that it is an inadequate ultimately judged inadequate by Jesus and Paul.

A twenty-minute check in the library confirmed that MacArthurs conclusions after three years of intensive study are basically valid–on the literal level and with one important exception.

Two standard Greek reference sources, Kittle’s famous Theological Dictionary and Bauer’s lexicon as edited by Danker in the third edition.  Both agree that δοῦλος basically means “slave.”  Both of these sources also agree that in Greek culture the whole idea of slavery was degrading, whereas in the middle eastern world of great empires, the kings ministers were called “slaves” or “servants.”  In that context, it was considered an honor to be the δοῦλος of a great king.

This concept was transferred in the Hebrew Bible to the privileged servants of the Lord: Abraham, Moses and the prophets.  The Lord keeps his servants in a special relationship to himself:

Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?  (Numbers 12:6-8)

Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets (Amos 3:7).

It is in this sense that Paul applies the term δοῦλος to himself and other members of the apostolic team; other Christians he normally calls brothers and sisters.  The expression paradoxically implies humility and service on one hand, but honor and authority on the other hand.

Jesus and Paul both recognize the inadequacy of the expression δοῦλος to convey our relationship with God.  Jesus said,

I no longer call you servants . . . Instead, I have called you my friends (John 15:15).

In the epistle to the Galatians, Paul compares the relationship slaves to heirs.  The whole point of Galatians is to reject the imagery of slavery in favor of the mature and free relationship that adult children have with their father.  Galatians is the magna charta of Christian liberty and the manifesto of the Reformation.

Because you are sons and daughters, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts . . . so you are no longer a slave, but a son or daughter  (Galatians 4:6)

The Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother    . . . we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman (Galatians 4:26,31).

Does Jesus Own Slaves?

In John MacArthur’s sermon on the subject of his new book, he announced an amazing discovery: English translators of the Bible, going back to the authors of the King James Version have perpetrated a massive fraud on the reading public.

The Greek word δοῦλος (doulos) means slave, not servant.  Jesus doesn’t have servants, he only has slaves.  We, as slaves of Jesus have no rights at all.

Disclaimer: Since I haven’t read the book yet, I will admit it may be more nuanced.  I am here responding to a thirty-minute sermon.  You can see his You Tube introduction here where he claims “I uncovered a distortion of truth . . .”  He even calls it a “conspiracy.”

I am teaching a class on “Interpretation” this semester.  The class deals with the proper linguistic, historical, and theological interpretation of the Bible.  We use a textbook that is well accepted by evangelical Christians: Grasping God’s Word by J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays (Zondervan).

Here are three points from the book, which could be illustrated in any textbook on the subject.

1.  Words do not have one inflexible meaning, but a range of meanings depending on context.  It is not possible to translate a Greek or Hebrew word always with the same English word.  (Think of the English word “pass” in these contexts: at the dinner table, on the football field, when driving a car, and when taking an exam.)

2.  We have to understand words and passages in the Bible against their historical, cultural, and social context.  We have to take a journey back into the ancient and strange world of the Bible and understand the text in its own world before we can understand its meaning for us.

3.  We have to read the Bible theologically, in light of the bigger picture of what it says about God and his ways and purposes and our relationship to God.  In particular, when understanding metaphorical language we have to compare various metaphors to get a total picture.

(updated 3/16/2011)

My Experience as a Union Member II

I was trained as a minister, not a profession highly represented by labor unions.  For various reasons, in the mid-1980s I decided to spend a few years working with my hands while I raised my family and learned a little more about life.

I got a job with Eastern Airlines which had just expanded its hub in Kansas City, MO.  A daily commute of about 40 miles each way made it possible to continue living in a small town without disrupting our children’s lives.  I joined the union as a condition of employment.  Missouri did not have regulations banning exclusive contracts.  Harry Truman supported the rights of workers to organize and did not allow “right-to-work” laws to take root in his home state.  By that time, my thinking had changed and I was in favor of belong to the union anyway.

The workforce I joined consisted of some old timers who had transferred from Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, and New York.  Many of them represented the old style of union workers: they had bad attitudes and resented the company.  But most of the workers were young, energetic, conscientious, and hard working.  Most had college degrees.  This was a time of high unemployment and they were smart enough to recognize an opportunity for a good job with good benefits.

Eastern had just entered a new phase of management and worker relations.  A new contract based on cooperation between management and works had taken root and was working.  Under the contract workers had agreed to concessions of about 18%.  In return they would form teams working to find more efficient ways of getting the job done and enhancing revenue for the company.  When the resulting savings could be demonstrated, an appropriate percentage of the concessions would be returned to the workers.

It worked beautifully.  Everyone had a good attitude (well, the old-timers kept their attitude to themselves).  Flights got in and out on time without luggage being lost or damaged.  It turned out that the people who did the job knew how to do it best.  Customer satisfaction was high and millions of dollars in savings were identified.

Then a new president was hired, a man who took pride in breaking unions.  He didn’t like the new ways of cooperation and wanted to go back to the old ways of fighting.  He demanded new, deeper, and permanent concessions–take it or leave it.

Overnight the workforce was demoralized.  Company supervisors were required to use harsh tactics and fire so many people they clogged up the grievance process.  I saw first hand how vicious and malicious corporate management could be in its attempt to control workers.

In particular, I remember the case of one man who had been appointed to the safety committee because he was so scrupulous.   He made sure all of his coworkers followed safety rules to the letter, to the point of becoming a friendly nuisance.  We would groan, but actually appreciate his concerns even in matters we thought trivial.  During the apocalyptic last days of the company he was fired on the spot when equipment he was operating malfunctioned.  The supervisor knew it wasn’t his fault, but he followed his orders.

The union felt it had been betrayed and vowed never to accept another concession.   Like old Samson, they would rather pull the financial house down on top of them than be bullied into submission.  And that’s what happened.  The end result was a strike, bankruptcy, and the end of Eastern Airlines.

People don’t like being bullied or dictated to.  They want to have a voice in their destiny, political or financial.

My Experience as a Union Member I

I grew up in a so-called “right to work” state.  Most of my family worked in some aspect of housing construction and made good money without the benefit of union membership.  I read articles in Reader’s Digest about corruption in the big unions and violence during strikes; so back in the 70s, I didn’t see the need for unions.

A few facts I didn’t realize at the time:

1.  During times of full employment non-union employers have to compete with union wages.   Non-union workers were benefiting from the standards set by union contracts.  During times of recession, though, employers can cut the wages as low as they want.

2.  Most of the people I knew making good money in construction were paid as self-employed “sub-contractors.”  Their take-home pay was good, but they had no benefits and had to estimate and pay in their own self-employment tax.  Unfortunately, most of the people I knew did not have the financial discipline and accounting skills to keep up with the quarterly estimated payments and ended up having tax problems.

3.  Many of the self-employed workers did never got around to getting health insurance or investing in a retirement plan.

4.  “Right-to-work” laws are nothing else than government regulations forbidding private businesses from entering into an exclusive contract with a labor union.

5.  I was unaware of the history of the labor movement and how violent and corrupt the opposition to it was.  The goons and thugs and corrupt cops worked for the corporations.

6.  Organization and representation in the workforce is an extension of democracy.  If we don’t accept taxation without representation, why should we accept employment without representation?

. . . more to come

The Governor of Wisconsin Doesn’t want Concessions

He wants to dictate concessions.

Presidents Day

I liked it better when we celebrated Lincoln and Washington’s birthdays.  I’m not sure a president should be celebrated just for getting elected.  He should have to do something, take a courageous stand maybe.

But I’m celebrating Presidents Day anyway, because I am glad we have 4-year, two-term max, presidents rather than hereditary monarchs, Presidents for life, Beloved Leaders or whatever else dictators call themselves.

The citizens of Wisconsin are showing there governor that he is an elected public servant subject to the laws of the land.  He cannot arbitrarily cancel contracts or take away the rights of teachers and other state employees to representation.

I am ashamed at house of representatives in my state who think that punishing the children for the sins of the fathers and mothers will somehow improve the economy.

Maybe the state senate will be wiser and more compassionate.

Children who came to this country under the age of 18, regardless of the circumstances, broke no law.   They grew up here, they have no other home.  If they stayed in school, stayed out of trouble, and graduated from high school, they should be welcome in our state’s colleges.

I hope one of our state legislators will introduce a law requiring citizenship class in high school for students who do not have legal citizenship.  I suppose states cannot grant U.S. citizenship, but they could grant a certificate of state citizenship to all students who graduate from high school in one of the state’s public schools.

John Steuart Curry–Local Artist

When I lived in Nortonville, I frequently used to pass–or sometimes stop and read–a small historical highway sign pointing to John Steuart Curry’s birthplace.   He was with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, one of the three famous Regionalist painters of the twentieth Century.

He became famous paintings scenes of his native state and its people: an outdoor baptism, a tornado, or old John Brown with a Bible in one hand and a “Beecher Bible” (a Sharps rifle) in the other.  In the mid 1930s Curry offered a modest proposal to Kansas State University.  He would serve as an artist in residence in return for a reasonably salary.

His local university could not find the funds, or see the need, so Curry expatriated to Wisconsin in 1936 and became the first artist in residence at the agricultural college of the university in Madison.

His famous murals of life in Kansas were funded by contributions from newspapers, but some politicians delayed the project because they thought Curry presented negative images of our state:  People might get they idea from seeing his tornadoes that we have bad weather here!  Or worse, from seeing the murals of John Brown, that we have a violent past.

Of course, like all prophets, he was finally appreciated in his home state in the years following his untimely death.  The politicians even found the funds to erect a highway marker in his honor on old HWY 59 in Jefferson County.

[Links to online exhibits of Curry's art here.]

Bike Salvation II

Salvation in the Bible ultimately refers to eternal life with God–but there are many references to salvation in a secondary sense; i.e., to healing, wholeness, or deliverance from temporal, this-world dangers.  I am thinking of salvation in this secondary sense, when I speak of “Bike Salvation.”  Riding a bike is one of the keys to my own health and well being, and it could be one of the answers to the dangers facing our planet.

It’s been about five years or more since I saw a program on television about the new superhighways that are being built in China.  One Chinese man proudly announced, “We used to ride bicycles, now we ride motorcycles, soon we will be driving cars.”

The problem is, there are three or four times as many people in China as in the United States, and a similar number in India.  There is not enough oil in the ground to fuel all those cars.  I don’t know if there is enough steel, aluminum, and plastic to build the cars.

We have created the wrong role model for other developing economies.

The most popular material for building bicycles now is carbon fiber–scroll down a little and see the Pinarello beauty.  (I’m old-school, I like steel, but that’s another story.)  So it’s a good thing that all that carbon is being used to build bikes rather than being released into the atmosphere.   My I don’t understand the science here, but it’s got to be a good thing that all those bikes are powered by carbohydrates rather than hydrocarbons.

I’ll be writing a little more in the next few days about my recent adventures with bicycles.

It’s not too late to save the 96

I’ve heard that prolife people are supporting the vote to repeal healthcare on Wednesday.  My suggestion is that we instead rally to help the citizens of Arizona repeal their cut-off of funds for transplants.  Maybe in a show of solidarity each of the other 49 states could pledge 2% of the funding needed.

Does anyone know of any charitable funds to help the transplant patients?  This is a serious question.  I would send a modest contribution, and I’m sure other citizens would.  I know a lot of people have been saying it should be the job of private charities or churches to help poor people get the help they need.

If there is a fund, I would be willing to contribute.

Food for Thought: She Speaks for Animals

TEMPLE GRANDIN TO SPEAK AT K-STATE NOV. 9 (K-State Events)

Source: Chelsea Good, 303-829-4718, chelsgood@gmail.com
Website: http://bloggingfoodforthought.blogspot.com

Monday, Oct. 18, 2010

MANHATTAN — Temple Grandin, a world-renowned animal behaviorist and high-functioning autistic, will speak at Kansas State University at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 9, in Forum Hall at the K-State Student Union.

The lecture, which will cover Grandin’s personal and professional life, is free and open to the public. It also will be streamed live on the Web at http://ome.ksu.edu/webcast/bci/blog/index.html.

An HBO movie about Grandin recently won seven Emmy awards. Grandin didn’t talk until she was 3 1/2 years old. She was diagnosed with autism in 1950, and her parents were told she should be institutionalized. Instead, Grandin developed her ability to think in pictures and see situations through the perspective of animals into a successful career as a livestock-handling equipment designer. She has now designed the facilities in which half the cattle are handled in the United States.

Her first book, “Emergence: Labeled Autistic,” stunned the world. Until its publication, most professionals and parents assumed that an autism diagnosis was virtually a death sentence for achievement or productivity in life.

Grandin’s lecture is sponsored by Food for Thought, a grassroots group of K-State students who seek to bridge the gap between agriculture and consumers. The group includes undergraduate, graduate and veterinary students, as well as young alumni, and works under the guidance of faculty adviser Dan Thomson, the director of K-State’s Beef Cattle Institute. More information about Food For Thought is available at the group’s blog, http://bloggingfoodforthought.blogspot.com, on Facebook or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/fftgroup.

How to Write the Hebrew Letters

The site Byron found has a link on how to write the letters: http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/7_handwriting.html.  See also the link there to the site Hebrew for Christians.  Note the links on “Hebrew for Christians” to the Shema and other Jewish Prayers.  The Amidah or Shemoneh Esrei is historically a very important prayer.  There are audio links for these prayers, along with the Hebrew text, transliteration, and translation.  The transliteration system used in sites like this may not be exactly the same as the system scholars use, but it gives you some idea of the pronunciation.

Iwig Still Going

Iwig dairy did meet the deadline and sold enough shares to remain open.

Ari and Elijah will continue to enjoy the delicious chocolate milk when they visit us.

Still Time to Save Iwig

Iwig dairy still need to sell 20 shares today, of an original 300.

More here and here.

More Illogical Nastiness

I still want to remind everyone to visit the Iwig web site and do what they can to save the farm.  In the meantime, I’m still discouraged by the meanness I am seeing in primary race for senate in my state.

One candidate is now accusing the other of wanting to grant lower in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants.

That sounds reasonable until you apply a little logic.

Who are these “illegal immigrants” who want to take advantage of our educational opportunities?

They are graduates of our state’s high schools who were brought here as children by their parents who came here without permission, seeking jobs they were told “Americans won’t do.”

What law did the children break?

They were brought here by their parents.  Did they have a moral obligation to turn back and cross the border alone in the other direction.  The parents broke the law and were aware of the risks and the possible consequences.

The children went to school, did their homework, obeyed the rules they understood, and now want to go to college.  They only home they now know is the state where they graduated from school.  How is it to anyone’s advantage to deny them an education?

Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have a chance if he were running in the current political climate.  After all, he granted amnesty in 1986 to undocumented workers and their families.