Socialist Jesus

KEEPER: Biblical vs. Deistic Economics

Scot McKnight point us to this article...

Biblical vs. Deistic Economics

I’m not sure I’d push this onto deism; but what David Dunn says in response to Dave Ramsey is worth consideration and conversation. Much of what Dunn says here was said years back by Ron Sider. The issue even for a Christian libertarian, as I see it, is two-fold: (1) all that we have is not “mine!” but “God’s” and what God has given us, and (2) the fundamental idea of taxation, which runs right through Israel’s laws, is not theft by the government but support for the people.

I’m for a good solid reading of the Bible, but one has to be careful about thinking levitical laws are for today; one has to see what the law was driving at (care for the marginalized); one has to think these things into the NT teachings and the radical attitude of Jesus and the early church toward possessions and even property; and one has to baptize it all into changing times, including a vastly different economy in our world, and how best to live this out in our world. Yet, even after all those moves have been made … well, there’s too much to say here. Here’s Dunn’s response to Ramsey.

Even though the Christian financial “guru” Dave Ramsey claims not to understand Occupy Wall Street, he does know why protesters (and by extension most Americans) want to raise taxes on the wealthy: We are sinners. “At the core of this demand [to raise taxes],” he says, “is envy.”
This judgment is not just offensive and wrong (see my last post) but sadly ironic: Dave Ramsey tells people to bring the Bible to their personal finances, so he should know that God’s economy is all about (what he scornfully calls) “wealth redistribution.”
Being a theologian, I could talk about how sharing in the life of the Trinity obligates us to share our lives with others, but another excuse to “spiritualize” our wallets is the last thing we need. I am also tempted to “tear apart” Ramsey’s caricature of the “Occupy” movement (it may truly be one of the finest examples of a “straw man fallacy” I have ever seen). But I respect Dave Ramsey as a fellow Christian and a person who has helped free thousands of families from crushing debt. (He does “God’s work.”) Therefore I will focus on the practical, theological root of his economic “heresy.”…

If we are truly the possessions of a loving God (Leviticus 25:23), then rights must be regulated by needs. In contrast to the deistic view Leviticus 25 (the closest thing the Bible offers to a clear economic “policy”) presents a more “open” theology of people and property. That is why this chapter gives more rights to the poor than the rich, saying that a person who falls into poverty, and sells his property to survive, has the right to buy it back at any time (with some exceptions). Or a relative may but it back for him.

This “policy” does not exactly qualify as what Ramsey calls “theft” (yet) but it does not support his deistic concept of exclusionary property, either. If Ramsey says nobody has a right to take his “stuff,” then I assume he believes nobody has a right to make him sellit, either. Though he agrees that everything we have comes from God, which is why he rightly stresses private giving, he sadly fails to let that belief get in the way of his laissez faire economics. Otherwise he might not be so quick to condemn progressive tax reform.
What Ramsey calls “wealth redistribution” the Bible calls “Jubilee.”

Ramsey says, “When someone takes my money and gives me no say in the matter, that’s called theft — whether they’re using a gun or the government.” Though this statement begs the question and shows a desperate need to Google “social contract,” it is most troublesome because of its exclusionary theology of property. Or as toddlers say, “Mine!” This doctrine does not come from Ramsey’s Christian faith.
Exclusionary property rights require Deism.

KEEPER: "Authority, Social Contract Theory, and Christian Faith"

Authority, Social Contract Theory, and Christian Faith
by By Paul DeHart,

What is the Christian philosopher of politics to make of the pretensions of social contract theory—namely the requirement of consent for the legitimacy of any given regime and, in some versions of the theory, not merely the stipulation that consent is necessary for legitimate government authority (or for the establishment of society) but also sufficient? At one level the Christian political philosopher need not respond as a Christian but can respond, rather, simply as a political philosopher. Responding as a political philosopher, such a person might note the self-referential incoherency of voluntaristic accounts of obligation per se—which is to say, of any account of obligation whatsoever, whether moral, political, or legal. Responding simply as a philosopher, such a one might note also the impracticability of obtaining actual consent (whether express or tacit) in a way that clearly underwrites the authority of any given regime. As a result of that impracticability, no extant regime has obtained the clear consent of most of its citizens (nor has any society obtained the unanimous consent of all those it takes to have the full responsibilities of citizens). Responding again simply as a philosopher, such a person might note that many presentations of social contract theory seem to commit the genetic fallacy. And, finally, responding as a philosopher, the Christian political philosopher might note the incoherence of deriving any normative content from hypothetical social contracts (and hence from hypothetical consent), such as occurs in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Whatever we are to make of theories of covenant or consent, it is clear that the early modern theories of social contract—such as those proffered by Hobbes and Locke—leave much to be desired on purely philosophic grounds.

To return to my question, though, how should the Christian political philosopher respond as a Christian political philosopher? Just here I think it’s worth taking into account the work by outstanding Christian analytic philosophers working in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion—philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, to name two. On Plantinga’s epistemology, any person x can said to know something y just in that instance where y is a true belief that x holds precisely as a result of the proper functioning of his (or her) cognitive faculties. And x’s cognitive faculties are functioning properly if they are functioning in accordance with their design plan and in a proper environment. Such an account of knowledge is quite different from the strong foundationalist account I described, following Plantinga, Wolterstorff, and others, in any earlier post on the problems with Jeffersonian philosophy. Given what Plantinga and Wolterstorff call “Reformed Epistemology” (an epistemology that Plantinga builds on Aquinas, Calvin, and Reid), it is plausible that one knows the claims of faith of to be true even without any evidence (or without any evidence under the definition of evidence advanced by strong foundationalists). Such claims could be properly basic. It is possible that I hear such claims from a trustworthy source, that I believe them, and that they are true. In such a case, if my cognitive faculties were designed to produce true beliefs as a result of testimony from some trustworthy source, it is plausible that I have knowledge of such claims. Now, I see plenty of reason to reject the dominant alternative of the Enlightenment—its strong foundationalism—just because that account is self-referentially incoherent. And so far as I can tell, no one has offered a knock down argument (such as that which led to the demise of Enlightment evidentialism) against the account just described. But given all this, it is plausible that the Christian person knows (if Christianity is true) the particular claims of the Christian faith--and this whether or not the Christian person can demonstrate (i.e., show) by rational argumentation the truth of such claims. But if that’s the case, then why shouldn’t such claims be taken into account in the practice of political philosophy? Why shouldn't the Christian engaged in the practice of political philosophy make use of all that he or she knows to be true?

Given Christianity, one thing the Christian person knows by faith is that Jesus of Nazareth is LORD (kurios) and king. Moreover, the Christian person knows by faith that Christ has a kingdom—such a person is by faith a member of that kingdom. Such a person accepts by faith (and not irrationally) Christ’s claim, in Scripture, that all authority has been given to him as a result of his conquest of death through his death, burial, and resurrection. It is just because all authority has been given to Jesus of Nazareth that, according to the Scriptures, “The kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdom of our of God and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.” That is, Jesus of Nazareth, not Caeser, is the King of kings—the authority over authorities. His Kingdom is the Kingdom over the kingdoms. And the Christian is, by faith (and faith freely given), a member of this Kingdom of kingdoms. Thus, St. Paul writes to his fellow Christians that their citizenship (or polity) is in Heaven. And he says so in the present tense. The resurrection of the Christ, according to the Christian faith, establishes Jesus of Nazareth as the word’s rightful kurios, as its ultimate authority. And he has this position by virtue of who he is and what he has done and without the consent of those over whom he rules. According to Christian scripture, Jesus of Nazareth will judge the nations. It says nothing of their consent to his judgment. Christian Scripture says that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus of Nazareth is kurios. But, again, nothing here about consent.

Just here an important objection might emerge. Aren't human beings creatures with free will? Doesn't St. Thomas rightly note that such creatures are governed by God in accordance with their special nature and so in light of this very important feature of human nature? And precisely at this point I must register my enthusiastic endorsement of not only the spirit behind the question but also of the proposition that animates the objection. For I believe, contra Hobbes or Mackie (or some other determinist), that humans not only have free will but also that this free will is only rightly understood as free will of the incompatiblist sort. I believe human persons have what philosophers call libertarian free agency (not in the political sense of "libertarian") or contra-causal freedom. Moreover, I believe that the Kingdom of Heaven is about right relationship with God and that right relationship among free creatures can only be established freely and without compulsion. Even more, on Christian belief, God became man in order to restore human persons to right relation with Him (the right relation of man to God being part of what Augustine of Hippo means by pax in his De civitate dei).

Even so, when the Christian person by faith enters the Kingdom of God, part and parcel of what that person freely does is to acknowledge the LORDSHIP of the Messiah of God as the universe's rightful kurios. Indeed, part of what the Christian freely does is to submit to that Lordship--which is, of course, nothing but the Lordship of infinite love and the authority of infinite Goodness. But this means that in his or her freedom the Christian person freely recognizes and submits to something that, according to the Christian gospel, already obtains--namely the LORDSHIP, and hence, the authority--of Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover, I think there is an important modal distinction between the way in which Jesus of Nazareth (and likewise, the God of Israel) exercises that LORDSHIP and the ontological ground of that LORDSHIP. When it comes to entering or living as part of the Kingdom of the Heavens, then that LORDSHIP (because of who the God of Israel is and because his human creatures bear his image) is exercised in accordance with our free will. But, as the exercise of LORDSHIP is distinct from the possession of it, the way in which YHWH exercises LORDSHIP over creation and the way in which the Messiah of YHWH exercises authority in His Kingdom, is distinct (modally so) from the possession of that LORDSHIP and so distinct from the ontological ground of it. Christ exercises his governance in accordance with our free will (at least to some extent) but not on account of it.

To reiterate the initial point, Christian Scripture clearly teaches that the ground of the LORDSHIP of Israel's Messiah is his death, burial, and resurrection from the dead. As a result of these things, part of the Christian gospel (as N. T. Wright says) is the announcement of His ascension to the right hand of the Father. This Christian proposition is a Hebraic way of saying that He has been exalted to the place of rulership--the place of authority over the entire cosmos and over all other authorities and powers. And, if Christian belief is also true belief, then the Christian knows these things by faith.

Now, to return to social contract theory and the principle of consent . . . Given the foregoing, we can note two things. First, the Christian political philosopher as political philosopher knows (or can know) that conventional social contract theory, which stipulates that consent is both necessary and sufficient for the establishment of authority among human persons, is self-referentially incoherent. The Christian political philosopher as Christian knows that in the paradigm instance of authority—the authority of God and of his Messiah—consent is not even necessary. At the base of things, consent is neither necessary nor sufficient for authority per se. Therefore, when the Christian person enters arguments about the nature of political authority among merely human persons, he or she must reject arguments that, without qualification, establish consent as sufficient or even necessary for authority per se over human persons.

The Christian person may of course subscribe to the proposition that consent is required in particular circumstances--which is to say that consent is conditionally, though not absolutely, necessary. For instance, there are occasions upon which we are not dealing with the outright exercise of authority but only with the stewardship of human affairs in particular times and places--times and places in which people equally valued and loved by God find themselves in need of human governance but also find that God has neither established a human intermediary between God and a certain people (such as with Moses and Israel) nor appointed a judge (such as Samson) nor anointed a King over his people (such as with Samuel's anointing first of Saul and then of David). In such a situation, it would seem that Locke is right. The only way that authority (for the governance of temporal matters) can obtain among people who are equal, when the divinity has not ordained some particular ruler, is through their consent. But such stipulations as are given here and as, in fact, are given by Locke himself entail necessarily that consent is not an absolutely necessary condition for the governance of even temporal matters. That is, to reiterate, consent is neither necessary nor sufficient for authority as such. Nor is it absolutely necessary (nor, for that matter, sufficient) for authority relations among human persons. Even in the world as we have it, on Christian revelation, consent only applies to people in certain circumstances. It is a matter of contingency. Consent is not an unimportant contingency. For I would stipulate that consent is a necessary condition for government legitimacy for most people at most times and in most places--for instance, people situated such as we are. Still, consent is never more than conditionally necessary.

Here’s what I'm trying to get at. When you read a political theorist like Hobbes or like Filmer you find, the gaping canyon between them notwithstanding, a surprising agreement. They both think the power of human sovereigns mirrors the sovereignty of God. That is, they think divine authority and human authority are both species of the same thing—authority—which are considerably alike in nature. Thus, one should take Hobbes seriously when he refers to the Leviathan as the mortal God. The source of the power to bind for Hobbes’ immortal and mortal God is much the same—irresistible power. But what the Christian knows by faith seems clearly to entail something quite the contrary—namely that divine and human authority aren’t much alike at all (perhaps not even analogically similar). For only God exercises authority in the proper sense; mere humans never do. Though, just here, it must be noted that most Christians would not attribute to the immortal God the sort of "power" that Hobbes ascribes to Him. For the Christian also knows, by faith, that God is good--not tame, to be sure, but certainly and unequivocally good. For the Christian person, the authority (or power of God) just is the authority (or power) of goodness--and substantive goodness (both in the metaphysical and moral sense), though infinite, goodness at that. Hobbes, of course, will have none of this. But why think his conception of power or authority as such is right or even that it matters much at all? But to return to my point--mere humans never, on the Christian account, exercise authority as such. Rather, given Christianity, the most that a human "ruler" ever exercises is something given in trust. Such "rulers" or "authorities" within human polities, whether they be one, the few, or the many, only ever exercise a stewardship over human affairs. As the Apostle says in Romans 13, the "authorities" are God's--which is to say that rulership over things human ultimately belongs only to Him. Moreover, that the "authorities" are God's is something, given Christianity, that the Christian person knows by faith.

I say that the Christian knows all this by faith. What I mean is that if the articles of Christian faith are true and if the Christian person believes them to be true as a result of properly functioning cognitive faculties, then the Christian does in fact know such things by faith and in the rational sense of know. Of course the Christian person will not have Cartesian or Lockean certainty about the tenets of the faith. But, as a number of philosophers point out, no one can have such certainty about much of anything and maybe about nothing at all. But why think one need Enlightenment certainty in order to have knowledge? The self-referential incoherency of the standard Enlightenment account opens the door to knowledge of the tenets of faith where the knowledge in question is not beliefs held with Cartesian or Lockean or Clifforidan certainty. Indeed, the self-referential incoherency of those accounts opens the door to knowledge of the articles of Christian faith even in the case where the efficient cause of the beliefs in question is the transmission of testimony through reliable sources (and even in that cases where the sources are reliable but we remain unable to establish, to a certainty, there reliability). So, from the Christian standpoint, if the tenets of the faith rule out the social contract account of authority as such, then so much the worse for conventional social contract theory. If, as a result, the ontological ground of human authority is not to be found in consent, then we must look elsewhere. If the Declaration of Independence nevertheless suggests that all governments acquire their just powers only from the consent of the governed, then we will have to reply that this is to claim too much for consent. The government of God--or of the Messiah of God--requires the consent of none. Nor does God require the consent of men when He ordains and establishes, in trust, human "authorities" among them. Consent is at most conditionally necessary for authority among human persons--such as those instances in which God has not anointed a King or chosen some judge and yet in which His creatures, made for society and equal among themselves, nevertheless require some form of governance (instances which, to be sure, we think obtain for most persons at most times and places). But, given rulership of Jesus of Nazareth at the Right Hand of God, given that He is King of kings whether or not He is recognized as such, there is no absolute necessity in consent. Consent is not one of those bedrock principles of reality--of even political reality--that goes all the way down.

Four Reforms that Don't Require Bureaucracies to Implement

 

The following  article appeared in the NYT. I'm especially fond of suggestion #4.

Did You Hear the One About the Bankers?

CITIGROUP is lucky that Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed when he was. The Libyan leader’s death diverted attention from a lethal article involving Citigroup that deserved more attention because it helps to explain why many average Americans have expressed support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The news was that Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

It doesn’t get any more immoral than this. As the Securities and Exchange Commission civil complaint noted, in 2007, Citigroup exercised “significant influence” over choosing $500 million of the $1 billion worth of assets in the deal, and the global bank deliberately chose collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, built from mortgage loans almost sure to fail. According to The Wall Street Journal, the S.E.C. complaint quoted one unnamed C.D.O. trader outside Citigroup as describing the portfolio as resembling something your dog leaves on your neighbor’s lawn. “The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation,” The Journal added. “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.”

Citigroup, which is under new and better management now, settled the case without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. James Stewart, a business columnist for The Times, noted that Citigroup’s flimflam made “Goldman Sachs mortgage traders look like Boy Scouts. In settling its fraud charges for $550 million last year, Goldman was accused by the S.E.C. of being the middleman in a similar deal, allowing the hedge fund manager John Paulson to help choose the mortgages and then bet against them without disclosing this to the other parties. Citigroup dispensed with a Paulson figure altogether, grabbing those lucrative roles for itself.” (Last Thursday, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.)

This gets to the core of why all the anti-Wall Street groups around the globe are resonating. I was in Tahrir Square in Cairo for the fall of Hosni Mubarak, and one of the most striking things to me about that demonstration was how apolitical it was. When I talked to Egyptians, it was clear that what animated their protest, first and foremost, was not a quest for democracy — although that was surely a huge factor. It was a quest for “justice.” Many Egyptians were convinced that they lived in a deeply unjust society where the game had been rigged by the Mubarak family and its crony capitalists. Egypt shows what happens when a country adopts free-market capitalism without developing real rule of law and institutions.

But, then, what happened to us? Our financial industry has grown so large and rich it has corrupted our real institutions through political donations. As Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, bluntly said in a 2009 radio interview, despite having caused this crisis, these same financial firms “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they, frankly, own the place.”

Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.

We can’t afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don’t require new bureaucracies to implement. 1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can’t risk another trillion-dollar bailout. 2) If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits — period. 3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another A.I.G. is building up enormous risk. 4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know.

Capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty — provided they are balanced with meaningful transparency, regulation and oversight. We lost that balance in the last decade. If we don’t get it back — and there is now a tidal wave of money resisting that — we will have another crisis. And, if that happens, the cry for justice could turn ugly. Free advice to the financial services industry: Stick to being bulls. Stop being pigs.

Corporations and Government

Corporations are not people

The Problem, explained

Why evangelicals reject reason, or, Catholics have an easier time

A friend pointed out this article from the New York Times:

The Evangelical Rejection of Reason
By KARL W. GIBERSON and RANDALL J. STEPHENS
Published: October 17, 2011


THE Republican presidential field has become a showcase of evangelical anti-intellectualism. Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann deny that climate change is real and caused by humans. Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann dismiss evolution as an unproven theory. The two candidates who espouse the greatest support for science, Mitt Romney and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., happen to be Mormons, a faith regarded with mistrust by many Christians.


The rejection of science seems to be part of a politically monolithic red-state fundamentalism, textbook evidence of an unyielding ignorance on the part of the religious. As one fundamentalist slogan puts it, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” But evangelical Christianity need not be defined by the simplistic theology, cultural isolationism and stubborn anti-intellectualism that most of the Republican candidates have embraced.


Like other evangelicals, we accept the centrality of faith in Jesus Christ and look to the Bible as our sacred book, though we find it hard to recognize our religious tradition in the mainstream evangelical conversation. Evangelicalism at its best seeks a biblically grounded expression of Christianity that is intellectually engaged, humble and forward-looking. In contrast, fundamentalism is literalistic, overconfident and reactionary.


Fundamentalism appeals to evangelicals who have become convinced that their country has been overrun by a vast secular conspiracy; denial is the simplest and most attractive response to change. They have been scarred by the elimination of prayer in schools; the removal of nativity scenes from public places; the increasing legitimacy of abortion and homosexuality; the persistence of pornography and drug abuse; and acceptance of other religions and of atheism.


In response, many evangelicals created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and colleges, as well as publishing houses, broadcasting networks, music festivals and counseling groups. Among evangelical leaders, Ken Ham, David Barton and James C. Dobson have been particularly effective orchestrators — and beneficiaries — of this subculture.


Mr. Ham built his organization, Answers in Genesis, on the premise that biblical truth trumps all other knowledge. His Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Ky., contrasts “God’s Word,” timeless and eternal, with the fleeting notions of “human reason.” This is how he knows that the earth is 10,000 years old, that humans and dinosaurs lived together, and that women are subordinate to men. Evangelicals who disagree, like Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, are excoriated on the group’s Web site. (In a recent blog post, Mr. Ham called us “wolves” in sheep’s clothing, masquerading as Christians while secretly trying to destroy faith in the Bible.)


Mr. Barton heads an organization called WallBuilders, dedicated to the proposition that the founders were evangelicals who intended America to be a Christian nation. He has emerged as a highly influential Republican leader, a favorite of Mr. Perry, Mrs. Bachmann and members of the Tea Party. Though his education consists of a B.A. in religious education from Oral Roberts University and his scholarly blunders have drawn criticism from evangelical historians like John Fea, Mr. Barton has seen his version of history reflected in everything from the Republican Party platform to the social science curriculum in Texas.


Mr. Dobson, through his group Focus on the Family, has insisted for decades that homosexuality is a choice and that gay people could “pray away” their unnatural and sinful orientation. A defender of spanking children and of traditional roles for the sexes, he has accused the American Psychological Association, which in 2000 disavowed reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality, of caving in to gay pressure.


Charismatic leaders like these project a winsome personal testimony as brothers in Christ. Their audiences number in the tens of millions. They pepper their presentations with so many Bible verses that their messages appear to be straight out of Scripture; to many, they seem like prophets, anointed by God.


But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described as an “intellectual disaster.” He called on evangelicals to repent for their neglect of the mind, decrying the abandonment of the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformation. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”


There are signs of change. Within the evangelical world, tensions have emerged between those who deny secular knowledge, and those who have kept up with it and integrated it with their faith. Almost all evangelical colleges employ faculty members with degrees from major research universities — a conduit for knowledge from the larger world. We find students arriving on campus tired of the culture-war approach to faith in which they were raised, and more interested in promoting social justice than opposing gay marriage.


Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll, and publications like Books & Culture, Sojourners and The Christian Century, offer an alternative to the self-anointed leaders. They recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society.


Americans have always trusted in God, and even today atheism is little more than a quiet voice on the margins. Faith, working calmly in the lives of Americans from George Washington to Barack Obama, has motivated some of America’s finest moments. But when the faith of so many Americans becomes an occasion to embrace discredited, ridiculous and even dangerous ideas, we must not be afraid to speak out, even if it means criticizing fellow Christians.


Karl W. Giberson is a former professor of physics, and Randall J. Stephens is an associate professor of history, both at Eastern Nazarene College. They are the authors of “The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age.”

Here's my response, after reading the above article: 

Mark Noll wrote "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" in 1995. Things haven't changed much, have they?

Protestantism has always had a complicated relationship with the mind. Recall Luther's 1569 Table Talk: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.” Then there's this little gem: "Reason is the Devil's greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom ... Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism... She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets."
Martin Luther, Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142-148. Also,

Calvinists have a more difficult time articulating their nuanced attitude toward the mind, because they hold differing interpretations of the extent and the degree to which man has been corrupted by original sin. See this . Furthermore, it is harder to hold a balance between faith and reason when one stresses the "sensus divinitatus" as the means of knowing God, and denies argument and disputation a role in that process. Ultimately, for Calvinists, faith is "beyond reason;" See this. For those whose Calvinism is more loosely held, or more remote (for example, many Baptists and non-denominational types) a "faith beyond reason" can easily slip into being a "faith AGAINST reason."

No doubt, Catholics have had their share of Jacopone da Todi's, mystics, and holy tortillas...but they've never been able to completely repudiate the "both-and" orientation of Thomas Aquinas toward faith and reason. I know many Catholics who are infuriated by American Catholic politicians, whose spiritual formation reflects more of Protestant nominalism/modernism/anti-intellectualism than their own tradition. But at least they can appeal to their tradition, which is not anti-intellectual, in criticizing those politicians. I envy them.

Purpose of the Occupy Protests?

QUESTION: Does anyone involved in a single one of the occupy protests actually know specifically what they are trying to achieve and why they think protesting will do something to achieve it? Because try as I might, all I see is confused people saying things that are not even close to consistent and factual information.

MY RESPONSE: Hanging around Wall Street could be a way to remind those on Wall Street of the effects of mortgage bonds, subprime mortgages, and collaterized debt obligations on the average American. People who are angry and frustrated because their voices have been drowned out by lobbyists also tend not to be very coherent. Angry people attract other angry people, who might not be on the same page as they are. When viewed through a camera lens, all one sees is confusion. Most of us prefer stability to chaos, so we dismiss the entire thing and go on surfing the internet and listening to our Ipods.about a minute ago ·

Five Facts about the Wealthiest 1%

5 Facts You Should Know About the Wealthiest One Percent of Americans

1. The Top 1 Percent of Americans Owns 40 Percent of the Nation’s Wealth
2. The Top 1 Percent of Americans Take Home 24 Percent of National Income
3. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Own Half of the Country’s Stocks, Bonds and Mutual Funds
4. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Have Only 5 Percent of the Nation’s Personal Debt
5. The Top 1 Percent are Taking In More of the Nation’s Income Than at Any Other Time Since the 1920s

(see the article for helpful charts) 

Seen at a recent protest

Record of a Facebook Dialogue about Rand Paul at the Tea Party Debate

It all started with this:

Audience at tea party debate cheers leaving uninsured to die

By Rachel Rose Hartman | The Ticket – Tue, Sep 13, 2011

If you're uninsured and on the brink of death, that's apparently a laughing matter to some audience members at last night's tea party Republican presidential debate.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a doctor, was asked a hypothetical question by CNN host Wolf Blitzer about how society should respond if a healthy 30-year-old man who decided against buying health insurance suddenly goes into a coma and requires intensive care for six months. Paul--a fierce limited-government advocate-- said it shouldn't be the government's responsibility. "That's what freedom is all about, taking your own risks," Paul said and was drowned out by audience applause as he added, "this whole idea that you have to prepare to take care of everybody …"

"Are you saying that society should just let him die?" Blitzer pressed Paul. And that's when the audience got involved.

Several loud cheers of "yeah!" followed by laughter could be heard in the Expo Hall at the Florida State Fairgrounds in response to Blitzer's question.

You can watch the exchange below:

Paul disagreed with the audience on that front. "No," he responded, noting he practiced medicine before Medicaid when churches took care of medical costs--a comment that drew wide audience applause. "We never turned anybody away from the hospital."

Paul voiced support for legalizing alternative health care and argued that the reason medical costs have skyrocketed is that individuals have stopped taking personal responsibility for their health care.

Though Paul spoke to the larger issues of health care and government-backed health insurance--both pivotal in the 2012 election--the audience's reaction has overshadowed the substance of the exchange between the candidates. And the day after the event, Texas Gov. Rick Perry offered his own criticism of the audience response.

"I was a bit taken aback by that myself," Perry told NBC News and the Miami Herald of the audience reaction after appearing at a breakfast fundraiser in Tampa Tuesday morning.

"We're the party of life. We ought to be coming up with ways to save lives."

The campaigns for Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann did not immediately respond to The Ticket's request for comment.

Conservative Andrew Sullivan writing for The Daily Beast's The Dish Tuesday noted that the United States obligates society to save someone in an emergency room. "America, moreover, has a law on the books that makes it a crime not to treat and try to save a human being who walks into an emergency room. So we have already made that collective decision and if the GOP wants to revisit it, they can," Sullivan wrote.

Sullivan also decried the audience reaction, writing: "Maybe a tragedy like the death of a feckless twentysomething is inevitable if we are to restrain healthcare costs. But it is still a tragedy. It is not something a decent person cheers."

I saw this link up on  Brad Boydston's wall. His comment: "Echoes of Ayn Rand."
Then I shared the link, and wrote, "Brad's right. I fear we'll be seeing more and more of this sort of thing in the near future. That's when it got interesting. "A," a teapartier, and I entered into a dialogue:
         
      
 A:    "I watched the video, and I didn't see what others are seeing, I guess. I saw the crowd cheer Paul's statement about freedom being about the right to make choices and live with the consequences. Then, when pressed further about letting the man die, I heard a handful of idiots shouting to, essentially, let him die. How do 4 people represent the tea party? I'm a bit confused.

Me:  Listen to the rest of it. Did you hear Paul chastising those idiots? Or disagreeing with them? No. He punted to "let the churches take care of them," to loud applause. How convenient to be able to dump the sick, weak and poor on
somebody else! That's the nasty underbelly of libertarianism. Leave me alone...if you need help, don't ask me...go ask somebody else! Shades of Luke 10:30-37. I refer you to Brad Boydston's message:

"I'm hoping that at least some of the people who supported tax-cuts and reduction in government services to the poor, saying that such things should be done through non-profits and churches, will step-up, and take some initiative to get the ball rolling. (Now that we're paying less in taxes than anytime since the 1980's we can most certainly can afford to be more generous.)

Some of the guys in our church are in desperate need of health services. But options are few in our area. We've been helping people with medicine, food, some other medical expenses, public transit passes, and job searches.

I've got a list of people who want to work. Some need training but some are ready to go as soon as a job opens up.

Checks can be sent to:
MasterPiece Church
PO Box 1113
Laveen AZ 85339-1113"

Note: "Marginalized Ministry"

Please help me see what you and the people in the crowd are doing to give to those churches to provide for those without health insurance, jobs, etc. I'm ready for lots of heart-warming stories! : D

A: Beth, my main point the headline and accompanying heartache is misleading. They did not cheer the hypothetical death. There are arguments to be had regarding the policies promoted by Dr. Paul (I'm no fan), but claiming the tea party crowd "cheers leaving uninsured to die" is horribly (purposefully?) misleading.  As for your challenge. It's a valid one, and I'll admit that I've been caught up with living life to the point that I've deferred a lot of that burden to others in our church. Heck, I may find myself relying on them soon if I can't find employment.

Me: Perhaps that headline is like the image of the old woman/young woman where you see what you are "set" to see. As for the view that it was only 4 people, and that the rest of the crowd did not share that their sentiment, I am reminded of how how Glenn Beck used to quote Martin Niemoller,

"First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me."

A:  What should they have done in that setting? Beat the 4 people to their senses? ;) Seriously, every ideological group I know how has fringe idiots who will do such stupid things as chear the hypothetical death of a purposefully uninsured 
man or cheer the very real hospitalization of a vice president while hoping for his death. The fact that one group got lucky enough to be televised doesn't make them more reprsentative than the other group 

Me: No, they shouldn't have beaten these four people senseless, but I'm amazed that I didn't hear any jeers. After all, we are talking about people here who hold a strong belief in PERSONAL responsibility; who want to see less government and  
social interference and more INDIVIDUAL initiative. The lack of any audible or visible disagreement from the audience makes me think they are either 1) inconsistent in their belief or 2) in agreement with the fringe idiots.

Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?

 This, from The Economist, shows why it isn't. 

Social Security: A monstrous truth

Sep 9th 2011, 18:22 by M.S.

NO PONZI scheme in the history of the world has ever lasted 75 years. Ponzi schemes depend on garnering an ever-increasing pool of new investors to pay out returns to prior investors. When the potential pool of new investors runs dry, they collapse. This will occur when the scheme runs up against the natural limits of its recruitment strategy; in the ultimate case, it can't keep going past the point where the entire population is already subscribed.

This should provide us with a hint as to why, as Kevin Drum writes (rebutting Shikha Dalmia), Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. The entire population of working Americans has already been subscribed to Social Security for decades, yet the system continues to pay out benefits on time. That is because the actuarial calculations underlying its revenues and benefits are sound. Rick Perry may consider Social Security "a monstrous lie", but my parents and one surviving grandparent keep getting checks in the mail, year after year. Social Security does face a shortfall in the coming decades, because of the population bulge of retiring baby boomers. Those costs are limited and, measured as a percentage of GDP, will flatten out. They can be absorbed through a modest, gradual increase in Social Security taxes and modest reductions in benefits for wealthier recipients. As my colleague notes, this is what a graph of Social Security's finances looks like:

This, meanwhile, is what a graph of a Ponzi scheme's finances looks like:

The difference is clear.

If you wanted to call Social Security an investment, you would say it is a play on the proposition that America's GDP will continue to grow over the long term. This is the safest play one can imagine making, which is why the returns are so modest. Like any investment, it could go bad. But if it goes bad, if the economy of the United States ceases to grow over the long term, it is inconceivable that any other investment large enough to feed a pension plan covering the entire working population could do better.

My colleague's partial defence of Rick Perry's attacks on Social Security construes them not as a call to scrap the system, but as a warning about its long-term problems. "Mr Perry is targeting Social Security because the current system taxes workers under an explicit commitment to provide described benefits that, as it stands, it cannot meet," she writes. If Mr Perry were in fact calling for limited changes to ensure Social Security can meet promised benefits past 2036, that would be fine. I disagree that this is what he's doing. You don't call something a "monstrous lie" when you want to tinker with it. What Mr Perry is doing is part of a consistent decades-long habit across much of the conservative right of attacking the foundations of Social Security. Up until about 2007, the goal of such attacks was clear: conservatives wanted to replace it with a Chilean-style defined-contribution plan that would be invested in securities. Within its own assumptions, that programme did at least make sense; but since the financial crisis, and with average returns from Wall Street now sharply negative over an entire decade, both the logic and the political support for any such programme have evaporated. If Mr Perry is no longer arguing for the dubious concept of turning Social Security over to the states, then it's not clear what he proposes as an alternative to the current system. The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin, generally a reliable voice for mainstream Republican views, has had no luck getting Mr Perry to clarify what he thinks, and warns that he "can’t afford to offer half-baked ideas and allow his past, troublesome statements to float around."

Perhaps opposition to Social Security has become a runaway train, a rhetorical and intellectual commitment too strong to give up even after it has lost its connection to an actual policy programme. But the effect of continued inaccurate attacks on the foundations of Social Security is to deepen most people's confusion about the actual soundness of the concept, and to reinforce young people's scepticism that they will ever benefit from it. I've been hearing such scepticism from my own cohort for almost 20 years now. It doesn't make any sense. If my generation does in fact fail to receive our Social Security checks, it will only be because we inexplicably decided to vote ourselves out of them.

My grandmother cast her first presidential vote for FDR, in 1936. He had passed the Social Security Act one year earlier. She began receiving Social Security checks in the year Jimmy Carter was elected president. She turns 100 in December, and the checks are still coming in. She has since been joined on the rolls by her two daughters. There is every reason to believe that their children, who have been paying taxes into the Social Security system for decades now, will also enjoy its benefits when they retire. Unless, of course, conservative politicians succeed in convincing working Americans that the whole thing is a "monstrous lie".

Jonathan Sacks on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sack's response to the tenth anniversary of 9/11: Let's rebuild the West's moral authority

TWO things have haunted me since 9/11. The first is the pain, the grief, the lives lost and families devastated, the sheer barbaric ingenuity of evil. The scar in our humanity is still unhealed.

The second is our failure to understand what Osama bin Laden was saying about the West. We did not hear the message then. I'm not sure we hear it now.

After the shock and grief subsided, two theories began to be heard. Firstly, this was an event of epoch-changing magnitude. The terms of international politics had been transformed. The Cold War was over. Another war had begun. The enemy was not the Soviet Union and communism. It was radical, political Islam.

The second was the opposite: 9/11 was terrifying and terrible but it changed nothing because acts of terror never do. The most important thing is not to overreact. Terror may bring dividends in local conflicts but it never succeeds in its larger political aims.

There is something to be said for both theories. But there is a third: why did al-Qa'ida attack the US? Because it believed it could. Because it thought the US was past its prime, no longer as lean and hungry as it believed it was.

Robert McNamara said the first rule in politics is to understand your enemy's psychology. As I struggled to understand 9/11 I began to suspect the answer lay in the events of 1989. That is when the narratives of the West and the rest began seriously to diverge.

In the West, 1989 was seen as the collapse of communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The Western narrative was triumphalist. It saw those events as heralding the victory of its values without a shot being fired. The free market and liberal democratic politics had won for the simplest of reasons. They delivered, while communism did not. They would now spread across the world. It was, said Francis Fukuyama, the beginning of the end of history.

There was, though, another narrative that said the Soviet Union collapsed not because of the triumph of liberal democracy but because of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan earlier that year. It had invaded in 1979 and was forced to withdraw, not because of superpower politics but because of the determined resistance of a small group of highly motivated religious warriors, the mujaheddin and their helpers. That, historically, is the event that captured the imagination of bin Laden. According to this account, the humiliating retreat of the Soviet Army set in motion a series of internal crises that resulted in the fall of a great power. If one of the world's two superpowers was vulnerable to asymmetric warfare -- the war of the few against the many -- why not the other, America itself? What 1989 represented was not the end of history but the end of a history dominated by the twin superpowers of communist Russia and capitalist America. Both were vulnerable because both were overripe and about to fall from the tree. Much excitement was felt in the West by the failure of communism. Less attention was paid to what Daniel Bell called the cultural contradictions of capitalism.

Throughout this period there were voices that few seemed to be listening to. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1981 masterwork After Virtue argued that the moral discourse of the West had broken down.

The "Enlightenment project" of a purely rational ethic had failed -- not because there was no such thing, but because there were too many. They clashed inconclusively and people were left with a sense that morality is whatever you think it is.

His minatory warning was: "The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time." That was a scary thing to hear from one of the world's great philosophers. I soon began to hear it from other leading intellectuals also, such as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Robert Bellah.

That is what I heard in the echoes of 9/11: that all great civilisations eventually decline, and when they begin to do so they are vulnerable. That is what bin Laden believed about the West and so did some of the West's own greatest minds.

If so, then 9/11 belongs to a wider series of phenomena affecting the West: the disintegration of the family, the demise of authority, the build-up of personal debt, the collapse of financial institutions, the downgrading of the American economy, the continuing failure of some European economies, the loss of a sense of honour, loyalty and integrity.

These are all signs of the arteriosclerosis of a culture, a civilisation grown old. Whenever Me takes precedence over We, and pleasure today over viability tomorrow, a society is in trouble. If so, then the enemy is not radical Islam, it is us and our, by now unsustainable, self-indulgence.

The West has expended much energy and courage fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq abroad and defeating terror at home. It has spent far less, if any, in renewing its own morality and the institutions -- families, communities, ethical codes, standards in public life -- where it is created and sustained. But if I am right, this is the West's greatest weakness in the eyes of its enemies as well as its friends. The only way to save the world is to begin with ourselves. Our burden after 9/11 is to renew the moral disciplines of freedom. Some say it can't be done. They are wrong: it can and must. Surely we owe the dead no less.

Lord Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth.

De-regulation, Simplified

Reality of de-regulation outside Tea Party distortion field:

1) De-reg banks = Wall Street meltdown, Great Recession
2) De-reg energy = Enron debacle, gutting 401Ks, Calif. cheated of $20 Billion
3) De-reg environment = Exxon Valdez, BP oil spills
4) De-reg mortgages = Liar's Loan / securitization fiasco.

Political Cartoons

Seasteading: Government as Industry, Citizens as Customers.

Here's how Wikipedia describes "seasteading:"

The Seasteading Institute, founded by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman on April 15, 2008, is an organization formed to facilitate the establishment of autonomous, mobile communities on seaborne platforms operating in international waters. Gramlich’s 1998 article "SeaSteading – Homesteading on the High Seas" outlined the notion of affordable steading, and attracted the attention of Friedman with his proposal for a small-scale project. The two began working together and posted their first collaborative book online in 2001, which explored aspects of seasteading from waste disposal to flags of convenience.

The project picked up mainstream exposure in 2008 after having been brought to the attention of PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who invested $500,000 in the institute and has since spoken out on behalf of its viability, most recently in his essay "The Education of a Libertarian," published online by Cato Unbound. TSI has received widespread and diverse media attention, from sources such as CNN, Wired Magazine, and Prospect Magazine. American journalist and commentator John Stossel wrote an article about seasteading and the Seasteading Institute in February of 2011 and invited Patri Friedman onto his show on the Fox Business Network.

"Let's forget about left and right...and instead, put our entrepreneur hats on. Let's think of government as an industry, where countries are firms and citizens are customers. Now this is not just any industry, this is the world's BIGGEST industry.....a start up country could be the world's first trillion-dollar business....What we need is a new frontier, an open space for political experiments, and the next frontier is the ocean."
-- Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman,  The Seasteading Institute

I think this is a splendid idea for all those libertarians who want freedom from territorial government. I hope the Cato Institute finds a nice oil rig out in the middle of the brine and settles in. Can't you just see it now?

"I pledge allegiance to the flag, and to the United Corporation of the Pacific for which it stands, one seastead under Rand, voluntarily joined, with liberty and profit for each shareholder."

Doonesbury and Jon Stewart Nail it

Today's Doonesbury  makes a perfect accompaniment to Jon Stewart's broadcast:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
World of Class Warfare - Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Visually Understanding the Debt

The New York Times has an excellent graphic to help tell the story of how we have come to find ourselves in such debt:

And here is a helpful Q&A about the Clinton years:

Q: During the Clinton administration was the federal budget balanced? Was the federal deficit erased?

A: Yes to both questions, whether you count Social Security or not.


FULL ANSWER

This chart, based on historical figures from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, shows the total deficit or surplus for each fiscal year from 1990 through 2006. Keep in mind that fiscal years begin Oct. 1, so the first year that can be counted as a Clinton year is fiscal 1994. The appropriations bills for fiscal years 1990 through 1993 were signed by Bill Clinton’s predecessor, George H.W. Bush. Fiscal 2002 is the first for which President George W. Bush signed the appropriations bills, and the first to show the effect of his tax cuts.

The Clinton years showed the effects of a large tax increase that Clinton pushed through in his first year, and that Republicans incorrectly claim is the "largest tax increase in history." It fell almost exclusively on upper-income taxpayers. Clinton’s fiscal 1994 budget also contained some spending restraints. An equally if not more powerful influence was the booming economy and huge gains in the stock markets, the so-called dot-com bubble, which brought in hundreds of millions in unanticipated tax revenue from taxes on capital gains and rising salaries.

Clinton’s large budget surpluses also owe much to the Social Security tax on payrolls. Social Security taxes now bring in more than the cost of current benefits, and the "Social Security surplus" makes the total deficit or surplus figures look better than they would if Social Security wasn’t counted. But even if we remove Social Security from the equation, there was a surplus of $1.9 billion in fiscal 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. So any way you count it, the federal budget was balanced and the deficit was erased, if only for a while.

Update, Feb. 11: Some readers wrote to us saying we should have made clear the difference between the federal deficit and the federal debt. A deficit occurs when the government takes in less money than it spends in a given year. The debt is the total amount the government owes at any given time. So the debt goes up in any given year by the amount of the deficit, or it decreases by the amount of any surplus. The debt the government owes to the public decreased for a while under Clinton, but the debt was by no means erased.

Other readers have noted a USA Today story stating that, under an alternative type of accounting, the final four years of the Clinton administration taken together would have shown a deficit. This is based on an annual document called the "Financial Report of the U.S. Government," which reports what the governments books would look like if kept on an accrual basis like those of most corporations, rather than the cash basis that the government has always used. The principal difference is that under accrual accounting the government would book immediately the costs of promises made to pay future benefits to government workers and Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. But even under accrual accounting, the annual reports showed surpluses of $69.2 billion in fiscal 1998, $76.9 billion in fiscal 1999, and $46 billion for fiscal year 2000. So even if the government had been using that form of accounting the deficit would have been erased for those three years.

- Brooks Jackson

Sources
Congressional Budget Office, "Historical Budget Data," undated, accessed 6 Sep 2010.

Austerity and the American Dream

My friend C. sent me this article, written by an Australian:

American dream comes with a heavy cost

Ros Coward

The US debt debate reveals a nation living beyond its means.

ONE word is missing in the American debate over the debt crisis: austerity. It's a revealing absence. In spite of the vast deficit, and despite the US being the home of individualism, no way is being offered for individuals to make a difference by changing their lifestyles.

People in Britain have become familiar with talk of the ''new age of austerity''. Politicians of both left and right use the expression to frame the narrative about the cuts Britain is now facing. While both sides ''warn'' about this coming era, austerity is not negative in the British psyche. Associations with wartime Britain soften it. Austerity is associated with personal changes that benefited society and made sense to people who learned to tackle wastefulness, to ''make do and mend''.

Long before the current cuts, austerity was making a comeback in Britain, associated with the environmental issues of recycling, cutting consumption and reducing our carbon footprint. Indeed, the New Economics Foundation recently launched the New Home Front, arguing that wartime lifestyles are positive models for reducing environmental impact.

 Not so in the US. In the five months I spent there earlier this year, I never heard the word austerity in political discussion. There was nothing about individuals living beyond their means. Yet the US deficit is founded on overconsumption, made possible by too much consumer credit and, less well recognised, too much environmental credit.

In the current war of words in Congress, there is no reference to the immoral lending that encouraged people who could not afford it to invest in the American dream. Yet that is what led to the property crash and the financial crisis. From individuals I heard nothing about the need for prosperous people to change their ways. There are, of course, many worthy ''green shoots'', such as the ''locavore'' movement or the ''greening the campus'' initiative at the university I was visiting, where a newly appointed sustainability officer tries to cut energy use. But people like him have their work cut out.

The whole of the east coast and the rust belt are vast, shocking landscapes to which many Americans seem oblivious. This is a society that has lived not just beyond its economic means but beyond its environmental ones, too, as the hundreds of miles of abandoned buildings, abandoned cars, and endless highways bear witness to.

Yet the American dream survives. You're either in it, or out of it. Being out means destitution. In Britain I know many people who reject consumerism, getting involved in poorly paid environmental or political work. We regard them as rather honourable. In the US, if you don't have money you don't count.

None of this is supposed to indicate Britain has got it right. Far from it. The relaxation of planning controls with the potential to trash the environment is a case in point. But at least words such as thrift and sustainability don't carry such negative connotations. They suggest a place to work from. In the US, the ideological mindset makes these negative terms, which in turn makes the future there look bleak. Their problem isn't just fixing government spending, but ultimately counting the real costs of the American way of life.

Here's my response:

Austerity is not an American virtue. Making a profit and consuming are. "The concept that making money (employment) and spending money (consumerism) is the primary goal of individuals within a market economy, and the assumption that individuals must work for an employer to "make a living" and that such activity is the most meaningful and desirable of human activities." wikipedia

So we have tended to equate consumption with success and happiness and being good Americans. We define ourselves in terms of our quarterly earnings reports and our "stuff." Buying and selling on credit just allows us to have more stuff, feel better about ourselves, and keep the economy rolling. Austerity is taken to be un-American, because it is a refusal to participate in this economic and social engine.

The housing crisis stands as a challenge to all this, because it means the conveyer belt has stopped. See this. Austerity is being imposed upon us, whether we want it or not. The question is, in the process, will we come to realize that the culture of capitalism is a false kingdom? If sin is missing the mark, then the gyrations between the extremes of consumerism and austerity are evidence that we are not where Christ intends us to be.