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By “capitalism” I mean that system of economics that uses the accumulation of wealth as its organizational principle, and contextualizes its response to human need within free market principles. Capitalism was once a mere economic system but it has become a worldview, one might even say it has become a religion. When wealth becomes our highest value, and property becomes our ultimate credential, we only work for human welfare to the extent that someone profits from it. So, if we can make providing health care profitable, a capitalist will do it. If not, the capitalist will let poor languish. If we can make saving the planet from climate change profitable, a capitalist will do it. If not the capitalist will let the species perish as a cost saving strategy.

When one tries to be a Christian within a capitalist worldview, the religion sets people up to be victimized or to victimize others. When the people hear sermons defining material wealth as “blessings” from God, they are being set up to live their lives in pursuit of an illusion. When the people hear prayers for our troops, but not our enemy’s, they are being prepared to be chess pieces in some rich person’s war game.

When Jesus told us to renounce wealth, to renounce status, and to turn the other cheek, he was calling his followers out of any culture that places a higher value on power, or wealth or glory than it does on humanity. It is not possible to follow Christ and to submit to the greed and violence of this or any culture. When the shepherd’s crook of Jesus is replaced by the invisible hand of the market the people feel called to empty their lives into the vain pursuit of profit. When Jesus’ call to nonviolence is replaced by the trumpets of holy war, the people feel called to spill their blood in the vain pursuit of national glory.

One who would follow Jesus must stand against all that is inhumane, including one’s nation and one’s church and one’s economic system. One must either renounce capitalism or Christ; for, under capitalism, the good shepherd is the butcher’s best friend.

Admittedly it is only a zebra fish, but the following video captures on film the firing of neurons in a brain. Japanese researchers showed a fish some food and then used a fluorescent probe to record for the first time the electrical matrix that we call “thought”

http://theweek.com/article/index/239603/watch-the-first-ever-footage-of-a-thought-being-formed

The US and NATO are denying a report out of Afghanistan that coalition forces are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of children, but the government of Afghanistan has confirmed that it believes the report is accurate.

The L.A. Times reported last April the claim of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that “110 children were killed and 68 were injured in 2011 in airstrikes conducted by pro-government forces, led by the United States, which furnishes air power for the Afghan government. Those figures represented a doubling of the child casualties from a year earlier.”

A more recent report by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child goes further to say it is “alarmed” by reports that hundreds of children have died in Afghanistan as a result of a “reported lack of precautionary measures and indiscriminate use of force.” The report also condemned the arrest and detention of children in that war.

The US denies the claims as unsubstantiated and claimed that most civilian deaths were a result of insurgents, but Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for the Afghan government said, “We agree with the UN report and confirm that innocent kids have been killed during coalition forces operations specifically US troops operations during the past ten years.”

It is always hard to tell who is telling the truth in situations like this, but I feel a duty as a human being to find out. The indifference of my country to issues like this is truly chilling to me. A recent poll shows that most Americans think it is okay for a President to kill those suspected of terrorism without any due process as long as they are not American.

I see the crowd in Washington and shudder at the cruelty of Democrats and Republicans alike when it comes to the lives of non-Americans. When I see the President cuddle with his two beautiful daughters, I try not to think about the fact that, if they had been born in Afghanistan, his foreign policy might have roasted them alive. I sometimes stay awake at night trying to figure out how to help Americans feel that the bombing of other people’s homes and children is as evil as if someone did it to us. So far, no luck. The violation of international law, the penetration of other nations boundaries and the death of civilians are seen as regrettable necessities of being the self appointed guardians of the world.

Long ago I promised a blog party. When someone pointed out that there is a “Rev. Jim’s Dam Pub” near Lake Buchanan Dam, we started planning a pilgrimage not realizing it was an hour’s drive and so would be hard for some people to make it on a weekday.

What if we gather at 1 pm or so on a Sunday at the church parking lot and carpool to Rev Jim’s? Making the drive would be hard on a weeknight, but might be a nice Sunday drive. Would March 10 work for people?

If so, the pilgrimage is back on. Let me know who wants to go, and I will call ahead to make sure they are prepared.

Certain religions seem to promise long life to virtuous people. This promise can be confusing when a good person is broken early in life like precious crystal, and a vicious bully causes misery well into their golden years. Some religions get around life’s unfairness by believing that, in heaven or in some future reincarnation, good actions will be rewarded and bad punished.

When spiritual teachers talk about life, they must be very careful not to invent an imaginary world that corrects the imperfections of this world. Symbols like “heaven” and “reincarnation” must lead us more deeply into the real world, not distract us by inventing some future life. Eternity has already started, so the consolation of religion is not the false promise of some other life, but a revelation of the depth and vastness of this life.

There is a word “macrobios” from the ancient world that is sometimes translated “long life,” but probably should be understood quite differently.  “Macrobios” can indeed mean “long life,” but it can also mean “great life” or “big life” as well.

When we feel at one with nature, we have a sense of a larger life of which we are a part. At birth we are born out of, and at death we return to a larger life. “Macrobios” can be understood as referring to this sense of vastness. When we live selfishly, the boundaries of our perceived world begin to shrink. We feel small, cramped and easily threatened.  When we act compassionately, the horizons of our life begin to widen and open to a larger beauty and purpose. We come to see every being as cells in one common body. When we can see ourselves this way, we live in peace.

Jesus, Buddha and the other great friends of humankind embodied what it means to live life as a part of the whole. “Macrobios” can mean “long” life, but it can also mean something much better.  “Macrobios” can mean living in the intimate vastness of our common life. And living in the whole does have it’s rewards. We may not even see the connection between our kind actions and the beauty we begin to experience all around us, but joy naturally follows a life in harmony with the whole.

It is silly to think that compassion will necessarily make our lives longer, but it is also sad not to know that love will always make our lives bigger.

Chris Kyle was a navy SEAL who served four combat tours in Iraq, winning two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars. He wrote a best-selling book, “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.” By his own count, Chris shot down over 250 people in Iraq. On Feb 2^nd he himself was shot down at a rifle range by a troubled veteran Kyle was trying to help.

Chris Kyle is being mourned as an American hero, which he certainly was, but his life and death both raise questions about just what those words really mean. Ron Paul, himself a veteran, stirred up a hornet’s nest by tweeting: “Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.’” and “Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense.” When challenged, Ron Paul explained further, “Unconstitutional and unnecessary wars have endless unintended consequences, a policy of non-violence, as Christ preached, would have prevented this and similar tragedies.”

Chris Kyle has been eulogized both as a “Christian hero,” and as an “American Badass.” But how does one build that bridge between the teachings of Jesus, who taught that we are all sisters and brothers, with the willingness of an “American Badass” to kill people he has never met on the word of people he doesn’t really know?

For Chris Kyle, that bridge was expressed by his tattoo of a crusader’s cross and by the logo of his private company with a sniper’s crosshairs extended to make a Christian cross. Over the logo read the words, “Despite what your momma told you, violence does solve problems.”

“I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian,” Kyle wrote. “I had it put in in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting. I always will. They’ve taken so much from me.”

“You just view these guys as the terrorists that they are,” Kyle said. “So you’re not really viewing them as a person. They’re out there, they’re bad people, and you just take them out and you don’t think twice about it.”

They are two separate topics, whether a soldier is brave, and whether a war is just. Brave soldiers have killed and died on both sides of every war in history. And because militant leaders can easily turn any question about war into a supposed attack on the troops, young men and women have marched eternally off to their own deaths. That death is physical if the soldier is struck down on the field, but it can be emotional if the soldier survives. I have no desire to criticize Chris Kyle, but I have great anguish to prevent other young people from being propagandized into unquestioning killers.

Chris Kyle said in an interview, “I am not a fan of politics.” This would also mean he was not a fan of trying to figure out how wars happen. The statement would imply that he would never have thought to ask what is really at stake in one nation’s violence against another. Instead, when he drew a bead on a target, he assumed the target was a “bad guy” because that was what he had been told.

Such unreflecting patriotism does not always last. Late at night propaganda weakens, and many veterans find themselves overwhelmed by the questions they did not ask before. We have reached a point in our nation’s history where more of our soldiers are committing suicide than are dying in combat. Kyle represents the heroism and the tragedy of the unquestioning soldier of every country and every age. Because his world was as simple as a video game where people born on one side of a line are good and on the other bad, Chris Kyle had little chance of realizing that he might have had more in common with the 250 Iraqi’s he shot down like dogs, than with the rich barons who send the soldiers on both sides out to kill and to die.

It is right and good to mourn the tragedy of how Chris Kyle’s died, but when we consider the fate of the eternal soldier, it is hard not to also mourn how he lived.

Religious hucksters are as old as the hills. From time to time law enforcement officials try to protect the gullible from such predators, only to hit a wall. I am not only referring to the constitutional wall that protects religious expression. They are also hitting a wall in human cognition that makes it impossible to clearly mark the distinction between one person’s religion and another’s superstition.

Sylvia Mitchell is a fortuneteller who used to be a live in advisor for Michael Jackson. The Times has an article today about her legal problems as a result of prosecutors trying to recover money on behalf of unhappy customers.

The complainant spoke by telephone from her home in Asia, on the condition that her name and country be left out of this article, as the embarrassing nature of the case could hurt her professionally. She said she first entered the Zena parlor in 2007 with personal and professional troubles.

A crystal-ball reading and Ms. Mitchell’s pledge to meditate on the matter cost $1,000, but the price tag, she said, implied quality. “A lot of these other psychics, if you walk by their shops, they look ghetto,” she said.

What followed were a series of candles and rituals and a “sculpture” that Ms. Mitchell said she created to absorb the victim’s evil spirits from a past life, the client said. The sculpture, however, needed fancy clothes and shoes, and so the client met Ms. Mitchell at a Gucci store and Bergdorf Goodman and paid for those things, she said.

The client said that once, at Ms. Mitchell’s urging, she wrote a friend’s name on a piece of paper, put it in a jar, spit on it, added water and slept with it under her bed. She then took it, covered with a cloth, to Ms. Mitchell, and when the psychic removed the cloth, the water had turned black.

The client said that the black water made her feel “a little bit troubled and a little bit skeptical,” but that she nonetheless forked over more than $120,000 to Ms. Mitchell over time, and left the country for good at the psychic’s urging. She said Ms. Mitchell promised to repay some of the money and did not. The client approached Mr. Nygaard, and he helped her take her case to detectives.

She said she was college-educated and realized that she should have known better, but she added, “When a person is going through a difficult time, you want to see answers.”

Freedom of religion has been a sacred tenet in this country that has made our nation a refuge for oppressed religious groups, but also a haven for religious predators. It is not uncommon for religious groups to insist that their right to discriminate against other groups is an article of faith.

Understandably, some  modern voices call for the end of religion altogether, but “religion” is term that can be impossible to define. When hardcore materialists accuse each other of being “metaphysical” it should be a signal that our task is not so simple as sorting religion into one pile and rational thought into another. The metaphysics of Aquinas are based on the metaphysics of Aristotle, yet we generally call Aquinas a “theologian” and Aristotle a “philosopher.” Few colleges would place Aristotle under the category of “religion,” yet, in many ways, his initial assumptions were articles of faith.

Carl Sagan was an atheist, yet his series “Cosmos” was a reverent hymn to the universe that would satisfy my definition of “religious.” Some of religion’s most strident critics (Freud, Marx, etc.) have themselves been accused of being religious by subsequent generations. It is easy to spot the limits of someone else’s worldview, but they are rare spirits who remember the limits of their own.

I once received a call in the middle of the night that a Navajo man was dying at a nearby hospital. I was asked come receive his confession. The caller said the man’s family believed he would go to hell if he did not give confession. I wiped my eyes and shook my head. We Presbyterians don’t do confessions, and I surely don’t speak Navajo. None the less, I was soon there holding the old man’s hand as he died. His family noding gravely as he spoke words I alone, the surrogate shaman, could not understand.

I just wanted to help the man die in peace, but an observer might have placed me in the huckster category, and who is to say? I have given my life to teach a form of religion that embraces reason and universality, but one thing I have learned in my lifetime of ministry: in times of crisis, some turn to reason and some to magical thinking, and it is not always easy at the time to tell the difference.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/nyregion/a-psychics-legal-problems-perhaps-predictably-grow.html?hp&_r=0

Fox ousted contributors Sarah Palin and Dick Morris, two of the most  obnoxiously partisan figures on the network’s air.

Karl Rove, himself sidelined by Fox after the election, has helped start a  new super PAC, the Conservative Victory Fund, designed to keep controversial  conservatives like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) from winning Senate primaries.

Senate GOP leaders created what amounts to a buddy system with their caucus’s most popular tea party  members, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, to get their help in  taming anti-establishment conservatives.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has been running around the country warning  anyone who will listen that Republicans must quit being the “stupid party” that  nominates nutty candidates.  -Politico