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A science website has a great little piece on 10 new species that were discovered last year. It even has pictures of them. Click below to see pictures of a snub nose monkey, a blue tarantula and a Spongebob Squarepants look alike.
http://scienceblogs.com/lifelines/2013/01/20/top-10-new-species-of-2012/
Brandon Bryant, a former drone operator, says he’s haunted by his role in killing more than 1,600 people. He says he is no longer clear that all of them were enemy combatants. In the article linked below Bryant discusses watching one of his first victims bleed to death.
Brandon Bryant says he was sitting in a chair at a Nevada Air Force base operating the camera when his team fired two missiles from their drone at three men walking down a road halfway around the world in Afghanistan. The missiles hit all three targets, and Bryant says he could see the aftermath on his computer screen – including thermal images of a growing puddle of hot blood.
“The guy that was running forward, he’s missing his right leg,” he recalled. “And I watch this guy bleed out and, I mean, the blood is hot.” As the man died his body grew cold, said Bryant, and his thermal image changed until he became the same color as the ground.
“I can see every little pixel,” said Bryant, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, “if I just close my eyes.”
Bryant speaks articulately of the dissociation his job triggered:
He says that as an operator he was troubled by the physical disconnect between his daily routine and the violence and power of the faraway drones. “You don’t feel the aircraft turn,” he said. “You don’t feel the hum of the engine. You hear the hum of the computers, but that’s definitely not the same thing.”
At the same time, the images coming back from the drones were very real and very graphic.
“People say that drone strikes are like mortar attacks,” Bryant said. “Well, artillery doesn’t see this. Artillery doesn’t see the results of their actions. It’s really more intimate for us, because we see everything.”
As our nation moves from one dirty war to the next, one wonders why there are no tears, no real remorse for our actions. Perhaps we have more in common with our emotionally wounded veterans than we realize. Long before Vietnam or Iraq, this nation committed a holocaust it has never really faced. Our genocide against the native people of the Americas has never been properly grieved. When we walk upon this land we feel the presence of our victims, but numb ourselves to their spectres, and so numb ourselves to everything else as well. Perhaps our cruelty to the remnant of that population, those native people we call “immigrants” is due less to economics, and more to a kind of psychotic denial.
Centuries of slavery have yet to be properly grieved, and so that shame lies beneath our cultural institutions further numbing us. Young black males in the U.S. are more likely to end up in prison than with a college diploma. Respected Banks have been caught in scandalous racist loan practices, yet our nation continues to shrug at economic injustice against people of color. Could this indifference to injustice result in part from the trauma of unprocessed guilt?
Millions have died to extend an American Empire we do not even admit exists. Why should Brandon Bryant be haunted by images of children wandering onto his screen after he ordered a drone strike, but not we the people who sent him to commit such crimes? Is it possible that, by really listening to our veterans when they confess to war crimes, we might come to admit that we are every bit as guilty as our soldiers and, perhaps, even more so? Surely soldiers are no more guilty than the nation that misleads them, sends them to kill for questionable causes and then renders them invisible when they come back home. Surely, any hope of healing our troubled nation must begin with what the ancient prophets called “repentance” -which means renouncing our numb arrogance and making a painful but necessary return to human decency.
(Thanks to Tamra Dixon for the link)
Lying in the backyard looking at the stars, Rev. Clovis Jones suddenly laughed out loud and turned to Texas Buddha. “Remember when we were in seminary and you got kicked out of class for getting all of us into an argument?”
Amy suddenly sat up, “What did he say?”
“I don’t remember which book of the Bible we were reading but, of course, we were all taking the Bible literally. So TB here starts asking questions and pointing out that we thought we were all taking the text literally, but we were each hearing it in our own way. So there we were, a room full of literalists at each other’s throat. Then he said, “You are fighting because none of you know your own hermeneutic.” That’s when the teacher asked him to leave.”
Amy propped herself on what arm, “What does that word mean?”
“Hermeneutics? It means how you interpret something, right TB?”
“Yes, the word comes from “Hermes” who was the messenger of the gods. Hermeneutics is an unfortunately scary word for a very important topic- how we make sense of things, particularly texts.
“ When we take up a book like the Bible, we think we are just looking at what the author meant, but we are sifting the words through the filter of our experience and whatever formulas we’ve been taught for simplifying what it all means.
“So we are hearing the same words very differently. A hermeneutic like a decoder ring. When we don’t realize that we are all interpreting by a different formula we can feel like everyone else is twisting what the text really says.”
“So why don’t we just throw out the whole idea of sacred books and just talk to one another?”
“Because the problem isn’t really in the books. We can have the same problem in everyday conversations. It just isn’t as pronounced.
“When a couple fights over who is going to do the dishes, that task may mean something different to each of them. To one partner, doing the dishes may just be a chore, to the other it may symbolize whether they are being respected in the relationship. If neither person realizes they aren’t really talking about the dishes, the situation can damage their whole relationship.
Reverend Jones went inside the house and was listening from the window as TB concluded his thought, “I once read an article that said the dirtiest, most germ infested object in most houses is the rag people are using to wash the dishes. A bad “decoder ring” can undermine the best attempts to understand and communicate. That is why Heraclitus said, “Even the eyes are poor witnesses to the barbarian soul.”
Rev. Jones did not entirely agree about the Bible not being literal, but he loved his friend and recognized that there was wisdom in what he was saying. So, to make sure TB would know he had been heard, Rev. Clovis Jones put on an Aerosmith CD, and came back out to listen to the words: “Something’s wrong with the world today, don’t know what it is. Something in our eyes.”
We here at jimrigby.org appreciate irony. To that end, we are establishing the prestigious “Christian Catfish Award.” The fish is a time honored symbol of our faith and the catfish is a bottom feeding scavenger. So this award, will celebrate particularly egregious expressions of pettiness or cruelty made in the name of Christ.
It takes one to know one, and we here at this blog recognize a good bottom feeder when we see one. Our first award will go to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Rev. Falwell spent a career scapegoating various minorities in the name of Christ. His Liberty University has long combined nationalism and evangelism. Jerry Falwell was talking about making America a theocracy before those Taliban punks had blown up their first sandbox.
And now, as July’s version of Sojourner Magazine will report, Liberty University has added a concentration in “Unmanned Aerial Systems.” That’s right, now godly students can learn to work on drones! Where else can a young man or woman of God can get an education based on the teachings of the Prince of Peace, and also learn to program killer robots that will unleash fire from heaven upon the heathen of the earth and then get to watch the pagans writhe like worms in the pit of hell? Turn the other cheek? I think not!
Thanks to reporter Lainey Rathgeber for finding a worthy recipient for our first Christian Catfish Award. We have also given ourselves an honorable mention in bottom feeding for thinking of this concept in the first place.
“Do you believe violence is always wrong?” Amy Jones asked Texas Buddha in the presence of her father as he packed for a hunting trip.
TB smiled at both Amy and her father, “I believe we should avoid harming other beings wherever possible. So I do not hunt, But I also recognize that life struggles against life. The cunning of the lion is born of the speed of the gazelle, and the grace of the gazelle is born of the mouth of the lion. Sometimes to feign innocence about this creates ever greater violence.”
Rev. Clovis Jones looked up from packing. “I remember when we were back at the University of Texas, you believed all violence is wrong.”
“Yes, I used to try to be completely nonviolent.” said TB. “I still try not to step on bugs and such, but when I lived in India, I saw villages harmed because they believed certain animals to be sacred and allowed those animals to carry disease into the community. I really wrestled with the issue of violence. Then one night I had a dream where I was working in a circus…”
Seeing Amy smile, TB said, “I know it’s crazy, but one day I was holding the rope for the tightrope walker. As the acrobat got midway across the rope, he suddenly he pulled out a gun and began to fire into the crowd. Like I say, it was a crazy dream, but there I was sitting there holding his rope in my dream and I realize if I let go I kill the tightrope walker; but, if I hold onto it, I am his accomplice in killing all those innocent people.”
“What did you do?” Amy asked curiously.
“Well, I woke up sweating, and I realized that sometimes there is no innocent place in the universe. At times if we do not stand with the oppressed, we have sided with the oppressor. I still try to minimize harm wherever I can, but I have also realized that violence can hide in any discrepancy of power. We are not innocent when we work within a system of oppression. If we are in an unfair hierarchy and think we are standing on the fence, we are usually standing on someone’s throat.”
I often get email from people who are trying to have a conversation with a religious person who is twisting their words. It can be very hard to have such conversations. We can question our own sanity when every sentence we utter comes back as a twisted pretzel. It is particularly painful to try to show a friend how their religious prejudice is harming someone else. Invariably the person with a prejudice concludes that they are the real victim. I am hoping this article will help a bit in those situations.
I decided to write the piece after I had a dream last night where I was officiating a funeral. Suddenly the funeral was crashed by a minister and his wife who wanted to use the opportunity to save the people from what I was saying. The preacher huddled down near a grieving family member oblivious to the angry look on that family member’s face, and then proceeded to bombard the poor family with the rehearsed words and studied gestures we’ve come to expect at a traditional funeral.
I woke up from the dream and wondered what might have triggered an anxiety dream like that. Then I remembered a rebuttal I read just that day to something I had written earlier. A few weeks ago I wrote an article for the Austin Statesman that was a call to the kind of religion the world needs, which I said would require changes from all of us. (link below). I try not to let those things get under my skin, but I hate when people cannot even understand what is being said.
One reader wrote a sarcastic response to the article that I think is illuminating on its own merits. We can learn a lot by how someone unconsciously changes our argument in a rebuttal. When human beings hear a truth that does not fit into what we already believe, we can respond very predictably by distorting what we heard. This rebuttal to my article was a case study in not wanting to hear. He sarcastically says:
We want to learn from “all religions of love” accept (sic) those in Western culture. We must exclude religions of the west with their limited understandings and misguided beliefs, rules and repetitive rituals. It seems one of those “magical changes” must be that 14311 Wells Port Drive Austin, Texas 78728 is not part of Western Culture. It’s so nice not to have an allegiance to the Presbyterian denomination as they were founded in Western culture.
In the article, I stated that western culture has a limited definition of religion. By that I meant we in the west tend to associate religion with supernatural beliefs, obedience to the rules of our cult and to repetition of rituals intended to magically change ourselves or our world. I said that there are many religions of the world that transcend those limits.
When I said “western culture” I did not mean everyone within the culture, but a critic would have a legitimate beef in pointing out my over-generalization, but his anger seemed to be directed at the fact that I was questioning those very traits. The rebuttal switched my point about narrow definitions to an attack upon the west itself which would obviously make me a fool since I come from the west.
When we don’t want to hear a new truth we often forget any contextualizing done by the speaker. After that distortion, it is easy to attack their argument as hypocritical because they too come from that group. Again, the rebuttal would be legitimate in questioning whether I was over generalizing (I was), but the brunt of the argument seemed to fall instead on defending that narrowness.
The rebuttal then takes on the three points of my article. The refutation is based on changing my statement “healthy religion leads us into reality, not out of it,” to an attack on all religion. The rebuttalist says sarcastically:
1. Religion truly is leading us out of reality. Especially, faith and superstition that lead into untestable truth claims. All those silly afterlife and untestable truth claims such as there is a hell to shun and a heaven to gain or the wages of sin is death. Yes, we absolutely need to be honest with each other, especially about Niebuhr and not about Jesus Christ.
In the second sentence my critic actually makes another valid point. If I say religion must not be based on untestable claims, then it cannot be based on belief in miracles, in threats of hell or in promises of heaven. If I had a way of conversing with the man, this might be a place we could have a meaningful disagreement, but it is also important to remember that I didn’t say religion shouldn’t make untestable claims. I said that untestable claims should not replace our common duty to be honest about the world we share with others. In other words, we can believe untestable things, but we cannot impose those beliefs onto others. It seems to me the author did not want to hear that point and so changed it into something else.
Again, the rebuttal says sarcastically:
2. I couldn’t agree with you more that we need to be less afraid of heretics and more afraid of Christian truths. No longer should our faith rest on the power of God, but rather on the holy torch of reasoning, human wisdom, and persuasive words.
It is interesting that, whereas I said the church should be more weary of its own prejudices, the writer changed what I said about prejudice to an attack on “Christian truths.” It would have been proper for him to try to argue that my statement amounted to an attack on Christian truths, but instead he misquoted me so he wouldn’t have to even make the case.
3. Yes, the world needs to call us to be good citizens. Christians need to be of the world and not just in it. We should not be a holy people, sanctified in Christ and called according to his name.
Here the writer interjects the word “world” into my call to be a good citizen so he can then use Jesus’ quote about being in the world but not of it. He then does another standard trick, he quotes scriptures that beg the question:
2 Timothy 3:1-5 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
Is this scripture really a rebuttal of anything I said? Could it not be used in any theological discussion by any two believers who don’t respect each other?
Matthew 24:4-14
4 Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. 5 For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many. 6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of birth pains. 9 “Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. 10 At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, 11 and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. 12 Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, 13 but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. 14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.
I may be getting forgetful, but when did I say I was the messiah? What is happening here is that, because my critic does not respect me, he sees a string of negative phrases in scripture as clearly referring to me, although each indictment would be his own interpretation of what the words meant.
Communication can be hard. We have a duty to try to communicate with those who believe differently. But I also believe it is disingenuous to pretend to have a conversation with someone who is using these techniques of distortion. One of the most helpful tools for conversation is to request that both side repeat accurately what has been said. After each speaker can say he or she has been heard the conversation can proceed. Sometimes our only gift is to point out that conversation is not possible unless both parties are willing to at least hear what is being said.
http://www.mystatesman.com/news/lifestyles/religion/what-kind-of-religion-does-the-world-need/nXyHK/
Gov. Perry,
I’m sure you don’t remember me, but we met some years back. I helped work on the campaign against hate crimes in Texas. When the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Bill was finally passed, I pushed his mother’s wheelchair into your office just before the bill was signed into law. I approached you privately to thank you for risking political damage by signing a bill I knew had been unpopular with your party. You teared up and whispered, “It’s the right thing to do.” So I know you have a heart.
I understand we come from very different political positions, but I know you cannot possibly be against food, shelter and basic health care for every Texan. I understand you hope to accomplish that through small government and not through large programs like the Affordable Care Act. But what do we do about the lives in the balance as liberals and conservatives struggle to define what our state and nation will look like. Must the weak suffer because the strong disagree?
By now you know the Rand Corporation’s analysis of 14 states saying that governors who oppose Medicaid expansion will cost their states $8.4 billion in federal funding and another billion in incentives for doctors to treat the poor. More importantly it is estimated that the actions of Governors like you will deprive millions of poor people of health care.
I understand that we have very different ideas of government, but neither of us wants people to suffer. However our differing sides struggle to forge the government of the future we have a current obligation toward those who have no vioce and who suffer in the meantime. I know you believe in a right to life, but what would that mean if the necessities of life were not also considered to be a right?
Please Governor, I know you have a heart. I have seen it. But, in our state, 12% of unemployed parents in a family of three cannot receive Medicaid coverage if they make over $2,290. Think of the misery you are unleashing on innocent people. The costs for health care coverage is estimated to be less than the cost our state will pay for uncompensated care. Please reconsider your refusal to receive federal dollars. We can disagree about how the state should be governed, but first let’s ensure that our fellow Texans have the necessities of a decent life. It may be hard for you politically, but as you said once before, “it’s the right thing to do.”
Jim Rigby,
Pastor, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church
Texas Buddha and Amy Jones were driving through the night to have her beloved Cocker Spaniel, Jerry, put to sleep. TB was driving while Amy sat in the back seat comforting her whimpering dog.
After a long silence, Amy, out of nowhere, said, “This is why I don’t believe in God.”
TB looked up in the rear view mirror, “That’s fine, Amy.”
Amy continued, “There’s too much pain in the world. I don’t believe in some invisible person who watches over us to keep anything bad from happening.”
After a pause, TB said, “I don’t either.”
Amy suddenly leaned forward and erupted in anger, “Then why do you use the word ‘God’ at all. Why can’t you just accept things the way they are? We’re born by accident, we grope through our lives by accident, and then we die by accident. Nobody up there cares.”
Several miles passed before TB responded, “Amy, have you ever seen a red tide?
Amy wasn’t sure she wanted to hear one of TB’s lessons right then, but she had asked him, so she finally muttered under her breath, “No, what is a red tide?”
“Sometimes algae can build up in the ocean and turn the water red or brown. Some of the algae have phosphorus in them, or something, and so the waves can glow at night.
“I remember a red tide I saw on a starless, moonless night. Everything was pitch black, I could not see the ocean or the sky, but when the waves broke, it looked like glowing beings were coming into existence and then disappearing again. I realized that this is the human condition. We cannot see the laws of nature written invisibly upon everything tying it all together. To us, every being seems to come out of nowhere and to disappear into nowhere. So, we celebrate when a being is born, and we grieve when a being passes away. All the while we are oblivious to the dark bottomless ocean of being undergirding it all.
“I use the word ‘God’ not because I believe there is such a being, but because I want to remember being itself. I want to remember that underneath the myriad shifting forms there is a seamless web of which we are all an expression. We cannot know what it is, but we must never forget that it is.
“And the universe is not indifferent to us, Amy. Everything interacts with everything else because we are not really separate beings. We are all tiny ephemeral expressions of being itself. When we love one other and care for one other we express that invisible ground of our being. So Amy, so on behalf of the rest of the universe, I’m sorry you are losing your friend. I truly am.”
The next ten miles, TB felt Amy’s hand on his shoulder.
Today begins the trial of Bradley Manning. It is illuminating that our nation has developed a habit of silencing whistle blowers, yet ignoring the alleged crime they report. The information Bradley Manning released may not have caused the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street movements, but it certainly informed them. In some quarters the leaks confirmed what people already knew, if we do not rise in solidarity we will all become victims of a system run amok.
I know it isn’t a popular position, but I myself would be in favor of releasing Bradley Manning. I think what he did was in the spirit of Daniel Ellsberg, who is now remember as a hero for revealing the lies behind the Vietnam War. Ellsberg said, “If Bradley Manning did what he’s accused of, then he’s a hero of mine and I think he did a great service to this country.”
Justice Hugo Black wrote of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.” I would go a step further. We have every reason to suspect that our nation has committed crimes against humanity on a routine basis since WW2. Whatever one thinks of Bradley Manning or what his punishment should be, we have a duty as citizens of this nation to find out if crimes have been committed in our name.
Gary Younge of the UK Guardian wrote of the Manning case, “In this world, murder is not the crime; unmasking and distributing evidence of it is. To insist that Manning’s disclosure put his military colleagues in harm’s way is a bit like a cheating husband claiming that his partner reading his diary, not the infidelity, is what is truly imperilling their marriage. Avoiding responsibility for action, one instead blames the information and informant who makes that action known.” John Pilger further contends: “Private Manning is the world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to ‘a moral choice.’ His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.”
According to a friend from school, Bradley Manning was always a person who lived by principle and confronted wrong when he saw it. Now he faces life in prison. It has been reported that he has been subject to cruel and degrading treatment bordering on torture. He almost certainly faces a dismal future. The information he thought would call America to conscience has driven us further into denial. Alan Moore does not accept willed ignorance as an excuse: “When the persecution of an individual who has exposed an evil is pursued so ruthlessly and yet the evil itself is studiedly ignored, all of us know that there is something very wrong with the way that our society is conducting itself. And if we do not protest in the strongest terms about what is being done in our name, then we become complicit.”
Some are calling Manning a hero, others a traitor. Neither label gets to the issue that he held a mirror up to our nation to reveal what looks like a monstrous image. We would rather destroy the one holding the mirror than confront what we have become. Perhaps we now understand why, in legend, vampires always hate mirrors.
“It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.” -Gandhi
I found this a moving story. Muslim leaders from around the world made a pilgrimage to Dachau, Auschwitz and other sites of the Jewish Holocaust. They recited prayers for the dead and, according to witnesses, were quite emotional as they relived a small part of the nightmare.
“What can you say? You’re speechless. What you have seen is beyond human imagination…Whether in Europe today or in the Muslim world, my call to humanity: End racism, for G-d’s sake, end anti-Semitism, for G-d’s sake, end Islamophobia for G-d’s sake, end sexism for G-d’s sake… Enough is enough.” – Imam Mohamed Magid, President of the Islamic Society of North America.
What a wonderful example for us all. If every Muslim person would prayerfully consider the Jewish experience that preceded Zionism, and every Jewish person would make a spiritual if not physical pilgrimage to a Palestinian ghetto to understand the slow genocide that is happening there, if every one of us would look at the world even once through the eyes of our “enemy” we might remember what should be the central insight of every religion. We share one human heart.
http://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/05/30-1?nocache=1