Gods And Fools

Babies and Bathwater, cont.

A couple of years ago, my buddy Patrick pondered my drift away from evangelicalism, especially in light of my decisions to A) stop affiliating with any church, even a non-evangelical one, and B) stop affiliating with religious labels and communities altogether.  He asked, "Why di you feel a need to throw the baby out with the bathwater?"

It's a good question, one which reveals many assumptions. My friend Carey, who I saw last weekend for the first time in several years since our HUP days, asked me the same question when I gave her the update.  But its answer depends on how you define baby and how you define bathwater. 

I would say I never threw out the baby. When I walked from Hollywood Pres or Anything Pres or Grace Community Church Against Grace, I didn't start shooting people and living life without regard for anyone else. I didn't exemplify my own previous propaganda about how religionless persons had no solid basis for happy or meangingful living.

Patrick probably believes that the baby is "a personal relationship with Jesus that involves a life of active service and affilation with a community of shared faith."  I believe that the baby is "responsible and healthy and joyful living that flows from a sense of the connectedness of our cosmo, a notion that is sometimes expressed well via Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Moses, new age and secular humanism, but which is often bungled by zealous practitioners of those  worldviews." 

Thus, in such an approach as the one I currently take, the particular holy person is the bathwater.  What do I have to gain by a lifelong affiliation with only one worldview and corresponding community?  I tried that, while ridiculing those who seemed  more promiscuous in their affiliations.  Now I've come to see things differently. 

Thought for the Day

"Fear has many eyes and can see things underground."
    -- Miguel de Cervantes

Most of us are wimps, and I think this recession is exposing our cowardice. I'll muse a bit more on this soon....

Deliver This

I got several things up this morning at the Daily News opinion website.  Most of it relates to the economy.

I was reading something the other day by liberal economist Paul Krugman about how William Kristol urged conservatives to kill Clinton's healthcare reform proposals in the early 1990s, because conservatives who prefer small government couldn't take the chance that the government might actually do a good job of administering healthcare.  It would be an ideological and political catastrophe, akin to, "Never mind how it works, how does it look on paper?"

It gets me thinking about the post office.  For many years, people joked about how inefficient it was -- and yet it gets your local mail delivered religiously. Have you ever had the electricity cut off because you couldn't trust the post office to deliver your bill to the power company.  Coming from Pakistan, I've been astonished at how reliable the U.S. postal service is, in every way.

And with open competition now in the overnight service, the post office still holds its own.  As a nonprofit, it raises its rates judiciously.  Its mission is to do its job well, not to maximize profits within the marketplace -- and if you still believe that the two are interchangeable, you haven't been paying attention. 

I've long believed that the free market's invisible hand will guide all pawns to their proper place.  And yet the stumbles of recent years have me thinking.  At the same time, the mail is being delivered on time, come hell or high water or rain or snow or sleet or hail.  Maybe our fear of government is a bit out of place -- especially in a democracy, where we are the government, not some despot.

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My father's charity school for his rural Pakistani village continues to function since his passing last fall. But now we kids are on the hook for a while, as my mother attempts to fix up the income property that once was supposed to pad our nest and which later was supposed to at least pay for his school.  Yeah, I have mixed feelings:  We can do something good for that country, in his memory; but I'm peeved at how he 'managed' the finances so that we've reached this point.  I'll need to post up some pictures of the kids, to remind myself what we're doing this for....

Word play

My latest piece for the CPD, here.  It deals with words, impressions & realities.

The bomb-maker's daughter

In another intersection of life & today’s news, this is the guy whose snobby daughter beat me in a class election that I thought was “rigged.” 

WASHINGTON: U.S. President Barack Obama wants assurances from Islamabad that the scientist behind Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme will not be involved in nuclear proliferation following his release from house arrest, the White House said on Friday.

Spokesman Robert Gibbs said the White House was aware of reports that a Pakistani court on Friday ordered the release of Abdul Qadeer Khan, who spent five years under house arrest after admitting selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

Khan is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country's atomic bomb.

Pondering Capitalism

On another blog, I wonder if capitalism is evolving in a new direction.  I also should have another blog post at the Center on Public Diplomacy this week.