Category Archives: I Know You Think I Don't Know What You're Really Saying

So this kid, Jefferson Bethke, aged 22, now has his 15 minutes of fame. I think less for his video in which he raps his contempt for religion but love of Christ, and more for the negative criticism it has engendered. LCMS Pastor Jonathan Fisk rapped his own response, and the blogs have weighed in, Catholic and Protestant, with an irenic back-and-forth between Bethke and Kevin DeYoung rounding out the rodeo.

So here’s my take on this whole I hate religion/love Jesus thing: the kid’s basically right, and everyone should stop getting their Roman collars and Geneva bands in a twist about it.

It shouldn’t come as any great surprise that a young evangelical hates religion but loves Jesus. Anyone who has spent any time in the evangelical world, which I did for many years, knows the familiar trope: Religion kills. Not in the Inquisition/Crusades/Thirty Years War kinda way (although that too). It kills the spirit. It’s the stuff of rite and ritual, litany and lethargy, pious sighs and disappointment.

Evangelical churches are filled with people who got fed up with religion, especially the religion of their youth. They wanted something more. They wanted a personal relationship with God. They wanted union with God. They wanted something that meant more that going through the diocesan or synodically approved motions. They no longer wanted the church, which had become falsely equated with religion, as their mediator — they wanted Christ. And Christ is a person, not a religion. Read the rest of this entry »

So this president was shaping up to be a friend of Israel the likes of which have not been seen since Amalek. Had the Jewish state taken its grievances to Vespasian’s kid Titus it would have been better. As far as U.S.-Israeli relations were concerned, Obama should have been buried upside down in the ground like an onion, if truth be told.

But now we learn that:

While publicly pressuring Israel to make deeper concessions to the Palestinians, President Obama has secretly authorized significant new aid to the Israeli military that includes the sale of 55 deep-penetrating bombs known as bunker busters, Newsweek has learned.

In an exclusive story to be published Monday on growing military cooperation between the two allies, U.S. and Israeli officials tell Newsweek that the GBU-28 Hard Target Penetrators—potentially useful in any future military strike against Iranian nuclear sites—were delivered to Israel in 2009, just several months after Obama took office.

The military sale was arranged behind the scenes as Obama’s demands for Israel to stop building settlements in disputed territories were fraying political relations between the two countries in public.

Ah, the catch. Or is something else going on that only discerning political minds can fathom, like from 10,000 miles away?

James Cartwright, the Marine Corps general who served until August as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Newsweek the military chiefs had no objections to the sale. Rather, Cartwright said, there was a concern about “how the Iranians would perceive it,” and “how the Israelis might perceive it.” In other words, would the sale be seen as a green light for Israel to attack Iran’s secret nuclear sites one day?

Yeah. We can’t have that. Because a world without Iranian nukes is like a day without sunshine. Actually, a day with Iranian nukes is like a day without sunshine, because the mushroom clouds would most probably blot out the sun, which is what killed off the dinosaurs, no? Or is that theory going the way of nothing-can-travel-faster-than-the-speed-of-light? (I could have told you that was baloney: ever see a McDonald’s Happy Meal make its way through a hungry 10-year-old?)

But, as usual, I digress. How this bunker-busting bombapalooza plays out, especially in light of the Abbas-threatened Palestinian-statehood vote in the UN, should be interesting, and by interesting I mean ridiculous, as this has all the makings of either grand guignol or commedia dell’ arte, depending on how much air time the anti-Israel nuts are given and how utterly silly the U.S. is beginning to look as its influence in the region fades like the once-seraphic looks of Miss California 1952.