"Only" fiction. Right.

As a literary scholar I am often intrigued by the sorts of things people will say about fiction.  If someone starts talking about the “message” of a particular work of fiction, oftentimes their concerns are written off as “making a big deal about fiction, for crying out loud!”

People who say this sort of thing also invariably think rather highly of themselves.  They really think that they’re smart.  They get it; people who make a big deal about fiction don’t get it.  Of course the only problem with this is, well, reality.  Very few readers of Ayn Rand’s fiction (e.g., Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living) deny that her purpose his to expound her worldview, the worldview of Objectivism.  It is not for nothing that  Nathaniel Hawthorne (e.g., The House of Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter) is known as a transcendalist writer, specifically one who, in the words of more than one Hawthorne scholar, wrote himself into a corner in using his fiction to expose his transcendalism.  In her novel, Adam Bede, the British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) took an entire chapter (Chapter 17, to be exact) to explain a bit of  her worldview and her philosophy of art.  In his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens takes on the philosophy of utilitarianism.  In their works of fiction and drama, Jean Paul Sartre (e.g., La Nausée, No Exit) and Albert Camus (e.g., The Plague) promulgate existentialism.  )Yours truly has been working on a novel for some time (presently being revised) which is a critique of a worldview.)

Of course, there are those novelists who are up to something else, depending upon the genre.  Tom Clancy and John Grisham, for example, although Christians, do not use their fiction to evangelize.  (This is not to say that their Christian worldview does not in some way inform their work as novelists, of course.  But, even writing as Christians, Clancy and Grisham are not up to the same thing as C. S. Lewis was in The Chronicles of Narnia, or The Space Trilogy.)  My point is not that all novelists are engaged in worldview exposition, only that some are.  And simply pointing out that a work is “only fiction” does not refute a claim that a novelist is expounding a worldview.  People who do this are not demonstrating the depth of their understanding.  Quite the opposite; they demonstrate the superficiality and and shallowness of their thought.

All of that serves as a necessary background for this.  I am one of those who do not believe that Dan Brown has written something that is “only fiction” in the same way that Clancy and Grisham write fiction.  (Granted: I spend most of my time studying texts much, much older than anything Dan Brown could write, but you didn’t really think I would let The DaVinci Code pass without comment, did you?)  I felt rather vindicated in this yesterday morning while listening to Coast to Coast with George Noori.  George’s guests were three scholars, none of them a “friend” (if you will) of orthodox Christianity.  All three of them agreed that, albeit a work of fiction, Brown’s book (and especially the movie) does a wonderful job of introducing the world to the symbols and thought-forms of gnosticism.  The reason is this.  Most people probably have no idea what gnosticism is.  Most people don’t read scholarly expositions of worldviews/philosophies.  Most people read novels and short stories; they see plays, watch television, and go to the movies.  If you want to expose a mass audience to a worldview or philosophy, one of the best ways to do so is through the arts.

Now, I have not yet read the book.  (It’s on my to-do list.)  But the reports I have of it from those who have, such as my daughter, lead me to agree that at least one effect of the novel is to expose the teachings of the gnostic interpretation of Jesus Christ and of church history.  And this is precisely why, on one hand, The DaVinciCode needs a response.  It is also the reason why, on the other hand, some of that response has bordered on overkill.

Look, orthodox Christians have been confronting gnosticism since the very beginning.  Most, if not all, of the New Testament was written to defend orthodoxy against gnostic claims, among others.  In so many ways The DaVinci Code is nothing new; and in so many ways, orthodox Christians should have engaged in business as usual.  And business as usual for the Christian concerns good news about salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, who accomplished for us the work of salvation on a cross.  It is not historical details, as important as those details are, that is brought into question by The DaVinci Code; it is the orthodox doctrine of salvation by faith which is brought into question.  Orthodox Christians have always proclaimed a salvation by faith (with vehement disqgreement about the role of works, of course).  And the gnostics have always proclaimed salvation by secret knowledge.  There is a difference between the two.  (It matters, for example, whether orthodox Christians worship a dead Christ [because He died on a cross, after all], as many gnostics claim, and whether gnostics worship a living Christ, as they claim to.)

And yes a novel can do that.  To assert otherwise is to demonstrate one’s ignorance, not one’s intellectual depth.

H/T Douglas Erwin, Ph.D., of the Kuyper Institute for the Study of Christianity and Culture for the insight into the gnostic implications of the DaVinci Code.

Obscene profits?

This morning, while sipping my morning coffee, I heard that enquiry into the alleged price gouging by oil companies has revealed that what best explains the whole mess is supply and demand (see this New York Times report).  I know—I just know it—that there are those who are sceptical that supply and demand can have such a gross effect on the price we pay at the pump.

It’s easy to be sceptical; I’ll admit that.  But I learned a lesson in supply and demand—and its effect on price—just a bit over twenty years ago.  It’s a lesson that ultimately resulted in my becoming the rather die hard capitalist that I am today.

I was in Germany on a military exercise.   During the course of this exercise, my tank platoon were just outside a small German village.  As frequently happened, some of the local boys (in the 12-14 year range) came out to check out my tank.  While we were all standing on our tank talking, I pulled a soda out and started drinking.  One of the boys offered me some money for one of my sodas (actually, the crew’s sodas; this is an important fact).  Wanting to live up to the reputation of Americans as generous people, I let the kid have the soda for free.  Suddenly, the demand for soda went from one-fifth of the German population present on that tank to one hundred percent of that population.  What was I to do?  Give one away for free and then start charging money?  So I gave away five of our remaining sodas, leaving us with three.

(Bullcrap.  My tank commander made me double-time it into the village to replace—at my cost, of course—the sodas I gave away.)

Note the effect of price on both the supply of, and demand for, the sodas.  When there was actually a price for the soda the non-crew demand for soda amounted to a demand on the part of only one German child.  This changed—drastically—when there was no price for the soda.  This then led to a sharp drop in the supply of soda.  If I were to have charged that single German child more than he was willing to pay, there would have been a change in the demand for soda, but no change in the supply.  If I had simply accepted his price, the supply of soda would have gone down only be one soda; plus, we’d have a contribution to the next soda purchase.  (It staggers the imagination: that German child knew more about free enterprise than I did.)

“But look,” you’ll want to say, “you’re ignoring at least two things, the fact that you didn’t really want to sell soda, while oil companies do want to sell gas and the fact that soda isn’t a necessity, but gas is.”  (Some bleeding-heart type will no doubt want to say that my heart was in the right place, which as we all know matters more than anything.)

Okay.  You’re right.  I wasn’t interested in selling soda; I was interested in international relations.  And oil companies do want to sell gas, which is precisely my point.  As I said above: Had I wanted to maintain my supply of soda, then the strategy would be to charge more for it than the German boy was willing to pay.  There is nothing in it for an oil company to charge more than we are willing to pay.  Not only that, but the oil companies are also subject to the law of supply and demand: they must purchase crude oil at market prices, unless they are drawing their own crude from the ground.  In most cases, however, the oil companies act as middle men.  They have to purchase crude, refine it and then sell the refined product.  Refining isn’t inexpensive.  All costs involved in bringing fuel to market must—they absolutely must—be passed on to the consumer.  And in order to remain in business, and to remain competitive, they must make more in the sale than they have spent in production, marketing and transporting of  product.  This is called profit.  And they must price the product so that (a) they can actually sell the product, otherwise they have a non-moving supply, in which case they will end up losing money or going out of business,  rather than making money  (i.e., the price cannot be too high); (b) they do not run out of product, or simply do not make enough in revenue to cover cost of doing business, much less make a profit (i.e., the price cannot be too low); (c) they can pay all the costs involved in doing business; (d) they can remain competitive (if their prices cannot be lower than the competition, then they had better not be much higher; and the quality had better be high).

“Yes,” you say, “but they make in the billions of profit, and their executives draw huge salaries and bonuses, while we are scrimping and saving and hocking jewelry at pawn shops just to put enough gas in our tanks to get to work.”

It is true that oil companies make in the billions of profits.  But they also spend in the billions just to do business.  The element to look at isn’t the raw dollar figure of the profit; it is the percentage that the raw dollar figure represents that we have to look at.  The anger at ExxonMobile stems from the fact that it made $36.130 billion in profit.  Goodness, that’s obscene!  But that $36.130 billion in profit was a mere 9.7 percent of ExxonMobile’s total revenue, which was $370.680 billion.  In other words, it cost ExxonMobile $334.55 billion just to do business last year.  If a figure which represents a mere 9.7 percent is too much profit how much is acceptable?  Would we be okay if ExxonMobile’s profits were just $17.5 billion?  That would be a profit of just under 5 percent.  I don’t think I have ever worked for anyone who thought that was an acceptable profit margin.

Let me ask you something.  Would you be satisfied with an income that was, after all of your bills and taxes were paid, only 5 percent more than all your expenses?  Let’s take someone who makes just somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000 per year.  If he makes 5 percent more than he needs just to pay his bills and his taxes then he makes only $1500 per year, or $125 per month.  Maybe he can put that in the bank, or take part of it to take his family out to dinner once or twice per year.  But now let’s say that, on that same $30,000 per year you were actually making 9.7 percent more than you need to live on, in other words, $2910 per year, $242.5 per month.  I doubt that you will shriek in horror, lamenting, “Oh, my goodness!  I’m just as evil as ExxonMobile!!!”  More than likely you will complain of having only the $242.5 at the end of the month.  Neither would you reject a raise which would leave you with 9.7 percent more than you needed live on.

A 9.7 percent profit margin.  Price gouging?  As price gougers, these guys are failures if they could produce no more than a 9.7 percent profit margin.  Price gougers should be made of sterner stuff.  (Besides, making a profit is not a function only of the price one charges for product.  More about this below.)

What is obscene here is not ExxonMobile’s 9.7 percent profit.  What is obscene is the innumeracy (to wit: ignoring the relatively more important matter of the profit margin, focusing on the net income  instead) and paucity of  economics education among United Statesians (to wit: not even knowing, much less understanding, the relation  between supply and demand and price).  (I should be more charitable.  My parents are business people.  I got most of my business and economics education just by keeping my ears open at the dinner table.  Benefits of a privileged childhood, no doubt.)

“Fine,” you say, “they made only a 9.7 percent profit. But Phil, surely part of the reason for that is the grossly high prices they are charging for their product.”  Perhaps.  But ExxonMobile is only one oil company.  In general, gas prices are relatively high at just about every station at which I could possibly fuel up.  Are we to assert collusion on the part of all the oil companies.  There is nothing in it for them.  And the only thing that any one of them would have to do is break with the others and sell at a lower price that the others.  As I said above, there is nothing in it for an oil company to charge more than we are willing to pay.

“But they are charging more than we are willing to pay,” you say, “and they can get away with it because we need gas, so we have to pay what they say.”  Even if that were true, which I deny, one of the many things that companies need to have to remain in business is the good will of the consumer.  When I listen to how people ( grossly uninformed people, I might add) feel about what they are paying at the pump, it seems to me that the good will of the average consumer is lost.  That is not good for business.  One of the oil companies could suddenly became the greatest American hero just by lowering its prices.  Not one of them is doing so.  The reason for this is quite clear to me: the “crude oil price excuse” is the primary reason.

Besides, all of this assumes that price is the only thing that makes companies profitable.  It isn’t.  Profitability is also a matter of good management of resources.  I have no knowledge of how to run an oil company (though I wouldn’t mind learning).  But I do know how to run a couple of other businesses.  One way a company can maximize profit is by looking for ways to increase efficiency and cut waste.  Let’s say you are running a business and as you are conducting your walk-through you note four hourly-wage employees standing at the water cooler, talking about the previous night’s episode of Survivor.  You note that they spend 10 minutes talking.  How much time has been wasted? (Time for which you are paying, mind you.)  If you said 10 minutes, you are wrong.  The answer is 40  minutes, because you were paying four people to talk for 10 minutes; you paid for forty minutes worth of a BS session.  What if that happened every day all year long?  40 minutes per day, 5 days a week, 260 days per year (ignoring holidays).  That’s 174 hours per year that you spend paying four people to talk at the water cooler.  Let’s say that taken all together the average hourly wage paid to those four amounts to $25.00 per hour.  That’s $4350.00 per year, paying people to stand around and talk.  ExxonMobile employs thousands.  Do you suppose that from time to time some of those thousands stand aroung talking?

We have considered only the effect of labor upon profitability.  There are hundreds of other factors involved.  In the restaurant business, one of the most important is food, especially condiments.  You know those ketchup packets you take too many of at your favorite hamburger place?  That cuts into the profit of that establishment.  You may not use all that ketchup, but the restaurateur pays for it.  The same goes for all those extra napkins, too.  Then there are all those people employed by the company that have nothing to do with producing the product that the company actually sells, most of whom are employed to assure compliance with federal—and other— laws: clerks, secretaries, accountants (expecially tax accountants), lawyers (all those lawsuits).  Then there are janitors and maintenance personnel.  All of these are actually a bit of a drain on profitability.  Sometimes it’s a wonder that any business can make a profit!  (Of course, in post-New Deal America that no doubt is one of the many goals of federal legislation.)

“Well,” you say, “that has little to do with the fact that it can’t all be explained by the increase in the price per barrel set by the world oil market.  When I fueled up on Monday, the price at the pump was $1.97 per gallon.  On Tuesday, it went to $2.79!  The gas that was already in their tanks didn’t go up in price; they had already paid for it!”

Sure.  But look, the value of any commodity isn’t just a matter of how much it cost the seller.  Price has to take into consideration the future.  It’s a fair question, which I’ll have to discuss; but I cannot do so at present.

The last thing to say about all this is that there is a problem in any discussion of profit.  That problem is the definition given to the term.  Capitalists define profit as a positive return (as opposed to a negative return, or loss)  made on an investment by an individual or by a business.  Marxists define it as a mechanism of class exploitation, where surplus value is extracted by capitalists from their workers and suppliers beyond the point where costs are covered.  Given how marxists define profit (i.e., exploitation) and that most of the loudest voices (i.e., Democrats and the Alien Media Nation) are marxist, the real problem here is that any profit has been made, not that too much profit has been made.  For any profit is objectionable because it is evidence of exploitation.  But marxists know better than to go after anyone and everyone who makes a profit, so they take advantage of our functional innermeracy (an innumeracy which they have helped bring about by means of their unchecked control of the public education system) and pick on someone who has made a mere 9.7 percent in profit; and they can get away with it  because that 9.7 percent is 9.7 pecent of billions, making it seem obscene.

9.7 percent profit margin remains only 9.7 percent.  It is hardly profiteering.

My Problem with Andrew Sullivan's Problem

This is another passage by passage response to some article somewhere.  This time its  Andrew Sullivan, “My Problem with Christianism: A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda,” Time Magazine, Sunday, 7 May 2006 [cited 10 May 2006].

Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.

Well, anyone familiar with the writings of the early Church Fathers knows that the relation between Christians and “political fundamentalism” and “social conservativism” has a long tradition.  For example, after the Christians “took over” the Roman Empire, homosexuality, though still widely practiced, was illegal.  Sullivan seems to think that Christians having an interest in the laws they live under and the government that runs their lives is something new and unusual.  It isn’t.  I’m not saying it is inarguably legitimate.  The relation of Christ to culture has been a subject of discussion since the earliest days of the Church; and there are at least five views on the subject:  Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture (see, e.g., H. Richard Neibuhr, Christ and Culture).  And  Sullivan’s  is  only one view.

The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power.

So what?  There used to be many Christians who thought that sex was something little more than a necessary evil.  That doesn’t mean they were correct.  And if government power is so corrupting that Christianity should not get too close (a ridiculous way of putting it), then why should anyone get too close?  And what is “too close”?  Probably, just closer than Andrew Sullivan thinks his opponents should be.

There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is.

Well “socially  liberal” can mean many things.  I am a devout Christian; and I also consider myself socially liberal.  I don’t believe in any contraception except self-control, but I hold that as an article of faith, binding only upon those who hold to the same faith; to me that’s logic.  With respect to gay rights, I agree that gays have rights.  However, because I believe that it is a prerogative of a state to define what marriage is, to decide that homosexual  unions are not heterosexual  unions and therefore that they are not to be called the same thing, I also believe that this position can be given the force of law.  The Christian, as a citizen has input on this matter, just like the non-Christian.  I believe that what women do should be a determination of their faith system, not government; I just am not familiar with a move on the part of any Christian to legislate “a woman’s place.”  (I also do not hold that “equal” means “identical,” which is what the left seem to hold.)  I am also comfortable with a multi-faith society.  I find positively offensive Sullivan’s intimation that we wish by political means to put down all other faiths but our own.  (There are numerous indications in Scripture that when Jesus Christ returns to this good earth there will be—HORRORS!!!—unbelievers.  It stands to reason, then, that Christians will always live in the presence of people of other faiths.  And here’s a little secret, Sullivan: Most, if not all, Christians, even us “right-wingers,” know this.)  One implication of Sullivan’s assertion that, “There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is” is that everyone, not just Christians, should stay the heck out of politics, or risk being thought of as someone who does not respect the freedom and conscience of others

They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.

Sullivan cannot possibly know any “right wing” Christians personally if he thinks that they either move to different neighborhoods or run atheists and gays out of town.  Single mothers?  Is he kidding?  In my church, we baptize their children; and we all of us make the affirmation of god-parenthood.  My denomination?  The Presbyterian Church in America, one of the most conservative denominations in the country.  Sullivan’s insinuation that we “right-wingers” view atheists, gays, single mothers, or pro-choice people as some sort of threat to our faith is further evidence that he doesn’t know his opponent.  He is arguing against people who don’t even exist.

And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple?

Well, there are those of us—we must be the smart ones—who believe that, yes, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls, but only if we mean by “knowable,” “exhaustively knowable.”  Heck, no one is exhaustively knowable.  But that doesn’t mean that we do not truly know.  I truly know my wife; but I do not exhaustively know her.  I don’t know everything about her, but what I do know, I truly know.  So, no we cannot know everything about God, but what we do know we truly know.  If God is so unknowable, then was Sullivan’s Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, wrong when He said (to God, by the way), “[T]his is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17.3)?  How can Jesus be so stupid as to suggest that eternal life is knowing God, if God is as unknowable as Sullivan says that He is?  If God is as unknowable as Sullivan seems to assert, then why does He say, through the prophet Jeremiah, “[L]et him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me” (Jeremiah 9.24)?  Where Sullivan and Jeremiah are at odds, I’ll throw in with Jeremiah.

Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.

Well, it may be the case that, for Sullivan and others “faith…is interwoven with doubt.”  But since Sullivan is a Christian, it should be a bit important what faith is to Jesus. When one reads the Scriptures—even if we limit ourselves to the Gospels—it ought to be clear that, for Jesus, faith means certainty.  When Jesus chastises people for their lack of faith, the presence of doubt is what He chastises them for.  Sullivan must be unfamiliar with passages like Matthew 6.30; 8.26; 14.31; 16.8; Luke 12.28.  In Matthew 14.31 Jesus refers to doubt as the contrary of faith:  “You of little faith…why did you doubt?”  And in contrast with Sullivan’s view that certainty necessarily means pride, Scripture requires both certainty (i.e., faith) and humility.  Finally, it is interesting to see that, for Sullivan, it is apparently just fine for people who believe in gay marriage to impose their belief on others by means of the civil law, but it is not so for those who do not so believe.  I have never seen ANY reluctance on the part of the Left—religious or otherwise—to impose their beliefs on others.  Neither have they ever had any reluctance to do so by means that circumvent the democratic process; that’s right, I mean the courts.

I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one or many of those camps. Yet the term "people of faith" has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone. "Sides are being chosen," Tom DeLay recently told his supporters, "and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will." So Christ is a conservative Republican?

This is a complicated one.  It isn’t so much that Christ is a conservative Republican.  But He is the one from whom we have our worldview.  Unless Christians are to shut themselves up in monasteries, or accept as true the proposition that they are to have absolutely no voice in their government, they shall have to align with one of the two major coalitions.  If I use a Venn diagram I just find more overlap between the Christian worldview and a conservative approach to politics and economics.  For one thing, the ground motive of the Left is Marxism, which is an explicitly non-theistic (if not downright anti-theistic) worldview.  Marxism has a non-theistic metaphysics, a non-theistic epistemology, and a non-theistic ethic.  Conservatism can be corrected by input from the Christian worldview; Marxism (and by extension, liberalism) cannot be.

Rush Limbaugh recently called the Democrats the "party of death" because of many Democrats' view that some moral decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual, not the cops. Ann Coulter, with her usual subtlety, simply calls her political opponents "godless," the title of her new book. And the largely nonreligious media have taken the bait. The "Christian" vote has become shorthand in journalism for the Republican base.

I have nothing to say in defense of Rush Limbaugh, except that I did not know that he is a Christian.  I know that his brother is.  As for Coulter, well, her opponents are godless because they are, by and large, Marxists.  Marxism is a godless worldview.  And nothing, including throwing the word “god” around, can change that.  And the fact that journalists have chosen to use “Christian vote” as shorthand for the Republican base means nothing.  Saying it, doesn’t make it true.  I see it as an attempt to malign Christians, or Republicans—or both.  My using the word “jackasses” as a shorthand term for liberal journalists would mean what, exactly?  Nothing.  What Sullivan tells us here about journalists only tells us something about journalists, not Christians.  The Romans used to call Christians atheists.  But I doubt that atheists would have us.  One more thing about Coulter: Back off Sullivan.  I’ve  a bit of a crush on her.  (Don’t tell my wife.)

What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either.  In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones.

Anyone who does not recognize just how political the Gospels are is right up there with someone who doesn’t know that, on the Christian view (right out of Jesus’s own mouth, no less), having faith means being certain.  Over against Caesar Jesus says that He, and not Caesar, is Lord.

"My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?

1.  Wait!  What happened to that uncertainty that Sullivan expressed above?  You remember; it went like this:  “If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple?”  Despite the Bible’s recording God as saying, among other things, “Man shall not lie with man as with woman,” Sullivan wants to claim that we just can’t be certain of God’s position on the love of a gay couple.  But now he’s certain.  How did he go from that uncertainty about all matters faith-related to certainty about what Jesus meant when he said, "My kingdom is not of this world"?

2.  On top of all that, I would have to say that Sullivan understands not one single part of “My kingdom is not of this world,” especially the part that says “not of this world” (ek kosmou toutou).  First, it is interesting to note that Jesus uses the word kosmou, and not ges.  Had He used the word ges He would then have been referring clearly to the planet.  His use of the word kosmou indicates His intention to refer to what some scholars call the “spirit of the age,” which we may think of as the current philosophical fad (e.g., the “post-modernism” that currently reigns as the spirit of the age in which we live).  On this view, Jesus is not saying that His kingdom has no existence on earth.  He is saying that the philosophical and theological base of His political economy is not rooted in merely human thought.  Also, it sometimes happens that an important part of a sentence may be a single word.  In this case it’s a preposition, “of,” (“ek” in the Greek, meaning “origin” or “source”).  When Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world, He wasn’t saying that His kingdom had nothing to do with this world.  He was saying—if you know something about how prepositions work—that the origin, or source, of His kingdom, and His kingdom authority, was not to be looked for, or found, in this world.  For the same Jesus who said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18.36) also said (get this, Sullivan), “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (Matt. 28.18).  This world, whether Sullivan likes it or not, belongs to Jesus Christ.  As it is written in the Mishna: “All the worlds were created only for the Christ.”  And while it doesn’t mean we are authorized to institute a coup (since the only person qualified to rule absolutely is the Christ to Whom the Kingdom belongs), it also doesn’t mean we need to keep our mouths shut.  Taking part in politics isn’t the same as trying to institute the kingdom just because our ground-motive is the Christian worldview.

Let me offer at least one way in which the Christian worldview operates in motivating us politically.  Take abortion as an example.  Sullivan would have us believe that leaving it up to individual choice is appropriate and consistent with a Christian worldview.  The Christian worldview motivates us to be concerned for both individuals and the societies they comprise.  If we believe that the evidence is in and that this evidence shows that abortion, among other things, has brought about a cheapening of human life such that restricting it would be beneficial for the society (not to mention the innocent life that isn’t ripped apart and sucked away like debris up a shop-vac hose) then why should we not try to restrict it?  Why should we not try even to do away with it completely?  Not only that, but it does not seem to us incorrect to think that the creator of life, who provides only for the killing of the guilty, may have a small problem with the killing of the innocent.

Now, if Sullivan thinks that we are mistaken about the facts, or about Scripture, or certain articles of the Christian faith, then why not correct our understanding of these matters?  As Jesus once said (John 18.23) to someone who slapped him, “If I have spoken wrongly then testify of the wrong, but if rightly why do you strike me?”

Finally, don’t let it escape your notice that although Sullivan raises the matter of doubt he himself has no doubts that: (1) the Christian faith has been hijacked; and (2) that this is wrong.

Of course it's not your fault: this is America

According to a California judge, as reported by Nanette Asimov, ("Judge Says California Exit Exam is Unfair," San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, 9 May 2006 [cited 9 May 2006]), being poor, among things, is a sufficient enough excuse for failing a high school exit exam that the exam itself can be declared unconstitutional because it violates the “equal protection clause” of the Constitution by virtue of being “unfair.” Unfair. I have come to hate that word. Allow me to critique the ruling, as reported by Asimov.

A judge in Oakland struck down California's controversial high school exit exam Monday, issuing a tentative ruling suggesting the test is unfair to some students who are shortchanged by substandard schools.

If finalized, the unexpected ruling would block the state from carrying out its plan to deny diplomas for the first time to tens of thousands of seniors who have been unable to pass the exit exam.

Judge Robert Freedman of Alameda County Superior Court said he based his ruling on the concept of "equal protection" and is expected to make a final ruling at a 2 p.m. hearing today.

“Equal protection?” Is he kidding us? The phrase has been used so much that it is almost devoid of meaning. At base it means a law that applies to me also applies to you. If I have to meet certain requirements in order to vote so must you. If I have not been to law school and passed a bar exam and neither have you, then if I am not permitted to practice law you are not either. Let’s apply this equal protection garbage another way. I know a guy who would like to have gone to law school, but could not afford it. Other, and lesser minds, merely because they could afford it, have gone to law school and are for that reason alone allowed to practice law. Notice how the laws respecting the practice of law are” unfair.” I mean, come on, the only reason he failed the bar exam was that he was too poor to afford to go to law school. It’s unfair to penalize someone—to deprive him of the opportunity to engage in work that he might enjoy—just because he is poor. (The full import of this seemingly ridiculous point will be clear below, when we see how the issue of poverty is raised..)

His ruling comes just weeks before graduation ceremonies begin at 1,129 California high schools and just days after state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell announced that 46,768 seniors -- 10.7 percent of the class of 2006 -- had not yet passed the exit exam. Of those students, 61 percent are poor, and 44 percent are English learners.

Here we see the issue of poverty. The law is unfair—and thus violates “equal protection”—because poor people just don’t have the opportunity to learn what they need to learn in order to pass the test. Just like laws restricting the practice of law to law school graduates violates “equal protection” by denying an occupation to the poor? Now, note how the numbers are used here. “Of those students [i.e., the 46,768 who failed the test] 61 percent are poor….” This 46,768 is 10.7 percent of the class of 2006. If you know how to do math, which I do—despite being poor (and a native Spanish speaker) as a child—then you know that the class of 2006 is comprised of about 437,084 students. If 10.7 percent of that number of students failed the test, then (using math, again) 89.3 percent passed the test; that is 390,316. Now, I wonder what percentage of that 89.3 percent are poor. I also wonder why we are not told that in this story. Are we to believe that this 89.3 percent are all the rich kids in California? I’m not buying it. Moreover, given that 61 percent of the failing students are poor, it must be that the other 39 percent are not poor. Not poor. What’s their excuse? Just a bunch of stupid, rich white kids, I guess. Not only that, but recall that 44 percent of failures are English learners. This tells me that 56 percent of failures are not English learners (i.e., they already know English). Now, to my mind, if 61 percent was supposed to indicate that poverty had much, or something, to do with the failure, then the 56 percent figure ought to tell us that English-learning had little, or nothing, to do with it. (Question: Would Nancy Pelosi call the relation between the failure and poverty a causal relation?)

Many of them, such as Iris Padilla, a senior at Richmond High in the West Contra Costa Unified School district, have been watching their graduating classmates with envy. Earlier Monday, before the ruling, she was in tears when asked by a reporter whether she planned to attend her prom on May 19.

Now, did the reporter ask her in English? I’m just curious.

"How am I going to enjoy myself and celebrate graduation if I'm not going to get a diploma?" asked Iris, who is passing all classes with the help of Spanish-speaking teachers and classmates.

¡Ay, pobresita! Nó llore. Todo será bién. Silly little girl. It might occur to you—as it did to me once upon a time—that you could enjoy yourself and celebrate graduation by getting that diploma legitimately, of course, which you could do by learning English. I know I sound insensitive. That’s because I am. I’ll tell you something (only to demonstrate that I have some standing on this issue): one of the many reasons I joined the Army was that I did not think my prospects for college were all that great. And I’m not talking about money. I sucked as a student; I graduated in the lower 25 percent of my high school class with a whopping GPA of 2.25. (I had the same problem with attending classes that John Nash did.) While I was in the Army I decided that it would enhance my military career if I got a degree. That meant taking the SAT, which I did not do in high school: I didn’t see any point to it. Taking the SAT meant learning all the math that I did not care to learn in high school (because I just wasn’t interested in the subject). And I learned that math on my own; I got math books and sat in my barracks room for days and weeks on end reading the instructions, following along with the examples and working every problem. I now possess a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. I am insensitive. I believe I’ve earned the right to be. I learned a priceless lesson teaching myself all that math: learning is the responsibility of the learner. Iris Padilla is a girl who, when presented with a choice between learning and whining, has chosen whining. Well, there is at least one sense in which she is assimilating to American culture. She’s got the intitlement business down pat. And the “your failure is always someone else’s fault” business also. Too bad.

But everything changed a few hours later when news of the tentative ruling hit the student grapevine.

"Wow! How? This is so good!" Iris laughed and laughed and laughed some more.

Yes. It is a good and joyful thing always and everywhere for a whiner to be validated.

O'Connell, who wrote the exit exam legislation in 1999 when he was a state senator and has called it a cornerstone of his school reform efforts, wasn't laughing.

"Recognizing that today's ruling is not final, I intend to do everything in my power to ensure that at the end of the legal day we maintain the integrity of the high school exit exam," O'Connell said. He noted that independent research has shown that the exit exam has actually led more students to buckle down to try to pass the test, and that struggling students have more access to tutoring than in the past.

“[T]he exit exam has actually led more students to buckle down to try to pass the test….” No kidding. On the other hand, if you don’t think anyone should have to buckle down to do anything, who really cares?

California's high school exit exam also carries strong support among voters and the business community -- future employers of today's high school students -- who share O'Connell's view that a diploma should indicate a basic level of academic skill.

Oh. God forbid that a diploma should signify anything real. Why next we’ll be hearing that graduating law school and passing the bar should indicate some level of skill in the law, or that completing basic training should indicate at least a modicum of military preparedness. What next? Soon we’ll be expecting licensed drivers actually to know how to drive!!! (Well, maybe not in California.) Is there no decency in the world anymore?

The exit exam tests 7th- to 10th-grade English, math and algebra skills. In all, 389,600 seniors have passed the test, although it is not clear how many have completed all their other graduation requirements.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was "disappointed" at the tentative ruling and said that "delaying the exam's implementation does a disservice to our children by depriving us of the best tool we have to make sure schools are performing as they should be."

“Och! Bitte schön, Herr Schwarzenegger! What can you be thinking? The idea that schools should perform. Schools aren’t actors you know. Schools don’t perform; they teach. But then who could expect an actor to know anything about that?” he said, tongue planted very much in cheek.

But attorney Arturo Gonzalez of the San Francisco law firm Morrison & Foerster, who brought the lawsuit challenging the exam, said he was thrilled with the judge's tentative ruling.

"I felt strongly that the state should not deprive a student of a diploma unless the state can say that every student has been fairly and properly prepared for that test," Gonzalez said. "There is overwhelming evidence that students throughout the state have not been taught the material on the test. And many students have been taught by teachers not credentialed in math and English."

Think of what a diploma is supposed to signify: that the required material has been learned. A student takes a test, demonstrating that she has not learned the material required for a diploma. On Gonzalez’s view, the student should be given the diploma—which signifies that the required material has been learned—even when she fails the test. His reasoning is ridiculous. It would be one thing if he wanted to assert that a student who failed the test because the material on it wasn’t taught had standing to sue the school for, say, malpractice. But to assert that the student is still entitled to the diploma, despite clearly not having learned the test material, is a non sequitur. If you don’t have what the diploma signifies then you can’t be entitled to the diploma. And it doesn’t matter why you don’t know the material; that is a separate issue. The most you would be entitled to is remedial education at the school’s own expense (i.e., the school receives neither state nor federal funds to do what it should have done in the first place). The state doesn’t have to prove anything except that the student didn’t learn the material; it should be up to the student to prove malpractice on the part of the school. It is real simple: the student knows the material or she doesn’t; if she does, she gets the diploma. If she doesn’t that is hardly the state’s fault; if it’s the school’s fault, then let her prove it. On Gonzalez’s logic there is no point in even having the test: every student is presumed to be worthy of a diploma until and unless the state, by school, proves otherwise! I’ll bet he sure wishes law school was like that. (On the other hand, the whole law school thing is a cute little protection racket. No point in giving that up.)

Gonzalez said he filed the suit after reading news reports last fall that about 100,000 seniors were poised to be denied a diploma. (The number has since dropped by more than half because many students eventually passed the exam, while others were exempted by a separate lawsuit on behalf of students with disabilities.)

On Feb. 8, Gonzalez sued the state in an 11th-hour attempt to block the exit exam altogether.

Earlier attempts to ban the test failed because, until now, no students were on the brink of being denied a diploma.

The suit, Valenzuela vs. California, was named for its lead plaintiff, Liliana Valenzuela, who, like Iris Padilla, is a Richmond High senior. According to the suit, Liliana maintains a 3.84 grade-point average and is 12th in her senior class of 413 students. She has passed the math portion of the exam, but not the English portion. Her first language is Spanish.

Oh, that poor little Spanish speaker. My heart is just bleeding. Did any Asians also fail the test? Asimov doesn’t include this sort of information in her story. Or is it that there are no Asian immigrants in California? (If you ask me,those Asians were busy actually studying and learning English while their Spanish-speaking peers were busy whining, in Spanish.)

The suit said that students who have repeatedly failed the test -- especially English learners -- have not had a fair opportunity to learn the material because they are more likely to attend overcrowded schools and have teachers without proper credentials.

When you think about it, the language here isn’t very helpful. “More likely to attend overcrowded schools”? Notice we are not given a percentage here. In this story we are told that 46,768 (10.7 percent of the total that took the test) failed the test and that, of these, 61 percent are poor and 44 percent are English learners. We are not told, among other things, what percentage of failures attend overcrowded schools and have uncredentialed teachers. We are also not told how many test-passers went to these overcrowded schools. And again we are not told anything about Asians, or anyone other than Spanish-speakers.

In his tentative ruling, Freedman said he was inclined to agree with that argument but will give the state's lawyers a chance to persuade him to change his opinion. However, Freedman may have signaled a reluctance to reverse himself when he asked lawyers on both sides to come prepared to talk about how conditions in the schools can be equalized.

He also asked the students' lawyers to explain what it will take to make the exit exam fair for future classes.

As for Iris Padilla of Richmond High, asked again whether she'll go to the prom, she smiled and said, "Si."

Now, isn’t that response just telling? She could not be prevailed upon to give up a “Yes.” It had to be “Sí.” I think this girl’s problem is that she just doesn’t want to learn English. Will Gonzalez also represent any students who, down the road, may be “deprived” of jobs because they don’t know speak English? After all, it’s surely not their fault.

It’s pretty disappointing how times have changed. I tell you the truth: when I was a kid and didn’t make the grade I didn’t crawl up into my mother’s lap to have her run her fingers through my hair while I complained of the unfairness of it all, saying “No te preocupes mijito. I wasn’t that good in school either.” (Bullcrap. She was a physics major in college.) My study time after school got longer, my free time shorter and in some cases I got my butt whipped. It was very motivating. If I wasn’t going to work hard for a good future, then I was going to work hard to keep from having my butt whipped. (Butt whippings, properly administered, have an almost magical quality!) And it was like that in every other hispanic home with which I was familiar.



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