Tasty Tidbits 7/18/11

Here’s some Tidbits to start your week:

1. Scandals and yawners.
2. “Bath salts.”
3. The cleanup crew versus the partygoers.
4. Strike Two!
5. Will hell be empty?

1

I read that Michelle Bachmann has left her Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod congregation, and the reasonable speculation is that she left because WELS’s stated positions on Catholicism and the Pope are a political embarrassment. (They think the Pope puts himself in the place of Christ. Yawn! The theological term for that is “antichrist.” Zounds! Bring the smelling salts!)

I don’t know where she’ll land, but it’s hard to find a corner of the Protestant world that has had nothing adverse to say about Roman Catholicism and where the Papacy is thought a fine institution (although admiration for John Paul II and Benedict XVI run high).

Think she’ll free-float until after the 2012 election? That — a churchless “Christian” candidate — should be a scandal, but with much of the GOP base, crummy or non-existent ecclesiology is pandemic.

2

New York Times has a prominent story on the new, apparently-dangerous “bath salts” stimulant.

These “bath salts” are legal because our legal system allows us to do whatever isn’t prohibited. As someone provocatively said out on the internet (where sometimes people actually are right), the Founders would be appalled that the government tries to tell us what we can eat, drink or otherwise introduce into our bodies.

I suppose I could imagine a system where one could only do what’s affirmatively allowed, but I wouldn’t want to live there, especially if they enforced the law. But there’s no way I’m going to play around with stimulants that some jackass cooked up in his basement.

I suppose the take-home, which nobody who really needs to hear it is likely to hear, is that if the maker labels it “not for human consumption” to skirt the FDA, one should take that label very seriously.

3

The party started when the Pill made sex safe the first time, before it became dangerous again (STDs, HIV), and then safe (Magic Johnson lives!), and then dangerous (false rape charges). It helped that there was bounty of goods as well as bodies.

And what a party it was! 40 years of boogying! Any wonder those cleaning up now have a tough task, and they resent the partygoers?

There’s chapters yet to be written. I think euthanasia will appear in one or more of them. It may have a different name, though. I’m even more sure that some version of “death panels” will appear brandishing formulae along the lines of QALY. That’s not exactly the same as euthanasia, but when we fund healthcare by government, we have to figure out how to allocate it in any world of scarcity (the only kind of world we know), and especially the kind of scarcity that’s felt after the party’s over. (We allocate now, to an extent, by ability to pay.)

4

Herman Cain shot off his mouth again against Islam. I agree that the good folk of Murfreesboro (home of the Sword of the Lord newspaper in my youth) have the right to protest erection of a mosque, but, heck, I also support the right of Neo-Nazis to march in Skokie. After the folk have protested and the Nazis have marched, I also have the right to say “now go away, you creeps.”

Cain’s effort to distinguish this crap from an attack on a religion is so lame it calls his intellect into question.

“That’s not discriminating based upon their particular religion,” he said. “There is an aspect of them building that mosque that doesn’t get talked about. And the people in the community know what it is and they’re talking about it.”
“Our Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state,” Cain said. “Islam combines church and state. They’re using the church part of our First Amendment to infuse their morals in that community, and the people in the community do not like it.”

(Block quote from NRO) This is “strike 2” on Cain as far as I’m concerned. One more ignorant remark like that and I’ll abstain from voting entirely if necessary to keep from voting for him.

Sorry if this sounds shrill, but religious freedom is under tacit attack from the left, and we don’t need people from the Right who think that the acceptability of a religion is susceptible of any kind of plebiscite.

5

Long before Rob Bell wrote “Love Wins” (of even it’s predesssor, “Sex God” — he’s got a real knack for self-promotion), thoughtful people were trying to reconcile (1) a loving God and (2) hell.

Kallistos Ware, a young English convert to Orthodoxy decades ago, was persuaded despite his status as a novice to write a book on The Orthodox Church. Decades later, the book — presumably revised as Ware became a monatic, a priest, a bishop and a Metropolitan and ceased being a wide-eyed novice — includes some thoughts about the reality of hell, here and here, among others.

He also notes that we may hope for, and pray for, the salvation of all, without exception, including even Satan himself.

But in the end, self-chosen alienation from God wins. God does not force love on anyone; we must add our fiat mihi secundum Verbum tuum for love to be born in our hearts.

Sorry, Rob.

Bon appetit!