The Orthodox Church today celebrates the Elevation of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross:
O Lord, save Thy people
and bless Thine inheritance!
Grant victories to the Orthodox Christians
over their adversaries;
and by virtue of Thy Cross,
preserve Thy habitation!As Thou wast voluntarily raised upon the Cross for our sake,
grant mercy to those who are called by Thy Name, O Christ God;
make all Orthodox Christians glad by Thy power,
granting them victories over their adversaries
by bestowing on them the invincible trophy, Thy weapon of peace!Before Thy Cross we bow down in worship, O Master,
and Thy holy Resurrection we glorify.
The goal of education is job-training, which is now the dominant pedagogical idea, is a high professional salary. Young people are being told, “you can be anything you want to be.” Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for “leadership.” All of this is a lie. Original discovery is not everything. You don’t, for instance, have to be an original discoverer in order to be a good science teacher. High professional salary is not everything. You can’t be everything you want to be; nobody can. Everybody can’t be a leader; not everybody even wants to be. And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers or housewives for mechanics or carpenters, they are no good.
(Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle)
The attacks in Egypt and Libya, incited by the release of an anti-Islamic movie‘s trailer, reminded me of this Wendell Berry quote:
Wes Jackson of the land Institute said once, thinking of the nuclear power and genetic engineering industries, “we ought to stay out of the nuclei.” I remember that because I felt that he was voicing, not scientific intelligence, but a wise instinct: an intuition, common enough among human beings, that some things are and ought to be forbidden to us, off-limits, unthinkable, foreign, properly strange. I remember it furthermore because my own instinctive wish was to “stay out of the nuclei,” and as I well knew, this wish amounted to exactly nothing. One can hardly find a better example of modern science as a public predicament. The modern scientists work with everybody’s proxy, whether or not that proxy has been given. A good many people, presumably, would have chosen to “stay out of the nuclei,” but that was a choice they did not have. When a few scientists decided to go in, they decided for everybody. This “freedom of scientific inquiry” was immediately transformed into the freedom of corporate and/or government exploitation. And so the freedom of the originators and exploiters has become, in effect, the abduction and imprisonment of all the rest of us. Adam was the first, but not the last, to choose for the whole human race.
(Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle, page 76, emphasis added)
When “Sam Bacile” (rhymes with “imbecile”) and Terry Jones choose to incite, we’re all infidels.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, by the way, seeks to hang the attacks on Obama’s supposedly feckless foreign policy. (The WSJ is in Full Fox Frenzy, blaming everything on Obama until Election Day.) But I think I’m with Rod Dreher on this: “Whatever disagreements I have with Obama on foreign policy, if I were voting on foreign policy alone, or if my vote were primarily about foreign policy, there’s no question that I would vote for Obama — or, to be precise, against Romney.”
I somehow lost a longish post I had written here. It’s too late in the evening to rewrite it.
Suffice that the risk of Sharia coming to America, if only in pieces and in drag (as “hate crimes” laws) is greater than I thought.
James Taranto quotes Muslim Brotherhood calls for what I’ll call Sharia in drag, while Eugene Volokh warns that two eminent international law scholars (here and here) think we should get with the Western European program, letting international law trump the first amendment free speech guarantees.
Me? I’ve alway’s hated the heckler’s veto, and I don’t hate it any less when the hecklers have Molotov Cocktails and car bombs.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 