Category: Faith & Ideology

A haunting history

In the Indian state of Kerala, a 25-year-old Medical student, now named Hadiya, has had her marriage to a Muslim, and her conversion to Islam the year before that, disrupted by guardianship-type judicial proceedings brought by her Hindu parents.

[One] problem is the profound Hindu paranoia about religious conversion. For many centuries before the arrival of the British, Hindus of the lower castes converted to Islam in massive numbers to escape an oppressive religious hierarchy. Under the British, and even after independence, many hundreds of thousands converted to Christianity for the same reasons. Hindu revivalists today see an opportunity for a great and glorious reversal of that demographic loss. This has made them aggressively defensive of their faith, and of “their” people. Hadiya is but a pawn in their game.

(Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal)

If Hindus were converting to Islam because it was less oppressive, then Hinduism is/was far more oppressive than I realized and/or Islam is/was, in its Indian setting, a far cry from the Islamist/Sharia advocates today in other parts of the world.

I can’t say much about the Hinduism side of that equation, but this is some circumstantial evidence, yet again, of how monolithic Islam isn’t—just as, sadly, there are multiple contending Christianities. Perhaps there is one true Islam in that mix, as I believe there’s one true Christianity, but I’m not competent to opine on which is it and I doubt that other Western non-Muslims are in any better position.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Evangelicals and Jerusalem

I had a bunch of good items stacked up 8-high in a draft blog. I’m going to break them up today.

Critics of evangelicals’ advocacy on Jerusalem say that they aren’t interested in the welfare of Jews, but rather believe that the Book of Revelations says Jewish control of Jerusalem is necessary for Jesus to return.

“The last battle is going to be over Jerusalem…that is the holy city,” Pat Robertson, the famed televangelist, said on his TV show Tuesday. “You go in favor of breaking up Jerusalem, you’re going against the direct word of Jesus, and this is a prophecy that has stood for hundreds of years.”

(Ian Lovett in a Wall Street Journal news item)

I’m sympathetic with the critics, though I don’t think it’s as simple as Evangelicals faking concern for the welfare of Jews to cover up efforts to hasten Christ’s return (at Jews’ short-term expense).

Rather, if I believed, as many or most evangelicals seem to, in the novel eschatological view of dispensational premillennialism, as popularized by prophecy porn like Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind franchise, it would be virtually impossible to keep those views from coloring my politics.

I personally abandoned those views, which I’d held half-heartedly, for saner and more historic eschatology about forty years ago. Because I was half-hearted about them, I don’t think they tainted my politics (remember: “It doesn’t matter what you ‘believe’ so long as you’re insincere”), but I can empathize with the True Believers.

However, as my footer in each blog said until recently, there is no epistemological Switzerland. Everybody has a worldview. And as a person of serious Christian faith, I would not for a moment try to exclude Evangelical voices from the Public Square. I just wish the sincere dispensationalists weren’t so loud out there.

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I would a thousand times rather have dinner with secular liberals of a certain temperament than with a group of religious conservatives who agreed with me about most things, but who have no sense of humor or irony.

(Rod Dreher)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

 

Monday, 12/4/17

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Okay, I suppose. If you insist:

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Caveat: David French is a skillful lawyer and an excellent pundit. So far as I know, his opinions on football rank right up there with some random guy sitting next to you at a bar.

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I would a thousand times rather have dinner with secular liberals of a certain temperament than with a group of religious conservatives who agreed with me about most things, but who have no sense of humor or irony.

(Rod Dreher)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Sunday, 12/3/17

 

Folks, I think we need to start coming to terms with the idea that the rapture happened and only David Bowie and Prince made the cut.

— Andrew Thaler (@DrAndrewThaler) December 2, 2017

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I am pleased to report that the new Firefox browser is terrific.

That’s all, folks.

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I would a thousand times rather have dinner with secular liberals of a certain temperament than with a group of religious conservatives who agreed with me about most things, but who have no sense of humor or irony.

(Rod Dreher)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

 

Saturday Potpourri 2

  1. The Spirit of Peace
  2. Pray without ceasing and see the doctor
  3. Almost she persuades me, a skeptic
  4. Always a corrupting enterprise
  5. I do remember — don’t you?
  6. SF passes the law of unintended consequences
  7. The ever-morphing political dinner name game
  8. PROBABLY

Continue reading “Saturday Potpourri 2” →