Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Yesterday I talked to an old friend back east who was about to lose a home through foreclosure. Today the foreclosure has been forestalled, and my friend is relieved.

Today my neighbor was talking about the number of SNL’s (?) (small mortgage companies) that have gone bankrupt. The neighbor’s usual topic of conversation is boobs.

Sometime during the afternoon a big “for sale” sign appeared nailed to the tree in my front yard.

I give up. What’s going on with the real estate market?

A year ago I got hooked on soymilk. I loathe milk, so when my aunt and uncle came to town and took me to a trendy coffeeshop, soymilk was one of the options for the coffee (although fair trade coffee was not), so I asked for it. Soymilk actually tastes pretty good and doesn’t make me nauseous or groggy like milk with its notorious tryptophan. Over time have become dependent on Silk Soymilk Plus with omega-3 and various antioxidants and vitamins for my morning coffee or tea, my breakfast cereal or granola, and my bedtime Swiss Miss chocolate herbal tea.

Today I didn’t feel like going all the way to the supermarket that carries the Soymilk Plus, so I got a carton of Silk Soymilk Fortified for Kids. I was comparing labels to see if this type of soymilk has a similar vitamin content (it does) when I noticed an unusual promotion on the carton. The product has a green cap to represent wind energy and pictures of windmills. According to the carton, they use 100% wind energy to make their products. They do seem to be purists. No animal products are used in any of their products and the soymilk is certified organic plus made from soybeans that were not genetically engineered. Their website, SilkSoymilk.com has an educational section about environment and how to support wind energy at home.

BTW, I’m waiting to see if the price of soymilk goes up as more acres are planted for ethanol.

From the discussion of Ted Haggard and wedge issues, here’s a more or less complete transcript of the video Scott gave a link to. There’s a lot of non-verbal content in the film–the images of the church, the multiple screens, the worshipers, the musical performers, as well as the pissing contest between the two indivuduals–So here are just the words without all the other messages attached. The film goes back and forth between Haggard’s statements about what he does and visual evidence of what he really does from his sermon.

Richard Dawkins (narrating): This is the New Life Church in Colorado Springs where conservative Christians have built a $18 million worship center as their new Jerusalem in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Evangelical churches like this have become a powerful lobby, exerting enormous influence on everything in America from the teaching of science in schools to foreign policy. this place strains belief. It isn’t just a church but a ready made social network. the 12,000 strong congregation can also attend 1300 organized programs whee they can meet to exchange Christian tips on everything form marriage to dog walking. it’s all terribly exuberant and intense, much less tradtion here than (unintelligible), but planty fo swaggering authority. (Pan to image of woman in pink standing in the aisle raising arm in straight up salute as Haggard enters arena, others in aisle raise two arms straight above head.)The pastor is Ted Haggard, a powerful man and chairman of the national association of evangelicals and the New Life is Ted’s evangelical vetting.

Haggard (sermon flashback): Welcome to all of our friends. Take a moment to say hello to the people in front of you, the people behind you, to your right and to your left. If you’re here for the very first time we have a packet of information we want to give to you so all of you visitors if you would please…

RD:Sadly the welcome would prove to be short lived. when I started talking to pastor Haggard about the Bible and scientific fact…

Haggard: You’ll find yourself wrong on some things, right on some other things but please in the process of it don’t be arrogant.

Haggard (sermon flashback): All right let’s all pray together the father we love you and we praise you we exalt you god. Everything that’s within us wants to give you praise and glory and honor becasue we are so grateful.

RD (narrates):The New Life church in Colorado Springs is a bastion of religious conservatism.

Haggard (sermon flashback): …for transforming our lives, thank you lord God…

RD narrates: I’ve come to try to understand what I see as irrational faith is thriving and why it’s attacking science.

Haggard (sermon flashback): ..and everybody say ‘amen’.

Everybody: AMEN.

RD narrates: Pastor Ted has a hotline to God to George Bush a staunch Republican he claims he has a weekly conference call with the president. has also rubbed shoulders with Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon.

RD: That was quite a show you gave to us today quite a bit of money seems to be spent here today

Haggard: Yes, I want people to worship and enjoy and be in a setting where the speaker is close to them–that’s why it’s in the round so they can be up close to me and so that I can look at them.

RD: Well, you’ve certainly very effective at what you do I mean you seem to have all the airs of, well, it almost reminded me, you must forgive me, of Nuremburg Rally.

Haggard: Ha Ha

RD: Dr Geobbels would have been proud.

(music)

Haggard: I don’t know anything about the Nuremburg Rallies but I know a lot of Americans think of it as a rock concert.

(pan to musicians, audience in neckties)

Haggard: When I prepare a presentation I don’t get a group af lunatics to come in and say, “Pastor, and you’re just so wonderful, I believe everything you say, oh yes, doctor Ted.” I would be opposed to that.

Haggard (sermon flashback): The Bible says who have been chosen according to the foreknowlege of God the father. He’s talking about us, we’ve been chosen. what’s that word? Obediant. Say it out loud.

Everyone: OBEDIANT.

Haggard (sermon flashback):Okay, we who have been chosen…

RD: Every person needs at the center, some sense of meaning about existance. It is life and death. It makes us who we are. Yet most of us, as we grow up and become responsible adults, accept that life is complex, that we live in a world of subtle shades, not sharp black and white. I worry that these born agains are being persuaded to return to childish certainties. The only truth they need is God: God as interpreted for them by their pastor.

Haggard (sermon flashback): Everybody knows that we believe in the Bible’s the word of God and today I talked about love your neighbor as yourself, now I didn’t have to produce evidence, sociological evidence or psychological evidence the book is true.

RD: How can you say that people are asked to think for themselves when they’re told everything in this book is true?

Haggard: Because they don’t have to believe that.

(talking at the same time)RD:this book says one thing , that says another, that says another..

Haggard: Well the evidence I can present is that we’ve got a book written over 1500 years by 43 different authors and it doesn’t contradict itself.

RD: It doesn’t?

Haggard:You can’t give me two–two experts in certain areas that are in the same generation that are in the same area of study that don’t contradict themselves.

RD: That’s the beauty of science. We have lots of evidence and the evidence al the time coming in, constantly changing our minds and you have one book that you say doesn’t change.

(talking at the same time) Haggard: Exactly. RD:not doing think for themselves

Haggard (sermon flashback): Everybody say “true”.

Everybody: TRUE.

Haggard (sermon flashback): All right then, that’s the…

Richard Dawkins (narrating): But my biggest concern is that evangelicals like Haggard are foisting falsehoods on their flock. Evangelicals are denying scientific evidence just to support Bronze Age myths.

Ted Haggard: We fully embrace the scientific method as American evangelicals, and we think as time goes along as we discover more and more facts that we’ll learn more an more about how god created the heaven and the earth.

RD: The scientific method clearly demonstrates the world is 4 ½ billion years old, do you accept that?

Haggard: You know what you’re doing is you are, you are accepting some of the views that are accepted in some portions of the scientific community as fact, where in fact your grandchildren might listen to the tape of you saying that and laugh at you, you want to bet? Sometimes it’s hard for a human being to study the ear or study the eye and think that that happened by accident.

RD: I beg your pardon, did you say by accident?

Haggard:Yeah.

RD: What did you mean, by accident?

Haggard: The eye just formed itself, somehow.

RD: Who says it did?

Haggard: Some evolutionists say it.

RD: Not a single one that I’ve ever met.

Haggard: (sarcasm) Really?

RD: (sarcasm) Really.

Haggard: Oh?

RD: You obviously know nothing about the subject.

Haggard: Or maybe you haven’t met the people I have.
Ha.Ha.
But you see, you do understand, you do understand that this issue right here of intellectual arrogance is the reason why people like you have a difficult problem with people of faith. I don’t communicate an air of superiority over the people because I know so much more, and if you only read the books I know and if you only know the scientists I knew, then you would be great like me.
Well.
Sir.
There could be many things that you know well, there are other things that you don’t know well. As you age you’ll find yourself wrong on some things right on some other things, but please in the process of it, don’t be arrogant.

Dawson (narrates) : We just had a rather disconcerting experience, we were just packing up our stuff ready to go and drove up in his pickup truck and said get off my land immediately I’ll have you thrown in jail, I’ll seize your flim and then he said a very curious thing. you called my children animals. (pan to group of people in parking lot including the woman in pink who gave the fascist salute) Afterwards we worked out that meant was that I talked about evolution He thought I was saying that his flock was animals I was since all humans are animals but…

The picture seems to be missing a caption….

Do we reap what we sow? If we live by the sword do we die by the sword? If we use the issue of gay marriage as a political tool of hatred and intolerance to manipulate people into voting without thinking, do we lose our souls in the process?

This week yet another member of the religious right, Pastor Ted Haggard, is at the receiving end of the world of intolerance he helped create. While the living was easy, he basked in the limelight of power, raked in the money, and lived the kind of life in private he condemned in public.

The Republicans created the anti-gay marriage issue as a wedge of hate to leverage votes and money, but God will not be mocked. The wedge has turned around to split the Republican party and the lives of those like Foley and Haggard who forged the sword of public opinion.

What exactly is Pastor Ted Haggard’s theology of sexuality? One parishioner describes the evangelical view of homosexuality:

The life of the gay man, in the evangelical imagination, seems to be an endless succession of orgasms, interrupted only by jocular episodes of male bonhomie. The gay man promises Christian men a guilt-free existence, the garden before Eve. As such, he is not just tempting but temptation embodied; “the Enemy”…

Haggard’s evangelical view of marriage, described at his son’s wedding servcie, is equally bleak:

Earlier in the week, at a staff meeting, he had announced that he would use the wedding as an illustration, and to that end he delivered a lengthy prenuptial presentation with slides, in which he laid out a fractal-like repeating pattern of relations, shrinking and expanding: that of God to man, reflected in that of man to wife, which is in turn a model for a godly society. Just as we conform ourselves to God’s will, so, said Ted, must “the Woman.” The Woman must take on her man’s calling, her man’s desire…

In return, Pastor Ted continued, the Woman gets the Man’s love; authority just wants to serve. “Total surrender!” he called. “True or false?”

“TRUE!” answered the 8,000 assembled.

The Man is the Christ; the Woman is the Body. He is coming; she is the church; she must open her doors. United, they are the Kingdom, ready for battle. “The Christian home,” preached Pastor Ted, “is to be in a constant state of war.”

There’s a lot of really weird stuff going on here. But what?