So in case you’ve been living under a rock, there are a bunch of people who have been camped out on Wall Street (and elsewhere) for the past while who are protesting against corporations and calling for…um…well, we’re not really sure what they’re calling for but I’m sure whatever it is has very good intentions. Because that’s what counts, right? It’s just good to see people standing up and speaking truth to power.

The problem, of course, is that in this age we’re not exactly sure what “truth” is. When someone is brandishing a sign that calls corporations “evil” you need some kind of basic frame of reference as to what evil is in order for it to have any real effect. As it is, apparently each person out there in the protest is making it up as they go along as to exactly what they think is wrong and is left to come up with their own conclusions (or lack thereof) as to how to fix it.

By way of contrast it is helpful to look at a set of protests that really did bring about some lasting change during the Civil Rights era. But the difference in the purpose of the Civil Rights marches with the Occupy Wall Street protests is striking. For starters, the Civil Rights marches actually had a stated purpose: ending segregation and discrimination. More importantly that purpose was backed by a moral resolve which was able to withstand fierce opposition. That resolve and moral certainty allowed for a unity of focus that brought people together working for common goals. When the marchers said that segregation and discrimination was evil there was no question in anybody’s mind of what “evil” meant.

But if evil isn’t real and if truth is whatever you make of it and if the only real moral ills in this world are whatever doesn’t make me happy, then it’s going to be really hard to get any group of people to share the same message for very long. And that’s if you can actually get anybody in the crowd to articulate a message to start with. Postmodernists really don’t make great protesters.

On the heels of the rejoicing and celebrations that a mass murderer has been brought to justice, some Christians are immediately coming out with statements that being happy over someone’s death isn’t a very Jesus thing to do.

Predictably leading the charge is Brian MacLaren who had this to say:

I can only say that this image does not reflect well on my country, especially in contrast to the images that have been so strong here in recent days … revelers celebrating a wedding.

Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?

The Vatican chimed in with this:

Faced with the death of a man, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibility of each and every one of us before God and before man, and hopes and commits himself so that no event be an opportunity for further growth of hatred, but for peace.

Which leads me to wonder why God put Ps. 58:10-11 in the Bible

“The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.”

I guess all those martyrs who are under altar screaming out for justice in Revelation 6:9-10 really should just shut up and sing Kum ba yah instead .

There is a righteous vengeance. And Jesus is the one who will ultimately execute it upon all the wicked. Rejoicing in justice is a very Jesus thing to do. It is not evil to rejoice that this murderer has been brought to his earthly end.

Never before in history have so many people had the ability to waste their free time and available resources sitting around feeling guilty because they have too much free time and so many available resources. From all accounts, most of these guilt-ridden souls live in the United States of America where the population is all rich, fat, lazy, and becoming stupider by the minute on a steady diet of new technology and mind-numbing entertainment. But as evil and stupid as Americans are, they also somehow manage to keep on being in charge and winning first place in just about everything that matters. Somehow that just makes them feel even guiltier.

I’ve never heard of a factory worker in Eastern Asia or farmer in Belize who spent a lot of time worrying about whether or not he’s morally bankrupt because he owns two pairs of shoes while someone over in the Sudan may only have half a pair that is the community property of an entire village. Mostly, folks in other parts of the world are too busy working and taking care of their own families to feel any sense of guilt for not shipping dollars across the ocean to folks whom they have never met. No, this type of guilt is a luxury mostly afforded to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who endure the obligation of feeling bad for the plight of everybody and everything in the world.

In the face of all this pressure to prostrate myself in penitence for my crime of existence I would like to make the following declarations:

• America did not get rich by stealing from poor countries; neither do I have a Western standard of living because I have stolen that right from someone else.
• Evil corporations are responsible for most of the jobs, products, and technological advances in the world. Ergo they are also responsible for most of the happiness in the world as well.
• Even though our processed, refined, cruelly caged and painfully slaughtered food is making us fat and killing us slowly, we are also inexplicably living longer than ever.
• We cannot save the planet. We also cannot kill the planet. The planet will be just fine long after we are all dead and gone.
• No matter what groups of politicians and international bodies may claim, America and America’s military are freedom’s last best hope. Without our blood, sweat, and money the majority of mankind would be in servitude to dictators and autocratic regimes.
• Technology is not making people lazy and stupid. People have always been lazy and stupid and many of them work very hard to for the right to be that way.

I believe that it is time for a small call to sanity for those of us who are fed up with constantly being told both explicitly and implicitly that we should feel horrible about being who we are and living like we do. It’s time somebody stood up and said “Enough!”

It’s time to start living guilt free.

Barack Obama says he is a Christian and I take him at his Word. But his articulation of that faith seemed more direct than usual this week even for an event where such statements would be appropriate.

On April 19th, The President made some remarks at the Easter Prayer Breakfast where he said in part:

I wanted to host this breakfast for a simple reason -– because as busy as we are, as many tasks as pile up, during this season, we are reminded that there’s something about the resurrection — something about the resurrection of our savior, Jesus Christ, that puts everything else in perspective.

[W]e’re reminded that in that moment, he took on the sins of the world — past, present and future — and he extended to us that unfathomable gift of grace and salvation through his death and resurrection.

In the words of the book Isaiah: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”

This magnificent grace, this expansive grace, this “Amazing Grace” calls me to reflect. And it calls me to pray. It calls me to ask God for forgiveness for the times that I’ve not shown grace to others, those times that I’ve fallen short. It calls me to praise God for the gift of our son — his Son and our Savior.

It’s an unusual moment of clarity for a President who seems loath to visit a church or be seen hobnobbing with members of the clergy.

In an age when “big business” is often synonymous with “great evil,” it’s unusual to see someone stand up and extol the virtues of the entrepreneurial spirit. Yet, Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, chairman and CEO of the Roosevelt Group and research professor at Yale University, has written a book to do exactly that. Doing Virtuous Business is subtitled “the remarkable success of spiritual enterprise” and it is a manifesto on being both doing good business and the business of doing good.

Although he is himself a Christian (and most of the book is written from that perspective), Malloch also writes of extolling virtue as a universal good that is embraced by all faiths. He quotes both Augustine and Aristotle with equal ease while making his case that both “hard” virtues such as courage and “soft” virtues such as compassion should be part of the economic capital of a good business. In the long run these values will make a business thrive and increase the wealth and responsibility of those who practice them.

Malloch acknowledges that striving to use virtue and gaining wealth from it may seem antithetical in some ways to the teachings of following virtue for its own sake. But he points out that the success is a necessary by-product of using virtuous business is not in and of itself an evil thing. The obtaining of wealth and the pursuit of riches are not necessarily the same thing. Motivation means everything.

Throughout the book the writer presents stories and examples of people who did virtuous business, from architects to restaurant owners and from charity organizations to furniture designers, the pursuit of ethical business is shown to be not only good for the entrepreneur but for those whom they employ and serve as well.

With scandals and shady deals from large companies making the headlines on a weekly basis, it seems a bit mind boggling to think of the possibility that a huge corporation could be an instrument of virtue in the world. Yet, corporations are just groups of people and people are governed by the same spiritual laws that have existed for millennia. And, according to Theodore Malloch, doing good is just good business.

This book was generously provided for review via the blogger program at booksneeze.com

John Piper, preacher, writer, and Calvinist extraordinaire, caused a bit of a stir when he weighed in on his blog about the recent burning of a Koran and the resulting violent riots that ensued.

As the Christian Post reports:

Piper…concluded that the parallel between Christianity and Islam is not of Christ to Muslim prophet Muhammad and the Koran to the Bible. Rather, the Koran parallels Christ.

“The giving of the Koran is in Islam what the incarnation of Christ is to Christianity,” asserted Piper in a blog posting on the Desiring God website. “If this is so, then Koran-burning is parallel to Christ-crucifying.”

I’ll agree that it makes a certain kind of sense to draw those parallels between the emphasis on The Word incarnate and the written words of the Koran as far as their value to the respective religions. That being said, I’m just not exactly sure what Piper is trying to demonstrate here. Is he giving a justification for the incredible overreaction of some Muslims who rioted and killed people because someone half a world away burned a copy of their sacred text?

I honestly think he isn’t really trying to assign an absolute moral equivalence to the burning of a Koran and the crucifixion of Christ. I suspect what he’s really doing here is pontificating in scholarly fashion over a theological comparison without really stopping to consider how his words sound to people in non-scholarly world.

However, even the pontification here is a little lacking. It would seem a little strange to say that after 1400 years of varying degrees of radical Islamic aggression that suddenly a reaction to an obscure guy burning a book suddenly explains “why the Muslims are so mad.” Simply put, Islamofascist fundamentalists are angry because their God is angry and they follow his example. Everything else is just grist to that mill. Cartoons of Allah, women who uncover their heads or dare to educate themselves, a teacher who names her teddy bear Muhammad, or a guy who lights a few pages on fire are all just excuses to lash out with an all-consuming anger.

Of course, a quick look around the world will show that not every Muslim is of this same angry stripe. Then again, the ones who aren’t lighting things on fire or beheading folks rarely make the news. And even the Islamic population that isn’t actively participating in acts of violence seems oddly reticent about condemning those acts when pushed to give an opinion. But that’s a different discussion altogether…

Back to the point, in my opinion, I don’t think Piper’s pontifications are particularly helpful. He sounds a lot like like he’s trying to pick up Falwell’s mantle of less-than-well-phrased public statements. Lord save us from your followers.

Since the last umpteen posts have been directed at the left, let’s take a swing at a pretty good right-wing example of doing violence to the words of Jesus.

Here’s Bryan Fischer from the American Family Association taking on the question of whether or not Christians should get into politics:

People who say the followers of Christ shouldn’t be involved in politics aren’t paying attention. And they aren’t paying attention to Jesus himself.

During the Last Supper, Jesus said to his chosen 12 (11 if you subtract Judas from the mix), “I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:29).”

Now I don’t have a trained eye, but sitting on a throne is a political thing no matter how you slice it.

In other words, Jesus’ entire discipleship program with his apostles was an academy designed to prepare them for service in the political arena.

So Christians just need to get over this debate about whether or not Christians ought to be involved in politics. Jesus has settled this question for us himself.

Which is, of course, why those disciples left that room and immediately launched a rebellion, set up a democracy, and then ran for office.

Or is it possible that the thrones that Jesus was referencing here were not exactly what Mr. Fischer had in mind? For not too much later on that same night, Christ also said this:

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”(ESV)

There is certainly a good case to be made for a Christian ethic of public service that includes political action but doing violence to the Scripture in support of that ideal does no favors to either side of the debate.

Ronald Reagan was right. The most frightening words a person can here are “we’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

Notice how the lady violates the man’s First Amendment rights both by telling him that he can’t protest the workers (thereby curtailing his freedom of speech) and then by ordering him to go inside his house as he peacefully stands on his property (thereby denying him a right to peaceful assembly).

I’m all for law and order but when power is abused, it’s time for those who abuse it to start losing their jobs. I honestly hope this woman loses hers.

One of the themes constantly pounded by the Christian Left is how evil, uncaring, and just-not-nice-at-all American corporations are. After all, some of them have an awful lot of money and and run by really, really rich people. Do we really need any more proof that Jesus wouldn’t be a fan? Evidently not.

One of today’s shining examples of this is a piece written by Allison Kilkenny and blasted out on the interwebs by various folks such as @TheChristianLft

She writes:

Bank of America hasn’t paid a nickel in federal income taxes for the past two years, and in fact raked in an additional $1 billion in tax “benefits.” The bank is enjoying these profits after accepting $45 billion from taxpayers, which the company then got to count as a deduction when they paid back the money.

Well, that’s just terrible, don’t you think? Of course, a teeny bit of research shows that BOA’s profit margin is currently -2.7% and that their stock price history for the past few years looks kind of like this:

Now I’m not saying that BOA is a paragon of virtue, nor that they may not use every means in their power to pay as little tax as possible, just like every other taxpayer in the country. But I have to wonder exactly what the left expects them to do. If you don’t turn a profit, then there’s nothing to tax. Simple as that.

In reality, those on the left would not be content even if BOA just opened its vaults and started chucking money out onto the streets. It’s not the lack of taxes that bothers them. It’s the fact that they’re allowed to continue to own billions of dollars in assets instead of being forced by law to spread that wealth around to those who are seen to deserve it more than they do: namely the programs run by those selfsame leftists.

The warning to “take heed and beware of covetousness” applies just as well to the would-be socialist as it does to the filthy rich capitalist.