{"id":1524,"date":"2003-10-23T16:47:58","date_gmt":"2003-10-23T20:47:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/10\/23\/1524.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:43:28","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:43:28","slug":"the-rev-and-the-gen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/10\/23\/the-rev-and-the-gen\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rev. and the Gen."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As it happens, Your Humble Blogger seems to frequently point to interesting and provocative essays by people who are not big favorites around here. One recent such is the prolific Amir Taheri<\/a>’s essay in the New York Post<\/a> of all places, about the Mahathir Mohamed flap. Another such is Jim Wallis’ recent essay in Sojourners<\/a>. I am no Christian, as my Gentle Readers are aware, and so have no dog with this theological fight, but I find the essay both interesting and a bit disturbing.\n

First I should say that I despite the Rev. Wallis and Your Humble Blogger both being on the left, and both fundamentally seeing our faiths as demanding that we work for social justice, I disagree with him on many policy issues. Furthermore, I often find his writing leaves me, well, with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. He is a pacifist; I am a pragmatist. He yearns for simplicity; I wouldn’t like it if I ever found it. He likes his hands clean (metaphorically—he is certainly not averse to hard work); I like ’em dirty (again, metaphorically, as I’m the laziest fellow you could ever hope to meet). All of that puts us in different universes, so it’s not altogether surprising that I’m not a big fan.\n

Still, it’s terrific to see somebody say that Gen. Boykin not only shouldn’t say such things, he shouldn’t think them. Yes, he has a right to think them if he likes, but I believe that dualism (and I can’t figure his outlook to be anything but dualist) is a serious theological error, and it’s incumbent on people who believe that dualism is a serious theological error to say so. To say, on the one hand, he made a tactical error in saying things that will make the world worse, not better, and on the other, he made a strategic error in thinking things that will make the world worse, not better. Gen. Boykin is wrong, and if it’s at all possible to persuade him that he is wrong, we are obliged to do so.\n

And yet...\n

There’s as much arrogance in his writings (and of course in mine) as there is in Gen. Boykin’s speech. If Gen. Boykin thinks that his Gd is the one true Gd, and that everyone else is worshipping idols at best, the Rev. Wallis clearly feels that his Gd (the pacifist one, the loving one, the tolerant one) is the one true Gd, and that the General’s comments are “not mere political incorrectness, but idolatry.” So each thinks their theological opponents are not merely wrong but idolaters. And that’s a bit disturbing, isn’t it?\n\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As it happens, Your Humble Blogger seems to frequently point to interesting and provocative essays by people who are not big favorites around here. One recent such is the prolific Amir Taheri\u2019s essay in the New York Post of all…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16854,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions\/16854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}