The Desert of the Real

Yahoo has a piece up from Deseret News on an obesity trend among mormons:

Merrill’s study suggests Mormons may be using excessive eating as a substitute for prohibited indulgences such as smoking and drinking.

“For years, the church has focused on the don’ts — don’t smoke, don’t drink, and all the other things that you shouldn’t do that are heavily enforced,” said Steve Aldana, a BYU professor who presented some of the study’s findings at a recent heart conference at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center.

Particularly a problem once they complete their service to the church and no longer have to walk around as missionaries anymore. However, this is not purely a Mormon problem. Nor is it new. Christians have the same problem in certain circles which try to bolt man-made rules onto the Gospel. I think it’s just more readily observable among mormons because their restrictions pretty much only leave eating.

Among Christians, the trend is usually limited to banning smoking and drinking when it comes to behaviors surrounding our health. So the gluttony is spread out across more targets, making the problem harder to detect. Caffeinne is a big one. There are a lot of Christians who abuse that substance (not use, abuse) and that is a mitigating factor that Mormons do not have.
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Radley blogged about the danish cartoons this morning. All in all a good post, and certainly has a better grasp of the reality of difference in reaction between even ridiculous branches of the Christian church and the Muslims when the media offends us.

However, I find his other point somewhat intriguing:

Still, I can’t get over the idea that this was needless provocation. That doesn’t in any way justify the Muslim backlash. And the backlash itself shows just how uncomfortably ubiquitous militant, reactionary Islam is (as if that weren’t already obvious).

But by the same token, if you know that’s the reaction you’re going to get, why go out of your way to invite it?

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Seems to me that that’s a fair analogy to what took place in Denmark. And it also seems to me that it would be petty, pointless, and unnecessarily confrontational to run the racist editorial cartoons.

Of course, yes, I think that the Danish paper had the right to run the cartoons. But that doesn’t mean it was a wise or prudent or necessary thing to do.

This is a very valid observation on the one hand. It is true that on the surface it looks like they were being irresponsible. However, consider for a moment what an obvious stranglehold Islam is already gaining in Europe. I think a lot of this has been done in the same way this country went to the liberal extreme it has. By bits and pieces. Muslims have had a slowly incremental influence, a gradual acquisition of power within those countries. From what I’ve read, it sounds like perhaps at least subconsciously this paper became aware of it, and chose this as an avenue to make that apparent to everyone. A wake-up call if you will.

Is that not exactly what we depend on a free press to do at times? To wake up the populace?

This is a controversy that I have, thus far, stayed out of. I have never read their book, I didn’t go to see the movie, and I don’t really know anything about the people involved. (Except for Chad Allen of course). I have started to write on this on a few occaisions, but for those reasons stayed out of public discourse on the topic.

Privately, both to others, and in my own counsel, I have found the whole thing to be overblown. We all have gone to see movies, even movies with a Christian bent (LOTR…such as was left when Peter Jackson finished mutilating it) with homosexual actors in it. To be making a stink over an actor in sin playing a part in a movie seemed rather like guilt by association to me.

Well, I guess I should’ve actually read the SharperIron article. I had no idea what kind of things were being said. As far as I knew, the controversy extended only to their having cast him in the part. As it turns out, many worse things were being said, which now have turned out to be lies. Mostly based on an incredibly unreliable source. Sharper Iron has already issued a public retraction and apology for that, for which I am thankful. So many would not be so willing.

This all came to my attention because of a rather well written article by Randy Alcorn. I don’t know much about the man, I’m afraid, so I can’t recommend (or not) his other works, but I do recommend this article. There are some points regarding doctrine and similar points that I disagree with him on in this post, but they are matters of degree primarily. I think his words here, particularly regarding the potentially far reaching effects of the things we right, are good for us all to heed and to ponder.

An excellent post from Neil Boortz:

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Muslim outrage huh. OK … let’s do a little historical review. Just some lowlights:

• Muslims fly commercial airliners into buildings in New York City. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslim officials block the exit where school girls are trying to escape a burning building because their faces were exposed. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslims cut off the heads of three teenaged girls on their way to school in Indonesia. A Christian school. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslims murder teachers trying to teach Muslim children in Iraq. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslims murder over 80 tourists with car bombs outside cafes and hotels in Egypt. No Muslim outrage.
• A Muslim attacks a missionary children’s school in India. Kills six. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslims slaughter hundreds of children and teachers in Beslan, Russia. Muslims shoot children in the back. No Muslim outrage.
• Let’s go way back. Muslims kidnap and kill athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslims fire rocket-propelled grenades into schools full of children in Israel. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslims murder more than 50 commuters in attacks on London subways and busses. Over 700 are injured. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslims massacre dozens of innocents at a Passover Seder. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslims murder innocent vacationers in Bali. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslim newspapers publish anti-Semitic cartoons. No Muslim outrage
• Muslims are involved, on one side or the other, in almost every one of the 125+ shooting wars around the world. No Muslim outrage.
• Muslims beat the charred bodies of Western civilians with their shoes, then hang them from a bridge. No Muslim outrage.
• Newspapers in Denmark and Norway publish cartoons depicting Mohammed. Muslims are outraged.

Dead children. Dead tourists. Dead teachers. Dead doctors and nurses. Death, destruction and mayhem around the world at the hands of Muslims .. no Muslim outrage … but publish a cartoon depicting Mohammed with a bomb in his turban and all hell breaks loose.

Come on, is this really about cartoons? They’re rampaging and burning flags. They’re looking for Europeans to kidnap. They’re threatening innkeepers and generally raising holy Muslim hell not because of any outrage over a cartoon. They’re outraged because it is part of the Islamic jihadist culture to be outraged. You don’t really need a reason. You just need an excuse. Wandering around, destroying property, murdering children, firing guns into the air and feigning outrage over the slightest perceived insult is to a jihadist what tailgating is to a Steeler’s fan.

I know and understand that these bloodthirsty murderers do not represent the majority of the world’s Muslims. When, though, do they become outraged? When do they take to the streets to express their outrage at the radicals who are making their religion the
object of worldwide hatred and ridicule? Islamic writer Salman Rushdie wrote of these silent Muslims in a New York Times article three years ago. “As their ancient, deeply civilized culture of love, art and philosophical reflection is hijacked by paranoiacs, racists, liars, male supremacists, tyrants, fanatics and violence junkies, why are they not screaming?”

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Indeed.

I know, it’s starting to seem like maybe you’re dreaming isn’t it? Good news in the political section of my blog? And more than one in the same day!

BB&T Corporation today said it will not lend to commercial developers that plan to build condominiums, shopping malls and other private projects on land taken from private citizens by government entities using eminent domain.

Awesome. And once again, we have a clear demonstration of how much better than the government the market is at everything.

Hat tip: Julie Staples.

Course, we’re still down by hundreds, but we should still cheer when someone makes the government abide by the law!

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents tried to seize 30 of the library’s computers without a warrant, saying someone had used the library’s Internet connection to send the threat to Brandeis. But the library director, Kathy Glick-Weil, told the agents they could not take the machines unless they got a warrant first.

As the friend of mine that pointed this out to me said, “How sad is it when this is news?”

This quote apparently has some folks up in arms:

“Yet many Americans, especially parents, still have deep concerns about the direction of our culture, and the health of our most basic institutions. They are concerned about unethical conduct by public officials, and discouraged by activist courts that try to redefine marriage.”

Now, I should give a disclaimer that I didn’t watch the SotU. I can get irritated without any help thank you very much. I really don’t see the point of tuning in just to be lied to for however long that’s going to drag on.

However, I would read this, absent its context, as saying simply that there are people concerned about the culture, and then a few lines expounding on what they are concerned about. There’s no equivocation, or attempt to tie them together.

Radley is backing off of an earlier post on this topic here:

Not causation, I guess. More equivocation by proximity. Of course, given that one-man, one-woman marriage is a pretty recent phenomenon, that hetero marriage hasn’t exactly been the picture of stability, and that politicians have been corrupt for as long as there have been politicians, you could make a pretty good case that neither of these institutions has ever really been all that healthy.

Now, normally I agree with him. In fact, I’d say the majority of the time I agree with Radley, and the commentary he posts on his site. In fact, the very next line is a good one:

If President Bush would like to discuss unhealthy institutions, he might start with economic freedom. Or the rule of law. Or individual liberty. Or property rights.

However, I think he’s being unfair to the president here. Lets not make his words any worse than they are. Simply mentioning two things together as issues some people are concerned about doesn’t make them “equally bad”, conflate them, or otherwise create some arbitrary link between them.

Furthermore, what is this about:

Of course, given that one-man, one-woman marriage is a pretty recent phenomenon

Relative to what? I suppose if you are an evolutionist (which I would guess Radley is) it might be recent relative to when they believe the world began….but as far back as we have history we have marriage between one man and one woman. Not that it wasn’t violated even in scriptural history with practices such as polygamy, but even when that was accepted among the jews the ideal was still that marriage was one man, one woman.

He makes it sound like the historical/biblical concept of marriage was made up last week.