Category: General

Okay

Two links for Thabiti Anyabwile in a row, and this one may be more serious than the last. I’m not much for joining movements, or frankly anything else that smacks of being practical.  I don’t understand racism, or even what it feels like to be oppressed.  The idea that the proof that someone is being oppressed is the fact that they feel that way is slack-jawed incomprehensible to me.  But Thabiti says so, and I’m inclined to believe him, because I trust him when he tells me how I ought to feel.

Now I’d like him to tell me what to do.  He’s issuing a challenge to the orthodox Evangelical church to form an organization, a campaign, a something. I’m no good at that sort of thing, and I’m pretty sure I’m nobody in the body of Christ, but point me to the bandwagon.  I’ll get on it.

Jeremiah the Liar

Jeremiah 28:27-28 :

Then Zedekiah said to Jeremiah, “Let no one know of these words, and you shall not die.  But if the princes hear that I have talked with you, and they come to you and say to you, ‘Declare to us now what you have said to the king, and also what the king said to you; do not hide it from us, and we will not put you to death,’  then you shall say to them, ‘I presented my request before the king, that he would not make me return to Jonathan’s house to die there.’”

Then all the princes came to Jeremiah and asked him. And he told them according to all these words that the king had commanded. So they stopped speaking with him, for the conversation had not been heard.

So the king fed Jeremiah a lie to say, if anybody asked him about their conversation.  And the people asked Jeremiah, and Jeremiah repeated the king’s lie.

I think we’ve only got two options here.  Either it was a sin for Jeremiah to lie in this situation, or it wasn’t.  The text doesn’t pass any judgment at all, but presumably the book is written either by Jeremiah himself, or someone close to him, like Baruch his scribe, and the lack of judgment has every appearance of tacit approval.  In fact, it would be pretty hard, taking this text into account, to argue that scripture teaches that every form of inaccurate reporting counts as “false witness.”

They’re the worst. I declare war on them forever.

Don Boudreaux on platitudes.

I hadn’t really thought about it before, but platitudes may be the biggest frustration of my daily conversation (at least the part of my conversation that has to do with ideas). Somebody drops a platitude, and the argument’s over, QED.  Won the race, and I didn’t even have to rev the engine. Then you have a choice – either you drop the subject, at the risk of writing off a fellow member of the human race as a mindless zombie, or you try to pry open that pretty little platitude and get your friend to think, at the risk of proving yourself a blue meanie and an obnoxious smarmy pants.