In one of my favorite movies one of my favorite lines is young Mr. Incredible complains that no matter how many times he saves the world it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. “Sometimes I just want it to STAY SAVED, just for a little bit. I just cleaned up this mess can you keep it clean for 10 minutes!”
If you’ve been following our long journey through the Bible you might have noticed that God could say exactly this. God’s project to reconcile earth with heaven keeps getting mucked up again and again.
In the book of Samuel Israel is having perpetual political and military issues with their neighbors. She keeps getting subjugated and abused by her neighbors and so her elders decide that the new political/military technology of monarchy is exactly what she needs. God gives them Saul, who is exactly what they are looking for. On one hand Saul does seem to help in the military department. With Saul the Philistines seem at least somewhat at bay, Jabesh Gilead delivered from Ammonites and Amalekites subjugated but according to Samuel speaking for God there are serious issues with Saul that are irrevocable.
Chapter 16 begins with Samuel in a funk. The world can’t say saved. His sons are corrupt. Saul has been a disappointment and so God tells him to get up and get a new king.
I’ll have a more in-depth analysis of the New Atlantis piece once I’ve had time to read it thoroughly (it’s a very long document). So far I’m about a third of the way through and I’ve encountered very little that I’m not already familiar with. Actually most of the supposedly really controversial and damning evidence that this article brings up is well known within the academic queer community. Nobody in queer studies actually believes in the simplistic political formulation “Born that way” any more than any serious Christian theologian subscribes to the “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” hypothesis.
As the authors of the Psychological Science in the Public Interest article point out, an individuals political attitudes about sexual orientation tend to correlate with their views of the causes of sexual orientation. Those who hold positive attitudes (i.e., that there is nothing inherently wrong with non-heterosexuality or its open expression) have tended to believe that sexual orientation is due to nonsocial causes such as genetics. Those who hold negative attitudes (i.e., that non-heterosexuality is undesirable or immoral and that society should restrict its free expression) have tended to believe that homosexuality has social causes, such as early sexual experiences and cultural acceptance of non-heterosexuality. We refer to these as the “nonsocial” and “social” hypotheses, respectively. Both hypotheses require direct scientific support; neither can claim confirmation solely because support for the other is weak.
Trump didn’t win over large numbers of religious conservatives by appealing to all of them. He won because he realized he didn’t have to. During the primary season, he bypassed religious leaders and went straight for voters, choosing to make the same promises that appealed to the non-churchgoing folks around them.
Minute 4 “Campuses are teaching students to think in all of the ways that cognative therapy tries to get people to stop thinking in. Catastrophizing, mind reading, etc.”
New study on “born that way”
The New Atlantis
Executive summary
Pushback