Prayer for Summer

This is from a website called Appleseeds.



Long warm days...
The pace of life slows...
A time for picnics and rest in the shade...

Lord,
help me to rest awhile in the cooling shade of your presence.
Slow down my restless heart and fill me with gentle compassion for all your people.

Amen.

Here We Go Again

Well, it's the end of the term, and paper-grading time, so you know what that means. Yes, it's our bi-yearly plagiarism report.

Here's the memo I just sent to my World Religion students:

Plagiarism--Pay Close Attention

Taking the work of someone else and changing a few words here and there IS STILL PLAGIARISM. If you "forget" to write down a certain source that you took most of your text from, I will still find it. I have already failed 2 of you for this. I hope it's not more. And if you are now thinking, "Did I do that?" chances are, it's very possible.

If anyone wants to rewrite their papers and get them to me by tomorrow night, I will throw out your old paper and start fresh. There will be a 10% late penalty, but that's better than 0, don't you think? You will have to email them to me, so make arrangements.

I'm very disappointed in a few of you. I thought better of you than this.

For those of you who put the work into your papers, thank you. It's hard-working students like you who keep us teachers going when we have to deal with this other stuff.

58 Signs You May Have Been Abducted by Aliens

I'm not going to post all 58 here, because they belong to another writer, and you can find them on his site, 58 Possible Signs of Alien Abduction.

However, having this information does put an interesting new spin on some pieces of my life. For example, Sign #2 is unusual marks on your body or scars you can't remember where they came from.

Check.

I also qualify for:

#4. Unexplained medical problems: Sudden illness, sinus problems, fatigue, migraines, or rashes. I have all of those except the rashes!

#22. Psychic abilities. Now this author thinks that means that you get a feeling that something's going to happen,then it does. But in my case, I get a feeling something's going to happen, and it NEVER does! See? I can predict with certainty what won't happen! If I get a feeling about something, you can bet it's NOT that!

#24. Startled. You awaken in the night with a feeling of panic or anxiety for no apparent reason. In my case, since my husband has the fan on so loud you wouldn't hear a tornado, I'm usually convinced that someone's in the house and I just can't hear him.

#42. Headaches. Since I get every possible type of headache, I'm sure one of them is covered in this.

#51. Difficulty trusting. I thought this was just cynicism born from the experience of being screwed over too many times, but now I know the real reason.

#54. Locking doors. You double and triple check locking up at night to prevent someone or something from getting into the house. Check.


I confess that I do find elements of this list amusing, because everything has some other explanation. But the guy who wrote this up has had a really hard time in some of his struggles, and I don't mean to mock him. I don't know whether I believe in aliens or not, or the whole alien abduction thing. I do know that a lot of strange stuff goes on in the world, much of consistent across history and culture, and much of it inexplicable by post-Enlightenment standards. So, who knows...?

Obama Orders Assassination of US Citizen

This may be old news to some of you, but I'm betting some of you have never heard anything about this. You can find a lot more about it in articles here, here, here, and here. Please notice that those sources aren't the type to find fault with the current president.

The situation involves a Muslim cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki, 38, who was born in New Mexico and currently resides in Yemen. It isn't quite clear what al-Awlaki has actually done, but he's been under surveillance by the intelligence community for a long time. He is said to have ties to both the Ft. Hood shooter and the Christmas "panty bomber.". He is suspected of being an al-Qaida recruiter in both the US and Yemen.

Al-Awlaki says he isn't any such thing, and his parents are trying to convince him to turn himself in--something that's hard to do now that there's an assassination order out for him.

Here's the thing. From everything I've read, this guy probably is a real threat. But he's an American citizen--probably a really bad one, but he's a citizen. An American citizen has rights to due process. If the CIA and other members of the intelligence community have the evidence they claim they have, al-Awlaki should be arrested and tried for treason, and then executed as a traitor.

But right now he's just suspected of being dangerous--however likely that is. And the president has decreed that he can be killed, no questions asked, no evidence required. I don't like this guy; I'm not on his side. But the last thing I want to see is the United States becoming a place where the ruling administration can target someone for death based on their religion or their politics, without giving that person a chance to defend himself.

Because what's next? Look, I'm pretty religious, and my religious beliefs cause me to be extremely critical of the current administration and its policies. Here I am doing so in a published format, in fact. Am I next? Or will it be Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, or Mark Levin? What about Sarah Palin...you might not like her, but her religious convictions and politics cause her to be vocally and publicly opposed to the current administration. Rather like al-Awlaki. Should she die for it? Should anyone?

Not in the US, we shouldn't. In other countries, those kinds of executions are standard--but we're not supposed to be like that. We're supposed to be living a better way. In our country, a citizen has a right to his own faith and worship, he has a right to oppose the government, he has a right to hang out with people who may be complete lunatics or criminals. If he commits a crime, he is innocent until proven guilty, when evidence is brought against him, and he has the right to defend himself.

And when the evidence shows that he is guilty, then, and ONLY THEN, do we execute his treasonous ass.

Makes Me Proud

Today my entire family is spending the whole Saturday (except for the time we took to go to David's soccer game) working at the food pantry.

Today is the Post Office's annual food collection--you leave food on your porch and the mail carriers take it and deliver it to the food pantry. So the church needs lots of volunteers to receive, weigh, and organize the food. So that's what my crew is doing today.

I'm proud of my husband and kids. They have good hearts. And I'm proud of the mailmen, too! Good job, guys!

Teaching Christianity and Islam

In my World Religions class, the hardest unit for me to teach is the Christianity unit, followed closely by the Islam unit.

The Christianity unit is hard because people either a) are some kind of Christian themselves and think they have nothing to learn (no matter how many times I warn them against it, this is always the unit with the highest number of students who skip); or b) they disdain Christianity and will not believe any information that might even hint at putting Christianity in a positive light.

For example, this week we were discussing Islam, which of course always has to include a discussion of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, and one student says, "But all that terrorism is no worse than all the stuff Christians did in the past. I mean, what about the Inquisition?"

Seriously? It wasn't the point in the discussion where I could stop and say, "What do you actually know about the Inquisition? Have you researched it for yourself, or are you just believing the vague condemnations you've gotten from television?"

So I just said, "Um, no." The Crusades get used the same way, as an example of aggressive acts of Christian terrorism against an otherwise tolerant and peace-loving people who never hurt anyone. Whatever. It's very frustrating to try to teach to people who already think they know everything.

The problem with teaching Islam is both religious and cultural. There are about a billion Muslims in the world, maybe 1.1 billion, and about 90% of those would not participate in, support, or approve of, any sort of violence. My son's little girlfriend is Muslim, her parents are a doctor and a dentist, and I can assure you, they're not a little domestic sleeper-cell.

The difficulty is in trying to teach the "most don't but some do" aspects of Islam. There is a strand of the Muslim tradition that supports the use of violence and/or military action to spread the teachings of the Prophet and bring the world under submission to Allah. Some Muslims, about 10%, choose to embrace that piece of their tradition. They aren't ashamed or apologetic about this--why should they be? They live in a culture where strength is respected, tolerance and dialogue are weaknesses, and if God's on your side, he'll enable you to force others to convert.

But Western minds can't grasp the cultural shift from "live and let live" multiculturalism to "God wants the world to submit, and we're going to make sure they do." But again, though 10% of a billion is a pretty significant number, it's still only 10%. 9/10 of Muslims are faithful people just trying to live in the world like the rest of us. We have to know what the other 10% are doing and what they believe--our safety and freedoms depends on it, and the threat is real, but we can't leap from there into saying that all Muslims should be classified with that 10%.

But in saying that, I'm afraid--or I was this week--that I allowed students to leave class with their anti-Muslim prejudices confirmed. That wasn't what I intended to do. Of course, they also do that in the Christianity unit, and I guess all I can do is to offer the real facts. I can't forcibly pry someone's mind open with a crowbar (though the thought has some appeal!). I hope that some of the real picture of both Christianity and Islam sinks into their brains over time.

Which would be better?

Being a preacher, or being a popular Las Vegas Entertainer?



Okay, well, I've done the preacher thing. And it's not half bad. I believe the whole Christian deal, and I get really excited about it, so I think that came through in my preaching. I like to talk about it, and I think my people liked to listen.

However, in the 13 years I've been ordained, there's only been a period of about 2 years when I made a living wage at it. I don't buy the whole "Do it for the love of the Lord" garbage people try to give you when they're declining to pay you enough to pay your bills, or the mountains of student loan debt you got into just so you could get this job that doesn't pay enough to pay the loans back.

Do popular Las Vegas Entertainers make more money than preachers? I guess it depends on the preacher and the entertainer.

Celine Dion and, say, me? Yeah...

Lunch shift show-girl and Joel Osteen? Not so much.

Now, does it matter which one makes more money? Yes and no. There's no shame in choosing a career that will allow you to support your family and give back to the community, and maybe even have a few nice things every now and then. Sometimes, preachers do attain that, and there's nothing wrong with it.

But being a preacher isn't in itself morally superior to being a singer, dancer, or magician. The question in the book is trying to lead the readers to ask, "Is it better to be popular or to do God's will for your life?" Well, what if God's will for your life is for you to be a popular Las Vegas entertainer?

Nobody ever considers that possibility...