Smear



Bo, the Obama family dog

 The Australian reports today on the story that won't go away; that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and is therefore constitutionally ineligible for office. This is on top of the rumours that despite being a Christian he is also secretly a Muslim who is plotting to Islamise the United States, a socialist, and if you subscribe to that particular view of eschatology, that he is even the Antichrist.

Documents such as birth notices and birth certificates can be forged, but to allege as such in Obama's case is very offensive. What disappoints me is that some conservative Christian groups are involved in spreading these rumours. Scripture clearly condemns spreading rumours, and for good reason warns Christians against this sort of conduct (Leviticus 19:16, Proverbs 11:13, 18:8, Matthew 7:1, Romans 1:29, 1 Timothy 5:13).

I have been around churches long enough to see the sometimes irrepairable damage that can be done to reputations by misguided self-appointed gatekeepers who take it upon themselves to call their leaders to account for their imagined failings.

In a democracy you have the freedom to speak up and criticise political leaders where necessary, usually without fear of overt retribution. This is a good and healthy thing. I'd say to Obama's Christian critics, if you want to oppose his Administration's policies or raise questions about the character of the man himself, well fine. Just make sure that you're doing it accurately. Spreading rumours is not only a poor witness and totally unacceptable, but it also damages the credibility of the church, which is enough of a problem these days as it is without you adding to it.

Komish hund

Another funny advertisement featuring a border collie, this time from Austria.

Jedi slime

General Grievous

A good way to cope with stress at work (which is more of an issue than some people might think) is to find little things in the day that you find amusing. I thought I would share one of them with my reader(s). Yesterday whilst doing some cataloguing I came across this tome, The Memoirs of General Grivas (London, Longmans, 1964). Who was this General Grivas? After a bit of digging, thanks to the good people at homework website Factmonster (a division of Pearson Education) I discovered that he was George Grivas (1897-1974). My home city of Melbourne has one of the world's largest Greek communities outside of Athens, but I have never studied Greek history, so I had no idea who he was. One thing is clear, however. Grivas is not to be confused with General Grievous, who was the commander of the Separatist droid army during the Clone Wars in Star Wars.

George Grivas (1897-1984)

Grivas on the other hand was a Greek and Cypriot general. Some people regard him as a national hero. He may not have killed scores of Jedi knights and kept their lightsabres as trophies, have four arms, speak in a raspy voice, or own a personal star ship named the Invisible Hand, but from what I have read about Grivas, he sounds like he was just as ruthless as his fictional counterpart.

Factmonster states as follows:

"He joined the Greek army and early became an advocate of enosis (the union of Cyprus with Greece). After the Second World War, he played a sinister role in the anti-leftist repression that helped bring about the Greek Civil War. In 1954 he returned to Cyprus to head a guerrilla army (EOKA), which conducted struggle against the British in Cyprus from 1955 to 1959. He opposed the 1959 agreements establishing the independent republic of Cyprus. In August, 1964, after fighting broke out between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, he commanded the Cypriot national guard and headed Greek forces on the island. Grivas was forced to leave Cyprus, however, in November 1967, after a number of Turkish Cypriots were killed in a battle with Grivas's national guard. In 1971, he returned secretly to the island, launching a terrorist campaign against the government of President Makarios. Shortly after his death, his movement succeeded in temporarily overthrowing Makarios, thus opening the way for a Turkish seizure of the northern third of the island (July, 1974) and its defacto partition."

"http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/.html." The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia.

© 1994, 2000-2006, on Fact Monster.

© 2000–2007 Pearson Education, publishing as Fact Monster.

13 Feb. 2011

Tea for the tillerman

This is my final post on my visit late last year to a mosque to hear a talk by former Christian turned Muslim cleric Yusha Evans. In this post I want to respond to his comments about the apostle Paul. He raised what experts tell me is a common Islamic objection to Paul. They seek to discredit him and his considerable contribution to the New Testament canon because, as he was spectacularly converted after Jesus's resurrection and ascension, he never met or personally knew him. He probably had more to say on this subject, and refrained from saying what he really thought, but knowing there were Christians present, chose his words carefully.

An entry on the Answering Islam website answers this objection as follows: 

"Muslims tend to regard Paul as the person who corrupted Christianity and usually reject the epistles of Paul as authoritative scripture. Many Muslims have charged that Paul's original name was Saul (of Tarsus), and that he changed his name to Paul after his conversion, and that he had never met Jesus. Though that name change theory is relatively popular, it isn't probably what happened. Saul was a Jew and a Roman citizen, and thus would have two names. Saul was his Hebrew name and Paulus was his Latin name. The first reports about him in the Bible are when he is in Israel and neighboring countries and there he certainly uses his Hebrew name. Later on in his missionary travels in Asia minor and Europe, he uses his Latin name, which is perfectly in harmony with his status and the places he visited. Moreover, since Paulus means "the little one," he might have seen it to be more appropriate and humble as he became a Christian instead of a name after King Saul.

And he did meet Jesus. He saw him in a vision on his way to Damascus. He might not have met Jesus while Jesus walked on this earth, but he met him after his resurrection, where he saw and heard Jesus in this incident.

Interestingly, the Muslim at-Tabari said, "Among the apostles and those disciples around them, whom Jesus sent out, there were Peter and his companion Paul." (A history of the Christian Church, Thalabii. Qisas al-Anbiyaa, pp. 389-90. Tabarii. Taarikh al-umam wa-l-muluuk II/II, 1560).

This is how Paul saw himself:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them--yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed (1 Corinthians 15:3-11)."

I also put the question of how to answer Paul's critics to theologian Dr James F. McGrath of Butler University. Head over to his blog for his answer.

I would add that the other apostles accepted Paul as one of their own, and his writings as Scripture (Galatians 2:1-10, 2 Peter 3:16). In one sense this objection is nothing new. Paul had to defend his apostolic credentials against his opponents in his second letter to the Corinthian church (2 Corinthians 11 & 12). By nature, Paul was a humble man, but was forced to boast because of his opponents undermining his work. Muslims believe that their holy book, the Koran, was imparted to the prophet Muhammad by supernatural means. Yet, when it comes to the apostle Paul and his writings, there is no room for the supernatural in their hermeneutics. I cannot accept that Paul was anything other than the apostle he rightly claimed to be, and unquestioningly accept his contribution to Christian thought and considerable contribution to the New Testament canon at face value.

Australian crawl

This snippet of news caused me to quizzically furrow my brow. A game developer is planning to release a swimming game that uses the Xbox 360's Kinect motion sensor controller featuring American Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps, called Push the Limit. This conjures up all sorts of funny mental pictures of people standing in front of their television screen playing this game by flailing their arms and legs about in the air to mimic swimming strokes. It will look even more ridiculous than someone doing Zumba. This won't be a game for the self conscious. If you plan to buy this game, close your curtains so your neighbours can't see you and laugh at your faux swimming antics as you're playing it.