Hang in there, Will. It ain’t over til the Fat Lady sings.

Wow, did Will just post a reply for the sole purpose of asking that it be removed? How odd.

Incidentally, Will’s link leads to an absolutely delightful blog post about how all Hillary supporters are intelligent and all Obama supporters are incapable of logical reasoning.

I think we should all head over to his blog and post some requests for him to retract our posts!

check this out at youtube

for instance, one could ask about Falwell’s comments about 9/11 being blamed on gays and liberals or Hurricane Katrina on gay pride parades and abortion, or Hagee’s comments on muslims…

but that the drumbeat and focus remains only on Obama and Wright spells out to me that white hatred and xenophobia are ignored, and that only blacks have something to explain, apologise for, or should be ashamed of.

I’m not black, I don’t agree with everything Rev. Wright said (I wouldn’t say “God damn America” as I love the country that many friends and family live in, but qualified by thinking it’s not as noble as some may wish it to be) – and yet don’t think that he’s the only one at fault.

Let’s elevate internet discussion by avoiding wasting time with the kind of insults that teenagers (or 24-hour-news-network hosts) throw around – couldn’t we hear some acknowledgement from some of the vehement haters around that Rev. Wright and other critics may have a point?

McTaggart said: Time is unreal; Moore said: I have had my breakfast.
(Apologies to (the late) Iris Murdoch, from whom this is taken.)

Depends on what “blame” means. For the last 2000 years, many if not most people in the West have believed that “sin,” ie, freely chosen and unrepented evil actions, merited eternal punishment. This, I suspect, was the first if not the strongest impetus to discredit the notion of free will. With gradually increasing insight into the degree to which our behavior is influenced by our physiology, our upbringing, our environment, and other non-metaphysical causes, it became obvious that the threat of infinite punishment is indefensible, even pathological.

But that doesn’t mean all punishment is indefensible. It is, as you say, behavior-modifying—a clumsy and coarse form of individual and social discipline, but sometimes better than nothing. As always (or at least as usual), everything depends on the circumstances.

But that’s a critical difference, I think. If Mr. Wright was only making claims similar to Sue’s (i.e.: the government is biased against the blacks) that wouldn’t be anywhere near as controversial as his unsubstantiated factual claims.

Indeed, this only strengthens my point.

My point was simply that we all make judgements about whether or not someone is lying, and to what extent, based on a whole host of factors, and that we may not agree on our judgements. Furthermore, I wanted to point out that this is especially troublesome when biases like race and sex come into play.

Hopefully that makes it clear(er)?

(ooh, just figured out where the preview appears. Sorry. First time posting.)

I think too often we conflate what people believe in privately and what they encourage others to believe in, or use as supporting premises for a public argument. I feel that it is important that we use a higher standard of proof when reasoning for public discourse, and that the standard should be set higher when we are speaking with more authority.

To return to my earlier example, I might use Sue’s lack of a raise as an example of why my friend, with whom I am on equal footing, should believe sexism exists. I would hesitate before using it (without further proof, anyway) as an example to a class of eleven-year-olds (not that I teach middle school, mind you, for which I give thanks), and I would certainly hesitate before using it as part of a legal brief (again, not a lawyer; thank God).

It is here that I think Wright fails my test of worthiness to be a pastor. I consider pastors as people who, when speaking from the pulpit, are heard by their congregation as the voice of God’s church on earth. I think they are certainly heard as people who have authority, and I think, whether it is merited or not, people tend to take pronouncements outside their field of expertise (which one assumes is theology, not the inner workings of government) as having more credibility than they perhaps merit. I think it is too easy for people to forget that pastors are merely human (which I took as one of the points of Obama’s speech) and that pastors have a responsibility as a result to be more careful when giving sermons.

And yet, I’ve certainly known “political” pastors who said things from the pulpit that not their entire congregations agreed with, and in churches where it was understood that you waited until the service was finished before you started yelling at him. I don’t know how many of Wright’s congregation debated him during coffee hour (do they have coffee hour? I’m a Lutheran; we joke that coffee is our 3rd sacrament). In those churches, it was understood that the pastor would make remarks that were sometimes quite inflammatory with the intention of opening up debate rather than closing it. I don’t know what the tradition is in Obama’s church, and I’m not prepared to drive all the way there to find out.

I’m willing to cut Wright some slack for being first human and second the pastor of a church with an unknown tradition, but I think he probably overstepped his bounds of authority, and certainly has gotten served notice that he should be much, much more careful in the future. It’s if he keeps employing this kind of rhetoric that I would worry.