zoecarnate

A couple of tantalizing tidbits from the news this week, certainly not the most meaningful but definitely interesting.

Quoth Wired:

The recording industry and U.S. radio companies have squared off for decades about whether AM and FM radio broadcasters should pay royalties to singers, musicians and their labels. Broadcasting music without payment is akin to piracy, the industry says.

What?? And here I thought this was satire…Wired continues:

But now the debate is getting meaner; there’s more at stake as the recording industry seeks new income avenues in the wake of wanton peer-to-peer piracy and declining CD sales in part due to the iPod and satellite radio. A U.S. House subcommittee could vote as early as Thursday on a royalty measure.

Taking it to the House of Representatives? Yawn. C’mon, guys. Can’t you do something more, y’know, creative? Well apparently, yes you can!

On Monday, the recording industry sent the National Association of Broadcasters — the trade group representing the $16 billion a year AM-FM broadcasting business — a can of herring to underscore that it believes its arguments against paying royalties are a red herring. The NAB says its members should not pay royalties because AM-FM radio “promotes” the music industry. [Emphases mine]

Red Herring - get it? Well if you don’t know what words and colloquialisms mean, their next gift should clarify things for you:

The herring present followed another gift — a dictionary, a bid by the recording industry to explain what it saw as the difference between fees and taxes. The NAB describes the latest royalty proposal as a tax.

Those cads! A can of herring, and a dictionary? Could they possibly top those?

And two weeks ago, the recording industry, under the umbrella group musicFIRST, sent the NAB four digital downloads: “Take the Money and Run” by the Steve Miller Band; “Pay me My Money Down” by Bruce Springsteen; “Back In the U.S.S.R” by Paul McCartney and “A Change Would Do You Good” by Sheryl Crow.

As Dave Barry would say, I’m not making this up. Kudos to you, recording industry. While I find your argument (as I have most of your technology-restricting arguments since around 199 draconian and stultifying, at least you’re saying it with some real flair and panache. You can read the full article here.

Moving right along, when I read the headline (again from the fine folks at Wired) British Police in High-Speed Chase … With UFO, my interest was piqued. When I read the opening line,

In a close encounter with the future of transportation, a police helicopter almost hit what its crew insists was an alien spacecraft. And then they chased it. Seriously.

I wanted to say “Heck yeah!” and “Finally!” Something you probably don’t know about me: As a teenager I was a huge UFO and conspiracy theory buff. I knew a lot, then, about the state of alien abductions and UFO sightings ’round the world. As one friend in my house church community here likes to say, “You used to be cool, Mike, and into UFOs and stuff. Now you’re just into theology.”

Oh, how we’ve fallen.

So this article! The original, from the Telegraph, sez:

A police helicopter crew gave chase to a UFO after it almost collided with their aircraft near a military base. The pilot was forced to bank sharply to avoid being hit by the mystery aircraft as the helicopter was returning to the Ministry of Defence base of St Athan, near Cardiff.

The helicopter crew are said to have crossed the Bristol channel in pursuit of the UFO, but lost sight of it and had to turn back due to a fuel shortage.

I don’t often utter phrases like this these days, but those police officers are my heroes. Having the cajones to give chase to a flippin’ UFO is amazing. I salute you, Brittian’s finest! Full story here and here.

“Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation’s U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.” More here (AP)

Disgusting. We aided in executing over 100,000 civilians (quite possibly three times that)–including women and children–in summer of 1950, while ‘back home’ we were revving it up for the (supposed) Leave It To Beaver decade. Mass extinction, all because our peace-loving democratic ideals were ‘better’ than their socialist/democratic/communist/revolutionary ideals. Preemptive idealicide. Jesus wept.

Continue reading ‘America-Backed Atrocities in the Korean War Discovered: Troubling Questions’

You know you’re doing something worthwhile when all the right people are denouncing you.

A couple of weeks ago Herescope denounced Jay Gary, Diana Butler-Bass, Brian McLaren and myself, who will be hanging out at the World Future Society’s annual conference in D.C. We’ll be talking about “The Future of the Religious Right” and of global Christian faith in general, but the Heroscope team sees our work as promoting “new theologies and practices,” and “disparaging…of biblical prophecy.” Somehow, they suspect that all this winds up “creating an evolutionary convergence” where we all sing Kumbaya and venerate Gaia and Easter bunnies. As if that’s a bad thing!

Moving along: I’ve already told you the kind of flack The Shack has been getting recently with the heresy-hunter websites. Well, as Steve Knight reports at Emergent Village, now our ‘ol pal Mark Driscoll is in on the action too (you can watch his eight-minute YouTube rant on the E.V. link). Apparently he’s mighty uncomfortable with the sacred feminine, anthropomorphic depictions of God, and the idea of the Trinity (and thus, human relatedness) as mutually submissive rather than chain-of-command hierarchical. Sigh. Co-publisher Wayne Jacobsen blogs his response to the question “Is The Shack Heresy?”

Of course Frank Viola has had his share of critique concerning Pagan Christianity–not all from shrill heresy hunters, but certainly enough of it. Well, Tim Dale over at Karis Productions produced this pretty funny spoof response:

I have two observations about all the shelling and attack from this past month: Most of the people above are friends of mine, and for the most part, we can all laugh this off (in the cases of Frank and Team Shack, they can laugh all the way to the bank, as these books have really struck a chord with most readers and have become best-sellers)–even if we don’t know whether to laugh or cry sometimes. Others, though, are not so fortunate–heresy-hunters can cost people their livelihoods.

I don’t have the privilege of knowing Peter Enns, but his story has been all over the blogosphere recently. As Christianity Today reports, Enns has been suspended from his teaching post at Westminster Theological Seminary for writing his 2005 book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, which takes a hard look at the messy, complex, and human aspects of Scripture from an evangelically-informed text criticism point of view. The Board of Trustees said:

“That for the good of the Seminary (Faculty Manual II.4.C.4) Professor Peter Enns be suspended at the close of this school year, that is May 23, 2008 (Constitution Article III, Section 15), and that the Institutional Personnel Committee (IPC) recommend the appropriate process for the Board to consider whether Professor Enns should be terminated from his employment at the Seminary. Further that the IPC present their recommendations to the Board at its meeting in May 2008.”

I understand that confessionally Christian schools are not as enamored with “freedom of thought at any cost” like their liberal arts counterparts; I get that evangelical higher learning institutions are trying to maintain a precarious balance between intellectual integrity and nurturing creedal faith commitments. All the same, Enns is not Bishop Spong or something–he’s asking questions about Holy Writ that the rest of the Church (and world at large) have been asking since the 19th century. Like it or not, those who read and love the Bible are going to begin pondering its more troubling aspects with greater honesty and ideological flexibility.

Heresy-hunting is far from the world’s worst problem. (Next time, I’m going to blog about sex trafficking. Please try to refrain from throwing yourself off a building.) Nonetheless, it is a downer. As I mused last year, sometimes I wonder why I even bother participating in this kind of ‘dialogue’–it all seems so insular. Sometimes I just want to throw my blog into the ocean (so to speak) and becoming a wandering hermit…with my wife and child, of course. But for now, I suppose I’ll leave everyone with an easily-rebuttable maxim: If you don’t have something kind to blog, don’t blog anything at all.

Related:

Mike Todd’s The Shack Film casting call

John MacArthur launches Nothing Must Change tour

Heretic Hunter video

Brad Cummings and Wayne J have something constructive to say about all of this in their Doctrine Police podcast at The God Journey

…a picture says a thousand words, yes?

Really and truly.

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You tell us what time you would have wanted your email sent, and we’ll take care of the rest. Need an email to arrive 6 hours ago? No problem.

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No, of course it isn’t Google’s April Fool’s Day joke. Sigh. I liked Gmail Paper better.

Not to get too political here, but I think this is awesome:

“Town Clerk Annette Cappy stands in her office in Brattleboro, Vt. Friday Feb. 29, 2008, holding a sample ballot with an article which voters will consider that would instruct the town’s attorney to draft indictments allowing President Bush and Vice President Cheney to be arrested by local authorities for crimes against their Constitution. On primary day Tuesday March 4, 2008, its residents will vote on whether to issue warrants for the arrest of Bush and Cheney, should they ever visit.”

More here.

Glory be, my day of infamy has arrived–the biggest heresy-hunting ‘blog this side of Ken Silva has targeted little ‘ol me for witchery! Ingrid Schlueter of Slice O’ Laodecia sez that my main website, zoecarnate.com, advocates “cool new “Christianity”, including an ad for an emerging conference, and links to all the emerging sites of Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, and a host of others listed under the category, “Dispatches from the Great Emergence”.

Guilty! Of everything except being cool. (My wife will tell you that I’m a big nerd, and I still dress funny if she doesn’t have any input.) Continue reading ‘I’ve Been ‘Sliced! (or, when heresy-hunters attack)’

Hee-hee-hee. Courtesy of The Wittenburg Door. Serious commentary on Archbishop Rowan Williams, Islam, and sharia law in Europe from Alan Jamieson and Maggi Dawn.

I leave the Internet alone for a few hours, and look what happens! I go out for a meeting with my life coach, and some drive-by ya-hoo litters my blog with shallow, contradictory, and fight-picking comments. I’ve deleted them. But since you obviously love attention, oh anonymous sir (I’m almost positive you’re male), I’m going to place them all here in one place, so we can get a full dose of them in one sitting.

You call yourself “Me,” email address: me@me.gov And here’s what you have to say:

“Hey, my cousin has Synesthesia…how dare you make fun of this awful disease!”

–On Synesthesia

“Hey, your post makes heaven sound like the mormon heaven, so will we get as many wives as we want, or will it be like Islam where we get 70 virgins?”

–On Living New Heaven & Earth Realities

“I’m all for house churches…I mean, what other church would allow you to worship and smoke wacky tobacky at the same time?”

–On Our Composting God: Making Meaning of the Mess

“So basically, you’re saying that now you’re a lazy out-of-work crazy….but in the future, we’ll all bow down to you because of your immense intelligence…sweet, sign me up!”

–On My Career Now and in the Future

“Wow, I like totally agree. I mean, in 2025, I want to have bionic legs so I can finally dunk the ball. No wait, I don’t want to have legs so I can sit in my recliner all day, and have “An Inconvenient Truth” streamed into my retinas….what a sweet freakin’ life!”

–On A Typical Day in my Life, 2025

I’m so in agreement with you mike. Calvin and Luther and the whole lot of church fathers, all the way back to the first century even, were a bunch of hypocrites. I mean, we live lives that are much more authentic than they ever did. I mean, can we even call those monsters Christians? I mean, they formed the paradigms with which all of us view Christianity, what an atrocity! I say, down with Calvin, down with Luther, with Augustine, and Peter and Paul, and Jesus…oh wait, strike that last one.

– On What to Do About Unrepentant Murderers in the Church?

Ah, the prolific pen of “Me.” How he lacerates with his poison wit, so deftly handling sarcasm and the ideological put-down. Could it really be me? My self-loathing, sophomoric alter-ego, giving myself a well-deserved punch in the you-know-where? Am I going to awaken at the keyboard one night to the stupefied realization that I’m Tyler Durden?

I’m open to the possibility. For now, though, I have a more modest proposal for “Me”: You can say what you want on my blog…within reason. What you’ve said, though absurd and unhelpful, isn’t out of bounds. But you can’t hide behind anonymity…identify yourself. C’mon, fess up: Who are you, Me? If you don’t tell, and you leave further unsigned comments, your IP address is goin’ bye-bye.

So the other night I had a dream that there was a new commodity on the market called Intelligent Paper, an invention that did for books what Director’s Cut DVDs do for film. It was for all intents and purposes regular paper, except when you tapped a sentence–any sentence–twice with your finger, all kinds of little multicolored errata would pop up, like those old VH1 Pop-Up Videos, or the Comments feature in Microsoft Word. What would these “extras” say? Definitions of words, author’s commentary, you name it.

Upon waking, I was at first stunned at what a revolutionary invention Intelligent Paper would be. But then I realized that the new crop of electronic paper eBooks, and indeed the Web page probably trump Intelligent Paper in terms of functionality–it’s as fruitless as a visionary dream of 8 Tracks 2.0

In my dream I was passing a newsstand at an airport, and there were several paperbacks and comic books, available in two editions–regular, and Intelligent Paper! Was that a nerdy dream or what?