Lest Blood Be Shed

I actually watched some TV last night and I was fortunate enough to catch a documentory about Noam Chomsky on Free Speech TV (FSTV). The documentary, Manufacturing Consent, uses the title of one of Chomsky's books and takes a somewhat creative format in going through his life and ideas. Chomsky is a pre-eminent linguist who deciphered human natural language and was jetted around the world to accept prizes for his accomplishment. Everyone hailed him as a genius... That is until he started questioning and deciphering the results of free markets and free press being in the same bed. The documentary outlines how Chomsky's ideas evolved as he himself toured various countries being asked to speak about these ideas. I would do little justice in trying to convey his ideas without writing way more than I intend but the basics of his ideas are that the goal of free markets are to make more money, when you have corporations controlling media they will only convey "the news that's fit to print." Unfortunately the news that is fit to print is the news that makes the corporation money. Anything that disrupts this flow of money is an idea that does not get reported. This may seem innocuous until one looks at all of the news that is not being printed. There are thousands of people dying at the hands of the US government, multinational (oil) corporations, foreign governments, etc. The example they give in the documentary is that of the East Timor genocide. The New York Times only devoted 70 column inches over 10 years to the horrible human rights violations and genocide that was taking place there. Where not once did they mention the human rights violations or genocide. It may seem as if these ideas of a propagandist press are only recent (and that's what the press would like you to believe) but Chomsky was writing his books in the early and late 70's. He saw the dangers of corporate control of the media as a propaganda machine for corporations and those elite (20% of the population) who drive the path of western culture.

The thing is that Chomsky is still writing books. He is the pre-eminent lecturer in foreign countries and is on many TV programs around the world talking about his ideas. He is an expert that you will never see on the big news corporations because he is rocking their boat in a scholarly and rational way that cannot be challenged other than through silencing and defamation.

Have fun with Chomsky!

Recently I've heard and/or read lots of people attempting to confront socially constructed gender roles. In some cases they completely deny all gender distinctions. I'm wont to agree with some caveats. What I've been reading usually centers greatly around Galatians 3:28 though there are definitely secular sources for this discourse in feminist and queer studies.

It would seem in Galatians Paul is saying that in our baptism we lose our social identity as well as all the trappings that come along with that identity. This little discussion comes right after Paul rails against the Galatians for attempting to live by the law and not by the Spirit of the Lord. "Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law." It seems all Paul does in the follow verses is to take the freedom from the law to its faithful conclusion. It is not only that we are no longer under the "supervision of the law" but we are also free from the trappings of societal norms/laws. In Christ and in our faith in Christ we are no longer bound by nationality, class (cast), and gender. This is a liberating theology for everyone especially all of those in our community who do not naturally tend to a specific gender. How liberating it must be for a hermaphrodite or transgendered to hear these words of oneness and acceptance. Even a female or male oppressed by society's patriarchy can feel the freedom the comes from these words. Further, the queer community whom some would say are the antithesis of gender norms in our society today can claim (and have) these words as their own. Feminist theologians speaking to gender issues and patriarchy also have used this liberating theology to claim community when it is being denied to them. We are being called to live life without division or hierarchy!

Unfortunately, this liberating theology in some understandings has been taken to a binding theology. In what I find to more of a silencing of voice than a liberating of spirit, some have begun to claim we need what amounts to removing all diversity from our midst. Not only are we to remove our social gender but we are not to claim experiencing God in our sexual gender. This is more of an argument of whether we can have unity without uniformity. Diversity without division. I say we can! Our personal experiences of Gender do not need to be denied to obtain the oneness in faith of which Paul was speaking. The feminist does not need to deny his struggle with social structures that identify him as female and lowly. Neither does the queer need to deny her experiences as a gay male to obtain the community in Christ of which Paul speaks.

All of our experiences of God are valid and need not be denied in vain attempts at human effort (read the law) to bring about equality. If our focus is on Christ, all of our experiences will inform our faith and we will grow ever closer to Christ and in doing so we will draw closer in oneness . So claim your oppression under patriarchy and call upon us to focus on the equality inherent in creation, claim your oppression under social norms and call upon us to focus on loving kindness, claim your oppression under national/ethnic dividing lines and call upon us to focus on the dignity of every human being, claim your oppression under poverty and call upon us to free our hearts from want and greed for in all of this 'there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.'

Since December 25th at about nine in the morning I've been having some really strange requests to my blog. They are coming from literally hundreds of different IP addresses (all seem to be DSL ip addresses) but all requesting the same few pages.

A tiny white ghost
Human Rights Violations
A Funeral for the Iraqi Civilians
AYEEEE, So much to do
No Lazzies

The only constant (and what I'm using to send them 403 Forbidden messages using mod_rewrite) is the User-Agent:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)

I've done some checking and no one has anything to report as far as what these people are doing other than taking up bandwidth. Their User-Agent is prolific over the Internet. I've had over 2000 requests in 2 days from that particular User-Agent and they show no signs of stopping. I'm thinking about redirecting them here just so it takes them a bit do download the page but that wouldn't be nice of me.

The only thing I can guess is they are trying to scrape email addresses from my site. Bastards!

Salvation - By Duane Michals

I found this surfing the net. It's sort of how I feel about what the extreme right is doing to religion. They are robbing us of our most sacred grace... free will... with/in/for the Holy Spirit.

Tomorrow will have more light than today. The sleepyness of winter turns on its side and begins to wake. Slowly we shall return to life for we are not yet dead.

The employee Christmas party was this past Friday and it was a blast. What other place than Rensselaer, IN could you get krunked, get hit-on by a divorcee (all night), cut-in on the dean of students, get propositioned for a threesome in a residence for priests (by a friend's date), have five people (including me) get told to leave a room through body language (read: starting to having sex), and steal someone's bottle of Jack to end the night (sorry Phil, I'll give it back. I didn't drink any of it).

All that aside, other than the usual weekend stuff I have really been pondering the "bible question" I talked about recently. I really do think the bible is not the meat of someone's life with God but rather the salt to make the meal taste better. Personal/Community experience with the divine I would say would be the heart of the matter (and watch this I'm going to use the bible to support my conviction, is that a paradox?). Reading Acts 10 I am more and more convinced that the "written law" is no law at all. The bible that binds us should rather be the words that free us in love to discover how God is encountering us where we stand with our community.

How do you see the bible? Friend or Foe? Divinely Inspired Pure Words of God or Divinely Inspired Reflections of God Encountered? Something imbetween?

It was announced today that PHP (the stuff that runs the software I use to blog) is vulnerable to various "computer attacks." My favorite part of the announcement is that as a random example of who should be worried about this bug, the security team mentions the Serendipity software by name.

I guess I'll be upgrading apache+php (and I might look into a newer version of serendipity while I'm at it).

Yeah! Fun!

Updated 13:05 December 17th 2004:
Apache 1.3.33 + PHP 5.0.3 and Serendipity 0.8-alpha8 have been installed. The upgrade from alpha3 to alpha8 wasn't as smooth as all the other upgrades I've done but I think I've got it now.