“The thing to remember about fathers is, they’re men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon–seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock–full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat - like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle it took such months to get. “

– Phyllis Mcginley

Change

A funny thing happened on the way to the changing room last night at Target. My wife had two pairs of jeans she wanted to try on. We were there with my one and a half year old daughter, and had spent the first half of our little outing chasing her up and down aisles of talking Elmo dolls and motion-activated cats; toy kitchens with more features than our real one; and games and gadgets so varied it becomes downright dizzying after a while.

In any case, my wife was ready to try said jeans on and suggested that we accompany her into one of the well-marked family dressing rooms.

“Uhm, I can’t let you do that,” the girl at the dressing room counter said, just as I was about to follow my wife into the dressing room, my 17 month old daughter held in a very obvious manner in my arms. It wasn’t as though we were two hormone-ridden teenagers, sneaking into the changing room to have a little fun.

And regardless, I imagine teenagers these days have many better places than public dressing rooms. We certainly did in my day…

There was a moment of silence as both our faces, I’m sure, took on expressions of surprise, indignation, perhaps even a touch of confusion. My daughter yawned. I’m sure that hint of anger blossomed on my wife’s face before my own, though we were all tired, at the tail end of our daughter’s umpteenth cold and what feels like decades of teething and nights cut into slivers shards of sleep. Indeed, sleep has taken on a new definition almost–has become some withered descendant of the glorious thing it once was. It wasn’t as though this little incursion into our normal shopping experience actually angered either of us. But it was annoying.

The girl stared back at us, and I pointed at the little icon of a man, a woman, and a child plastered in white and red to the changing room door and said “Then what does this mean? Isn’t this a family changing room?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t let you in there.”

“Why?” my wife asked.

“I’ve never heard that before,” I said. “We’ve been here a thousand times.” This may or may not have been an exaggeration. It certainly felt accurate at the time.

There was a moment of self-doubt. The girl’s face clouded over. She was younger than us. I imagine we both looked tired, too serious, perhaps a little intimidating. I had a particularly disheveled look to me, I know. I need a haircut. Sunday isn’t my best day.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay. Nevermind.”

At which point, I admit, I felt an odd mixture of guilt and disdain. I’m sure she was only doing her job–perhaps she was new–but then again, how hard can it be? There was a sign not two feet from where she sat that said “Family Changing Rooms.”

In any case, somewhat baffled, we entered the changing room and discovered to nobody’s surprise that neither pair of jeans was the right pair. Clothes shopping, it has been said, was the inspiration for Goldilocks.

Time

One thing I’ve noticed about having a family, or having a daughter now as opposed to being a childless married couple, is that not only is work more important and necessary now, but coming home from work is far, far better.

Nothing beats your toddler screaming “Daddy!” and running into the kitchen when you arrive, eager to show you a myriad things which she has names for only decipherable to herself and her mother. I mean it. Nothing in this glorious world compares.

There are the early mornings, too. The weariness. The effort and confusion. How can she be awake and so happy and energetic at 5:30 in the morning? How is this possible after waking up three times over the course of the evening? It’s not possible. It’s a dream…

But over a bowl of cheerios, her sippy cup, my black tea or black coffee, I know that there is a time for sleeping in and a time for being awake. I know that this time in our lives will pass so quickly it will be little more than a dream someday. I know this because it already is passing this quickly. I feel helpless against it, and that is because I am helpless. Every phrase ever written about the passage of time is a cliche, and every one is true.

God

And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

(Matthew 18:2-6 ESV)

I think it is a blessing indeed to be a father. I would not trade it for all the world…

~by Jillian Becker

I am a convinced law-and-order conservative, an eagerly practicing capitalist, an ideological libertarian. I accept enthusiastically the whole package of US Republican Party policy and sentiment - pro-America, pro-victory in Iraq, pro-gun, anti-abortion (with sensible reservations), pro-death penalty, pro-tax cuts, pro-smaller government, pro-spreading democracy and freedom throughout the world, pro-Israel, anti-welfare - all except one of its usual ingredients: belief in God. I do not accept God.

Quite simply, I cannot believe in God. I am old, past my three score years and ten, and decade upon decade I have read and listened, and there cannot be much that is old or new, famous, terse, verbose, smart, innocent, insidious, widely published or commonly uttered, learnedly debated or popularly discussed on the subject of God that I have not read or heard.

(more…)

Yes you indeed did read that correctly. I am an “appeaser” as that term should be understood properly from a historical perspective. So much hot air and verbiage has been spewed both over the television airwaves and in print this past week since President Bush’s speech before the Israeli Knesset which in most circles was viewed as an attack on the likely Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama that the time is ripe to examine that oft-maligned term and give it some perspective.

Most people associate the term with, of course, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s alleged coddling of Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler at the Munich Conference of 1938 that ceded the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany. It is suggested that in doing so appeasement of this nature invariably leads to destabilization and war in the long run as supposedly such men as Hitler are incapable of being appeased. In the debased culture of contemporary political discourse the shorthand is that any talks with unsavory regimes are to be eschewed as a sign of weakness. Conservatives of the stupid school (of which I count myself an opponent) of foreign policy suggest that appeasement is a peculiarly liberal (read: Democratic Party) tack that will leave America weaker. This is not only historically untrue it is also rubbish of the first order ideologically considered.

Leaving aside the fact that Chamberlain was a Tory British prime minister having succeeded the more liberal pacifist coalition government of Stanley Baldwin by pledging to do more to rearm Great Britain, the roots of sensible appeasement go back to the previous century and the inventive and productive foreign policy of another much-maligned figure Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich of Austria. Today Metternich is viewed by leftist ideologues as a reactionary and apologist for the ancien regimes of Europe and indeed he was “guilty” of the latter charge but that’s ignoring the landscape in which he worked.

Metternich’s greatest fear was that the nationalism unleashed by Napoleon’s conquests would result in a new nationalized Europe of perpetual war and disorder and as we have seen in Iraq, little good can come of disorder. After the crushing Austrian defeat at Wagram which ended the war of the Fifth Coalition against Napoleon, the newly-appointed Metternich had little choice but to appease Napoleon so as to preserve Austria to fight another day and this he did brilliantly first by arranging the marriage of Austrian Archduchess Marie Louise to Napoleon (thus giving the upstart Corsican an air of legitimacy by a tie with the ancient House of Hapsburg) and the Treaty of Schonbrunn which concluded the War of the Fifth Coalition while seemingly harsh for Austria preserved the Austrian Empire and brought a lot of unhappy German subjects into Napoleon’s orbit. Most importantly in positioning Austria as a future “armed neutral” juxtaposed between Napoleon and Russia he assured the greatest possible freedom of movement Austria could imagine at the time. And when Napoleon eventually overreached and invaded Russia and sealed his defeat and first trip into exile it was Metternich and Austria who reaped the benefits. Ultimately, of course, the endgame would play out at the Congress of Vienna that marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars and ushered in a century of peace in Europe (interrupted only by the Austro-Prussian War that would make the beginning of modern Germany and the Franco-Prussian War a few years later).

Now as we all know (or should know) the greatest American foreign policy mind of the past century, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was/is a Metternichian to his core having written his doctoral thesis at Harvard on the Congress of Vienna. Kissinger too was roundly condemned by the arch-conservatives who would later rally to Ronald Reagan for his policy of détente with the former Soviet Union. But here again one should examine the historical record. Albeit belatedly, Kissinger did succeed in getting the United States out of a disastrous war in southeast Asia and most importantly with Nixon opened the door to China as a counterweight to Soviet influence worldwide.

All of this brings us to the current contretemps. As Col. Jack Jacobs wrote here over the weekend both Obama and McCain are wrong. McCain is wrong to state that we shouldn’t be talking to the likes of Iran (which, in fact, we have been for some months with little to show for it as regards Iraq) and Obama is wrong to suggest that diplomacy in and of itself is likely to lead to salutary results. What is needed now is to identify our strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis our positions on the ground in the region and to enter into talks based on a realization of same while at the same time examining a series of points on which we might make common cause with both the Iranians and Syrians. That will be the subject of another essay I shall offer shortly on this crucial issue of the coming electoral campaign.

Author’s Note: While the views expressed in this article are my own I am indebted to my old grad school professor, Enno E. Kraehe, Willam W. Corcoran Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia, for many things including my understanding of this crucial period of modern European history and for imparting such pearls of wisdom that the Holy Roman Empire was not “very holy, very Roman or much of an empire” and that Frederick the Great is never referred to by that moniker in Austria.

TEHRAN — A man wrapped in a shawl stood at the door.

“This is Jesus,” said another man.

Jesus sat and peeled an orange as his companion, Nader Talebzadeh, began to speak, precisely, so as not to be misunderstood on a matter so sensitive. The Iranian director’s new film is based on the Islamic version of the life of Jesus, depicting the man Christians believe to be the messiah and son of God as a tormented Judean prophet foretelling the coming of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim faith.

One might imagine such a tale may not screen well in the red states of America. The film, nearly 10 years in the making, draws on the Koran and the putative Gospel of Barnabas, considered by many Western scholars a medieval fable. The premise of “Jesus, the Spirit of God” is that Jesus was compassionate and performed miracles, but was not crucified or resurrected from the dead. The message implies that Christianity, a faith of 2 billion people and the core of much Western philosophy, is based on a falsehood.

“I pray for Christians. They’ve been misled. They will realize one day the true story,” said Talebzadeh, whose film has been screened at international film festivals and is being marketed for wider release.

“People might use this film as a strategy to further demonize Iran,” he said. “They may succeed. But I hope once you see that the focus of the film is sacred, it will overwhelm. No one would have imagined that an Iranian would make a film to glorify Jesus.”

Not to mention an Iranian who supports President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and believes 9/11 was partly a U.S. government conspiracy. “Someone masterminded something,” he said. “And this is the cause for a lot of evil America is doing in this part of the world.”

There is another irony. The actor who plays Jesus, Ahmad Soleimani-Nia, once was a soldier in the Iranian army and later a welder for Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, which the Bush administration accuses of pursuing nuclear weapons. Such footnotes don’t seem odd when talking with Talebzadeh, who has kept Nia in Jesus character — flowing hair, beard, mystic pose — for seven years because he never knows when he might shoot new sequences for the film.

“Jesus, the Spirit of God” comes out of Iran at a time of hostile rhetoric between Washington and Tehran and a divide between Islam and the West that has produced jihad websites, DVDs on the apocalypse, editorial cartoons lampooning Muhammad and a recent Osama bin Laden tape condemning Pope Benedict XVI for a “new crusade” against Islam.

Religion has long been at the heart of tensions between East and West, but it is being swept into a wider cultural war played out on the Internet, film and satellite TV in which icons and sacred texts have been attacked and manipulated. A new Dutch film by a right-wing politician, who compares the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” depicts Islam as a violent faith. In response, a Saudi blogger posted a video suggesting that the Bible could be read as a document for war.

Talebzadeh knows that his Jesus walks on volatile terrain; one wonders, given the tenor of the times, how many fatwas would be issued if a Western director made a film suggesting that Muhammad, whose depiction is forbidden under Islamic tradition, was someone other than the prophet.

“There is so much wrong with this man’s understanding of Jesus and Christianity,” wrote an incensed Christian blogger, referring to Talebzadeh in a conversation about the film that is unfolding in cyberspace. “It’s another piece of Satanic propaganda intended to accomplish no meaningful purpose in this world.”

The rough, choppily edited $5-million film, condensed from a 1,000-minute-long series that will soon air on Iranian TV, reveres Jesus as a blessed prophet speaking parables and moving through soft light and angelic chants amid a ruckus of zealots and conspiring Pharisees. The narrative and dialogue are attributed to Islamic teachings and Jesus’ disciple Barnabas, whose gospel the director said was hidden by church authorities so as not to undermine the established Christian faith.

Scholars believe that the gospel, not included in the canon of the early Catholic Church, was written by others centuries later and ascribed to Barnabas. It overlaps with the stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but it does not present Jesus as the son of God. Barnabas’ tale resonates with Muslims who believe that it supports the Koran’s teaching that Jesus, though born of a virgin, was not divine, but one of the last great prophets. Talebzadeh’s film shows Jesus ascending to heaven before Roman soldiers come for him; Judas, the disciple who betrays him, is transformed into the likeness of Jesus and crucified. According to Islamic traditions, Jesus is alive and will return to defeat evil.

“Barnabas is a missing link the world is not ready to accept. It’s a piece of literature we should look into,” said Talebzadeh, a man with a graying beard who sat in his office the other day before a bowl of fruit.

Draped in a shawl and legs crossed as if in meditation, Nia-as-Jesus lingered behind Talebzadeh looking very much like a 1970s rock star. He was quiet, serene, a former welder with a thespian calling drifting between the Koran and the New Testament. He had never acted before, but his light skin and angular features mixed with Middle East repose conjured an aura of Western aesthetics and Eastern spirituality.

“I’ve never been able to resolve why I am so drawn to Jesus,” said Nia, a Muslim born in the western mountains of Iran near Iraqi Kurdistan. “It goes back to when I was a boy of 7 or 8. I saw a painting of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ and I identified with Jesus. He has always been with me. In my neighborhood, with my long hair and beard, I am known as Jesus.”

Talebzadeh grew up in Iran under the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In 1970, he moved to the United States, where he says he studied at American University in Washington, D.C., and Columbia University in New York. He witnessed a convulsive American decade of antiwar protests over Vietnam and the resignation of Richard Nixon.

For much of that time, Iran was a U.S. ally. That changed in 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led an Islamic revolution that toppled the shah and resulted in 52 Americans being held hostage for 444 days.

“I returned to Iran feeling there was a huge misunderstanding in the West about my country,” he said. “Iran was being demonized.”

Talebzadeh directed a number of documentaries on themes such as the Bosnian conflict and the Iran-Iraq war. In 1999, he began filming “Jesus, the Spirit of God,” which grew out of a passion that began decades earlier when he attended a school in Tehran with Christians and continued over his fascination with the purported writings of Barnabas.

“If there’s one thing in my life I wanted to do, this film is it,” said the director, whose Jesus movie won an interfaith dialogue award at the 2007 Religion Today Film Festival in Italy. “I didn’t say Jesus wasn’t crucified, God did. It’s in the Koran. . . . The film is made with faith. I tried to do it as beautifully as I could.”

He added that he hoped his 35-millimeter film would start a conversation between religions: “In the 21st century, the arts and the media have to create an area for more cordial discussions between faiths at a time when information is moving in the blink of an eye. . . . We should be joining people together, not giving distortion and misunderstanding. We have to say, ‘Have you looked at this door to know the truth about Jesus?’ ”

Some Americans have peeked through Talebzadeh’s door. He showed the movie to four audiences in the United States, and it was recently screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival. He said many people were open-minded and intrigued by the historical and religious questions it raised.

“The truth has a whole, different vibration to it,” he said. “If you enhance it with artistry, you can create a discussion.”

Not according to the website of the Worldwide Church of God in Fairfield, Calif.: “Attempts by the Iranians or anyone else who try to deny that Jesus Christ is the true messiah will ultimately fail. The Holy Bible confirms the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth in numerous ways, and no amount of filmmaking or lecturing or rhetoric to the contrary can defeat that fact.”

Nia-as-Jesus finished his orange. Talebzadeh, whose office was warm in the afternoon sun, kept talking about the film, about divinity, about how to capture truth.

He turned in his chair toward Jesus, and was still, after all these years, amazed at the likeness, the highlighted hair, eyes of fervor. He joked that he had been searching for his lead character for a long time when his assistant director spotted Nia on the street one day and said, “I found your Jesus.”

~from The LA Times

I just have to add that the preview for this movie looks so incredibly cheesy–I just laughed and laughed when I saw it.  Too bad Mel Gibson isn’t a Muslim–he could do this concept justice.  Oh my, oh my.

Seriously.

The debate over evolution has been going on ever since the concept was first devised by Darwin–even Darwin struggled with the idea of evolution, because it challenged his belief in God, and he was a deeply faithful man. Indeed, one of the reasons Darwin didn’t publish his Origin of Species was because of its contradiction with Christian beliefs.

Now, many years later, the debate still rages. (more…)

Christianity is a difficult subject for me on many levels.  I find it hard, for many reasons, to utterly abandon any notion of Christianity in my life–I am not a Christian, true, but Christianity’s roots are still very much a part of me.  I was raised Christian, and not in a fierce or fanatical way, but in a very deep way.  I think my recent study of Judaism has brought up many things in me regarding Christianity and Jesus.

For one, reading the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, the Torah, and so forth–I realize what the New Testament brought to the concept of God, at least for me.  The Old Testament is rather hard and cold–the Torah, though it is celebrated by the Jewish people in ways I have yet to understand, can be a very Commanding book, and very authoritative in a truly impersonal way.  Jesus and the Gospels brought a “closeness” and a warmth that the Old Testament doesn’t have, at least to me.  Of course, this warmth I speak of has also been used to create war and hate, but the uses of a Holy Text and the intentions of one are often very much at odds.

I find myself still trapped, perhaps, in the notion that the Old Testament just leads naturally to the New Testament–this is very ingrained in me, and while I have considered converting to Judaism because I admire so much the Jewish people, the intellectualism inherent in their culture and faith, I believe that this deeply rooted sense of the truth of Gospels will be hard for to shake–perhaps too hard.  The other problem I’ve felt lately with Judaism, is while they do not believe in Hell, there is still the notion of the “chosen” people.  And I think as a convert, I’d never really be considered “one of the group” as it were, and least not in the way I would want.  So there’s another form of exclusivity that turns me off–not Hell, but rather Life in general.  As much as I admire the Jewish people, I think I would always feel like an outsider–even if I was a well-liked, well-treated outsider.

So back to Christianity–I guess as I explore my spirituality I don’t want to limit the outcome.  I could never experience Christianity the way my parents do, or the way I once did as a child.  But there are good examples of Christians whose practices and belief appeal to me.  My mother-in-law is a good example.  Hers is a very personal, inward sort of faith.  I like that.  That’s one of the things I admire and respect most about her.  I also have read a little about Quakerism–and that also is something that is quasi-Christian but very different from the way I learned the religion.  There is something very appealing about Quakerism in its abandonment of clergy and mediators, in its mystical approach toward connecting with God.

Also, there is the notion of allegorical faith.  Many modernists believe in the allegorical qualities of the bible, unlike Evangelicals who believe it word for word.  Nevertheless, many modernists still accept that Jesus is the “son” of God; they believe in a place called Hell–and in the necessary “salvation” from this Hell.

The only way I think I could ever accept Christianity–perhaps the way that I do accept it–is with an interpretation that moves beyond the modernist/liberal views.  I think Jesus is a fine role-model, with a great deal of wisdom to offer, and a strong moral code to follow–and viewing him as the allegorical son of God is one way I think I can be at ease with the whole Jesus concept.  Nothing really proves that he wasn’t using metaphor when he spoke of himself as the son of God.  After all, most of what Jesus taught was in parable format–the use of extended metaphors was basically his very own Socratic method.

Regarding Hell, too, I think it’s important to think of this concept from within an allegorical framework.  First of all, most modern publications of the Bible no longer include references to Hell.  The Old Testament does not–so it is only sensible that the New Testament, birthed out of the Old, would not either.  Rather, the King James and earlier interpretations latched on to the very Greco-Roman concept of Hades, and translated that into Hell.  The notion of salvation, then, was also transformed.  Initially it simply meant closeness to God.  Jews believed in a very personal relationship with God.  There were many old, outdated ways (sacrifices) that they could make to apologize for doing bad things.  Here it is important to recall that Jesus was Jewish, though a very unorthodox Jew to be sure!  I think Jesus was simply trying to “modernize” or perhaps simplify the process, saying that all you need to do is believe to be “saved.”  This of course was later twisted into salvation from a Hell that had prior never been a part of either the Jewish religion or the message of Jesus.  Salvation was simply getting back in God’s graces.  There was no threat of Hell.  I believe there is no threat of Hell–only a life without God, or distant from God.  Salvation is, to me at least, simply a path to God and spiritual contentment.

So, to me, the only way I could accept Christianity is to view Jesus as a messenger who personalized the relationship with humankind and God–and used allegory and extended metaphor to describe our relationship to God as a very personal, even familial one.  Hell was a later invention, used to strike fear into the hearts of the unbeliever and “transgressor” and to make the concept of salvation more desperate, more essential, than it was ever intended to be.  Jesus was a reformer, trying to cast out old outdated methods of reaching closeness to God–his biggest enemies were the High Priests and the Tax Collectors, after all….

In this sense, I can see myself calling myself a Christian–one who believes in a close, personal, and individual relationship with God; one who doesn’t believe in the exclusivity of one man or one faith over the other (recall the Good Samaritan); and one who  disbelieves utterly in the concept or notion of a Hell that we need to be saved from–salvation, to me, is a deeply personal  thing, an awakening of our own inner spirituality  and our own  inner connection to God.