Month: August 2002

Check this out on CNN: A Pornog­ra­ph­er Hacks An Al-Quae­da Site. This is one of those bizarre lit­tle sit­u­a­tions in which some­one we thor­ough­ly dis­ap­prove of does some­thing we great­ly approve of.

Evi­dent­ly his exper­tise in run­ning a smut site was imme­di­ate­ly applic­a­ble to the chal­lenge of hack­ing a para­noid and ruth­less orga­ni­za­tion’s com­put­er. Mess­ner, using the aggres­sive tac­tics he’s employed to run his adult site, said he “hijacked” Al Neda for five days It kind of makes you won­der exact­ly what skills porn site oper­a­tors pick up… One more good rea­son to avoid porn like the plague–some of these guys are ace hack­ers!

I found the fol­low­ing excerpts sad: “I bought a dig­i­tal cam­era and con­vinced my wife to get naked for the Inter­net.” … His Porsche and its “WIVES” van­i­ty plates memo­ri­al­iz­ing his suc­cess in adult enter­tain­ment are, he believes, a tes­ta­ment that he and his fam­i­ly are liv­ing the Amer­i­can dream. And, in his own way, Mess­ner said, he is fight­ing an Amer­i­can war.

In the entire CNN arti­cle there’s not a hint of appro­pri­ate moral indig­na­tion that this man is both destroy­ing the sacred­ness of his own mar­riage and entic­ing men across the world to vio­late their mar­riage vows. I’m will­ing to bet that it did­n’t even cross the jour­nal­ist’s mind… *sigh* Does no one see how destruc­tive pornog­ra­phy is?

I ran across a very inter­est­ing rant com­par­ing Islam and Chris­tian­i­ty by a blog­ger I’d nev­er heard of called James Lileks (I found the link on blogdex).

At one point, Mr. Lileks iden­ti­fies him­self thus­ly I am a Deist, which means EVERYONE dis­agrees with me.

Trans­la­tion: a lot of his under­ly­ing assump­tions will dif­fer from yours, but you should still read the piece. He puts some very impor­tant points in a very direct way.

Here’s his open­ing state­ment:
There are two ways for a reli­gion to approach life:

A) Every­thing is per­mit­ted except that which is for­bid­den; over time, we work out the details as the sit­u­a­tions arise.

B) Every­thing is for­bid­den except that which is per­mit­ted, and we will work out the details in advance.

After an open­ing like that, how can you not read the rest?

(there’s a sim­i­lar dia­tribe at Lit­tle Green Foot­balls, although it’s not as reflec­tive it does have the virtue of a very active com­ments sec­tion)

I added this next bit on 8/9/2002
Ever won­der what an Epis­co­palian ter­ror­ist would look like?

Here’s an inter­est­ing tid­bit report­ed by The Wash­ing­ton Times: Thomas Jef­fer­son did not want a wall built between church and state. There are two books by two dif­fer­ent schol­ars ref­er­enced in the above arti­cle: Daniel Dreis­bach’s Thomas Jef­fer­son and The Wall of Sep­a­ra­tion Between Church and State and Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State by Philip Ham­burg­er.

Alan Wolfe, direc­tor of the Boisi Cen­ter for Reli­gion and Pub­lic Life at Boston Col­lege, is impressed by the new find­ings but doubts they can make a dif­fer­ence.

“I think it is ter­rif­ic schol­ar­ship, but I don’t think it can change any­thing,” said Mr. Wolfe, who reviewed the Ham­burg­er book and has sur­veyed pub­lic opin­ion on pol­i­tics and reli­gion.

“The ‘wall’ idea has tak­en on a life of its own and is part of our cus­tom and law,” Mr. Wolfe said. “Amer­i­cans love God and hate pol­i­tics, so they ask, ‘Why mix the two?’ ”

You can read some reviews from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press here and here.

Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine brought an unex­pect­ed arti­cle to my atten­tion. In Why We Need Hell, TooNewsweek jour­nal­ist Ken­neth Wood­ward argues for the impor­tance of Hell as an induce­ment for moral liv­ing.

This is a side­bar arti­cle to the main Why We Need Heav­en, which is a dis­cus­sion of the rival Jew­ish, Mus­lim, and Chris­t­ian per­spec­tives on the after­life and the way they impact the news.

I found quote par­tic­u­lar­ly amus­ing: (Speak­ing of the Koran’s promise of heav­en­ly orgies) Georgetown’s Voll doesn’t think that the vir­gins car­ry much weight with the Pales­tin­ian mar­tyrs; unlike the Ira­ni­ans in the 1980s, teenagers on the West Bank do have access to sex. More seduc­tive is that you would have “a house, reg­u­lar food, pros­per­i­ty,” he says. “You would have flow­ing water; some­one wouldn’t be bomb­ing your well. If you had lived with­out all that stuff for the first 15 or 20 years of your life, heav­en would sound pret­ty good with or with­out 72 vir­gins.” Hmmm… I’m guess­ing Voll does­n’t know any teenage boys.

And of course, Ernest Hem­ing­way wrote that he thought of heav­en as “two love­ly hous­es in town; one where I would have my wife and chil­dren and be monog­a­mous and love them tru­ly and well and the oth­er where I would have my nine beau­ti­ful mis­tress­es on nine dif­fer­ent floors.” Hmm… log­i­cal con­sis­ten­cy was­n’t one of Hem­ing­way’s dom­i­nant con­cerns.

The author buys some unfor­tu­nate inter­pre­ta­tions of the devel­op­ment of the after­life in Jew­ish the­ol­o­gy, and enjoys play­ing with the notion that both the sui­cide bombers and their vic­tims think they’re going to heav­en (and that their ene­mies are going to hell). Over­all, it’s a pret­ty inter­est­ing read (if not a good course in the­ol­o­gy).

Emergesque just turned me on to a great arti­cle about evan­gel­i­cals in acad­e­mia.

The arti­cles focus­es on the neces­si­ty of large foun­da­tions (espe­cial­ly the Lil­ly Endow­ment and the Pew Char­i­ta­ble Trusts) to pro­vide fund­ing for evan­gel­i­cal schol­ars (things like research and sab­bat­i­cals cost mon­ey!)

Some­thing I find pret­ty inter­est­ing: the evan­gel­i­cal schol­ars seem to be good invest­ments: “As mea­sured by schol­ar­ly pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, foun­da­tions sup­port­ing evan­gel­i­cal schol­ar­ship have received an unusu­al­ly high return on their invest­ment. A study by the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties found that 45 per­cent of their grant recip­i­ents had pub­lished books with­in six years of receiv­ing their grants. By con­trast, a study of schol­ars receiv­ing grants from the Pew Evan­gel­i­cal Schol­ars Pro­gram found that 90 per­cent had fin­ished their books with­in six years.”

There’s a relat­ed arti­cle from 2000 in the The Atlantic Month­ly