Rethink Afghanistan: Christianity and the Global War on Terror
featuring Jake Diliberto and Glen Stassen
Thursday, Oct 22, 7:00-9:00 PM, Fuller Theological Seminary, Travis Auditorium
In light of the recent escalation of the US presence in Afghanistan, and the 8th year anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, the conversation has often evaded Christians. What are we supposed to think about the global war in light of our faith?
Jake is a Fuller student, and a decorated marine veteran of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa. His is a unique story of transformation from a maker of violence to a just-peace peacemaker. He now questions US military policy and the US presence in the Middle East. Jake has testified before congress, and is the founder of Veterans for Rethink Afghanistan,
an organization which has mobilized 20 million peace
activists. Come to hear his story, and why we need to rethink Afghanistan.
Peace and Justice Advocates will show a portion of the poignant documentary created by Rethink Afghanistan. Fuller’s Christian Ethics Professor Dr. Glen Stassen will offer a theological and ethical reflection on the situation.
It is always exciting to stand among a group of Christians who are seriously seeking a way to achieve a good end through nonviolent means instead of supporting violence as a means to that end or even simply accepting it as a necessary evil. More often than not, I stand alone. Even Anabaptists and Mennonites like myself (we who are the historical Peace Church of Protestantism) are divided on the issue. There are large numbers of Anabaptists who have chosen to follow Luther’s two kingdom
dichotomy in which YHWH has willed two different kingdoms to exist side-by-side (the church and the world), providentially ordaining that one should operate one way (do no violence or evil = the church) and one the other (do violence and what would be considered evil of a Christian in order to maintain justice and peace = the world).
On the other hand, even among a group of Christians seeking an end to war and violence like the one meeting this Thursday in Pasadena, there will be some who are there for reasons that I do not share, like, for instance, because they are leftist, liberal Democrats who are pushing their political party’s propaganda and/or agenda, or because they have false notions of social, religious, and political realities, or even, perhaps, because they are stirred more by emotions, guilt, and even false guilt, than they are by reason. Last time I attended one of these meetings, it seemed to me that frightening statistics concerning the escalation in major international terrorist attacks were being fallaciously shoehorned into a polemic against the U.S.’s support and use of torture instead of acknowledging the many other things that have contributed significantly to the dumbfounding rise in terrorist violence that we have seen in the West over the past decade. Hopefully, those attending the meeting this time around will be more willing to struggle with the truths of the matter and not what those in the group wish those truths would be.
I just got the news–my mother may be homeless, but now that she is, she is actually succeeding to do the one thing she didn’t do and believed she couldn’t do when she had other options available to her–she is actually fighting to gain back her life! Apparently, she has found an apartment she wants that opens up next Wednesday, so she may be out of her car and into an actual dwelling next week! I was so afraid we were going to lose her. Thank you to all who have prayed that YHWH would help her in this time of her great darkness. Please continue to pray that she will keep fighting to regain her life and that YHWH will make a path clear before her to guide her to her restoration. Praise be to YHWH!
Life. A gift from YHWH. But sometimes, to some people, it is a gift that they desperately wish could be returned. My mother’s is one of those. From the moment she was born, her life has only been one deadening and destroying tragedy after another. And today is one of those days where that tragedy cuts deep. For the first time in a long time—probably for the first time in her life—she is in a position where the only way for her to escape is for her to do something about it. It breaks my heart that my family has done everything we can to help her, but there is nothing left we can do—and if we continued to try, it would only make it worse. Now she is truly alone and facing the one thing she’s fled from ever since the beginning—her own life and what she makes of it. What she does from this point, we don’t know. It scares the shit out of me. She drove off in her car toward the coast. She’ll be sleeping in that car tonight. Maybe for many more nights to come. I don’t know. I don’t know if she’ll make it. I don’t know if I’ll ever hear from her again. I don’t want to lose my mother. I don’t want her to give up. I don’t want her life to be nothing but tragedy. But there is hope because YHWH exists. And there is hope because Yeshua was raised from the dead to prove it in his very flesh and blood. And there is hope because mom has reached the very bottom of darkness and despair–there is nowhere further to fall. She can lay down and die in the depths or she can fight until her last breath to make her way out. Please, YHWH, be with her. Help her to find a way out of the darkness.
For bucking the trend discussed below (Judging The Cover of Biblical Studies Books) by having some truly artful, inspiring, and beautiful covers. I just received their 2009 academic catalogue and you can tell they put a lot of creative time and design into their covers.
Why is it that so many biblical studies books are either banal or butt-ugly? The question is serious. What is the problem? For all their wonderful content, it seems that the vast majority of biblical studies books have un-inspiring, un-artistic, pathetically pointless covers. And the colors they sometimes come in can either hurt your eyes or your tastes. Take, for instance, the Hermeneia series of commentaries. Personally, I do not think there are better commentaries out there. However, you would never know looking at the covers. And woe be unto the person who takes off the cover! It seems the standard mode of cover-design is find some picture with religious imagery or a picture of a manuscript or artifact and splash color around it. Voila. An uninteresting cover that says religious studies oriented.
Recently, I purchased a few volumes from the Contexts of Scripture series (the replacement to ANET by Pritchard). A friend asked how old the books were. I told her they were brand-new. She replied that they looked like textbooks from the early ‘70s that her father had kept. I joked, only half-heartedly, that perhaps people who study ancient history are stuck in the past. If only they were! In former days, a book was not only a thing to be read, but it was a thing to behold. It had a presence and invited you to it. It was not just interesting to read, it was interesting to glance upon, handle, or display. Perhaps the beauty and detail of something like a Jerusalem Talmud from Artscroll is not possible or judicious when it comes to smaller paperbacks, but publishers outside of biblical studies have proven that they can sell good books that look good too. Am I shallow for thinking something like that matters? What do you think?
Or should I say enslaved?
California has now become the second state in the confederacy to stop interfering with people’s liberties and choices when it comes to adult consented union. Hurrah! It is bad enough that government has been denying people liberty of union, but it is worse that it has arbitrarily prejudiced its injustice against certain people—homosexuals. Finally the bigoted individuals who use power for oppression are being overthrown. It wasn’t all that long ago that a black person DARED to sit in a white person’s seat. And now homosexuals have DARED to step into a room of heterosexual marital vow. Thank God for their holy defiance. But there is still a long way to go! There are a lot more tyrannical, anti-Constitutional decrees to throw down before there will ever be liberty and justice for all.
As psyched as I am about this event, I have to wonder exactly WHY so many homosexuals are clamoring for marriage. Is it simply because it has been denied them? Do they see it as a ritual of the privileged or elite to which they no longer want to be segregated? Are they hoping the fight will eventually enable them to come full circle so they can turn the tables on their oppressors in retribution? Is it simply symbolic to them of a goal achieved and a tyrant overthrown? If the last—what a price! To gain one’s freedom and liberty of union from someone who doesn’t and shouldn’t have any authority or say in the matter and then to willingly and even intently seek to surrender that freedom and liberty back is ludicrous! Marriage pales in comparison with domestic union (or partnership), which all homosexuals have been able to do without prejudice and without governmental encroachment. Why turn down such a great thing? Why turn your back on a union that allows you and your spouse to decide for yourselves exactly what is and isn’t appropriate for you, decide exactly what you do and don’t want for yourselves in that union and (if worse comes to worse) its dissolve? Why instead let someone else tell you what your marriage is and what it is not and decide for you how it will be and how things will be if worse comes to worse? Why should anyone else have authority over you and your union with someone else? Isn’t that the whole point of fighting against a government that denies you the ability to make your own choices of union?
Well, if injustice is being overthrown, I am glad. And if someone chooses to embrace marriage, then I say so be it. Do as you will—that is your liberty and right. I support you in making a choice out of your liberty and right. But don’t think I won’t also hold you responsible for the consequences of your choice just as strictly and without prejudice as I do heterosexuals who have put themselves into that situation, reneged on it, and ruined families and lives cruelly and unnecessarily because they were not able to sustain and prosper an institution that they signed up for.
See Premonitions And Extra-sensory Knowledge Part I.
The final example of my experiences combines the knowledge of what someone is going to say with what they are going to do AND secret things they’ve done that others wouldn’t know. It is so incredible that you might not believe it. I still have a hard time believing it myself except that as a man of science, I cannot deny the evidence even if I have no way of explaining it. Real knowledge about the future came to me from outside of me in exacting detail that puts psychics to shame. I’ve only told two or three people of this event. The anonymity of the internet provides an opportunity to be more open about the embarrassing situation.
My first car was cheap. It burned oil and overheated. Due to lack of trust in my own transportation, whenever I drove on long trips to visit my family, I would pull into rest stops and let it cool down. At one rest stop, I pulled in, inclined my seat, and prepared for a peaceful and uneventful half hour. As I scanned over the dozen or two people going about their business, my sight fell on a man in the far distance. He was an average adult male. Nothing at all should or would have marked him out from anyone else. But the instant my eyes fell on him, a bizarre and irrational bundle of thoughts flooded my mind in intimate and exacting detail. The man was a sexual predator. He liked to watch people and masturbate. And at this very moment, he was trying to do so. Never in my life had I ever looked at someone—whether a complete stranger or not—and had any such thoughts. Why on earth would I think such a thing? What possible reason was there to justify it? It was ridiculous. I shifted my position on the seat, turned on the radio, closed my eyes, and tried to forget it all.
After five or ten songs, I turned off the radio, opened my eyes, and looked about. The man was gone. And yet a thought in my head said he was still there–back behind a certain structured and shadowed area where he was trying to masturbate. It was too dark, far away, and protected by various structures for me to see much of anything, but the thought in my head said he was there. It then came to me that because the man was failing to get off on whatever subject he’d chosen, he was going to walk right up to my car and ask me if I would masturbate for him.
I brushed these fanatical thoughts away, turned the radio back on, and let time flow over me. About fifteen minutes passed before I noticed the man walking from the area where I thought he had hidden himself in a direction toward where my car and others were parked. I watched him out of the corner of my eye while pretending to have no notice of anything or anybody at the rest stop. When he was close, he beelined toward my car. I fiddled with the radio thinking that if I pretended not to notice him, he wouldn’t take notice of me and just continue on his way. Unfortunately, he stopped right outside my door, leaned down, and knocked on the glass.
Maybe it was all just coincidence. I had no reason to think he was doing or would do any such things as I had. Perhaps all he wanted was to ask for a smoke. I cracked my window and tried to be civil. I said hello and asked how I could help him. He looked around nervously and began to recount a short story about something or other he was looking for. He stumbled over his words and stuttered a bit. After a few moments, he must’ve realized I didn’t understand what he was trying to say. He then took a breath and said, You are very pretty.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to believe. All I managed to get out was, Thank you.
He then asked me whether I masturbated. How was I supposed to respond to something like that? I thought, well, if everything I thought is true, I could try to subvert his impulses with a check to his conscience. I told him that I believed there was a God and therefore there were morally right and morally wrong things to do and that masturbation was wrong in many situations. He paused, licked his lips, and then asked me if I would masturbate for him. He quickly followed up the request by saying he would pay me $25 or $35. I told him no. He tried to convince me it was okay by saying we could go someplace where no one could see, that he wouldn’t touch me, that he only wanted to watch, and then increased his offer to something like $55 or $65. I said no, rolled up my window, started the engine, and pulled out without looking back. As I drove, I could feel my heart trying to beat through my chest. My body was quivering. For awhile, my mind raced with images of the event. I felt violated, humiliated, angered, and then began wondering if maybe I should have done something to report the man. It wasn’t until long after the event that I was able to marvel at the foreknowledge instead of the circumstances of it.
Addendum: While preparing the rough draft of these posts, I flew off to Chicago for vacation and family reunion. During dinner, out of nowhere and completely without suggestion or influence from me, an aunt on my father’s side raised the subject of having had premonitions. The conversation immediately caught my attention since I had decided to write on the subject of my premonitions two days earlier. I didn’t know that she had these experiences as well. She mentioned my dad’s premonition and jokingly suggested it ran in the family. Laughter faded as I recounted one of my own. Suddenly her suggestion didn’t seem so far-fetched.
Sometimes I see or know or dream things before they happen. When I was little, I called it deja vu. Since my youth, it’s happened often enough that I no longer take much notice and just shrug them off. The strange feeling of deja vu that accompanied the occurrences in the beginning is now long gone.
My premonition or dream experiences range all along the spectrum from small and insignificant to large and disturbing. Yet even the smaller ones have remained in the memories of my friends and loved ones. So far, I’ve had four different kinds of foreknowledge: dreams of future places or events, knowledge of what a person is going to say, knowledge of something that is going to happen, and knowledge of details in a person’s life that I have never met before and have no reason for knowing.
The premonition dreams are no different than any other dream. They come, go, and are instantly forgotten. They seem to have no correlation at all with reality. There’s never reason to single one out from another until I will suddenly realize that I have already been to the place I’m at or seen the event unfolding before me. The more recent the dream to the occurrence, the clearer my remembrance.
For instance, I once took a vacation with a girlfriend and her family to Lake Arrowhead. I had never been there before. When we arrived at the lake, we parked in front of a large lodge. As we walked the stretch of concrete between wooden pillars toward the doors of the building, I suddenly took notice of my surroundings. When we walked in and I looked around, I recognized the interior from a dream several months prior. The dream was fresh enough in my memory to recall significant details. I grabbed my girl’s hand and excitedly announced how I had dreamed of this place. I told her that in my dream there was a grand curving staircase that went one level up and one level down around the far corner where the building bent. We walked the length and when we turned the bend, there was the staircase. Of course, she couldn’t see that it was the same grand curving staircase from my dream—only A staircase. I then told her that in my dream, I had gone down the stairs and played on a pinball machine on the right across from the stairs. I was eager to see if what was down there. After all, it was a pretty decadent place–not one in which you would expect a pinball machine! What were the chances that a pinball machine was sitting in the exact place as I had seen it in my dream? My girlfriend didn’t seem as eager as I to find out. We approached the stairs, looked over the rim, and there was a pinball machine sitting up against the wall exactly where I described it. I wanted to go down and play, but my girl pulled me away and told me I was scaring her.
Other times, dreams are far removed from their real world counterpart. Recently, for instance, I attended an anniversary showing of a movie we’ll call 1968. Nothing about the place brought any recollection to mind like the lodge at Arrowhead. But after the film, circumstances changed. Several men who had worked on the film were sitting on stage being interviewed. I was sitting behind a man taller than myself. This was fine during the movie, since I had to look either up or straight ahead. But when people were sitting down on stage, this became a bit of a problem. Since I had an aisle seat, however, I merely leaned out to the side into the aisle. This gave me a somewhat distorted viewpoint, but an unobstructed one nonetheless. Suddenly I knew this was not a unique viewing. I had seen this same number of aged men men sitting in these exact same positions in that same kind of lighting before and from the same kind of skewed viewpoint. Unfortunately, the dream was too old to remember anything more than the sight of it. A similar occurrence happened when I was in Ireland with my brother last year. I was in a whole new world for two weeks (I had never been to Europe before that time). And yet in the middle of this grand adventure over the emerald isle, I suddenly stumbled upon a bit of the island that was more than familiar—I had been see it before in a dream. There was nothing about the place that would stand out to anybody except me. I told my brother I had seen that place before in a dream. I don’t think he paid it any mind and neither did I. We went about our adventure.
My father told me a story when I was young about how he had dreamed of an event before it occurred. In his dream, he was riding his bicycle down an incline not far from home. For one reason or another, he lost control of the bike and crashed. A lady who was driving down the hill saw the incident, pulled over, and helped him up. She opened the door to her car and ushered my father in. Although Dad doesn’t remember her face, he vividly remembers her car and the bottles of soda that were on the floor. He had to step over them to get inside the vehicle. The lady then drove him home. The events happened exactly as he had seen it. He was riding down the same hill in his dream. He lost control and crashed. A lady pulled up in the same car of the same color. And he had to step over the same bottles of soda on the same side of the car to get in as he had dreamed.
The amount a person is going to say does somehow relate to how early or late I know it. If someone is going to say a few words, it usually comes to me within a matter of seconds before they say it. If more is involved, it comes to me at an earlier time. For instance, I was visiting an aunt and uncle on my mother’s side in Fresno. I mentioned that I was thinking of going back to school for a Masters and was currently studying Hebrew. My aunt told me she attended seminary (where she met my uncle) and had taken Greek. She then said she couldn’t remember Greek anymore except for one thing… I couldn’t hold my tongue. I blurted out anthropos!
before she could take a breath. Her jaw dropped. She just stared at me, dumbfounded, then asked how I knew she was going to say that very word. I admitted that I sometimes just know what someone is going to say. She looked at me for a moment then asked me what she was thinking. I said it didn’t work like that. It came and went on its own. Over the course of the night and into the next morning, she continued to bring it up either to ask me again how I knew out of all the Greek words in the language which one she was going to say or to simply proclaim her amazement at the fact of it. It was no big deal to me. Just one instance of many.
See Premonitions And Extra-sensory Knowledge Part II.
Wow. I have received a lot of spam in my time. But I have never received a wantonly illegal phishing scam dressed in the name of God. And the interesting thing is that whoever is perpetuating this was specifically looking for people with a Christian faith who might be taken in by the false spiritual declaration and, naively, respond. Someone actually took the time to conjure all this up. If I ever meet the person who did this, I will kick them in the nuts so hard that they will have their first vision of God.
From Sister(Mrs).Mary Saleh
Abidjan Cote d Ivoire West Africa.
Dearest in the lord,
I am Mrs Mary A.Saleh ,from Kuwait.I am married to late Mr Jacob Saleh, who worked with Kuwait Embassy in Ivory Coast for Twenty-Six years before he died in the year 2003,after a brief illness that lasted for only five days…[more bullshit]…When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of (US$2.5M )Two Million,Five hundred Thousand United States Dollars) in a General Trust Account with a prime bank in Abidjan Cote d Ivoire. Presently,this money is still with the bank. Following my ill health, being a victim to cancer , I have decided to donate this fund to a Christain organizations (Church) that will utilize this fund the way I am going to instruct herein,according to the desire of my late husband. I want this fund to be used in Christain Activities like,Orphanages, Christain schools, and Churches for propagating the word of God and to endeavour that the house of God is maintained…[even more bullshit]…Please always be prayerful all through your life as well commit me into your daily prayers. Contact me on this e-mail address (DELETED), any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing another Church for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I stated herein. Hoping to receive your reply immediately .
Remain blessed in the Lord.
Yours in Christ,
Sister Mary Saleh.
-some spammer/computer fraud
In specifically New Testament terms, my top favorites are:
- Matthew
- John
- 1 Peter
- Hebrews
- 1 John
In terms of the Hebrew Bible, my top favorites are:
- Genesis
- Exodus
- 1 Samuel
- 2 Samuel
- Ezekiel
- Isaiah
- Psalms
Favorite associated extra-biblical texts are:
- 1 Enoch
- Odes of Solomon
- The War Scroll
