For some reason, the immortal Andrew Klavan’s web site has been down most of the week, but I see it’s up again now. Here’s his report of his attendance at the Tea Party Patriots American Policy Summit in Phoenix.
“Now, this is very high-level intellectual material,” I told the crowd, “and I know you’re just a bunch of knuckle-dragging, Bible-thumping tea partiers who might not be able to understand its subtlties. And some of you may be asking in your simple, silly way, ‘Hey, what’s the difference between post-modernism and lying?’”
What, indeed?
A couple items from Joe Carter’s ever-interesting Thirty Three Things post at First Things blog:
Facebook Blamed In 1 in 5 Divorces in the U.S.
In the end, Facebook is a social tool. For single people, social networks can help them meet that special someone. Even for marriages, social networks can help further along a relationship. Just like with any other social medium, however, even the most innocent of intentions can turn ugly with improper use.
You don’t need to be a psychologist to realize that Facebook can accelerate the process. Stories of people whose marriages were destroyed by affairs that began on social networks abound on the Internet.
You know, I was a conscientious objector in the sexual revolution. Now I seem to be using Facebook and missing all the most… interesting stuff.
I’m beginning to think I’m kind of clueless.
Yoga Is Not As Old As You Think… Nor Very Hindu, either
The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the 21st century, is neither eternal nor synonymous with the Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It is a child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism, in which Western ideas about science, evolution, eugenics, health and physical fitness played as crucial a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive, multi-level hybridisation that took place during this period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were rationalised, largely along the theosophical ideas of ‘spiritual science,’ introduced to India by the US-origin, India-based Theosophical Society, and internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga renaissance.
In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised with drills, gymnastics and body-building techniques borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England, the United States and other Western countries. These innovations were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras—which has been correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as ‘the yoga canon for people who have accepted Brahmin theology’—to create an impression of 5,000 years worth of continuity where none really exists. The HAF’s current insistence is thus part of a false advertising campaign about yoga’s ancient Brahminical lineage.
Maybe those Christian yoga groups aren’t as dangerous as we thought…
I’ve had a couple pastor’s wives tell me they know and know of several men who started affairs on Facebook. It’s shocking and shameful.
Uummm… A few years back, there was some mention that the internet itself was responcible for 1 out of 7 marriages failing.
Then there was talk of photo porn you could purchase in some of your less reputable bookstores or magazine outlets causing 1 in 10 marriages to fail.
In the late 50s and early 60s, Playboy was a villainous marriage destroyer.
For ages before that, it was brothels in general that wrecked marriages…
etc…..
Facebook is just one more “modern” tool satan uses to screw us up and destroy our relationship with the Lord. God created marriage to glorify Himself. People should look at Christian marriages and SEE God reflected back.
I don’t believe God hates Facebook…I think He hates what we have done with it. He gives people incredible brains to invent and create such wonderous stuff… and then satan gets into us and we help him hurt the ones we love.
Before Facebook, before the internet…my pastor at the time had an affair with a woman he was giving marriage counseling to. The pastor gave earth-shakingly good sermons and we thought was the perfect husband/father role-model. The woman involved, we thought was having problems but otherwise was a really Godly woman/wife/mother.
The pastor and the woman decided to disobey God…all on their own…without Facebook etc….
God gives us free will… He loves us completely, without condition….but, oh! How we must grieve Him at times!!
I used to own a duplex 7 years ago. My tenant and his wife and two kids seemed like really nice folks. She left him for some guy on the E.coast.
All the way from Oregon to Connecticut…all in a chat room. Oh, how our friends cursed the internet!!! Later we learned she’d had affairs with guys at her job and in their church. But no one cursed her job or her church…hhhmmmmm……
As like the nation of Israel, we don’t ever seem to learn from past mistakes. When we ignore God, we sin. It is as simple as that.
I must be really clueless, because even after you’ve pointed out this trend, I’m unable to imagine what Facebook could possibly have to do with anything. Are people enjoying some kind of contact on Facebook that wasn’t previously possible with, say, cell phones and email accounts and, for that matter, old-fashioned letters? What’s supposed to be going on?
one of my points……. exactly.