And this news story comes under the heading "Oh, for God's sakes" . . .

from cnn.com

Toys for Tots rejects Jesus dolls
POSTED: 1:51 p.m. EST, November 14, 2006

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A talking Jesus doll has been turned down by the Marine Reserves' Toys for Tots program.

A Los Angeles company offered to donate 4,000 of the 1 foot-tall dolls, which quote Bible verses, for distribution to needy children this holiday season. The battery-powered Jesus is one of several dolls manufactured by one2believe, a division of the Valencia-based Beverly Hills Teddy Bear Co., based on biblical figures.

But the charity balked because of the dolls' religious nature.

Toys are donated to kids based on financial need and "we don't know anything about their background, their religious affiliations," said Bill Grein, vice president of Marine Toys for Tots Foundation, in Quantico, Virginia.

As a government entity, Marines "don't profess one religion over another," Grein said Tuesday. "We can't take a chance on sending a talking Jesus doll to a Jewish family or a Muslim family."

Michael La Roe, director of business development for both companies, said the charity's decision left him "surprised and disappointed."

"The idea was for them to be three-dimensional teaching tools for kids," La Roe said. "I believe as a churchgoing person, anyone can benefit from hearing the words of the Bible."

According to the company's Web site, the button-activated, bearded Jesus, dressed in hand-sewn cloth outfits and sandals, recites Scripture such as "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." It has a $20 retail value.

Grein questioned whether children would welcome a gift designed for religious instruction. "Kids want a gift for the holiday season that is fun," he said.

The program distributed 18 million stuffed animals, games, toy trucks and other gifts to children in 2005.



I'm not exactly sure what kind of people would attempt to send dolls like this indiscriminately in a time when tension between Christians, Jews, and Muslims is at an all-time high, but I do know one thing: Whoever they are, they will probably claim to be persecuted for their faith.

Come on, ladies and gentlemen--we're supposed to be ambassadors of reconciliation, not insensitivity. If you are reading this and you were part of that project, then may I submit that it was probably blocked not because of some God-hating military officer but because God isn't interested in being any more embarassed by Christians than He/She/It already is?

Next time . . . send a bike and leave the dolls at home.

Recently, I wrote about ecumenicalism.

Fresh from the enthusiasm of a Buddhist meditation seminar I attended, I advocated (with the fervor of any devoted newbie) a point of view that, at my core, I don't completely agree with. You see, spirituality doesn't involve merely the communal (if it did, then we wouldn't see such an emphasis in so many religions on prayer, fasting, and meditation) but an individual search to know, at some level, one's creator. In essence, one cannot have spirituality divorced from identity, from the core truths of our individual beings that make us who we are.

Let me begin with a question:

Do you know who you are?

I don't mean knowing your name, or your social class, or what position or job you hold. I mean, deep down, when all of those things are stripped away . . . who are you? What do you value most in yourself? In life? In relationships? What makes your blood boil (or to run cold)?

What resonates with you?

In other words, deep down, when all of your relationships and plans and dreams come crashing down around you . . . what's left?

The most damnable aspect of this world is that it asks so many people to be something different than who they are . . . and one of the chiefest voices crying out for people to abandon their identities is religion. "In the name of God" has become the world's most destructive phrase, because it often accompanies the act of depriving someone not only of life and livelihood, but of who they are. And to lose who you are is to lose the only means by which you can walk in this world without becoming overwhelmed in its depravity, its cruelty, and its misery.

It is, in essence, to lose your own soul.

Those who lose their identities beyond the point of getting them back become ghosts, walking zombies unseeing and unremarkable. They do nothing, they accomplish nothing, and they are nothing . . . except breed others of their own kind (either by devouring or infesting them). Eyes hollower than the darkest night, they wander aimlessly, and despite their large numbers, they wander alone.

To know yourself, then . . . to really know yourself, is at its essence what it means to be alive.

During my first year at TCU, I read an op-ed in the student newspaper from a man who was in TCU's ROTC program. Among other things, he said that he wished the United States were in another war because maybe our citizens would become more united and more supportive of their government. (At the time, the government in question was the Bill Clinton presidency, combined with the Republican Congress that had taken hold under Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America.") This prompted a letter from me to the student and a rather testy exchange in which the student proceeded to use, of all people, his dad as a reference for his views . . .

It is 6 years later, the United States has entered another war, and I don't know if this man is alive or dead.



I remember the weeks after 9/11--I remember the prayer vigils, the atmosphere of mutual support, and the students who, for the first time in their lives, sang "God Bless America" without a hint of sarcasm. I remember the almost unanimous support of programs that have since become household names in our culture--Homeland Security, Condition Yellow/Orange, and "detainees." I remember the Afghanistan war and the outpouring of support to our troops as they fought (and won) a campaign that, historically, had proved unwinnable for any other invading power.

Then we invaded Iraq and found no WMD's.

Then we started hearing about Guantanamo Bay . . . Abu Ghraib . . . the secret prisons . . .

Then our list of enemies expanded to include names like Zarqawi and Nasrallah and Ahmedinijad.

Then, one by one, our allies began to fade away . . .



Was it always this way? Was there ever a time when Americans remained united behind a cause throughout the course of a long struggle?

I doubt it.

Lincoln, Roosevelt, Washington . . . they had their opponents, too--and those opponents did not just sit quietly and whistle "America the Beautiful" when the United States was enduring times of great stress and hardship. (Lincoln, in particular, had a great many enemies, some of them within the military . . . and Roosevelt was confronted by the NAACP during the height of World War II concerning the practice of racial segregation in the armed forces.) Did this criticism serve to undermine Presidential authority, however, or did it serve to challenge, and therefore improve our response to national (and international) crises?

This is a question I ask myself as I consider that young man's op-ed and our eroding national consensus on the war, the presidency, and overall values this nation should adopt. Personally, I think that vocal dissent--even forceful vocal dissent--is healthy and necessary, especially during the pursuit of something as important, arduous, and potentially devastating as a war. As a citizen, I think that a government that decides, in my name, to engage in a course of action that will place my economy, my acquaintances, and my honor in jeopardy cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed recourse to the necessities of war as a defense against critique.



Will we ever grow out of the idea that an America without dissent is an America we should support? I don't know . . .

All I do know is that the more corpses we generate, the more pieces of our national integrity we sacrifice, the less safe I feel.

Ecumenicalism--the term brings shudders to the backs of every hardcore fundamentalist (of any faith), and yet to me, what is more frightening is the chaos that can result when followers of different faiths do not talk to each other. The idea that I, or you, or any one of the two-footed, air-breathing, opposable-thumbed, goop--brained members of the human race can know better than anyone else in the world who God is, whether or not he exists, or what place we all have in the grand scheme of things is utterly ridiculous, and yet many people practice this fantasy as a general rule, unwilling to allow their prejudices to be challenged via open and honest conversation.

I'm not talking here about the rather fatuous argument some practitioners of ecumenalicalism have been guilty of presenting--the whole "what you believe may be true for you" line of reasoning. This argument presupposes that ecumenicalism is individualistic in nature and that (worse) religion and/or matters of the soul are to be pursued in a whimsical manner.

Neither is the case.

Let me ask you a question: Have you ever known spirituality to be expressed without some form of contact or communion between 2 or more people?

Case in point: Christianity's worshippers regularly meet together in groups for mutual support and for training in the art of listening to their souls as they relate to a Creator who became flesh, died, and rose from the dead for their well-being. While church attendance is considered optional within Christianity, it is a given that anyone who really considers and adopts the claims of Christianity has a need to find like-minded people to spend time with.

The same is true of any other faith. Buddhists meet together in groups, Muslims pray and fast in groups, and even Wiccans, pagans, and Satanists experience some sort of communal bond with others of similar vein.

So . . . how, in the name of God, could ecumenalicalism possibly be non-communal? The whole point of ecumenicalism is to bring people of different (even diametrically opposed) perspectives on spirituality together. It is, at its heart, a communal exercise, one inimical to the dismissive claim that one person's lie is another person's truth.

What this statement implies is worse than simple individualism--it implies that spirituality is something whimsical, to be pursued haphazardly. (Are questions of morality, origin, and destiny ever to be pursued haphazardly? Is finding who you are, who you really are, something you would consider to be a merely whimsical endeavor?)

What one believes is important--and why one believes it is also important. Do you believe in the God of the Bible because you came to that conclusion through a time of serious soul-searching and personal reflection? Or (as in the case of so many people who spend much of their lives in the same community) have your perspectives on God, yourself, and spirituality derived simply from the fact that "everyone else believes it, so I should too"?

If the latter is your story, then may I challenge you to consider dialoguing with people of another faith? I am not asking you to challenge your God, or your family, or your moral values--I am instead asking for you to engage in the kind of serious personal reflection and soul-searching that will allow you to arrive at conclusions (and, ultimately, a faith) that are, at their core, true, vibrant, and real. If spirituality is anything, it is the essence of something about which we tend to have little knowledge and no control . . . is it, then, wise for you, or me, or anyone to pretend that we have knowledge and control beyond our capabilities?

Can we, in attempting to justify our little perspectives on God, presume to be God ourselves?

This in essence, is the real reason why ecumenalicalism is important--it asks us to let go of the petty notion that we, in our finite consciousness, can "know" the "whole truth" about anything . . . especially the nature of soul, spirit, and being.

I am (as anyone who has read my now defunct Voice of Fort Worth blog can attest) tired of corporations operating as laws unto themselves--and even (it seems) as their own police forces as well. For example, anyone who has ever walked into a store with a perfectly functional alarm system and has been asked to leave their backpack and/or other belongings at the front counter anyway is perfectly within their rights, as far as I'm concerned, never to set foot in that store again. Furthermore, we have a perfectly functional set of avenues for airing grievances in the United States whenever this kind of thing happens--either to a customer or to an employee.

My recommendations (if something like this should happen to you) are as follows:

1. Start by filing a complaint with the company/entity responsible--at the lowest level of management you can. Work your way up through higher levels of management until you are satisfied that your concerns have been addressed. (And remember, while you have a grievance, you also have the responsibility to air that grievance in a civil manner.)

2. Sometimes corporations as a whole are unwilling to cooperate with customer demands--in which case, you should leave the corporation and/or file a complaint with the appropriate government offices against the company. (If you're a customer, this would be the Better Business Bureau, as well as your local area chamber of commerce. If you're an employee, this would be the federal Department of Labor and its corresponding state organizations.)

3. Sometimes (as in the case of the present decade . . . *sigh*), normal government avenues of complaint and redress of grievances are uncooperative or unresponsive, in which case, you are within your rights to file a lawsuit against the company, begin a community-wide boycott, or unionize and strike. This was the rationale for all of those student protests in the 1960s--that other avenues had been taken and that they had proven unsuccessful.

4 . . .

There is always the press--and Al Sharpton. :)

Today I read the headline story on cnn.com, yet another report of a school shooting . . . except this one was in a community closely related to my own (or at least the one I was born into). Amish and Mennonites are by no means one and the same (in fact, the Amish split from the Mennonite denomination because they felt Mennonites were adopting an attitude toward culture that was too liberal), but members of both faith communities have very close ties with one another--ties of blood and ties of community--and I am sure that the worshippers at my parents' church are very heartbroken over what has happened (and may even know some of the people involved).

This attack, of course, comes on the heels of another school shooting in which a man apparently molested 6 girls one by one before the police stormed the building--and a public scandal involving the actions of Congressman Mark Foley.



For me personally, however, the violence of the daily headlines only adds to the chaos. This past weekend, I received in my email (for the third time in as many weeks) a report of a female TCU student being raped on the outskirts of the university campus. No one knows the identity of the men who are responsible for these rapes (though the TCU police seem to have it narrowed down to two latinos in an SUV . . . which narrows it down to approximately several thousand people), but at a point when TCU's campus reconstruction efforts have torn up many of the university's lighted walkways, these reports are (for good reason) eliciting a lot of fear from the student body.

And what do all of these news reports have in common?

For one thing, all of them feature the same human response to pain.

It is not for me to evaluate the deeds, thoughts, and words of others--I am not God, and I do not even have the capacity to evaluate myself, much less anyone else. A man who forces himself on a woman--or anyone--for pleasure is certainly guilty of a greivous sin, against others but also against himself. However, this does not in turn allow me to pass judgment on him, to say that he is "wicked" or "psycho" or "a monster."

And yet that is exactly what our adversarial culture wants us to do.

Men like Mark Foley are all too often written off as "perverts," just as men like the school shooters this past week are written off as "maniacs," and the rest of us go on our merry way, never taking time to consider for a moment what deep social flaws might have driven these men to do what they did in the first place . . . and as "bleeding heart liberal" as that previous statement may have sounded to you, I want you to know one thing, ladies and gentlemen:

If we were to examine ourselves and our society for any flaws that might be contributing to the violence we see in the news every night, we would have the tools and the information we need to prevent it from happening again.



These incidents have something else in common as well: All of them reveal, to a certain degree, our unhealthy attitudes toward sex and sexuality.

I'm a big believer in the importance of love as a part of any sexual activity--I think that sex without love is a danger not only to the bodies of the people who engage in it but to their souls and spirits as well--but I also believe that in order to fully enjoy sex, one must fully understand oneself as male/female, or (more to the point) as masculine/feminine. We live in a society that does not teach young boys how to be men anymore, and this is a problem, because a boy who does not know how to be a man can be a very, very dangerous individual.

I wish I could give you a roadmap to cultural healing, to a place of reconciliation with who we are as sexual beings, but I am afraid that the ascendancy of a political-religious establishment dedicated to superimposing mid-20th century concepts of manhood and womanhood onto 21st century American men and women makes this roadmap impossible. What saddens me the most about these crimes is not that they happened but that a religious establishment bent on maintaining its hold on power will doubtless use them to justify its continued delineation of sexual "no fly zones."

Meanwhile, the pain-filled voices of victim and victimizer reverberate against each other in the wind . . . and we go on, pretending we can't hear them.

As I mentioned yesterday, I heard a radio interview this week on NPR--specifically, Fresh Air's Terry Gross interviewing the hon. rev. John Hagee regarding the formation of a group at the eminent preacher's San Antonio mega-church (which includes such luminaries as Mr. Rod Parsley) dedicated to influencing American policy in "support" of Israel. This group, as I hinted yesterday, claims that Christians have a biblical mandate to support Israel, and by "support," they mean promoting a governmental policy that, in opposition to 40 years of American diplomacy, would give Israel carte blanche to (1) toss aside 30 years of diplomatic efforts toward peace, (2) annex as many territories at it wants, and (3) engage in whatever military action it wishes in the Middle East . . .



I used to be part of the movement that spawned organizations like this one.

When I became a Christian, it was in the context of the evangelical movement that routinely spawns (and celebrates) figures like John Hagee--and routinely elects politicians like George W. Bush to high office. I was, ladies and gentlemen, a true believer. I listened to Christian radio, watched stations like TBN and Daystar, and enthusiastically bought evangelical literature, especially books devoted to "Bible prophecy" and the "end times" (indeed, I was an adherent of the Tim LaHaye/Jerry Jenkins school of thought regarding the end of the world and Christ's Second Coming--and bought a substantial number of their books).

What I began to discover, however, was that the point of view I was adopting (the rapture/seven year tribulation/armageddon perspective) was largely advocated by people who, for one reason or another, had no love for people in the Middle East who weren't Christian or Jewish. Moreover, there was no consideration for the God of Christianity's own teachings--such as "Turn the other cheek," "Love your enemies," and "Love your neighbor as yourself." None of the writing coming from this movement seemed to exhibit any consideration for the intricacies of ancient texts--in fact, it seemed to pull some statements (like the seven year tribulation) completely out of the air. (I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who spent your lives believing in a seven year tribulation, but having read the book of Revelation, I see no indication that what John saw happening in the future took place over seven years--in fact, it could just as easily been a period of 7000 years he was viewing.)

Also . . . to put it mildly . . . none of this ideology's most vocal adherents, to my knowledge, has demonstrated an iota of the care, love, and understanding toward others that would, I would hope, mark anyone as a "man of God." I've listened to most of these people, and it seems to me that they are, as a rule, more concerned with establishing religious/financial empires than in doing any kind of substantive Christian service. (Do you see any of them out on the street helping the poor the way Mother Teresa did? Do you see any of them abandoning tape, radio, and television ministries--and accompanying large salaries--to spend their lives working with people who have AIDS, or who are homosexual, or who have abused alcohol and drugs?)

What the Christian new testament teaches me--what Christ teaches me--is that without love, there is no credibility. Without love, there is no ministry. Without love, there is no Christianity.

If there is anything I can say about the so-called "pre-trib" school and most of its champions, it is that it (and they) lack love--love for the Arabs of the Middle East, love for the Israelis of the Middle East, and (to be quite blunt) love for the rest of the world, including our own country. I am not saying that al qaeda, hamas, hezbollah, and many of the other similar groups proliferating in the Middle East are good, or that they are freedom fighters, or that they care one iota about anyone but themselves. (Personally, I am in favor of every last one of them being found, tried, and locked up in the deepest, darkest dungeon on the planet--especially given their practice of targeting women and children in their so-called "war of liberation" against Israel and the West.) I'm saying that without love, real love, for those who are labeled as "enemies," no Christian theology, however attractive and commonly taught, is worth a damn.

If you believe--really believe--that you could be taken up to heaven in the twinkling of an eye, even while reading my blog, then what do you care about the rise and fall of nations? Shouldn't you instead be dedicating your efforts to helping those in need around you, feeding the hungry, giving warmth and succor to the sick and imprisoned, clothing the naked . . . the things that Christ taught you to do?

Do you think your God cares more about your vote and your political views than he cares about whether or not you gave someone in need a bite to eat, clothes to wear, or a warm bed?

I can tell you, my friend, that my worst fear regarding the "rapture" is not that I won't be taken, but that when I stand before Christ, and he asks me what I've done with the life he's given me, I won't be able to say anything.