First Professional Sports Athelete that says He’s Gay

In case you don’t follow sports or you simply have not heard, the first professional athlete in a popular American sport has come out publicly and said that he is gay.

That athlete is Jason Collins, a 34-year-old man who plays in the NBA. He made his announcement to Sports Illustrated and it will be featured on the front cover of Sports Illustrated’s May edition. The quotation that Sports Illustrated is placing on the front cover, and the statement that has been quoted often by the media in reporting of this story is as such:

I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay. I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation.

Please keep in mind that last word of the statement, “conversation,” because I will return to this at the end of this post.

I do not want to comment on Jason Collins coming out and saying he is gay. I have written about homosexuality, its political status and the underlying issue of it already (https://churchandworld.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/understanding-the-current-status-of-gay-marriage-in-america; and also at https://churchandworld.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/thoughts-concerning-the-debate-on-gay-marriage).

But what I do want to concentrate on in this post is the response from the media and culture, for I believe it will help to prove what this blog has been saying about the social climate and culture we are involved in, a climate being forced upon us and our children.

Movie Commentary: Gone Baby Gone

The Movie Gone Baby Gone is a distinctly Christian movie, or to put it another way, distinctly Catholic. Though the Catholicism of the movie comes in the form of Roman Catholicism, it is not the distinctly Roman dogmas such as papal infallibility and the Marian dogmas that drive the religious and moral perspective of the main character. Instead it is the wisdom of Catholicism as it applies itself so readily to every day life and to situations that humans go through, that ancient wisdom of thousands of years of conversation, thought, action, doctrine, and life.

In a very real sense, the film can be characterized as ultimately displaying two competing moralities: a post-modern humanist perspective vs. a Catholic perspective. That is what makes the movie so intriguing. It is not blank evil against good, but  instead it is one way of righteousness pitted against another way of righteousness. The two different kinds of righteousness  that are placed in opposition to each other are a human-centered vs. a divine centered morality. In some ways, the moral systems of the film could be seen as a degraded Protestantism which has now boiled into a humanist secularism vs. a folk Catholicism that is seen in the young detective who may not be the most devout Catholic but who is obviously Catholic in his upbringing, beliefs, perspective, and actions.

Poem: Sangre De Cristo Mountain

I am posting today one of my poems. But I believe a brief introduction is necessary to grasp the atmosphere of the poem properly.

Matthew Arnold was an English poet who lived in the 19^th century. If you know anything about European and English history you would know that this was the time when the Industrial and Scientific revolutions were taking off and with this explosion of new society came more and more a rejection of traditional Christianity.

Arnold, living in this time, found himself in a unique situation. Raised as a Christian, he was connected to the older world where Christianity still held some strong sway among the masses and was the worldview underlying many assumptions. But he was watching this world pass away into a new society that he sensed rising up around him.

The Underlying Issues Concerning Abortion

In the last two posts I have outlined the legal status of abortion and the nature of the debate surrounding it. In this post I wish to speak of the underlying issue that concerns abortion.

The question that reveals the heart of this issue, the question that shows what the issue is really about, is a simple question: If there is any chance at all that the fetus is a living human being at the time of conception, how can this even be a debate? Prisoners can be some of the hardest criminals but there is one type of person who even they hate: child molesters and child killers. Children are always the first rescued in a situation, they are the most cherished when it comes to protection, and they are often the only thing that brings softness to even the hardest of men. 

The Debate Surrounding Abortion

I had meant to do only two posts on this issue of abortion, but this second post became so long I decided to split it up into two posts, which means there will be three posts altogether concerning this issue of Abortion.

In my last post on Abortion I outlined the legal status of abortion to help better understand where America is politially on the subject of Abortion. In this post, I wish to comment on the nature of the debate that surrounds abortion.

To understand any debate it is best to take a step back and really try to understand the position of both sides. When it comes to abortion this is even more important. Abortion is one of the most divisive issues in America, and each side is extremely passionate about their position and is in a state of war against the other. 

The Current Legal Status of Abortion

I wish to post two posts about abortion, just like I did about Gay Marriage. The first post will be merely giving the legal status to those who do not fully understand the legal state of abortion in our country. The second post, which I will do in a few days, will be my observations of the true nature of the issue from a Christian perspective. I hope this will be insightful to those who care about our woman and children in this nation and who want to understand abortion in a more holistic way.

Movie Commentary: Prometheus

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! To those who have not yet seen Prometheus, the following commentary reveals much about the plot, themes, and characters of the story, so you may not want to read on until you have seen it. And to those who have seen it, I would hope that this commentary would inspire you to go watch it again in order to think even more throughly through it.

The film Prometheus is a poor film for Alien fans who simply wanted a straight prequel with the same atmosphere, the same unexplainable and un-philosophical horror, and the same 70’s-80’s heavy metal like vibes where the female heroine defeats the evil with her inner Amazon warrior. For these fans, this film is a poor attempt at banking off the name of a famous franchise, when all the director really wanted to do is create a new and unique movie that really didn’t have anything to do with Alien save a few points of homage, the same homage that was paid to the movie Laurence of Arabia throughout the film.

However, to view the film in this light is simply unfortunate and short sighted. It is sweeping under the carpet a masterpiece of human creation and insightfulness. This film is much more in the league of an old classic such as Oedipus, or the ancient myth origins which go beyond some local phenomenon to speak to the grandness of the human narrative.

Auguste Comte- Part 2 (Humanism)

In Part 1 of this post I discussed briefly the beginning of Comte’s life and the philosophy of one of his main influences, Henri de Saint-Simon. In this post, I will expound on Comte’s own thought and then comment on how his thought has influenced the world ever since.

Comte would soon break away from his teacher Saint-Simon and would develop a much more systematic philosophy that would outline how this vision of a new society would be founded on what he called a “positive philosophy”. It was this philosophy, which is now known as positivism, in which Comte would have his greatest influence on those who would come after him.

Before we begin to look at what positivism is and how Comte thought it should be used to reshape society, we must understand something very important. For a philosophy to have any sway or power it must be able to explain history in such a way that fits with its own self-identity. Thus it must place an interpretation on history so as to show how this new philosophy fits into history and will work to create the future world to come.

Comte knew this very well, and this is why throughout his work he spends much time detailing and explaining why history was the way it was, why the problems that brought the French Revolution came to be, and how positivism would work to finally create a better world then what was before. This teaches us that there is a battle for the interpretation of history. Whoever gets to place their interpretation on history will be the one who gets to write the future. 

Auguste Comte- Part 1 (Humanism)

Karl Barth points out very sharply in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century that the charateristic trait of man from the 17^th and 18^th century is the Will for Form. What this means is that man had come to realize that he has the ability to form and shape his world into what he desires.

For centuries man had lived in preordained boundaries and roles. The king or some monarch ruled and the people were his subjects. The church said what was right and wrong and man obeyed, for the most part. Everyone had their roles and their economic and social place was decided at their birth. But suddenly, with the Reformation and the Enlightenment, all that had begun to change. And with these old structures and boundaries changing it was as if man had woke up to a new world and the old world seemed nothing but a dream. Suddenly man realized he could build his own system, create his own law, and make his own rules concerning reality. It is not as if these things had never been attempted and accomplished, but never had there been such opportunity to systematically re-shape the world as the opportunity that presented itself to the men of the 18th century.

Man was awake and he felt truly alive for the first time (so he thought), alive to build a new world after his own desires and not after forced boundaries that he had be forced to live under for so long. New theologies, philosophies, and belief systems were formed. New economic systems and ways of living were being tried and promoted throughout the western world. And all this would culminate in the American and French revolutions, which show an attempt to form and shape a completely new nation with a new political, legal, and social structure.

It was into this climate that Augste Comte was born and he would take part in this reshaping of the new world in his own way. His part would be to reshape society and the way people think about how to build and form a functioning society. His approach would be fairly novel and his influence on those who would come after him is clear. Many have called him the father of sociology because of his influence and thought. By taking a brief look into Comte and his philosophy, we catch a glimpse behind the curtain of our modern world as we see one of the wizards of Oz who has taken part in building the world in which we live. 

Jeremy Bentham (Humanism)

I desire to begin posting about Humanists, including various humanists and their influence upon our world, the societies and association they have created, and the documents and manifestos they have published. This will come in many formats and it will consists of many posts. To know that  a post is part of this series the title of the post will give the name of the subject and after will have (Humanism) in parenthesis.  I hope to someday expand these posts into a book that will be but a volume in my endeavor to teach Christians the true nature of the society we are in and the dangers that exist for our churches and our children going on today and going into the future if we do not respond wisely.

When we look to history we must realize that what we see are transmitters, fountains, and sources of thoughts, beliefs, and actions that have worked to shape and mold what we know of today. Concerning the Western secularism that we find ourselves engulfed in, Jeremy Bentham is a great conduit in which to understand our modern condition and dilemma. The reason it is particularly helpful to look for an individual figure is because often the one person will encompass in himself all the various strains of philosophy, thought, and actions of those who came after him. In our time of complexity, with so much information, looking at one man like Bentham allows simplicity, for in him one can see in one look what would take a scanning of a vast horizon of the modern world.