Increasing our Capacity for love

"When apologists for eugenics discuss the potential for human engineering, they almost always mention increasing human intelligence, as if that is the most important human attribute. Funny, how they never discuss increasing our capacity to love. "

Wesley J. Smith in The Corner.

Six Frigates

Mrs. Islander, in a terrible breach of Christmas protocol, gave me the book Six Frigates by Ian Toll. I completed reading it yesterday, and I cannot recommend it too highly.

I am an Army man (Signal Corp, actually), and I don't really have a visceral feel for naval issues. But I have re-read C.S. Forrester's Hornblower Saga more times than I can count, and I am happily working my way through Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey Maturin Series.

In Six Frigates, Ian Toll covers the political and economic conditions that forced the creation and development of the US Navy. Into this setting he weaves the epic story of the Navy's actions on the seas, from the "Quasi War" against France, the war against the Barbary Pirates, and through to the War of 1812, when the US Navy did the unthinkable and defeated several British frigates in one-on-one battles.

This is a real, rip-roaring, salt-spray, cannons-thundering sea yarn that just happens to be true. Huzzah!

Scrubs on Abortion

I don't watch Scrubs, but all the cool kids tell me that it's a very funny and important (popular) show. So I was surprised to see this clip on YouTube.

The point I'd like to make is that I don't find this depiction of Jesus troublesome.

Congratulations to the producers and writers of this episode for taking on what could have been a flaming train wreck and making a well placed point. (Jesus doesn't negotiate.)

Weinsteins Return to the Trough

As an update on my previous post, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, and their distributor MGM's Harry Sloan are releasing a Christmas slasher movie. Apparently a very lame Christmas slasher movie. A remake of a 1970s-era slasher movie.

In light of their recent exploration of creating "Christian movies," there are two arguments to I anticipate:

1. Don't give box-office money to these guys. They deserve to go broke.
2. Pay to see their "Christian movies." They need positive reenforcement to make good movies.

I, myself, tend naturally toward argument number 2. But in this case, the Weinsteins have taken up a stick with a nail in it and beaten me to argument 1.

Hollywood Just Don't Get It

Here are two stories that do not bode well:

First, file this under the heading "HOLLYWOOD JUST DON'T GET IT" from Comingsoon.net:

The Prodigal Son Works at Ikea?

Variety reports that Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment have made a deal for Prodigal Son, a romantic comedy that Gigi Levangie Grazer will write with Mimi James. Brian Grazer will produce.

The story revolves around a workaholic single woman who is set up on a date by her mother. Her date, a handsome, kind and caring carpenter who works at Ikea, turns out to be Jesus Christ, who's returned for Armageddon and settled in contemporary Los Angeles.

"It's a love it or hate it idea, but we're not aiming to offend," Gigi Grazer told the trade. "He won't be having sex. It'll be a disarming romantic comedy, a story of unrequited love, sort of like 'Splash.'"

Yow! Is this the price we pay for the de-mythologizing of Jesus!? It may be 'way past time to retire the Jesus, My Soul's True Love-type P&W songs and return to Onward Christian Soldiers. This kind of stuff makes the GodMen thing look reasonable.

Brian, two thoughts:

One, Christians worship Jesus 'cause He's GOD, not 'cause he's the lovable home handyman*

Two: If Jesus is coming back for Armageddon, that's pretty harsh. How does he get by with hanging out at the Ikea? Doesn't he try to warn people of the wrath to come? Or is Brian's version of Jesus not comfortable with that whole "judgmental" thing?

Is this the absolutely lamest idea since Korah, Dathan, and Abiram called out Moses?

The second story is like unto the first:

WEINSTEINS COURT CHRISTIAN CROWD

Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who, while heading their former company Miramax, infuriated conservative Christian activists with films like Kids, Priest, and Dogma, have announced that they are forming a new company to distribute faith-based movies. They said Wednesday that they have signed a production deal with Christian film producer Impact Entertainment. Executives of The Weinstein Company also said Wednesday that they plan to release six theatrical films per year and an additional number of direct-to-DVD productions.

Oh, man. It's those "direct-to-DVD" productions that put the cherry on the Sundae.

Jeffery Overstreet describes some of my reservations:

Since the Contemporary Christian Music has done so much to sidetrack Christian musicians so their music doesn't accidentally end up in arenas where the world might hear it... why not create Contemporary Christian Cinema? That way, faith-related films can play to those who already agree with their messages, and to those who don't want to bother with the challenges of mainstream movies. Meanwhile, mainstream audiences can put even more distance between themselves and films that openly wrestle with issues of faith. They'll spot the "faith" label, feel a shiver run down their spine, and move on to something else.

Walls and boundaries. That's what we want. Neat and easy labels and categories. All the better for judging other people, for staying where we are, for complimenting ourselves on our choices.

Every group that is disaffected from the mainstream produces it's own art that speaks to those disaffected. This is not always a bad thing. This ghettoizing allows fledging artists to find an audience and allows unsophisticated audiences to find art that speaks to their exclusion from mainstream culture. This can nurture artists at the beginning of their careers. But ultimately it is a dead end for the artist and the sub-culture itself. It develops its own vocabulary and conventions, its stereotypes and bogeymen that those outside that group find more or less incomprehensible or excluding.

A sub-culture needs to speak to the mainstream culture and to do so it must speak in a way that is relevant and accessible to that mainstream culture. Artists need to avoid sneering at people who cannot "read" their art because that are not current on the sub-culture's shibboleths.

So, please let us have more Christians engaging in our culture, being salt and light; but please, no "very special" versions of Bible stories.

Two More Blows Against the Theocracy!!

*Hey, Brian if your Jesus hits his thumb with his hammer, what does he say?

2008 Timewaster

An electoral map that lets you pit leading Democratic contenders against a few Republican contenders.

I dispute it's accuracy on several grounds (it's 'way too early for these kinds of polls to make sense), but what fun!

I'll be checking back on this sight throughout the primary season.

Obama Fever! Catch it at Church!

I, for one, welcome our Democratic Overlords:

WASHINGTON — Famed pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren on Wednesday defended his invitation to Sen. Barack Obama to speak at his church despite objections from some evangelicals who oppose the Democrat's support for abortion rights.

Obama is one of nearly 60 speakers scheduled to address the second annual Global Summit on AIDS and the Church beginning Thursday at Warren's Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.

But seriously, folks, the idea of inviting Barack Obama to speak to Conservative Evangelicals is a great one. It allows those Evangelicals to see the man and verify that he doesn't have horns or a bifurcate tail. It allows Obama to receive feedback from a conservative crowd, which is much better for us all than for him to be stuck in the Liberal echo chamber.

The end result may be a contribution to the moderating effect in national politics.

Speaking of Obama, a great observation on This Week with George was the two possible effects of Barack Obama on the Hillary! primary campaign:

• It's terrible! He preempts Hillary's tack to the social center!
• It's wonderful! he's sucking all the oxygen from the room, snuffing out lesser lights!

I tend to go with the second of these perceptions, hence my prediction of a Hillary/Obama ticket.

Who Will Run in '08? Part II

Rich Lowry at National Review Online has a column on Barack Obama as the Anti-Hillary:

...After all this [hate for the names Clinton and Bush], who doesn’t hunger for a clean break? Thus the energy behind the possible presidential bid of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. He is the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement. And that is because everything about him says, “I’m not a Bush, I’m not a Clinton, and can we please talk about something else?”

It will be manifestly good for the country if it elects a president in 2008 who doesn’t elicit yowling hatred from the other side...

Hillary would have formidable assets in a 2008 race, but the timing could be against her. Maybe it’s too soon for another Clinton in presidential politics. On the Republican side, the most talented and accomplished Republican officeholder in the country, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is sitting ’08 out precisely because of the baggage that currently attaches to his last name.

At the moment, nothing but sweetness and light attach to the last name Obama. Skeptics note that he is a creation of the media, as if this speaks badly of him. Most politicians would spend millions and go through every exertion to be so created by the media. The more serious, related objection is that Obama has no record of accomplishment during his two-year stint in the Senate. There’s a political trade-off here, though. By the time he does anything in the Senate, he will probably be thoroughly acclimated to the institution, making him just as unappealing as the dozen other senators who consider running for president every four years.

The genius of Obama is that he has a pure liberal voting record — a 100 percent rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action in 2005 — at the same time he appeals to independents and avoids seeming noxiously partisan. No doubt, some of this sheen will be lost the day he were to announce for president. But it also reflects something real. Obama is willing to say that Republicans are wrong, not evil — a very basic concession that nonetheless takes some bravery in the blog-besotted fever swamp that is much of the left right now. He has shown that he can speak the language of religious believers in a non-focus-group-tested, genuine way. And he has charisma, an invaluable asset that can’t be bought or faked.

So, Obama looks good. But in my estimation he looks good for a failed presidential try--which is not a bad thing. Even a failed primary campaign will give him national exposure and let him step up to the ultimate big league of politics. Everybody on the Democratic side has at least one failed primary campaign (Kerry and Edwards have a failed general campaign behind them) except for Hillary, who has lots of experience with her husband's campaigns.

So here is why I said what I said in my earlier post on this topic: Hillary has the experience and resources, while Obama has the "juice." If they could reach a modus vivendi they could link the reliable donors of the Democratic party to the excitement that, frankly, grim Hillary lacks.

Who Will Run in '08?

Sure it's early, but that's OK. James Lileks has settled the question:

National issues do not have the usual appeal at the moment. It is hard to describe how little I care about presidential handicapping at this point. It’s going to be Guiliani / Rice v. Gore / Obama. Move along, please.

That's not a bad guess.

I don't think it'll be Gore, though. Maybe Clinton / Obama.

I'm just saying...

Duty to the Republic

I am a self-confessed Old Guy, so I like to actually travel to my polling place on election day to cast my vote. Today I dropped by on the way to work and encountered a uncrowded community hall, staffed by the lovely white-haired ladies whe are, to me, as certain a fixture of American Democracy as the Capitol dome.

So some brief observations:

When I showed my ID to the woman with the polling book list, I announced my address. The woman at the next table called out, "What house do you live in?" When I said that I was the next-door neighbor of G____, she said, "Oh yes! Your wife pet-sits dogs!" By our fruits are we known.

I was half-way through marking my ballot when a woman who had come in after me went up to the poll workers and started asking questions about the candidates on the ballot. They told her several times that they could not, by law, do anything more than hand her the ballot. I called out to her that if she was too confused she could just copy my completed ballot. That got a chuckle from the workers. They pointed out that copies of the the state-printer voter's guide were available across the room, but she dismissed them as "too complicated."

Finally this woman asked why her ballot didn't have the candidates Dave Reichert and Darcy Burner. (These two candidates have been flooding the airwaves with ads for the last three weeks.) She was informed that they were candidates for District 8 (which encompasses Seattle and the highly populated I-5 corridor. We were in District 2. This did not molify her, nor did it explain to her why she was not allowed to vote in an election that would affect all of Washington state.

God Save the Republic!

UPDATE: Let me acknowlege that Taleena of Sun Comprehending Glass called and offered to drive my wife to the polling place later today. She was also offering to baby-sit for moms that wanted to get to the polls. Large snaps to her.

LATER UPDATE: Here in Western Washington, heavy rains, caused by a series of low-pressure cells, over the North Pacific have caused flooding in Washington's I-5 corridor. I will be interested if this affects voter turnout in the liberal heart of the East/West Conservative/Liberal divide in Washington state.

Man, that Rove and his wacky weather machine!

One Cosmos

As if I didn't have enough on my plate, new books, articles, and blogs keep appearing.

A new read (for me) is One Cosmos, a very funny and almost surrealistic walk through the mind of a thoughful supernatualist.

So many words, so little coffee.

Build Your Own Theocracy

In a previous post, I quoted Rick Garnet on the conservative conspiracy:

...he can only report that they advanced their cause in those years by founding magazines and think tanks, seeking funding for both, associating with conservative forces within the Catholic Church, and forging ties between conservative Catholics and conservative Evangelicals.

This is all very cunning, I expect, but I believe the customary term for such methods is "democratic politics"

There is a very readable column in The Nation about Progressive Democrats trying to emulate this consarned, newfangled technique:

The time had come for the donors to think differently about how to spend their money, just as conservatives had done forty years earlier when they launched a counteroffensive against liberalism and pushed the Republican Party far to the right. The meeting was led by Rob Stein, a former official in the Clinton Administration, who'd spent the last year and a half developing a PowerPoint presentation vividly mapping the rise of the conservative movement. He'd convened the meeting to encourage progressives to emulate the conservative funders by investing in the "guts" of politics--leaders and ideas and institutions that would last beyond one election. A month later the Democracy Alliance officially came into existence, as an exclusive collective of donors and one of the progressive community's most ambitious undertakings yet.

So, are we a theocracy yet?

But, give them credit, Rob Stein and Ari Berman (the article's author) are aware that it's more than just the forms they need to find:

Almost two years along, the Alliance's 100 donors have distributed more than $50 million to center-left organizations and activists--a lot of money, yet still largely symbolic given the deep pockets of its members. Even as the donors pour millions into a new political infrastructure, however, problems have emerged that mirror many of the problems of the Democratic Party today and the progressive movement in general.

The first is determining what, exactly, the group stands for and wants to accomplish. Unlike the money guys who underwrote the right, members of the Alliance seem to lack strong ideological conviction about what the future ought to look like. And they do not have the militant perspective of outsiders eager to disrupt and overrun the party establishment. The right-wingers developed a core set of principles and stuck to them with an insurgent sense of persistence and aggressiveness. The wealthy liberals, in contrast, are still debating among themselves how to spend their money. Do Alliance members just want to be in the club or do they intend to change it? Do they want to stick with the party's stars--Bill and Hillary Clinton and their cadre of influential aides, who are preaching "moderation"--or are they ready to listen to new voices? Are they really committed, and prepared, to fund long-haul change?

So, is the Democrat's 2006 situation comparable to the Republicans back in 1964?

In 1964 the conservative wing grabbed the steering wheel of the Republican Party and swerved. They rejected the party's establishment and candidate (Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton ) and nominated Barry Goldwater. At the nominating convention, Nelson Rockefeller was booed when he tried to speak.

The conservative's reward? They took a monumental pasting in one of the most lopsided presidential elections in United States history. (Unmatched until Reagan swept 49 states in 1984.)

Conservatives saw that they were not connecting with the Main Street America. The institutions of communication (newspapers, radio and television) were either pro-Democratic or pro "Rockefeller" Republican.

So conservatives began to build the institutions that would allow them to speak to the American people. But they were not just trying to swing an election, they were communicating commonsense conservative ideas.

Of all the lessons from the right, the Alliance has forgotten arguably the most important: It takes both money and conviction to achieve victory. "It doesn't make sense to develop a strategy without a vision," says James Piereson, longtime executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, which was one of the key half-dozen funders on the right. "It's a mistaken analogy that conservatives succeeded because of our tactics. I always thought conservatives were successful because of the ideas we were trying to sell."

The final, most difficult lesson that must be learned from the Conservatives is that you have to distance yourself from your crazies. From the late 1950's, William F. Buckley and the Conservatives started purging the party of Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, and other extremist elements.

I don't think that the Democratic Party has the grit to show the Kos Kids and the 9/11 conspiracy theorists the door.

The Dramatic Reconquista

Wretchard notes over at The Belmont Club:

One of the more curious gaps in popular history is the lack of a first rate account of the Spanish Reconquista, the name given to the 800 year campaign by Christian kingdoms in Spain to expel Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. Writing a dramatic history of the Reconquista is hard because it went on for so long. So long, in fact, that both sides had changed character over the intervening 8 centuries, one side morphing from the tribal Visigoths to the kingly state of Ferdinand and Isabella and the other going through a succession of Islamic regimes.

There is, of course the The Poem of the Cid which I haven't read, and the movie El Cid which I have seen. However, the most exciting and dramatic fictionalization of the Reconquista I have encountered is The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. I wait eagerly for the movie version.

The "Come to Jesus" Story

Back in the late 1980s, there was a fascinating political indicator. It became very easy to tell which Republicans had presidential ambitions by listening to their "Come to Jesus" stories.

What I mean is, everybody on the Republican bench was going around Lions and Kiwanis meetings giving much the same old rubber-chicken speeches of yesteryear, but adding a section where they described the moment they had become "born again." It was startling to read transcripts of Bob Dole, Alexander Haig, and many more telling how they had (figuratively) walked down that sawdust trail.

Well, what is old in new again. John Kerry has trotted out his redemption story, and he's not alone:

Kerry is the third high-profile Democrat to give a reflective, deeply personal speech on religion and politics in recent weeks, following Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Robert P. Casey Jr., the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.

The addresses fit into a broader effort by liberal religious groups and Democratic candidates to appeal to religiously motivated voters in November's midterm elections.

I welcome this new thread of discussion to American politics. I only hope that none of these men develop a facial tic from frantically winking to their secularist supporters.

Specter of the Theocracy, Part VIII

Mirror of Justice, provides a snippet of an outtake of a review of Damon Linker's book " The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege."

...If I follow Linker's story—stripped, that is, of its bombast—it goes rather like this: There is a group of articulate and influential thinkers in America who believe firmly in liberal democracy and free markets and things of that sort, but who also believe that the principles underlying modern democratic order are derived from a long history of European Christian thought regarding human authority. They are, moreover, convinced that the notion of the inherent dignity and worth of every human being is grounded in something older than liberal tradition. They also think that an impermeable "wall of separation" between public policy and private faith is an extra-constitutional and misguided principle. They believe that the lives of the unborn ought to be protected in law, and that the Supreme Court's decisions pronouncing abortion a constitutional right are a collection of willful jurisprudential fictions. They regard the traditional family as a desirable institution, believe marriage to be the union of a man and a woman, and are somewhat anxious concerning the drift of modern culture towards an ever greater coarseness and ever more pronounced indifference to innocent life.

Now, whether one agrees or not, none of these convictions is, by any sane measure, "extreme"; they all fall well within one of the broad main currents of American political and social thought. Nor are any of the historical claims involved particularly fantastic (though Linker knows too little of the history of ideas to see this). Nor, surely, is it any secret that persons holding such views have supported George Bush in both of his presidential campaigns, and that some of them continue to offer him advice. Nor, as far as I can tell, has anyone among the "theocons" made any attempt to keep it a secret. If these men are in fact "radicals," they are far and away the most unadventurous radicals ever to have appeared on our political horizon...

When Linker actually describes the methods employed by the theocon conspiracy, it turns out that they consist principally in encouraging Christians to vote for conservative politicians who will use legislation, referenda, constitutional amendments, and court appointments to frustrate the secularist agenda. Moreover, though Linker speaks of the decade 1984–1994 as the period of the theocons "stealth campaign" to seize power, he can only report that they advanced their cause in those years by founding magazines and think tanks, seeking funding for both, associating with conservative forces within the Catholic Church, and forging ties between conservative Catholics and conservative Evangelicals.

This is all very cunning, I expect, but I believe the customary term for such methods is "democratic politics" (though I am prepared to be corrected on this)...

Precisely!

Bizarro World

I don't think I am alone in feeling that I have become trapped in some kind of Bizarro World. Three items:

• The Pope calls Islam violent.
  

• Muslims attempt to prove the Pope wrong by murdering a nun.

• Grand Mufti Sheik Mohammed Rashid Kabbani: "The pope's remarks emanated either from ignorance and lack of knowledge or were deliberately intended to distort Islam. Reason is the substance of Islam and its teachings ... Islam prohibited violence in human life."

Maybe the Grand Mufti Sheik could spend a few moments to condemn his co-religionists from murdering helpless women.

I really don't think that this kind of behavior can be accomodated. I don't think that you can blame the rest of the world for the loony, murderous acts of these people.

We must condemn it. We must not excuse it. We must not say that it is in any way justified.

Backlog

I'm having to mediate a dispute between Blogger Beta and the corporate firewall. So here are some blog posts that have been langushing.

The Work of Optimism

Of the anniversary of 9/11, James Lileks writes about the upcoming movie The Path to 9/11:

Just so you know: 9/11 reset the clock for me. All hands went to midnight. I'm interested in what people did after that date, and if the movie shows that before the attack one side lacked feck and the other was feck-deficient, I don't worry about it. It's like revisiting Congressional debates about Hawaiian harbor security in November 1941. Y'all get a pass. The Etch-A-Sketch's turned over. Now: what have you said lately?

And on pessimism in our culture:

The news is never good. If the economy's up, there's an expert on hand from the Institute of the Possible Downside warning about unforseen pressure on the bond market, softening housing, hardening tensions, turgid wage growth, and explosive release of inflationary pressures. Have a cigarette. Was it bad for you?

TV news gives me the same impression, which is why I avoid it. All those earnest faces. Good evening, we're deeply concerned, and powerless to do anything about it. Although we hope you infer from our brows the need to contact someone, and urge action on this issue. Now here's a baby giraffe.

The formulation seems simple: The continued existence of problems at this late date in human history implies that we're regressing. We're screwing up, we've lost it, and we wander confused amongst the morass of the malaise and vice versa. Hard times, brother. Hard times. I'm not saying they should pretend we live in the Republic of Happy Bunnies Who Pee Champagne, but for God's sake, sometimes you'd think the bread lines snaked from the Hoovervilles to the soup kitchens again. I'm probably confusing the sugar-coated recollections of early youth with actual history, but I grew up with a sense of optimism and confidence in the country. That really makes me sound like Mr. McFartus shakin' a whittlin' stick at the jaunty-hatted younguns, I know. But the icons in my dim early youth, either by absence or presence, were JFK and Humphrey. They weren't defeatists, and they didn't give off that rank stink of anger.

Of course, someone who's angry about different things is always unbalanced, right? I'm sure I'm regarded as a delusional tool because I worry more about Islamicists than global warming. But it comes back again to that theme I blathered about a few weeks ago, the idea of the eternal adolescent strain in American culture; to the adolescent, the cynic is the truth-teller. The optimists are the fools. (It takes an adolescent to think that people who believe in nothing are the best judges of those who believe in something.) It's all a pose, for the most part, but after a while it feeds on itself. Pessimism produces its own coal, stokes its own furnaces. Optimism is harder. Optimism takes work. You have to roll your own.

People don't seem to remember the gloom of the late 1970's when it seemed that we were trapped in "stagflation," suffering from malaise, and waiting for Japan to eat our economic lunch (cf. the book and movie Rising Sun.)

Into that gloom came Ronald Reagan. Admirers and critics alike recognized his sunny optimism. And that optimism carried him into two terms in the White House. Are there any Democrats lining up for 2008 who are optimistic? Heck, are there any optimistic Republicans?

Not Imperial Enough?

Wretchard comments on some re-thinking of the War on Terror:

The genuine tone of amazement in the WSJ is a reminder of how poorly understood the military role of the War on Terror has been, especially in Iraq... The point is that from the beginning the Administration's War on Terror was never primarily military; it was always -- even from the days of the First Fallujah campaign -- fundamentally a political war and continues to be to this day, as the continued existence of Moqtada al-Sadr illustrates.

...The military's prosecution of a politico/military campaign can be viewed as an attempt to compensate for the failure of other aspects of American power (diplomatic, development and informational) to project themselves into the field. It's a Band-Aid to compensate for the absence of institutions which America, if it were truly an imperial power, would have had. But America will never have a BBC, which was itself the evolutionary product of Imperial Britain. Yet America has its own sources of strength, including media industries which enabled it to dominate the popular culture of the world. The most serious question posed by the WSJ article is not whether the politico/military approach is the correct approach, but whether such a broad campaign can be prosecuted by so limited an agency as the US military without the rest of America's "soft power" behind it.

Perhaps we need to do is to go full-out Imperial and appoint some aristocracy. Hillary Clinton for Duchess of Bagdad?

Oh, Jeeze...

Via Day at a Glance:

Anglican dean compares terrorist bombers to the 'violent passion' of Jesus

The Anglican Communion - seen by many Christians as being a sort of Huffington Post of Christendom - apparently has added another clerical eccentric to its ranks. After a series of well-publicized rifts, including some led by bishops who deny the Resurrection and at least one who is a practicing homosexual, the latest controversial pronouncement comes from the Rev. Canon Philip Gray, chaplain to the Bishop of Blackburn, who compared the actions of the London tube bombers to Jesus:

We cannot simply ignore the violent passion of Jesus cleansing the temple with whips. We are never told of the collateral damage possibly resulting from his actions. In the Christian tradition we rejoice over the passionate commitment and bloody deaths of numerous martyrs.

We need to consider deeply the fact that the same religious passion and spiritual single-mindedness lies at the heart of a London bomber and a Christian crusader.

According to the Yorkshire Post, Gray's remarks appeared in the Blackburn diocesan newsletter.

It seems that there is no end of professing "Christians" who are eager to trivialize their own beliefs and the suffering of people.

I mean really. "Collateral damage?"