I think abortion is unjustified homicide, but I’m talking about another kind of murder here.

“Operation Counterstrike” is a blog hosted at blogspot. Here is what the anonymous author advocates. He is commenting on the recent sentencing of Scott Roeder, the man who shot dead George Tiller, an abortionist who aborted very late term unborn children. Here is what this nameless person says:

Roeder’s conviction on a charge of first-degree murder is nice, but it is not justice.

Justice will be when right-to-lifers have to live as Dr. Tiller lived: behind guarded gates and bullet-proof glass.

Justice will be when right-to-lifers die as Dr. Tiller died: in their churches, by gunshot to the head.

Blogspot blogs have a feature that enables people to report inappropriate blogs, such as this one that, true to form, shows no regard for human life, advocating murder.

Please use this feature to report this blog. Once a few people report it and the administrators see what this person calls for, the blog wil be removed. Thanks. Let’s have this sort of thing cleaned up.

Go and do it now.

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As many readers will know, shortly after the earthquake in Haiti that did so much damage and claimed so many lives, Pat Robertson (a somewhat notorious televangelist involved in what has been dubbed “Word of Faith” theology) said something (I suppose I should say that he said yet another thing) that Christians in general didn’t think much of. His claim is that in history, the Haitians of the time made a pact with the devil to obtain freedom from servitude to the French, and that because of this, they have suffered numerous travesties since then, including this earthquake. Here he is in action:

Unsurprisingly, the response to this from the Christian community has been fairly negative. Christian theology just doesn’t teach this. The idea that whenever something bad happens to a person or to a group it is the result of a wicked thing previously done by that person or group is not one that you can find in the work of any major Christian theologian in history, as far as I am aware (I am setting aside for now the obvious fact that in this case the people who suffered and died were not even the same people who allegedly swore this pact – a pact for which there’s really no evidence anyway). For that matter, it is not taught in the Bible either. In fact there are passages in the Bible that directly deny this view.
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Each month I’ve been getting annoying emails from my existing website host telling me that I’ve exceeded my bandwidth limit. Most of that is caused by the popularity of the podcast, which is nice. But the upshot of my wild, out of control runaway success (as well as the all too frequent downtime) is that I have to invest in some upgrades. I’m about to change hosting providers, so the ride might be a little rocky over the next few days. Sit tight and everything will be back to normal soon!

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A friend of mine made an interesting comment to me lately about this blog. His room-mate had read some of what is here (in fact he could be reading this right now!), and he told my friend something to the effect of “this guy says things that you have to be a tenured lecturer to get away with saying!”

It’s probable that he didn’t mean everything that I’m about to say, but that comment – and other quite different comments as well – make me think about the kinds of things I write about, and also about the reactions I get to them. I think it’s fair comment to say that as someone who wants people to realise that I am quite self consciously a conservative evangelical, and as a person who does not as yet have the protection of a secure teaching job, I take a few risks. If I do, then I don’t do it deliberately, but I probably do it. Warning, the following is a bit of a rant, but it’s something I’m a bit passionate about, and hey this is my blog, I’ll post whatever I like.
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Back in June 2009 I explained that I am not an inerrantist. In response to some initial (but, I think, quite mistaken) criticisms of my comments there, I said in November, “You heard me right the first time, I am not an inerrantist.” I then added some historical perspective to what I was saying with a blog post called “Errantly Assuming Inerrancy in History,” where I discussed the way in which a number of important theologians in history spoke about Scripture, which would be more than enough to make modern inerrantists uncomfortable. In a nutshell, in these blog entries I explained that I think that while inerrancy is false and that I do actually think the biblical writers expressed some false scientific assumptions and may have made minor mistakes on the finer details of history, geography and minor errors like citation errors, the message expressed in the Bible is the very word of God who is infallible, and every part of that message is correct.

Assuming it’s true that great minds think alike, it’s encouraging to see great minds agreeing with what I say, so I welcomed the chance to read Matt Flannagan’s thoughts here, where he summed up and affirmed my view that “one can affirm the authority of the bible, even the claim that it is infallible in what it teaches, without affirming that it is inerrant, in the sense of containing no errors.” Have a look, I think it’s definitely worth reading (naturally, the fact that we agree has nothing to do with it ).

To be fair, Matt himself did not, in that piece, deny or affirm inerrancy. My position, as I have always made clear, is that inerrancy is false at face value, and if it is qualified to the point where it starts to look plausible, then the one who holds it has to allow for so much error that it’s pointless to use the label “inerrancy” at all because it is misleading.

In spite of the positive response I have seen from very committed and very conservative Christians like me, the negative reaction has not stopped. In a sense I don’t mind this. Those who are firmly committed to a strict doctrine of inerrancy will, initially at least, disagree and react strongly to what I have said. This opens up the possibility of discussing the issue with them, and exposes the issue to a wider audience. That’s a good thing. But I do think that those responses often warrant a response, and at times some sort of corrective as well when they go too far in their critique and step into unfairness or misrepresentation, an inevitable feature of human disagreement it seems.

Recently Jeremy Pierce at the Evangel blog (hosted by First Things) blogged on a blog on a blog (and now I’m blogging on his blog). In a blog entry called “Basic Inerrancy,” he blogged on Matt’s article, who had in turn blogged on what I said earlier. Interestingly, although I took Matt to basically share my view, Jeremy says “I actually agree with much of what Matt says,” while saying of my piece, “There are so many things I disagree with in [Glenn's] post that it was very hard to pull myself away from my desire to write a detailed response, but I didn’t have the time.” Ah well. But I want to draw attention to the way that Jeremy criticises the position I outlined.
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Mainstream New Testament scholarship on the Gospels is considerably more conservative than it was, say, forty years ago (or thirty, or perhaps even twenty). For example, the greater number of New Testament critics seemed to agree as a kind of in-house duty that the Gospels were written late in the first century – the later the better, and if you can find a way of saying that they weren’t finished until the second century, even better! The centre of what is “mainstream” has moved a long way since then. Now, voices like those of Bart Ehrman or the Jesus Seminar have been nudged well and truly to the fringes, well-known now more as curiosities than as sources of sober minded scholarship, and it is voices like N. T. Wright, Craig Evans and Richard Bauckham that are setting the pace. Much of the extraordinary scepticism and radical reconstruction of first century Christianity is now seen as simply unwarranted.

But I digress (I got distracted by a certain sense of satisfaction with the sea change that the world of biblical studies has seen). Even those with outdated and extraordinarily sceptical approaches to New Testament studies acknowledge the relatively early date of authorship of the letters written by the Apostle Paul. The first epistle to the Corinthians was composed in the mid fifties, around twenty-five years after the crucifixion. From reading through the letter you can see that one of the theological issues that the church in Corinth was struggling with was scepticism over the resurrection.
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David Gleeson over at exchristian.net wants to correct common misconceptions about atheism. Unfortunately he ends up perpetuating a major misconception of his own, and also messes up a little Greek. Commenting on the very first alleged misconception, he says:

1. Atheism is the belief that no gods exist.

This statement’s ubiquity is exceeded only by its utter falseness; not only is it misleading, but it is the complete opposite of the truth.

The word ‘atheism’ comes from the Greek prefix ‘a’, meaning without, and ‘theist’, meaning having a belief in a supernatural deity. Atheism, therefore, literally means “without theistic belief”. Atheism does not positively assert anything; rather, it is a statement of withheld belief.

Atheists, therefore, do not positively assert that gods do not exist. Atheists simply withhold belief in said gods because the evidence is not sufficient to warrant the belief. This is not to say that there isn’t sufficient reason to believe that certain gods do not exist. There is. But to categorically deny the existence of all gods would require a leap of faith that is anathema to a true atheist. Atheism requires no such leap.

I’ll start with the way that the writer gets his Greek wrong.
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I got an email from a reader named Kristina. She’s a freelance writer here in New Zealand and she’s conducting a survey on church experiences, hoping to publish the result in one of the New Zealand Christian magazines. She’s asked me to pass on her invitation to take part, and here it is:

If you are a Christian, please fill in this simple survey to help gather information about our current Church experiences. The information is annonymous and will be used as research for an article that will be published:

http://www.surveybob.com/surveybob/s/ca717cef-badd-41ea-bbc6-99027342c39a.html

I’m taking part in the survey today.

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To borrow and misapply the words of the Apostle Paul, “I am in a strait betwixt the two!” I’ve been reading through Gary Olson’s recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “It is who you know and who knows you.” What he had to say in that piece resonates with me. Here’s an excerpt:

… I was reminded of an odd paradox of academic life: Faculty members are expected to become world renowned in their disciplines and well respected within their institutions, yet are also expected to avoid appearing to be self-promoting or, worse, boastful. In fact, many professors overcorrect by adopting a false humility—feigning, for example, not to want a particular award, honor, or position when the exact opposite is the case.

Apparently, this stance is so much a part of our collective DNA that it begins even before we become faculty members. Learning to network early in your career is one way to increase the likelihood that you will be successful in academe. I routinely advise new scholars that networking—forming professional relationships with other scholars in a field—is an important way to help build their credentials. I have spent three decades serving as a mentor for doctoral students and junior faculty members, and yet I am continually surprised to hear them dismiss networking as a clear form of self-promotion.

At workshops when I mention networking, someone inevitably blurts out, “Aha! Just as I thought: It’s who you know that counts!” The implication is that, somehow, that system is corrupt and people are rewarded or advanced based principally on favoritism and personal relationships, not on intrinsic merit.

My standard reply is, “Of course it’s who you know. How could it be otherwise? If no one knows you exist, how can you expect you and your work to be ‘known’? Networking is the way you become known, and recognized, in your discipline.”

Clearly, some people have confused the important work of promoting your ideas and research with a kind of fatuous promotion of self. Promoting yourself (“Look how great I am”) is different from promoting your scholarship (“Here’s what my research has discovered” or “Here’s what I’ve been working on lately”). Central to the research endeavor is the desire to disseminate the results of your scholarship widely, and while interesting or groundbreaking research will certainly reflect well on the researcher, the focus should be on the former.

Head on over to the Chronicle’s website and read the entire article, it’s well worth the few minutes it takes. He concludes by saying: “Sure a few academicians go too far in the self-promotion department. But being too shy may well hold back your progress in becoming a player in the discipline. In short, it is who you know (and who knows you) that counts—but that’s a good thing.”

OK, so not everything he says there applies to me because alas, I am not a faculty member. But the kind of tension that the author refers to is one that I do grapple with. I can’t help but feel that – especially as someone who wants to display Christian character as best I can – I don’t want to emphasise my own merits or sing my own praises. It just feels wrong and alien to me. And yet, the very nature of what I want to do – namely to get ahead and actually break into professional academia – requires that I do just that. I know of nobody else in New Zealand who tackles the (specific) issues that I do in the whole area of religious convictions in political philosophy. Does that mean I should tell people that I am New Zealand’s foremost expert on those specific issues? That sounds absurd to me! On the relationship between theology and meta-ethics I can think of one other person who I would trust nearly as much as my own (yes Matt, that’s you ). Should I tell people that? How pretentious that sounds to me! These are examples of what I mean. They are the kind of thing I generally like to let the audience decide, but of course there are times when the person I want to communicate my credentials do hasn’t had the luxury of being an audience member for longer than the five or ten minutes he or she will spend initially reviewing my job application. I need to tell them and tell them succintly. Should I tell them “just Google my name, you’ll see what I mean”?

It’s a fine line, and one that I have difficulty with.

Glenn Peoples

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A 2007 report from the IPCC, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has now prompted an apology by the authors. That’s because errors were spotted, well after the report’s publication:

[Professor Graham] Cogley, who wrote a letter about the problems to Science magazine that was published online Wednesday, cited these mistakes:

- The paragraph starts, “Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world.” Cogley and Michael Zemp of the World Glacier Monitoring System said Himalayan glaciers are melting at about the same rate as other glaciers.

- It says that if the Earth continues to warm, the “likelihood of them disappearing by the 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.” Nowhere in peer-reviewed science literature is 2035 mentioned. However, there is a study from Russia that says glaciers could come close to disappearing by 2350. Probably the numbers in the date were transposed, Cogley said.

- The paragraph says: “Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035.” Cogley said there are only 33,000 square kilometres of glaciers in the Himalayas.

- The entire paragraph is attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from the WWF, Cogley said. And further, the IPCC likes to brag that it is based on peer-reviewed science, not advocacy group reports. Cogley said the WWF cited the popular science press as its source.

- A table says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2840 metres. Then comes a mathematics mistake: It says that’s a rate of 135.2 metres a year, when it really is only 23.5 metres a year.

Still, Cogley said: “I’m convinced that the great bulk of the work reported in the IPCC volumes was trustworthy and is trustworthy now as it was before the detection of this mistake.” He credited Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon with telling him about the errors.

However, Colorado University environmental science and policy professor Roger Pielke Jr said the errors point to a “systematic breakdown in IPCC procedures,” and that means there could be more mistakes.

SOURCE

Like many, I echo the sentiments of Patrick Michaels, who, when commenting on one of the errors, said: “I’d like to know how such an absurd statement made it through the review process.” How indeed. One of the concerns that has been raised in recent times, especially after the leaked email scandal from East Anglia, is that the peer review process employed in climate change science is suspect.

Oh, and here’s the reason I titled this blog entry the way I did: All of the above errors were found in a section no longer than half of one page. The report is 838 pages long, and the whole thing went through the same peer review process. Someone’s credibility is starting to hemorrhage. The trouble is, if they’re right, they’re making the truth very hard to believe.

Glenn Peoples

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