March 26, 2004
Democratic Unity?
I watched the Democratic Unity dinner last night on CSPAN-2. They had Carter and Clinton and Gore (oh, my!), and practically all the Democratic primary candidates except Kucinich, everyone making nice with each other in a show of unity.
How boring.
I can't wait for them to win the election so they can go back to doing what Democrats normally do so well, squabbling among themselves.
March 09, 2004
Single-Issue Voter
The NYTimes has an article on gay Republicans:
As a lesbian in a long-term relationship, Margaret Leber objects to the idea of amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
But Ms. Leber, a software engineer and a registered Republican in Jeffersonville, Pa., is also a member of the Pink Pistols, an organization of gay and lesbian gun owners, and marriage is not the only issue on her mind.
"Right now, I am leaning toward Bush," Ms. Leber said. "All the Democrats just rolled into Congress to vote for this gun-control bill. Somebody with my values and beliefs can't be a single-issue voter."
Guess it depends on which single issue is more important to you...
March 06, 2004
Spring 2004
Just pulled my first weeds of the year from the flower garden. Looks like spring is on its way...
The Docetic JT
The brouhaha over a recent movie that depicts the punishment of Jesus in extremely graphic detail reminds me that I used to be a docetist. Of course, I didn't know it at the time.
You see as I was growing up I had a lot of questions about religion. Since I never got any satisfactory answers, I eventually learned not to bother asking. So I gradually formed my own explanations. One example: since Jesus was supposed to be a god, he couldn't possibly have suffered when the Romans thrashed him and nailed him to a cross. He only pretended to suffer and bleed in order to convince everyone that he was human.
Little did I know that during the early centuries of Christian history, there were actually several groups of Christians who believed that, or something very similar. The belief that Jesus only appeared to suffer because he wasn't really human has come to be called docetism from the Greek word doceo meaning "appear." Gradually docetism was stamped out by the strain of Christianity that eventually triumphed in the fourth century CE.
More information on docetism and other varieties of early Christian beliefs can be found in Bart Ehrman's excellent Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew.
As for me? Oh, I gave up all those silly beliefs ages ago.