Disaster Area

What Is Sin?

Well, whatever it is, Evangelicals are sure there's a lot more of it than everyone else. A recent survey by Ellison Research (hat tip to Episcopal Cafe)shows that there are many things that most of the population define as sin (even the for the non-religious "the concept is commonly accepted even among those who are not religiously involved", according to Ellison).

(Update - for some reason the tables didn't display properly, so I fixed them...)

The data are sliced and diced quite a few ways, but I thought I'd highlight a few things. First, the overall numbers:

Behavior	Overall
Adultery	81
Racism	74
Using hard drugs such as cocaine, heroine, meth, LSD, etc.	65
Not saying anything if a cashier gives you too much change back	63
Having an abortion	56
Homosexual activity or sex	52
Not reporting some income on your tax returns	52
Reading or watching pornography	50
Gossip	47
Swearing	46
Sex before marriage	45
Homosexual thoughts	44
Sexual thoughts about someone you are not married to	43
Smoking marijuana	41
Doing things as a consumer that harm the environment	41
Getting drunk	41
Not taking proper care of your body	35
Gambling	30
Telling a little white lie to avoid hurting someone's feelings	29
Using tobacco	23
Not attending church or religious worship services on a regular basis	18
Watching an R-rated movie	18
Playing the lottery	18
Being significantly overweight	17
Not giving 10% of your income to a church or charity	16
Drinking any alcohol	14
Working on Sunday/the Sabbath	14
Spanking your child when he/she misbehaves	7
Making a lot of money	4
Dancing	4
Average	36.3

We can see, then, that the average person has some peculiar standards for "sin". Not correcting an error in getting too much change is more sinful than having an abortion. A sixth of people think being overweight is sinful. The top of the list is dominated by big issues: Adultery, Racism and Drug use.

And it's important to bear in mind that just because someone may believe something is sinful, they wouldn't necessarily impose that belief on others, or want it prohibited by legislation.

I have to wonder about the "sexual thoughts about someone you aren't married to" item. I presume the question is meant to refer to married people, because if 43% of people think that's a sin for a single person thinking about another single person, i think we have a serious problem. Not to mention every single episode of Baywatch must have caused more backsliding than the slippery slopes in It's a Knockout...

It gets interesting when we look at the breakdown by demographics. You can look up many of those on the Ellison site, but one that caught my eye was the breakdown by Evangelical/Not Evangelical. There are lost more religious oriented breakdowns, but none as dramatic as that.

Here's the same list, with Evangelical and the difference between Evangelical and All added, ordered by the magnitude of the difference (i.e., the biggest likely cultural disconnects between Evangelicals and the rest of society)...

Facebook Swan Dive

I read an editorial in PC Magazine today by Lance Ulanoff that echoed pretty much what I've been thinking about Facebook - namely that it's in that long downward slide to oblivion, but not many people realize it yet.

And it's a shame, because the reason I signed up was that it was a great way to keep in touch with  hundreds of youth who have grown up through my church and diocesan youth programs. Sadly, the plethora of add-ons and plug-ins has steadily drowned out the original purpose, and the quest to get big enough to sell for billions will do to it what it has done to many a fast-growing community before - kill it dead.

Ulanoff points to AOL as probably the first of the internet generation companies or "communities" that died that way. Strangely enough, MySpace seems to have enough user-generated, organic content to survive, even though the software and interface still look like they were designed by a monkey on crack. Well, maybe that's part of it too - better a monkey on crack than some soulless business suits...

Free Music - Get It Now

While driving around England last November, there was a song being played regularly by a new artist from Ireland Wales (thanks to Dennis for the correction) by the name of Duffy. She didn't have an album out then (and still doesn't in the US until May). The track they played back then was Rockferry - the title of her debut album. It was moody and stood out quite a bit from the other stuff normally played on Radio 1. She's been described as a bit like a modern day Dusty Springfield... which I can see, sort of - and which is explained a bit by the influence of Ready, Steady, Go! (see below).

Anyway, the next single, Mercy, is the free single on iTunes this week (until next Tuesday when it all changes. You can also see the video on Youtube. Go check it out.

More from Wikipedia:

Raised in Nefyn on the Llŷn Peninsula with her twin sister, Katy, her parents divorced when she was 10, and she moved to Pembrokeshire with her mother and sisters, while her father remained in Nefyn. Her early interest in singing was apparently inspired by her father John Duffy's videotape of the 1960s television rock show Ready Steady Go!.

Duffy returned to Nefyn when she was 15, and started singing in various local bands. After being involved in an unsuccessful music project in Switzerland, Duffy returned to Wales in 2003 and auditioned for Wawffactor, a Welsh alternative to Pop Idol on S4C where she was expected to win, but eventually came second to winner Lisa Pedrig.

Hypocrisy and Just Desserts

If I were to write about it, I'd hardly be the first person to remark on the Eliot Spitzer scandal. It's just such a nice round story, though. The Mr. Clean crusader who swooped through the finance markets turns out to have spent in the neighborhood of $80,000 on high priced call girls. Little wonder his exposure was greeted with cheers on Wall Street. One could perhaps feel sorry for him in other circumstances, but those who play holier-than-thou have basically set themselves up to be judged by higher standards than mere mortals. And don't even get me started on Dr. (not really) Laura Schlessinger who, on NBC's Today Show, managed to actually blame Spitzer's wife for not taking care of her man's needs. More specifically:

"It's interesting. what you said about what men need -- men do need validation. When they come into the world they're born of a woman. Getting the validation from mommy is the beginning of needing it from a woman. When the wife does not focus in on the needs and the feelings sexually, personally, to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like our hero, he's very susceptible to the charm of some other woman making him feel what he needs. These days, women don't spend a lot of time thinking about how they can give their men what they need."

"Susceptible to the charm of some other woman"? She was a $5,000 an hour call girl, Dr. Laura - are you some kind of moron? Oh wait, you don't have a book due out this week, do you? You do? Oh, quelle surprise! Of course, Dr. Laura ripped this off directly from Mark Driscoll, who used this defense on behalf of Ted Haggard, whose wife was thrown unceremoniously under the bus too.

Speaking of holier-than-thou, it doesn't get any more so than at the Vatican, where the seven deadly sins have been revised to include accumulating obscene wealth - something the Vatican has more experience with than any body on the earth, so I guess they know whereof they speak. I'm guessing Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican's number two man in "sins and penance", probably signed the order with a solid gold fountain pen, and the irony would be completely lost on him. Far too many people have made hay with that, too, so I hardly feel original here.

There's another heaping portion of hypocrisy lying around waiting to be stepped in in the good old Church of England. There's the case of the Bishop of Horsham, who is apparently just another good ol' (sort of) closeted gay Anglo-Catholic bishop who just loves to support our ever so lovely gay bashing so-called Anglican renegades from the Episcopal Church. Now, even this wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the fact that the Bishop of Horsham is still welcome to fulfill all of his episcopal duties without hindrance. He will also be off to Lambeth without a care in the world, and with the full blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury - unlike a certain Bishop of New Hampshire. "Don't ask, don't tell" was a stupid policy when the US military adopted it, and it remains a stupid, hypocritical policy today, but apparently it's still alive and well in the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion.

All of which just makes it sadder to see a series of posts from Maggi Dawn about a very nice visit to Cambridge a couple of weeks ago by the Archbishops of York and Canterbury. It's nice to see the personal and human side of public figures, espoecially ion the wake of Rowan's Sharia Law Escapade (now there's an idea for a TV show...). However, at some point the Archbishop of Canterbury surely has to realize he can't appease Rome, and the rabid conservatives in the Anglican Communion, and move the church into the 21st (dare I even say the 20th) century.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - it took a woman in Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori to begin dismantling the old boys network here in the Episcopal Church, and it will probably take a woman to do it in the Church of England, except... fat chance of even getting a female bishop there within the next ten years or so and maybe fifty before we see a female Archbishop of Canterbury.

Strangely enough, hypocrisy isn't one of the seven deadly sins, and it's also one the Vatican managed to miss the second time around. Maybe it's because they don't have mirrors there...

Cloudscape at Haleakala

Browsing through photos from last year, here's one that caught my eye. Clouds swirling around Haleakala at about 10,000 ft. with the sun trying to break through.

International Women's Day - Hurrah!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, what with the work trip to the UK a couple of weeks ago and then last week being occupied mostly by a not so fun medical procedure (nothing serious, and maybe more later - oh wait, no, sorry, I promised a friend I wouldn't - never mind).

The important event this past weekend was International Women’s Day on Saturday March 8. I’m not a big fan of special days or weeks or months for things (The International Day for Three-Legged Blind Dachshunds being a case in point), but this one is important.

In my opinion, the two most important Millennium Development Goals are Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women and Improve Maternal Health. The evidence from around the world shows that educating women has the largest positive effect on societal development. The effect is particularly evident in reproductive health, where sex education, and in particular birth control, always results in women having fewer babies, thereby stabilizing entire communities. Getting off the constant pregnancy/birth treadmill does wonders for not just the health of the women but the communities they live in, too. It's no big secret that the most godforsaken places on earth feature the highest birth rates and highest infant and maternal mortality rates.

Marking International Women’s Day, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour had this (among other things) to say:

“Many States appear to have simply ignored the commitments they have made. It is shameful that, in the 60th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fundamental rights are still not enjoyed by many women around the world.”

The leveling of the playing field needs to continue everywhere. Even in the enlightened West there is still a long way to go before women get a decent hold on what might be called equality. It’s a crying shame that one of the last bastions of male privilege remains "the church". Replace “States” with “Churches” in the previous quoted paragraph and you still wouldn’t be far wrong.

Kathy Escobar, a contributor to the Emerging Women blog, has a really great post about women finding their voice in the Emergent “conversation”. It’s apparently still a bit like trying to order two pints of lager and a packet of crisps in a crowded British pub where the barman doesn’t know you, but still, you have to start somewhere. In particular, she highlights these thoughts, and expands on them very well:

• The only way this (restoration and reconciliation in the church) can begin to happen is if power (aka: leadership, voice, value) begins to shift.
• Those without power need to begin to step into it.
• Power is not finite. If someone gives up power, it doesn’t mean that there’s now less power in the room. It actually means that there’s more power in the room.
• Don’t underestimate how much tending and nurturing this shift is going to take.

Number three strikes me as particularly important, because to too many people in power, power sharing is seen as a zero sum game, when in fact it isn’t. Acknowledging other smart people doesn’t make you less smart. It may make you feel less superior, but shouldn’t that be a good thing?

Well, it may be a day or two late, here’s to women the world round. You deserve more than a lousy single day anyway.

Still Alive and Kicking...

Wow, a whole week without posting. It must be this almost week-long business trip to England that's cut into my blogging time.

Oh well, home soon , when normal random commeting and ranting will resume (especially if I get stuck behind annoying drivers on the way back to Heathrow and/or home from Seatac tomorrow).