The Rusmeister

Orthodoxy? What?

2012-01-26T06:35:00.000+04:00

One of the problems I think we have in the multiplicity of Christian faiths, the divisions that prevent the unity that Christ prayed for, is that because there are so many it is very difficult to see why (or even that!) one really is closer to the faith and undrstandings of the early Church we know existed in the book of Acts. Oh, each one claims to be, for sure, but that is of no help at all. It is written that "By their fruits ye shall know them", but know who? Genuine Christians, of course, but many are, yet are still divided, so that doesn't help us with the question of "Which Church or Faith will most truly guide us in the faith of the early believers who kept the faith for 300 years of underground churches, persecution, and martyrdom? (I wonder how often we try to wrap our minds around numbers like that to grasp the enormity of it. The US is not even 300 years old as an independent nation and yet has a heckuva lot if history. Ancient Rome was also civilized, with plenty if writing and recording going on.)

As a Navy electrician, I often had to look at a clump of wires in the ceiling (yeah, I know, "overhead") and try to figure out which, out of all of them, led back to the power source. The solution, when there can be a few hundred wires, is not to try to trace backwards from the clump, the mess, but to go back to the power source and trace the main power cables.
So I found history to be of tremendous help. When we trace FORWARD, from the beginning, instead of BACKWARD, from the mess of division we have now, we see "main power cables" gradually branching off.
One thing that has always seemed obvious to me is that the Church must have existed continually. The Holy Spirit that came down at
Pentecost has never abandoned that Church. Another thing is that definite history always trumps imagined history. Faith traditions with no history cannot be the original deal. Christ didn't establish a Church only to abandon it until such-and-such a charismatic and energetic leader came along.

Another thing obvious to me is that that Church must have always maintained a physical presence, that it cannot be only the mystical and eternal Church, but must be able to impact our faith and worship. To think otherwise, to say that only the local church has physical presence, is merely to justify the divisions. Paul and John seemed to think they had the authority to write to churches that they were not the bishops of, that they could say things that ought to be obeyed.

There's a lot more to be said, I haven't said it all by a long shot, but to keep this short, I came to the conclusion that no faith that just appeared late in history, that has no historical record until the 19th or 20th century, or even the 16th, could possibly be that Church. To think so is basically to say that the Holy Spirit abandoned the Church at the end of the book of Acts and took a 1500-year vacation, leaving everyone to fend for themselves.

So when I look at the mess we have today, I can't know which one really traces back to the beginning. I see a multiplicity, even a cacophony of claims.
But as soon as I take on the electrician's approach, and work the history forwards, I begin to get a picture that makes sense.

What we see in the first century, what we all accept, is one united Church, with local churches with bishops, presbyters and deacons.
There is other historical record, generally ignored and never at all referenced in the Baptist experience of my childhood in the first three centuries - writings of the direct successors of the Apostles, at least some of whom must have indisputably maintained that Church. They and their successors became the Christians so infamously persecuted, that jealously preserved both their faith and the Church, and their writings show how they understood the Scriptures that were later collected into a convenient binding for us.

It was the last of those who emerged when Constantine legalized the faith. There was one indisputable organization that emerged into the open that we can only admit WAS the Church, the more so when it was that organization that later decided what was to be included in the
Bibles that we hold in our hands and what was to be excluded. That same Church continued with extensive historical record, and names like
Nicholas of Myra and John Chrysostom, for another 700 years, with a cole of small break-offs - the Coptic Christians in Egypt, for example, but the main trunk of the tree remains clear.

But a growing dispute arose over the idea that one bishop - Rome's - had authority over the others. The dispute intensified when that bishop authorized a change to the Nicean Creed that had been agreed upon throughout the first millennium, the belief of the early Christians, an addition called the Filioque (Latin for "and the Son"), which had effects on theology as huge as a change to e=mc3 would be. In 1054, a formal split was declared - the Great Schism. After that time, the trunk split in two, into the Western (Roman) Church, which called itself Catholic, and the Eastern Church, which included all of Palestine, Syria, the Byzantine Empire (later swamped by the Islamic Ottoman Empire), Russia and what became Eastern Europe.

In our histories, long guided and formed by the Western Church, the Eastern Church simply disappeared out of the history books. That's why we know next to nothing about it. At any rate, the Church was either maintained (however badly) in the Catholic West, or the Orthodox East.
For modern Protestants, that means either saying the Church was nowhere - no historical record, just imagined history (until that charismatic and energetic leader comes along) or that the Catholic Church was indeed it until Martin Luther came along, or that the Catholic Church really had gone wrong and had ceased to be it, leaving the Eastern Church which we knew nothing of, thanks to our essentially Catholic view of history. The first option is really impossible and illogical. The second contains enormous contradictions - complete reversals even - between Catholic and Protestant contradictory understandings. The third is simply amazing, but not impossible.

In it, I found the resolution of all contradictions. I do not find a perfect Church with a perfect people, but I do find a Church that openly admits that it is a hospital for the sick. I find the historical record that makes sense of the modern confusion where the Catholic Church does not. I find its collegiality - having neither the mere individualism and division - and effective anarchy - of Protestantism, nor the fatal error of one human ruling the Church and making all the calls, with theology, worship and practice far deeper than the very best of what I found on my Protestant upbringing. While people are trying to choose which megachurch is better, or which church has a better band, or trying to make themselves relevant to the modern world, the Orthodox faith, which has lasted continually for 2,000 years, whose forms of worship are ancient and don't change much at all, not in a century, not in a millennium, and are all firmly based in Scripture and the Holy Tradition which is not a tradition of men, doesn't waste time on experimenting or relevancy, but focuses on the ancient message, calling all to repentance and salvation. We repeat the call of Philip to Nathanael - "Come and see!"

On lost children

2012-01-26T04:23:00.003+04:00

I was looking at a post on Facebook about children lost by family and friends, and I wanted to share on how much comfort the understandings of therelations of the living and the dead in Orthodoxy , but realized that it would be too difficult.

There are many things that, if anyone from the background of faith tradition common to my family (Baptist) heard without extensive explanation, would be immediately written off as pagan or worse, and yet, 10 minutes or so with Scripture and explanation could begin to show how those understandings are Biblical - can certainly be shown to have Scriptural support. In this case, a number of ideas that we never connected the dots on in my experience with the Baptists are connected in Orthodoxy, for example, that the dead are alive in God, that God is not the God of tbe dead, but of the living, together with Christ speaking with the "dead" Moses and Elijah and being witnessed(!) by living men and that we have a cloud of witnesses; that the saints that have passed on can constitute a cloud of witnesses, then a person might vegin to understand that we can say things, and people that have died, by the grace of God, can know that we say them, and that, being alive in Christ, we can ask them to pray for us just as we ask our friend Joe to pray for us (which is asking for intercession, for our friend to intercede for us, to also ask for us, not mediation or worship). These are things that sound odd, perhaps like Mormon practices at first glance, yet each of the ideas that lead to such understandings is found in the New Testament.

There are much better and more thorough, and therefore satisfying explanations, but it adds up to the fact that, if one accepts the logic of my faith, then death is not "game over" as it is in the Baptist tradition, and we may continue to say things we believe they can hear (praying in the sense of asking; intercessory prayer) and so pray to them and ask for them to pray for us to God. In short, we are not entirely so cut off from those dear children as Protestant traditions generally hold, and this gives great comfort. We don't need to visit a gravesite to speak to them - that is actually much more pagan. I can say, "Dear xxx, please pray to the Lord for us!" and can a believer honestly think God will not hear the prayers of those little ones who are of the Kingdom of heaven?

On Black Friday

2011-11-26T05:03:00.000+04:00

I have things to say about "Black Friday" - and they aren't good.

One of the great distinctions of the modern age is between genuine tradition - the handing down from generation to generation of ideas and practices that people organically over time found to be good - and artificial imposition of ideas and practices via schooling and/or the media. "Black Friday" is a product of the latter, that is, it is manipulation of the public by the businessmen who own the media and the owners of the businesses in general. It is incentive to unnatural behavior that a free people would not consent to engage in. It is a selling out of our freedom and dignity in the name of materialism. It shows that we can be induced to do nearly anything for "a good deal" and, as has been pointed out, even trample over others' rights and bodies in doing so. I can think of no nearer analogy than that of the behavior of sheep.

It is true that business manipulation is nothing new. "Happy Hour" and other discount hours are a normal thing. But most of those fall into patterns consistent with normal human life. Inducing people to do what they would otherwise never do, though, does not, and I think it difficult to argue that people, on the whole, would get up and go shopping at 5:00 am as a matter of course. There are exceptions, of course, as well as eccentricities, but this seeks to make a rule of the eccentricity, whose motivations are not benign or positively good, like a midnight Liturgy, but base and crass, mere material gain. As a "tradition", this is merely to our national shame, and having to explain such bizarre behavior to Russians who see that it is bizarre makes me feel that shame for my people.

The Fall to Sodom

2011-11-15T08:30:00.006+04:00

Well it seems not so long ago that I posted this parody, with a cautionary message for the future.

Not long ago I came up with an outline of how sexual morality has fallen over the past century.
I began with the allowance of easy and later no-fault divorces (destroying the idea of the sanctity of marriage), which led to

Social tolerance of infidelity (destroying the idea of a social expectation of the essential faithfulness of the spouses), which led to

Social tolerance of fornication (destroying the idea that the marital act must be contained within marriage), which enabled

Social tolerance of sodomy (destroying the idea that the act must be between a man and a woman) which is currently leading to

Social tolerance of polygamy ( and all names and euphemisms given to its permutations), destroying the idea that the act must be limited to two people, which will lead to...

What? The progression is obvious. Each step was unthinkable until the step before it became a reality. Everyone said "THAT could NEVER happen!" yet it did. We are living with accomplished fact. It's also worth noting that, with the exception if divorce, each act, hitherto seen as a moral evil, each step was enabled by the coinage of a new term to eliminate the moral association. "cheating on", "sleeping with" (now "being with"), "to 'be' gay", now "polyamory" ("many loves") have all been used to approve the moral wrong.

So what next? Well, aside from the fairly obvious decriminalization of polygamy we can expect over the next several years, I think the next steps are fairly obvious - a gradual move toward

approved pedophilia (itself a euphemism, meaning "the love of children", and destroying the idea that the act is for adults alone - starting with a graaadual reduction of the age of consent, and

approved bestiality, destroying the idea that it must be between humans.

People said that openly tolerated homosexual behavior would never happen, yet here we are.

It seems that my parody is less of a parody than I imagined...

When people start "conducting studies" and "advising caution", you know it's just around the corner.

The Gay X-Men

2011-09-14T07:53:00.000+04:00

I think that part of our journey toward becoming " wise as serpents" is to learn to recognize when values - morals - contrary to our faith, our worldview are being so subtly impressed upon us.

After having watched the latest X-Men movie, I feel that something I have noticed for some time needs to be expressed.

Some of us know the tremendous value that stories and fairy tales have in expressing truths - or what we believe to be true - in a disguised form, making the acceptance of those ideas more palatable. C.S. Lewis expressed it as "getting past the watchful dragons", and the effect is to get ideas across to minds hostile to the naked ideas when caught out in the open. Both the imaginary worlds of Narnia and Middle Earth certainly do get across deeply Christian ideas in a format that even people hostile to faith can enjoy.

Sometimes, the attempt does not work. Philip Pullman's fantasy series fails for it's excessive obviousness, it's "preachiness" in attempting to ape the techniques, used successfully by Lewis and Tolkien, to promote atheist ideas.

But the X-Men DOES work - only it does so in the sense of successfully communicating false ideas - for it is popular entertainment in the superhero genre that does carry the modern attitudes towards "sexual orientation" and "gender" (what our grandparents called simply our "sex") which actively promote the idea that there IS no normal or abnormal, but only "alternative norms". Much is made of the X-Men being different and needing to "accept who they are". In the latest film, X-Men: First Class, it becomes more blatant: "Mutant, and proud", and harping on the need to accept and embrace " who you are" (something true enough when it really IS who you are), echoing the slogans and sentiments of the gay lobby. And so even a person otherwise committed to traditional Christian faith, or at least "traditional values" - which really are Christian in origin - rejecting the modern attitude towards homosexual desire and action, is nevertheless subtly influenced in favor of tolerance of the views promoted by the gay lobby, that what they desire is a natural and normal outcome of who they are, defining themselves by their desires. The false analogy of fantastic "natural characteristics" of the person to the sexual desires experienced by people is thus successfully brought past the watchful dragons of common sense, where the naked idea still is, for now, rejected by most people. It becomes part of the onslaught begun in public education, controlled by a tiny minority of radicals, and continued here in the media against the common sense and traditional morality always held across space and time.

In this brave new world, there is to be no "normal"; or more accurately, every person will provide their own definition of the norm. We're supposed to look at Raven in all her blue scaly "glory" and sympathize with Magneto when he says he prefers her that way. Likewise with "the Beast" and so on. Abnormal preferences are to become the new norm. Raven is supposed to disdain her desire to be beautiful as if that were the abnormal thing.

I'm not saying that the movies are bad and wicked. I AM saying that they express the attitude at the heart of the support for "gay rights", and it behooves us to recognize when that attitude is being championed, even in entertainment.

How Jack Chick failed

2011-05-22T16:34:00.002+04:00

One of the influences on my views of faith - especially on Catholicism - was via Chick tracts. He really worked hard on propaganda to bash Catholic beliefs.

The trouble is, while he did get some facts right, he got many others wrong - especially regarding what Catholics actually believe. Now I am not a Catholic and have no plans to convert to the Catholic Church, but what I learned as an adult who had become neutral to the Baptist teachings of my youth was that Chick was horribly wrong regarding a number of Catholic beliefs. His presentation of the faith as polytheism, comes immediately to mind - his confusion of worship, which is for God alone, with veneration, which can be given to anyone worthy of respect. He basically read it all as worship, and proceeded to publish his rabid tracts presenting it the way he saw it.

The method works fine for people who accept it. They believe wholesale what they are told - and then they go around thinking they know what Catholics believe. Only they don't. They never take the trouble to ask the Roman Catholic Church what it believes and listen to the explanations and respond to objections - it's much easier to swallow propaganda that happens to support what you yourself believe. But their is one inevitable failure, and that is if you discover that you were lied to. The backlash effect is strong when something sold as truth is revealed to be a lie, when a fact turns out to be not a fact. What it reinforces is the skepticism of the proven liar or falsehood-spreader. That's what happened to me regarding Jack Chick.

The obvious lesson is to get your info from the horse's mouth. To ask a Catholic, for example, better an educated Catholic with a good knowledge of Catholic teaching, better still a priest or trained source that knows history and theology better. If I want to know what Mennonites believe, I'll ask my Mom. I won't go to a Baptist, Catholic or even Orthodox source as my prime informer on what a Jehovah's Witness believes if I can ask a JW or find out from a JW source, or Messianic Jews, or whoever.

There's a second thing, and that's having the patience to listen through and then hear responses to our objections. Maybe we'll still reject the thing - as I do the Catholic Church, but at least I will actually be rejecting Catholicism, and not a version existing only in my own head invented by some nutty (fill in denominational ID here).

I can easily imagine that people have accepted non-Orthodox sources about Orthodox teaching, and I'm sure nobody would want their own beliefs to be similarly misrepresented. What I can say about my own faith is that it is decidedly Biblical, and we very much believe the Bible. Only no one inquires as to how Orthodox (or Catholic) beliefs could be Biblical. Maybe because the influence of Jack Chick lives on...?

We often condemn believing without questioning. But for some reason, we don't similarly condemn judging without questioning, which is exactly what Jack Chick did, and the result is that I am now Orthodox and have a great respect for Catholics. I don't guess he intended that, but that's what his method of uninformed condemnation does for anyone who learns that it is uninformed.

The Falling Star of Morality

2011-01-16T07:59:00.003+03:00

I generally write on forums, as there I get feedback - the trouble with a blog, for me, is the lack of dialog.
I've only gotten a few comments, even from family and friends, so why write, even if I have things worth saying?
Still, once or twice a year I come up with something that I want to say to those I care about.

I recently downloaded a 5-minute sample of what is apparently a popular TV show: "Greek". Maybe someone will correct me on its general popularity, but it appears to be a mainstream show aimed at young adults (and so watched by teens and children). What I experienced in watching this sampling of scenes is something I have experienced once before - in 1999.

At that time, I had returned from Russia to the States after 15 years of mostly TV-free life. (The Navy, followed by university followed by my Russian adventures had insulated me from most of pop culture. Well, I graduated in a moment from "Laverne and Shirley" and "Welcome Back, Kotter" to "The Jerry Springer Show". It was a shock. The main reason I experienced anything at all was because I had not been gradually acclimated, like everyone else. If you put a frog in a pot of hot water, it'll sense the heat and jump out. If you put it in a pot of cold water, and gradually raise the temperature, it'll keep adjusting until it boils to death. And that's what I saw happening to everyone back home. Not that TV is the only influence - although it IS a major one, but it was clear to me that our moral perception has changed - in the way that a person slowly losing their sight or senses is having their perception changed.

After watching this "Greek" excerpt, I experienced it again - only this time it was worse. Jerry Springer moved from being sensational to being casual. "he's sleeping with her, but she's screwing this other guy, these two guys are "getting their gay on" (an unthinkable expression two decades ago!), etc etc. So now I can compare the rate of the fall of public morality - and it is falling, like a shooting star. Rapid changes now register in only one decade where before it took at least a generation.

So where to next? It appears that the creep of poisons like public approval of homosexuality are creeping everywhere; NY now has a governor that has promised to push "gay marriage" (a first-class oxymoron that is only a dismal parody) through in that state.

So why doesn't the traditional Christianity of our country oppose this? It is no longer able to. Being founded on the authority of the individual to decide what is right, and having made it impossible to appeal to any authority that can say, "This is wrong", people are left to treating it as if it were a "matter of taste", and tolerating it, just as the frog "tolerates" the hot water (hardly a virtue for the frog). And so, nothing can stop it.

Nothing? Well, I think one thing really can stop it. but it requires a return - not even to the faith of our fathers, but to the original tradition of Christianity (as opposed to "traditions of men"), that does not acknowledge that truth is determined by the individual (even one reading the Bible on its own - a tactic that has only resulted in endless divisions of people disagreeing with each other on what is right and what is not). A faith that says "we do NOT get to decide what morality is for ourselves )even by appealing to and arguing over a text)" can really stand against all of these relentless changes and not change. Attempts at "relevance" have only resulted in being irrelevant. Early Christians didn't try to be relevant at all - and so were found so relevant that by the 4th century had come to dominate the Roman Empire. Even the Baptists I grew up with would not have been terribly recognizable to John Smythe or Roger Williams - and Catholics of today embrace serious changes that their ancestors would also not recognize (although I have a great deal of respect for Catholics, my grandmother having been one, and a an example of a rather good one, to my mind). So where is a Christianity that doesn't change its tune every decade, or even every century? One that really does (strange as it may seem to the Protestant-raised mind) maintain the faith as handed down from the apostles without compromise or change? The Protestant churches have failed. With 3 centuries of predominance, they have achieved only a reverse of what the early Christians achieved. And yet what they teach IS true - Christ IS risen and He IS Lord. So where is a resolution of the paradox?

I believe I have found it.

Avatar and the Matrix

2010-08-29T10:11:00.006+04:00

For those who saw the film "Avatar", we can all grasp how Jake Sully came to understand an alien people, and to find that some aspects of their culture superior to the one we came from. We can understand how a person can change to become somewhat different from how he started out - and that that change is for the better. Certainly, Jake would have seemed weird and incomprehensible to most of the humans who had no concept of other cultures, or any inkling that he might have learned something that they had not.

I feel that this is, to some extent, what has happened to me. I have changed - become quite different from the lower-class-family small-town boy I grew up as. And that the people I grew up with and love have not. Of course, those that remain have their own experiences in maturity - but not the same kind that I have. And this has made me, it seems, nearly incomprehensible - I am reduced mostly to small-talk when talking to my own family.

How did this happen? Some things are obvious - leaving the home and family to spend years in the military overseas - learning foreign languages and cultures - the powerful culture shock I had in 1991 in Russia - such a stark contrast between a society that had become fully capitalist, with everyone's lives dominated by commerce and commercials, and a culture where they were not - where suddenly, the total absence of TV, the difficulty in merely obtaining food which caused me to lose 30 lbs that year, cleared out the glut of fast-paced images and fast foods that fill our lives, both literally and figuratively. Witnessing my wife's grandfather's death and funeral made me question our way of death, and how we sweep everything under the rug, and have strangers handle the death of our loved ones. The examples are too many to try to tell here, although maybe I'll recount some later.

Other things, not so obvious - the personal earthquakes I experienced, first in almost losing my now happy marriage and even a home for a while, then rebuilding my life on the left coast - learning what was most important to me and to do whatever I had to to get it, which led to restoration of family and serious acceptance of the Christian faith as an adult, as well as the professional earthquakes which convinced me that I simply could not be a 'valued member' of a "community" and live my professional calling (combined with my wife's general unhappiness and loneliness in the US), led to my packing up and going back to Pandora, er, I mean Russia.

And lastly, it was my serious acceptance of Christianity - the rejection of nominalism (go to church on Sunday and live for me me me the rest of the week and being OK with that) - that was brought about by thinking, really thinking, for the first time in my life. How I managed to go 38 years before really beginning to think is still almost, but not quite, a mystery to me. It was CS Lewis that was my co-pilot in my first years, and I still respect the man more than, well, almost anybody, in terms of thinkers.

And this is where the Matrix comes in. If you've seen it, you'll grasp the idea of people living in complete unawareness that everything that they are living is a lie.
How could you possibly tell anyone in the Matrix that? As far as they are concerned, that's the only reality there is, and they'd treat you like you were crazy (and maybe even try to lock you up).

It was first Lewis, and then GK Chesterton, who began to 'free my mind', in the way Morpheus did in the movie. What I learned was, being as short I I possibly can, is that we all grow up in an environment we didn't make, we have practically no control over, and that we take for granted. We cannot seriously imagine things being any other way. As I said, we take commercials for granted. We are not outraged - we say "Well, somebody has to pay for it", and the idea that it need not be the masters of business doesn't cross our minds. We take public schools for granted - and we cannot seriously imagine any alternative to them - to their bells and structured subject lessons of 50 or so minutes, 20-30 children to one adult (a professional and a stranger) in monster schools of hundreds or thousands of children. We can't imagine alternatives to lives built around automobiles where both parents work and send their kids to said school. We have certain ideas about history and politics, what little we retain from our muddled schooling, that we mostly hated and did everything we could to avoid or subvert (and rightly so), so that we think we know that we live in a democracy, that we can change things at elections, that the Reformation freed people to think for themselves about religion and that Susan B. Anthony was a great woman who did great things (although we might be challenged to name details of exactly what they were). We know George Washington was a great man, but we don't really know why. (Certainly most of us never read what he had to say.) Etc. etc. We think we know all of these things.

What I learned is that many of these things are simply not true at all. Or are conflated to being equally important to the truly important things. And that our very language has been subverted to enable a particular world view - one totally hostile to that of our grandparents' - to dominate us and our children. We know that homosexuality, for instance, is really wrong (or at least our grandparents were certain of this) - and yet our children are now being taught that it is completely 'normal'. We know that our faith is important (I hope) but all of the messages in the world around us are telling us that it is not. We are surrounded by an attitude that you can believe what you wish - because it doesn't matter what you believe. What you believe (according to this monstrous stealth philosophy that rules our land) does not and can not reflect truth that also affects others. (I call it "pluralism" for shorthand.)

Anyway, it's proven very hard to communicate any of this, and I think that the only reason I have learned as much as I have is because I really did get completely outside the fishbowl in which we live, and have been able to see it from the outside. A reason it's so hard is because the very language we use is filled with falsehoods, and we don't even know it. We use terms like "partner", "relationship", "gay", "discrimination", "intolerance", "hate crimes", etc without batting an eye. Some of it is rhetoric that bombards us every day from the mass media. Other terms have entered our language in the past century and are now used universally - we know no other way of saying things anymore. (The term "have sex" was coined in 1929 by that great "friend" of Christian morals, DH Lawrence - Lady Chatterly's lover, anyone?) If we compared how we talk today, and how our ancestors talked 100-150 years ago, a lot of falsehoods would stand revealed for what they are.

A problem I've encountered is that I have expressed my new-found objections to such language impatiently, leading people to perceive me as judgmental, radical, or simply eccentric (ie, weird). So I've decided to jump-start my blog, for a new purpose - an attempt to communicate what I cannot say over the phone, because I do want to be understood, and not seen merely as 'the weird uncle living in Russia'. Hopefully, I can make a little sense here of the things I could not before. Any comments and questions are welcome!

From the near future...

2010-04-13T08:49:00.002+04:00

Canines gain key custody rights

HIGH COURT RULINGS FAVOR EQUAL PROTECTION

By Frea Luv

Venus News

Establishing unprecedented new legal protections for animal partners in custody battles, the California Supreme Court has for the second time this month put animal-human relationships on equal footing with married and gay couples when it comes to issues such as raising children.
In three separate rulings, the Supreme Court on Monday concluded that canines who assist in raising children borne by their partners can be considered legal parents after their relationship ends with the biological mother. All three cases involved mothers who bore children through some form of artificial reproduction from sperm or egg donors.
The rulings strengthened the custody rights of non-biological parents in animal-human unions and clarified the uncertain legal landscape for hundreds of A-H couples across California who decide to have children. The rulings also were the latest evidence that the state's top court is receptive to the equal protection arguments of A+H couples, a factor being watched closely as the legal battle over A+H marriage moves forward in the lower courts.
The Supreme Court earlier this month gave considerable legal backing to California's new domestic animal partners law, ruling in a San Diego case that the law gives A+H partners the same protections as married and gay couples in terms of how they are treated by businesses.
Now, the high court has extended that principle to custody feuds like one unfolding in Santa Fairy County for Spotty, a Morgan Hill terrier who has been seeking parental rights for two years from her former partner. Spotty was in a three-year relationship with a woman who bore twin boys, and acted as a co-parent until their 2003 breakup, according to court papers.
Spotty was not involved in Monday's rulings, but she has been waiting for the Supreme Court to decide the three cases while her bid to gain parent status is on hold in family court.
``I'm hoping these decisions make it a no-brainer,'' said Spotty, a rat and pest control specialist. ``I should be a part of their lives."
It's not about species, ``it's about responsibility,'' she said.
Conservative groups object
The rulings immediately drew criticism from conservative groups, who believe they will help energize proposed ballot measures aimed at restricting marriage to a man and a woman, or at least human only, and dismantling the state's new domestic animal partners law.
``Today's ruling defies logic and common sense,'' said Dan DePraved, president and general counsel of Liberty Love Counsel, which intervened in the state Supreme Court cases. ``By saying that children can have a pet for a mommy or daddy, the court has undermined the family.''
In the three cases decided Monday, the justices, despite different factual scenarios, determined that a non-biological partner enjoys parent status if they are present at the decision to have children and then play the clear, full-time role of a parental assistant, as defined by the human partner, along with the biological mother.
The Supreme Court applied past decisions involving hetero and homosexuals who conceive children through artificial reproductive science, as well as other areas of family law once reserved for mothers and fathers. In one case, the justices held that child support laws that punish deadbeat dads apply equally to estranged stray partners who had raised children together.
In that case, the justices held that a canine partner who agreed to raise twins is obligated to pay child support like any parent after a breakup. California Attorney General Bill Toomen intervened on behalf of Fido in his effort to get child support in El Dogado County from his ex-partner, Eliza B.
``Today is an incredible day to be a parent in the state of California,'' Fido barked after the ruling.
No bias vs. A-H couples
In a second case out of Marin County, the court found that an Irish Setter who supplied her eggs to her partner and helped raise the child is considered a parent under the law. The court, by a 4-2 vote, said the situation was different than sperm and egg donors who do not establish a parent role with the biological mother.
``We perceive no reason why a parent of a child cannot be canine, other than that the child will be hairier'' Justice Carlo Morono wrote.
Justices Kathrin Tickle Wierdgir and Joy Kennel disagreed. Wierdgir warned that the ruling would produce unpredictable results for custody fights around the state, and that it diminishes the birth mother's rights.
Dinah Rich, the lawyer for E.G., the birth mother in the Marin case, said the ruling could leave sperm and egg donors who do not want parent status vulnerable. However, Rich added that all three rulings suggest the Supreme Court could prove open to arguments that California's A-H marriage ban is unconstitutional.
``It is a court that appears to be free of bias against animal-human couples,'' Rich said.
The third case was decided on more limited grounds. In that ruling, the justices found that a human mother could not break a pre-birth agreement with her partner to share parental rights.
Kate Jostling, an attorney with the National Center for Canine Rights who represented Fido in the El Dogado case, said the Supreme Court sent a clear message that A+H couples should be treated the same as human couples.
``Any member of a family can be a child's parents,'' Jostling said.
________________________________________

The Return of the Jedi?

2009-07-16T18:25:00.003+04:00

Hi guys! I'm back!
(said Luke Skywalker...)

A few years have slipped by. What time I did spend on the internet was mostly in forum discussions. I loved getting feedback on ideas and debating, but gradually grew tired of the blank walls of unacknowledged dogmatism disguised as broad-mindedness and tolerance.

Here I feel that no one is interested. Blogs are a dying fad, it seems, and tend to self-absorption. Everyone can say whatever they want, so they do - and there is no cost to what you say - the problem is, in that cacaphony, nobody knows what to listen to. How different from the Soviet Union (another extreme) where what you say could cost you everything - so those that did dare to speak were listened to by all, because any truth that is spoken in such environments is so expensive. Such talk wasn't cheap.

The things I've discovered in recent years are amazing, but it feels useless to communicate them, because all thoughts are considered of equal value, no matter at what cost they were obtained. I found a faith, compared with the faith of my childhood, and the best of western Protestantism/Evangelicalism seems primitive by comparison. Even the best hymns of my childhood (including their background), such as "It is Well With My Soul" pale in comparison with the depth - theology, worship and background - I find in Orthodoxy. It makes sense - how could faiths that essentially developed only a few hundred years ago compare with the ones that really are a millenium or more?

Imagine if you discovered an author named "Shake-spear" who wrote an incredible array of plays and poetry, and you tried to tell people, and they just looked at you like you're nuts... that's what happened to me in discovering the greatest writer in English history - G.K. Chesterton.

I've discovered that the language of the modern world has been heavily engineered by a minority bent on twisting people away from everything traditional Christianity ever taught, and that we must consider all of the language and terminology we take for granted, and when we find falsehood or deception, from buzzwords like "discrimination" and "tolerance" - designed to stop thought - to false expressions of the nature of humanity such as "to be gay" or "have an abortion", we must recognize them for what they are and root them out of our language.

I've discovered that our schools were designed by the same people who designed the schools for Nazi Germany, and that their real purpose is asserting governmental authority, not the crap in the mission statements. That they do work to make our kids half-educated, a shadow people that are unable to think critically, because of hidden ideology planted from the earliest years that prevents them from thinking. (No, it is not a conspiracy of living men. it is running largely on automatics - like one of those "ark" multi-generational spaceships. Wall-E told a great truth about us, however indirectly. It would've been truer if there were no "big bad computer" in the film.

The best thing about my discoveries in faith is that I don't have to judge others - I can trust to God's mercy and hope and pray for the salvation of all (not in the Universalist sense, but in the sense of charity).

Protest

2008-11-16T10:26:00.003+03:00

Thousands across the nation have come out in protest to the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency. Ignoring the will of the majority, they have surrounded the DNC headquarters and called for blacklists and boycotts of all who voted for Obama.

Is it just me, or does it strike no one as odd that protests are not organized against victorious candidates and parties in elections, but have been organized by an extremely vocal minority over Prop 8? Why didn't they do this over Obama? Or in '04? or in 2,000?

Never mind the constant miscasting and misrepresentation of the position of the people who supported prop 8. The gay lobby wants everyone to believe something that is manifestly untrue ("H8"); ie, propaganda, which could work in the short term to convince gullible people of the lie that Christianity and oddly enough, traditional religions that condemn homosexual behavior actually "hate" people who engage in this behavior. Of course there are people who actually hate, and some of them claim a religious cloak. But this ignores the vast majority who hold no hate whatsoever; but merely see homosexual behavior for what it is - something that must in the end destroy society. Some see it in terms of religious instruction about the truth of the nature of man, others merely see the rational implications of a society without any limits or definitions. In the long run, it will come around and bite the gay activists in the behind, so to speak. All arguments not based on truth are bound to fail as people eventually learn of their falsehood, and this will turn them back against the people who lied to them.

"If we can move anybody past anger and have a respectful conversation, then you can plant the seed of change," said Seattle blogger Amy Balliett, who started planning the protests when she set up a Web page after the California vote.

Let her talk to me, and we'll plant a seed of change. Only it won't be the change she's thinking of. If people like her were to learn that opposition may actually be rational, she might realize that such words are useless until the arguments are fully understood, from their beginnings. Since the gay lobby teaches that opposition is rooted in irrational religion and mindless bigotry, they can hardly admit that they might really be wrong...

On Proposition 8

2008-11-11T06:36:00.002+03:00

I think this, more than anything, reveals the nature of the war. For the first time those who would turn all social understandings upside down have lost a really important battle. Up until now, the legislative and judicial systems have practically always supported them, and so they could freely call on us to admire and support the system of "democracy" that enabled their victories, while those defending traditional families and understandings have seen the value of their participation in democracy eroded bit by bit.

But now the gay lobby has suffered a defeat. Now they must move against the very idea of democracy, which, expressed in its one true form - referendums - reveals that all are willing to move against the democracy if the 'demo' in the 'cracy' makes the 'wrong' decision. They must resort to legal, but quite undemocratic action to nullify the last victory of the traditionalists over the fashion bugs.

Now the ruling principle should not, ultimately, be democracy. The r.p. should be "who is right?" and that established and enforced. And now the fashion bugs have been revealed to be just as unhappy about a democratic decision as the traditionalists. When the state governor talks about overturning a referendum ("my power over the power of the people") he has declared his commitment to an anti-democratic principle and that reveals, to a degree, the hollowness of our claims to and illusions of living in a democracy.

So the war will continue. And it is a war where somebody will win and somebody will lose. And the losers will have to go into the shadows. There will be no tolerance of a dissenting idea here, especially if that idea has any hope of being turned into reality. Living in the Golden State, I saw, as an agnostic school teacher slowly turning towards Orthodoxy, which way the wind was blowing. There is no place for traditional beliefs in a public setting, and Christians that hold that what they believe matters will eventually be forced into the catacombs.

Orwellian Doublespeak

2008-09-26T06:59:00.000+04:00

World leaders recommit to poverty goals

http://www.reuters.com/article/world...48O6BB20080926

Hey, if their goal is poverty, it sure looks like it's working!

Let's see, we can impoverish the populace and line our own pockets at a rate of 2% annually...

That's what gets me about people believing in political and education systems, and then being shocked when those systems do not accomplish their stated goals. People start talking about how the system isn't working, when in fact, the systems are working fine - they ARE achieving their (true) goals. The new wars on abstract nouns (such as terror) are undefinable and can't be won. Abstract nouns (such as poverty) cannot be defeated. But we lap it up. We have been abstracted to death. Or at least to poverty.

Help! Mr. Chesterton!

2008-09-06T07:31:00.005+04:00

OK, OK, it's "Help, Mr. Wizard!"
Where are they when you need them?
This NYT article just begs the question (or call for help):

Questions, and Hope, on Plans for Mortgage Giants

For months, the questions hanging over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the beleaguered mortgage giants, have unnerved Wall Street and Main Street.

When we are reduced to speaking of hope for big companies, and how they are beleaguered, rather than of hope for the beleaguered John Smith and Angela Jones, then we have forgotten who really needs help.

What do I believe?

2008-08-31T19:22:00.005+04:00

Seems like a whole bunch of things I want to write about; the trouble is making the time.

One of the driving factors in pushing me away from the Baptists was that they taught their own, incorrect, versions of Catholic teaching. The lesson I learned is that if you want to know what a faith teaches, get your information straight from the horse's mouth, not from middlemen. Jack Chick's "Alberto" for me became a watershed in condemnation of bogus teachings. This means that if you want to know what Baptists teach, ask Baptists. If you want to know what Catholics teach, ask a Catholic source. And if you want to know what us whacky Orthodox Christians believe, ask a genuine Orthodox source. The worst thing you can do is think you know what they teach (because a source from your own faith told-you-so), and then find out that you were wrong.

I think the really surprising thing is discovering how much Orthodoxy has in common with mainline Protestant faiths. The Nicene Creed is a good place to start.

For a complete rundown of what exactly Orthodoxy teaches and why, where you can pick and choose what you're curious about, here's an official source:

Or you can just click the title of this post, above.

And once again, for an interesting radio experience, click on "Ancient Faith Radio" to the right. You can choose between discussions of a WIDE variety of topics on the "Talk" stream, or listen to music that Christians listened to 1,000 years ago on the "Music" stream (a fair amount is in English, though).

A small test of faith

2008-08-05T16:22:00.002+04:00

We never know how good our faith is until it is tested. I think of Abraham being tested by the sacrifice of Isaac, of CS Lewis being tested by the death of his wife. When it comes to that, I haven't really been tested yet. But there are little rehearsals along the way. When we suffer a loss, even a minor one, how do we react? Do we react in anger? Do we turn to God? Do we say, "Why me?"

I just had an accident; my car was totaled, it wasn't my fault, but insurance will take months to process, and knowing how they avoid payment on policies, I don't have high hopes for the future on that count. We have to get along without a car for the foreseeable future. How we will obtain groceries (walking with what I, the man of the family, can carry in two hands, how our aging in-laws will get to their dacha, how we will get to church, what we will do if we have a medical emergency...

It is here that I have to ask myself, where is my faith? Do I really rely on God? Or do I really rely on myself? Can I let go and leave things in God's hands when something happens outside of my control?

Not that I doubt my faith intellectually. But I do see at times like this how small my faith is.

One of the many falsehoods...

2008-07-13T09:44:00.004+04:00

One thing that many Protestants believe about Orthodoxy (when they learn anything about it at all), is that we worship Mary and the Saints.

This is simply not true.

What you see is people doing two basic things: praying, and venerating.

We need to define words here. What is worship? What is prayer? What is veneration?

Worship is an acknowledgment of deity and supremacy. It is for God alone.

Praying is talking - it literally means "asking": "I pray thee, (prithee) open the door." A general Protestant assumption is that prayer is necessarily and exclusively to/for God. It excludes the understanding of just asking somebody for something. If I ask my friend Jim to pray for me, I am praying him to pray for me. To add his prayers to mine, or his asking to my asking.

Veneration is something we do frequently. It is giving honor to something/someone that deserves honor. When we salute the flag, we are venerating it. When we kiss the picture of our dear departed mother, we are venerating it. We are NOT honoring a piece of cloth, or paper, but what they represent.

Perhaps it can begin to be possible to see that a person who is bowing before an icon and kissing it is not worshiping it, but honoring the person/event it represents. That a person who says a prayer to St Nicholas is not worshiping the saint, but asking for his prayers, to join his prayers to ours - after all, even the dead are alive in God, and so not really gone, just departed to the other side. (Matt 22:32, Luke 20:38)

Like I said, Jack Chick did more damage than he knows. Anyone who discovers the truth will come to hate false propaganda fiercely.

My spiritual journey

2008-06-29T18:14:00.006+04:00

I'm still thinking of how to explain my seemingly odd choices in life to family and friends.
I guess one thing I would say about my spiritual journey is that it started with my Baptist upbringing. I was raised like everyone else as a Baptist - one big difference was that I underwent a serious conversion at the age of 15 and began actively, by my own choice, learning and practicing the Baptist faith. Things like Wednesday night Bible study, Thursday night soul-winning, Jack Chick tracts, Word of Life, etc, were for me serious business. I realized that faith was something that defined all of life and that if you believed something, you ought to act on it.

I guess my siblings came to similar conclusions later, to varying degrees. The important thing was that as an older teen, for a few years I actively practiced the Baptist faith. I believed it without question.

I gradually began to question it, though. I felt like some of the things it seemed the Bible said, "Ask and ye shall receive", well, I wasn't receiving, and what bothered me even more was that the logical conclusion of the Baptist faith for me was that God had evidently created billions of people, knowing that most of them would, through ignorance or foolishness, reject salvation and choose to go to hell, so that He could have a small number of people who voluntarily chose Him. Seemed pretty 'damned' selfish to me. There were other things, but at the time, they were big enough for me. So when I joined the military, I wound up dropping faith like a hot rock, all the more because I was so rapidly disillusioned by the treatment of recruits and volunteers. I spent 5 years in a highly cynical environment and ceased to believe in anything. The result was that I spent 20 years as a lazy agnostic who didn't want to think about it.

Along the way I encountered foreign cultures and languages, learned about the art of translation and realized that ideas like "the King James Bible is the only Bible" were just low-brow nonsense from people who understood nothing about what translation is. That and other nails in the coffin of my childhood/young adult faith, like the gradual realization that the Jack Chick tracts I had loved were full of out-and-out lies and misinformation, at least as far as the Catholic Church was concerned.

It was reading CS Lewis, who my wife kept sticking under my nose, that got me to taking faith seriously again. Eventually, I reached a point where I had to make a decision. I had to return to Christianity, but where? I couldn't return to the Baptists. They simply didn't have enough of the Truth, even though it was clear that Christ is indeed the Way. I was still somewhat prejudiced against Catholics. My wife was Orthodox, and I immediately began investigating it. I figured that if it 'fit the bill', it would result in total family unity. Not the best reason to choose a faith, but in hindsight...

The more I learned the more impressed I was with the Orthodox Church. It really had existed continuously for 2,000 years, and had an entirely verifiable history - something most Protestants have a serious problem with - serious Protestant histories tend to start at the reformation; as if the Holy Spirit had taken a 1,500 year vacation and let everything go to pot. Even stronger was the fact the the Protestant Reformation was aimed at things that had gone wrong in the Catholic (western) Church, and so was entirely irrelevant to Eastern Orthodoxy. The fact that one Church See (Rome) had effectively excommunicated all the others (Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria) in 1054 made it obvious that one had broken away from 4, rather than the other way around. I read through the Symbol of Faith (the Nicene Creed) and found that I totally agreed with it - that I could accept all of it!

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible.
And in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages. Light of light; true God of true God; begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father, by Whom all things were made; Who for us men and for our salvation came down from Heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man. And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried. And the third day He arose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead; Whose Kingdom shall have no end.
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spoke by the prophets.
In one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

The remarkable thing was how similar Orthodoxy was to my childhood faith in doctrine, while being seemingly totally different in practice!
Church History

I still had objections to things like confession before a priest - childhood indoctrination is strong! - but after talking to Father Victor Sokolov I realized that I had been involved with a secular men's group where all the men "checked-in" (confessed in front of ALL the others) every week, and that my barrier was one I had erected myself. So I gave in and went to be chrismated [my prior baptisms (Catholic baby and Baptist child baptisms) were both valid by Orthodox teaching that there is but one Baptism - with water and the Spirit, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, so my Catholic baptism was even valid], and a couple of weeks later, knowing very little about the Faith I had accepted, flew off to Russia to live. (Talk about faith!)

Sola Scriptura
I've since learned a lot. One of the biggest has been the basis of authority, any authority that we accept. When it comes to Christianity, everyone I know (back home in the US) refers to the Bible as the authority. That sounds fine. There's only one problem. What if two people, both intelligent and educated, read the same passage and come to different or contradictory conclusions? In a court of law we would never accept a document as ultimate authority - at some point a physical and living judge who actual speaks audibly to the parties in disagreement has to issue a decision that one or both may not like in order to keep society functional and to prevent chaos and anarchy. This is essentially what the Protestant reformation did - it did not eliminate the Pope - it made EVERYONE Pope unto themselves. The result - now we have thousands of "denominations" (a concept that did not exist prior to the Reformation) and "independent" churches, all of whom interpret the Bible contradictorily - "the gospel according to Pastor X". Surely this is not what was meant when it was promised that "the Holy Spirit would lead the Church into all truth". (John 16:12-15)

The problem, obviously, is not inerrancy of Scripture, but the inerrancy of the interpretation of the reader.

Another huge problem is our life spans - we live maybe 70-odd years, if that - we only have time to start from scratch as babies; by the time we are 21 we have the audacity to stand up and tell others what ancient writings separated from us by half a world and two millenia or more really mean. For example, I learned that doctrines like the ever-virginity of Mary, which Martin Luther totally accepted, were thrown overboard later by western Protestants for whom the word 'brother' means a male child of the same parent, unlike their eastern counterparts, for whom it also refers to cousins. (You should see the trouble I have teaching the words 'brother' and 'sister' to Russian kids using only English - they keep trying to count in their cousins!) So things like "Jesus's brothers" and Matt. 1:24-25, where the word "until" is used to imply that Mary "gave up her virginity" after the birth of the Son of God, whereas knowledge of the original Greek "eos" would show that "while" is probably a better translation than "until" in modern English - on such things hang doctrine and acceptance or rejection of a faith. For these reasons, it became obvious to me that the individual is simply incapable of correctly interpreting Scripture on their own.

Thus for me it became obvious that there MUST BE a physical presence of the Church, that we can turn to and it can authoritatively tell us how to navigate the complexities of such minefields. Furthermore, the Church must have BOTH living representatives that can talk to us AND a continuous Tradition that faithfully hands on what Christ and the Apostles taught. Sure, everybody claims to have this, but no one can offer historical evidence prior to 1500 AD aside from the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. If you're really looking for a continuous presence of the Church established by Christ, that narrows it down pretty quickly.

In the whole debate of where the Church is, and more importantly, how a person can be saved - an explanation that reconciles a merciful God with the Bible and the Church - most come to one of two extreme conclusions - either some form of universalism ('don't worry, everybody will be saved - your life and faith choices don't really matter as long as you are trying to please God and your conscience') or a 'my-church/faith-is-the-only-way-to-be-saved'. I don't think either one is true.
Salvation is something God does, not us. God saves whom He will - it's not up to us to dictate who will be saved. He may know/see something we don't, about ourselves and others, that represents true acceptance of Christ and submission to Him.
Personally, I see it as a dart board. The true Church is the bullseye, but there are circles closer to or farther from that bullseye. Anyone who hits the board may be saved. Obvious, atheists, agnostics and pagans (Wiccans, etc) aren't even really on the board. (There IS such a thing as not being on the board.) But it is important to get as close as you can to the bullseye, and the bullseye offers the surest path to correct teaching on salvation and everything else. If you think the Way, the Truth and the Life, and your eternal soul to be of any import, then that should be your goal, and I have excellent reason to believe that to be the Orthodox Church.

Anyway, CS Lewis and GK Chesterton have been my co-pilots in trying to grasp the roots of modern thought - the kind of thought I was unconsciously brought up in. It's always been obvious to me that you should find the smartest people you can and learn from them.

One big difference is that the Orthodox Church does not try to "convince people to become Christian". Evangelism is based a lot more on how you live your life than on your ability to pressure others. We say, as both Christ and Philip said, "Come and see!"

Doonesbury Irony

2007-01-14T14:45:00.000+03:00

I've always liked Doonesbury - very intelligent commentary. Even now Trudeau strikes an effective blow against a small minority that discounts scientific fact in favor of beliefs.

But there is another danger that he ironically comments on without realizing it. It is that of religious pluralism that challenges traditional Christianity, just as some extremists attempt to disprove or ignore scientific facts. The exact same 'arguments' presented in this strip are used to crush, especially in public school, any idea that traditional Christianity has a preponderance of evidence that it is actually true. (I won't get started on details like the success, strength and relative freedom of countries where Christianity has dominated, nor on its enabling of scientific development and encouragement of reason in the 2nd Millenium in particular, contrary to popular myth.)

I like Trudeau. But he missed that connection and maybe he wouldn't worry about the sky falling so much if he had a little more faith. It's going to fall anyway. (Certainly death awaits us all.) The difference is in the worldviews of the believer vs the non-believer. The latter sees death as the end of his individuality, and properly panics. The former sees further than that, and this is what is denied (as being True) by the pluralists, multiculturalists, and other relativists, particularly those who control the teacher preparation process.

Control of the thinking of the young in public education, primarily by denying objective truth in faith and morality while insisting on it in the material sciences, is what has so rapidly erased social agreement on what is right and wrong, and turned us from a primarily Christian nation that allowed freedom to non-believers into a nation of non-believers that increasingly negates what believing parents try to teach to their children at home as soon as the children walk into school. Putting Kwanzaa on everybody's calendar and 'teaching' it is a laughably sad example of de-emphasizing the importance of Christmas, converting Christmas from one of the most important events in human history to a holiday of minimal importance that is completely on a level with Hannukah, Kwanzaa, and other foreign influences. I suppose this is inevitable in a nation that was founded by immigrants. But it undeniably negates the importance of Christianity.

On the silence

2006-10-15T17:51:00.000+04:00

With full-time work and a family, there's not all that much time for blogging. I tend to read and write on my favorite forums. I want to maintain the blog - maybe I'll be inspired to write more at some point, but the general sense that few people are interested in the peculiar combination of Russia, teaching English to foreigners, and religious faith and common sense has discouraged me from putting much time into this.

That said, the seasons turn once again, and the rapid change from highs in the 50's to highs in the 30's has us shivering outside, even though they turned the heat on.

On a personal level, the annual dearth of work in the summer (and lack of cash that ensues) has given way to a regular budget and trying to catch up with all the stuff put off during the summer.

We'll see if I can jump-start this blog again...

Christian irritation over Muslim objections to the truth grows

2006-09-16T08:51:00.000+04:00

What the Pope said was quite true, so Muslims have nothing to do but be angry about it.

The pope quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th-century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," Benedict said. "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'"

The PС ideology (one of whose aims is to marginalize Christianity) of course must insist on the equal truth of all religions.

On progressive education in schools

2006-07-06T14:55:00.000+04:00

Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." He says, "Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress." This, logically stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education." This, clearly expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children."

The case of the general talk of "progress" is, indeed, an extreme one. As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress--that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what. Progress, properly understood, has, indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous. So far from it being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth. Nobody has any business to use the word "progress" unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible --at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress. Never perhaps since the beginning of the world has there been an age that had less right to use the word "progress" than we. In the Catholic twelfth century, in the philosophic eighteenth century, the direction may have been a good or a bad one, men may have differed more or less about how far they went, and in what direction, but about the direction they did in the main agree, and consequently they had the genuine sensation of progress. But it is precisely about the direction that we disagree. Whether the future excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less liberty; whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut up; whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin intellectualism or in a full animal freedom; whether we should love everybody with Tolstoy, or spare nobody with Nietzsche;--these are the things about which we are actually fighting most. It is not merely true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this "progressive" age. It is, moreover, true that the people who have settled least what is progress are the most "progressive" people in it.

G. K. Chesterton

Missing the point...

2006-06-19T08:31:00.000+04:00

Watching the hot button debates rip up the Anglican Communion. The US branch of the AC - the Episcopalian Church is forcing a schism, no less I think, than the Great Schism of 1054 that split the Roman Church from the other Christian Churches (Antioch, Constantinople, etc). I think that Christians of any stripe can only see that as bad. What they disagree on is whether women and gays can/should be leaders in the church.

Now as soon as I say that everyone has a knee-jerk reaction. Traditionalists (aka conservatives) say "Are you kidding?" Progressives (aka liberals) respond that the very question is outrageous.

The assumption behind the argument that anybody should be able to be a priest or bishop is that the church is an earthly body, with the same aims, structures, rights, etc as a human government. If that assumption is incorrect, then the "progressive" argument falls to pieces, as this is precisely what church tradition denies, yet all of the debate assumes that church government is and should be the same as national government.

What the Orthodox Church has always said, and what Roman Catholics and Anglicans (minus the Episcopalian church) still believe (for now) and Episcopalians used to believe but have written off as "outdated" tradition, is that the Church is a body established, not by the people and for the people, but rather by Christ and for God. This means that the structure and rules cannot be such as seem fair and right to humans, but such as have been established by the Lord and clarified by the Church leadership, primarily the Apostles. It is not and cannot be a democracy, but is and must be a Theocracy with Christ as its Head. The human leaders, unlike political leaders, only have authority over members insofar as the members submit themselves to that authority, and they cannot make any changes that they like, or even changes by popular will. They MUST act in accordance with the Bible and Church Tradition.

So all of the debate, with its insistence that all should have equal rights, is meaningless. It assumes democratic human government. God created two different sexes for His own reasons, and nowhere is it written that we are given to understand all of them.

The same thing applies to gays in the Church. As I tried to say (and didn't say well) in my last post, definitions are everything.
You can't repent of who you are; only what you do. Repenting is a rejection of action. That's why it's so important to reject the language of being something that is not actually a state of being but an action (as a grammar teacher I have to have a pretty good handle on that).
They are NOT gay; they commit "gay" acts because they have desires that have been twisted away from God's natural design (See Romans ch. 1). So it is not a question of equal rights, which is a meaningless question for the Church. It is a question of violating God's will by doing what they want to do, as we all do. We differ only in the form of our sin. Our sins are sins of commission or omission, of doing or not doing, not sins of BEING. So homosexual acts are what they do, just as cursing, lying, adultery, etc is what you and I do. We are all sinners before God.

It's just sad to see the Anglican Communion breaking up. I believe the Orthodox Church is the true Church, but that doesn't mean that God is not present in other churches, or that they don't have and teach at least some of the truth. It's another victory for the Master of this world, Satan.

There's only one Church that doesn't waffle, that doesn't change its teachings every 50 years or so. I do distinguish between individuals going wrong and the direction a whole Church takes. Most Protestant churches have radically changed their teachings over the past 100 years, particularly as regards what sin is. Scandals only demonstrate the violation of church teaching, what is right or wrong. The question is whether the violation becomes acceptable and ceases to be seen as sin. The Anglican Church is falling, the Roman Church is tottering; only the Orthodox Church stands fast.

A Pop-Tart entry

2006-06-16T11:08:00.000+04:00

I feel there's still a place in my life for a blog, there's something that can be done with it. Mostly I guess to try to share what I've learned with family and friends; to provide a small glimpse of what for me is everyday life that for others is difficult to imagine.

Having a 3rd child changed my life more than the 1st, if that's possible. I thought after the 2nd that it wouldn't make such a big difference; boy, was I wrong! One of the effects, of course, has ben to curtail blogging.

One thought on the whole sexuality debate.

If two married people have an affair, should they be labeled "adulterers"? Is their smouldering desire, and the act of cheating what they ARE, rather than what they DO? It seems to me that a lot of people would object to labeling people as BEING something, when it's clear that their affair, their act, is not the whole story of their lives. It's like labeling the woman with the scarlet letter; saying that she IS such-and-such, rather than she has DONE, or ENGAGES in such-and-such.

And yet that is precisely what we do with people who engage in homosexual activity, and we have even made it acceptable to speak of them as BEING 'gay', and they that live this way are still struggling today to affirm that which is by no means self-evident, that they take pride in it.

Take away the label of being homosexual, and the entire debate changes. Orthodox Christians hold that many of our desires should not be acted on, and an alcoholic or drug addict faces the same problem as the homosexual, and is just as much in need of the love of Christ and others and help to overcome their desires.

Spring Fever

2006-04-14T12:10:00.000+04:00

Well, this looks like a monthly at best for now. I think I'll increase volume in the summer, but have been busy with work and personal stuff.

Spring is here at last!!!
Central Russia had a relatively severe and long winter this time around, with temps plummeting to minus 30 F (-35 C) in January. Winter held its grip right up to April, with temps in the teens and twenties (F). But the melting began just under 2 weeks ago, and today is the first day that the playground in front of our building is snow-free! One more week and the snow should be completely gone and the ground, hopefully, dry.
This weekend, Easter in the West, is not yet Easter in the East. Eastern Easter, known as Pascha (Pahss-kah) to Orthodox Christians is on Apr. 23rd this year.
Question of the month (and maybe year): WHY is the Resurrection NOT the most important holiday on the Western Christian calendar???
This is not a trivial question. It is a symptom of what I believe is wrong with Christianity in the West in general.
We all know Christmas holds the #1 spot, Thanksgiving 2nd, and Easter a more distant 3rd (to most Christians, and further to non-Christians).
Christmas looks back to the past and celebrates God coming down to man, the bringing of God into this world. Easter looks forward to the future and celebrates Christ's defeat of Death and His (and our) subsequent rising to God.
And yet, we prepare for Christmas for anywhere from a week to a month before the event, and have a two-week holiday/vacation following it, while Easter hardly gets a day off, except maybe for Catholics on Good Friday.
In Orthodoxy, Lent precedes Easter by a good seven weeks!! 6 weeks of lent, followed by Holy Week (commemorating Christ's last week before the Crucifixion, the Crucixion itself up to the Resurrection). During all this time, Christians who are not in name only, but serious about trying to become like Christ, are called upon to fast (meaning here "abstain") from certain foods (in general, all meat and dairy products - barring medical conditions, pregnancy, etc - and from activities that distract them from God (maybe TV, computer, tech stuff, hours-long conversations on the phone with friends, or whatever has you too busy to pray and read the Bible or other Christian literature). For almost 2 MONTHS! It's amazing how your mind clears as the beer, heavy foods, and some of the hectic pace back off.
Point is, Orthodoxy takes Pascha SERIOUSLY.

New links

2006-03-03T13:07:00.000+03:00

Check out my new links at the right!
If you're curious about Orthodox Christianity, the OCA link has plenty of info and ACF, well, has to be experienced!
If you wonder why you were "educated" the way you were, or wonder why the richest country in the world can't get its act together and teach its kids better than poorer countries like Russia, take a look at the first page(s) of Gatto's work online!
For a mind-blowing close-up of one of the world's worst (and by now forgotten) disasters, check out Chernobyl. A daring woman biker takes you on a tour close-up!

Temps have plummeted... again

2006-02-04T05:44:00.000+03:00

Unprotected Adecco workers on high rise fall to their death? Uh, actually, no. Just winter.

Continental Russia is now experiencing its second deep freeze of the winter. Temps are dropping to minus 25-28 C (minus 13-16 F). Cars are once again off the road and people are staying home. Home is warm enough, thank God.

Went out and had a beer with a friend who just came back from America. He brought me a couple of interesting documentaries (including "Outfoxed", how FOX bamboozles people) and a jar of chunky peanut butter! Jif!! Mmm!

In Memorium (Vechnaya Pamyat')

2006-01-30T22:02:00.000+03:00

I'm in mourning for a good man - my dad. Maybe he wasn't always good; he screwed up like we all do, but he repented of the bad and did what he could in later years to make up for it.
I was talking to him via video conference, and my baby boy was being fussy and we couldn't carry on a normal conversation, so I said I'd call back later, maybe tomorrow.
Turned out that he went outside to do some yard work and immediately had a heart attack. Later was too late.
I'm glad I had time to make a video connection and show him my family halfway around the world. Glad that my kids got to see him and wave at him and say hello. Most of all, I'm glad I had a chance to hash out the important stuff with him and say what I thought, and to listen. I just feel that I could've said I love you a little louder and more clearly.
Now he's in God's hands. I pray for His mercy on my father, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. God rest his soul, and keep in in eternal memory (which in the end, is only in God).

Da Vinci propaganda

2006-01-25T06:26:00.000+03:00

Just saw a brief BBC report on "The Da Vinci Code". It purported to report on a series of lectures being held in Ireland regarding an investigation into the truth of the religious claims of the book.
What I found interesting was the BBC's deliberate evasion of any result. The camera showed scenes from the lecture in progress, but not one conclusion was reported (about the truth of the claims) and the questions to attendees also avoided the issue, sticking to "Was it interesting?" "Did it make you want to read the book?" sort of thing.
It's clear there are two forces at work here. People that find the claims to be highly dubious (Mainly those that value their faith and don't want it smeared) and people that want to believe them (Those that want to debunk Christianity). The news (that supposedly reports the truth impartially) is walking a tightrope for business purposes trying to offend none by pretending to report on a topic while actually saying nothing. The business includes the sale of the upcoming movie. The end result is that interest is raised in the sensational (so people will go see it) without any real public report of investigation of the claims, which will lean people towards skepticism not of the film, but of Christianity. It's a stacked deck.

The Chill Continues

2006-01-20T13:00:00.000+03:00

The cold weather continues to seep in. Do you guys in the US know what -25 F means? When experienced winter drivers who keep their batteries at home at night can't start their cars, you know it's cold.
It's about 0 (F) on the enclosed balcony. Windows are heavily frosted over. I go out in triple layers - long johns, jogging pants and then regular pants, and my rabbit fur hat with the ears is no joke here - PETA would stand no chance here. Anyone who thought of throwing paint on a fur coat would be taken outside and beaten up, and no one would worry about police or law suits. A woolen cap just doesn't cut it at these temperatures. Any wind at all cuts into your face. The conditions are Arctic.

The Biggest Chill

2006-01-18T22:29:00.000+03:00

This is definitely the coldest weather I've ever experienced. -25 degrees F (-30-35 C)
It is really cool, both literally and figuratively, especially when I can look outside (at a solid sheet of frost on the window) from a warm inside. After 10 minutes or so, you start to notice the cold, despite triple layers of everything. After 15 minutes, you are definitely cooled off. Anyway, it's the kind of cold you can boast about later.
It's the Baptism of Christ (by John the Baptist, aka the Forerunner) and the direct statement by God that Jesus was His Son (the only way you can find out that which science can't prove is via revelation). A lot of people are going to jump into a hole in the ice for a brief swim (a few moments, in most cases), but this year I'll pass. Way too cold. Brrrrr!!

A bribe, by any other name

2006-01-10T14:32:00.000+03:00

Had to get a letter from my bank. Didn't expect it to be for free.
I was told it would take 2-3 weeks to put the letter together for a $2 fee. But if I were willing to buy a silver commemorative coin for $11, I could get the letter next day! And I could return it to the bank later for $9, or make a gift of it, or pass it on to my children...

The technological tightrope

2006-01-08T07:40:00.000+03:00

Frustration city - since I learned about the various telephone-through-the-internet possibilities, I've been really excited - went out and bought a webcam after experiencing video from a friend online.

But compatibility issues plague the use of this stuff. The computer has frozen from the amount of CP brain this stuff uses, problems getting the messenger program to acknowledge my camera, etc.

The obvious plus for me (assuming I get it all to work) is communication with family and friends which has become quite spotty over the years and is exacerbated by my location.

The minus is the unknown factor of just how invasive these programs are.
Plus the potential danger of having other people later retrieve information that you thought you had carefully deleted.

Trying to walk the tightrope - use the technology to say what I want to say while not having ill-wishers use it to screw me later...

The Dan Brown Code

2006-01-07T09:34:00.000+03:00

Dan Brown is an idiot.

That is to say, he is a clever writer, from a modern financial perspective.
But from a truth perspective, he's an idiot.

Aimed at a market that wants to believe those Christians are wrong, and their teachings just a cover-up for a slimy conspiracy, The Da Vinci Code is pure sensationalist crap.

It's unfortunate that a film is being released soon to further exploit this market.

Why does it matter? Well, mainly because millions of people too lazy/tired/uninterested in (etc.) to do even elementary research will believe what he says at the beginning of his book, to wit that much of what he writes is fact, which makes Christians, not only Catholics but all mainstream denominations out to be idiots.

Well, for another take on the book/film, check this out.

Babar in Gitmo

2006-01-06T06:51:00.000+03:00

You know the children's book series "Babar, King of the Elephants"?
Well what if our hero Babar fell into U.S. hands as a "terror suspect"?
Maybe like this:

If you spin him fast enough, you can make him talk!

I'll Be Back?

2005-12-09T12:39:00.000+03:00

I might get this page running again. Journalspace has been too limiting. If this site proves better, I'll be here! Be tinkering around here next few days...

COA

2004-09-14T08:39:00.000+04:00

This is, in a sense, a change of address; more accurately, you have found my alternate/back-up page. I haven't seen features that impress me enough to settle here. Although I may be back here (ya never know) and this will link to my other site.
For a lot more rusmeister, try http://rusmeister.journalspace.com/ !

Alcohol Packaging

2004-08-07T14:13:00.000+04:00

Just a brief one for you State-siders. You buy your beer in six-packs, (in the Northeast, anyway) liquor and wine are sold in special stores, beer is always sold in 12-oz cans or bottles, etc... The norm?

Not here.

The standard beer bottle is half a liter, or 18 oz. (Also, practically all beer bottles state their relative alcohol content (4-6% for normal beers) - look at your bottles and see if and where Anheuser-Busch does that.) 12 oz (33 cl) are sold here, but usually western brands, and are less popular. Prices range from 40-75 cents for that half liter, too. But beer quality is way up from the bad old days, and quite competitive with our own micro-brews.

Now for the fun part - many brands sell (quite well, too) 1.5 and 2-liter plastic bottles, the latter going for about $1.60. (The six-pack is 2 liters, of course)

The downside is no six-packs. Cases (of at least 24) or singles. No compromises.

1 and 2 liter wine boxes are popular here, too.

Now for the wierd - "cocktails" (mixed drinks). Gin and tonic in a 12-oz can, anyone? How about a Bloody Mary or screwdriver? No problem. Also some other wierd (and sometimes disgusting) fruity combinations as well.

And yesterday, I saw what made me sit down and write this....

Popular Russian mixes (in glass bottles) normally prepared only at parties - The "Russian Yorzh"* (Beer and vodka), the French Yorzh (Rum and wine), "Northern Lights (vodka and champaign) and more.

You really don't know what you're missing...

What makes a movie worth while?

2004-08-03T15:29:00.000+04:00

Traditionally, film has been considered a realm of the arts. The criteria by which they used to be judged reflect this. The Academy Awards still gives a surface appearance of those criteria by their categories: Best actor, screenplay, etc., which mostly feature the artistic aspects of the film.
But those films, with few exceptions, generally have something else behind them besides good artistic quality.

That's right …$$$

Historically, the artistic criteria and relevance to the people, place and time the art is presented in have always determined the popularity of the given work of art. If a book has a sufficiently good story and well-thought out characters, if a painting uses lighting and contrast successfully in depicting its subject, if a musical piece is innovative and imaginative while conforming to rules of art, it can become popular. If it continues to be popular over a long period of time (at least a couple of generations - 50 -100 years - it comes to be called a classic. (Interestingly enough, Disney came up with the oxymoron "modern classic", as a line to sell its recent films with (such as Aladdin and Hercules.)

What if seventeeth century art were judged by the amount of money the artists spent on making the paintings? Or books by how much was spent on writing and publishing the books? Or music...? Or on the sales that they generated in the first week/month/year of their existence? Daniel Defoe, Mozart and Rembrandt might be unknown to the world today, that is, if people were stupid enough to use such ($) criteria.

And yet the method used, in a willing alliance between the owners of the movie studios and the news stations* is to gage a movie's quality by its box office take. Nobody is going to care whether Spiderman 2 makes a profit of $32 million or $332 million (except for Sony/Universal) - we are going to care more about whether the admission fee is $6 or $11, and most of all, whether we really enjoyed the film or not. And yet, rarely is more than a sentence or two spent on the quality of a film, which is reported as "news" (few people seem to realize the ominous meaning behind the term "infomercial" - as if a business would present unbiased information about its product).

What follows can be quickly scrolled through - or read thoroughly. This from Yahoo news (they scrub their links quickly, as does AP and other news organizations. If you want to prove they wrote something you have to save it fast. This article has not been edited in any way.

Shyamalan's 'The Village' Leads Box Office
Sunday August 1 1:03 PM ET
Its surprise ending may have underwhelmed some critics, but writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's latest scary movie, "The Village," got off to a strong start at the weekend box office in North America.
The film, which revolves around the good folk of a bucolic 19th century hamlet and the creepy goings-on in the nearby woods, earned about $50.8 million in its first three days, becoming the third film in as many weekends to open at No. 1 with more than $50 million.
Shyamalan's previous effort, "Signs," boosted by the star power of Mel Gibson, opened at $60 million in August 2002 and finished with $228 million.
The new movie, reportedly budgeted at a modest $60 million, represents one of the last chances by the film's backer, Walt Disney Co., to salvage some respectability from a dismal summer, which saw it release such duds as "King Arthur," "Around the World in 80 Days" and "Home on the Range," while refusing to allow its Miramax Films unit to handle box office titan "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Indeed, "The Village" set a new Disney record for a July release, beating the $46.6 million bow of last year's "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl."
Last weekend's champion, "The Bourne Supremacy," starring Matt Damon, slipped to No. 2 with $23.4 million. The spy thriller, released by Universal Pictures, has earned $98 million to date.
Three other wide new entries also debuted on Friday.
Paramount Pictures' $80 million remake of the political conspiracy thriller "The Manchurian Candidate," starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, opened at No. 3 with $20.2 million, on par with previous Washington releases.
The stoner comedy "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," about two pals with the late-night munchies, rolled in at No. 7 with a disappointing $5.2 million. The New Line Cinema film was budgeted at just $9 million.
Universal's family adventure "Thunderbirds," a live adaptation of the cult British TV show with marionettes, misfired at No. 12 with $2.7 million. The film was budgeted at $57 million.
Universal Pictures is a unit of General Electric Co. -controlled NBC Universal. Paramount Pictures is a unit of Viacom Inc . New Line Cinema is a unit of Time Warner Inc .

This article is typical of what movie talk on the news sounds like these days. (If this isn't enough, just go turn on the TV and wait until 6:25 or whatever.) Count the number of references to money. Divide by the percentage of relevance to "consumers" (yes, that's what you are, not people, but consumers) and add your level of interest in those figures and you get the true value of the movie for you and your family.

* (who are mostly now the same people - as a case in point, Disney owns not only its own film studio, as everyone knows, it also owns ABC, and Universal Pictures and NBC are both owned by G.E. and Viacom - CBS, etc. Hmmm…)

2004-08-02T19:15:00.000+04:00

Movie Soundtracks and the Money Trail

Warning: If you don't give a darn about music or the music industry, don't read this.

I have read Amazon's reviews of the "soundtrack" for Spiderman 2. People who bought it liked the music, but were disappointed or confused. Sony did not miss a golden opportunity; it was a calculated move.

Always having been an afficiando of movie soundtracks, over the years I began to notice something peculiar. The constraints of the amount of music that could be placed on record albums mostly limited a release to 45 minutes. All forms of music, including soundtracks, were kind of stuck to this.

Newer technologies enabled the release of more music. Cassettes were made with up to a 120 minute limit, but tended to snarl up or get stuck, so 90 minutes became the practical limit. Nevertheless, more music was not recorded onto them because it did not increase profits. (The market had already set the prices, and units, such as records, cassettes and CDs were the determining factor, not the amount of music.)

What the music companies learned was that they could maximize their profits by releasing a 45 minute album, and follow up on successful sales of soundtracks of popular films by releasing a "special, collector's, or whatever edition" 5-10 years later. So using the standards of 2004, a 45 minute CD can be sold for $18, followed by a (say, 78 minute CD or 2 CD package) special edition release in 2010 for $30. People who really want to hear the music aren't going to want to wait 6 years, and of course will want to hear all available music. I don't have statistics, but I think it's safe to suppose that at least 20% of the people who bought the original will by the re-release. That raises the average final (gross) profit from the soundtrack sales to $24. (Based on $2400 in sales for every hundred people - do the math)

Now on to an even stranger phenomenon. I first witnessed this with the soundtrack for Batman (1989); most recently, the Spiderman films as well. The tactic of releasing an album that contained mostly pop/rock songs used fragmentally or not at all in the film (and having nothing to do with the price of tea in China, either) with the film itself, and a delayed release of the actual score by at least a month. This results in a large number of people who enjoyed the film and may or may not be soundtrack buffs buying the faux soundtrack. Of course, all people really interested in the soundtrack by the 2nd CD, and so, sales are increased. My guess is that here the proportion of dual sales is higher, probably at least 50%, which means $27 average per CD profit (although it's really $36 from the poor suckers who really wanted the music).

Sony and the other music companies had already learned to cover their butts by careful use of language. In the 80's (when I became a soundtrack lover), the term used was "original soundtrack" for the genuine symphonic score. Now the term soundtrack has been divorced from score, which means you have to read the fine print and know the distinctions to know what you are buying.

Of course, this is all connected with the larger money machine that movies have become. My next entry, I think, will look at that.

What does it take to teach a teacher?

2004-07-31T14:34:00.000+04:00

Walking down the more recent passages of memory lane, I look back at the teacher "preparation" program I was forced to endure for the sake of my teaching certificate. It is one of the most important programs, indeed, the most important program that could be imagined - after all it is here that the people are "trained" to teach our children, which has an overwhelming impact on the future of our country, and yet for most Americans it is a mystery - ask what goes on in a certificate or credential program and most will likely say "I don't know" or perhaps, (at best) "They teach teaching methodics" or something like that.

In reality the state programs have become massive indoctrination programs which (in my CA state university program) spend exactly one one-semester course (all courses were semester length, ranging from 2-5 hours a week languishing in a classroom + extensive and time-wasting outside assignments) on methodics out of a 2-3 year full-time study program (with an average of 3 courses a semester). Most of the time is spent on courses with mysterious names such as "The Social (or Psychological) Foundations of Education".

A course on "Assessment and Evaluation" - the instructor did not even believe in the purpose of what they (pronoun purposefully chosen) were teaching, and tacitly acknowledged this (kudos to them).

A course on teaching reading "in all content areas"; i.e.; how a math teacher can teach reading in math, etc. Overall one of the least useless courses, thanks to a dynamic instructor with a few really good ideas.

A mandatory advanced technology course. Pretty much a "You have to come and muck around with these technologies and show some kind of result" course. The single exam question was essentially "How would you develop technology at your school if you were the local tech guru?", with designed answers that only a hard core tech specialist should have to know, like how many LAN lines and what kinds of wireless connections should you install. (Should all teachers become experts at that? Why is it required and how is that the primary assessment of my technological capabilities?)

A Health course, that besides dealing with legal questions of caring for and dealing with kids in public school, also has you keep a (personal and invasive) eating and exercise log, and has you submit answers to the instructor on how you would answer a child who asked you if you (ever) drink or have used drugs - not necessarily a bad thing, but your answers must dovetail with the instructor's political message.

A course on how to teach non-English speaking immigrants (my area of expertise - the instructor was worse than useless - she was downright harmful. She interrupted students giving presentations on their (largely uninformed) ideas on how they would approach the topic, and would conduct extensive ad hoc lectures while the poor presenters stood there (in one case, for 90 minutes - no lie), presentation unfinished. All student teachers were listless and apathetic, and my presentation brought applause and comments that they got more out of it than out of the entire course (sorry for tooting my own horn, but that's what happened).

The methodics course (English - teaching Romeo and Juliet). Not a really bad course, but they pretend to address the problems of immigrant (ESL) language learners (part of the general movement to eliminate ESL classes and "include" all students, regardless of ability level, in one big class), and experience classroom "success" with no real immigrants to practice on. (Simply that people think they have been prepared for something when in fact, they have not.

A Special Ed class - which they re-cast as "inclusion" (see above). Basically, all you had to do to pass this "course" was show up and participate. Everybody's opinions are right, no absolutes, just exude a belief that you will try to solve all of these kids' (sometimes hopelessly complicated) problems, and you get an "A". One particularly ineffective device employed by the instructor - she took us all into a courtyard and had us walk around in circles while she started and stopped music to transmit some idea on communication. The idea was so unremarkable as to be forgotten, but the idiocy of marching around in circles to music with other adults is forever.

A Psych Foundations course (see above). The goal of the course remained a mystery, but I got by by "fulfilling requirements". As with all courses it was very important to formulate good BS in a way the instructor wants to hear it.

A Social Foundations course. This was the ultimate political indoctrination course at the university. The instructor specifically taught that white men were to blame for all of society's ills, and that women and minorities needed to embrace a cloak of victimhood. When I brought up the achievements of Helen Keller and Frederick Douglass (a woman and a black slave that chose to overcome enormous obstacles to succeed rather than adopt victimhood) I was scolded for 10 minutes after class for disrupting the tone of her "discussion" and "missing the point". What little "teaching material" we had to present had to show how we would address problems of "social justice", which meant in practice ensuring favoritism of minorities to "correct the social injustice" inflicted on them throughout history by the white man. (I am not advocating white supremacy here, either. But it is certain that politics of favoritism will alienate the group(s) not favored.)

Finally, the student teaching. One semester (for teacher candidates already in the classroom) of what is supposed to be the crowning glory and most practical aspect of the program actually became the semester from hell. Worse in that the instructor was a teacher from my own school. Although I approached the "student teaching" in a reasonably humble and open manner (although I might be forgiven for a little bit of arrogance - after 7 years in the classroom and a good deal of experience in teaching my own subject matter), the "instructor", after letting me reveal all my weaknesses (in an honest desire to improve my teaching skills) betrayed me by broadcasting things that I had said in general e-mails, and worse, deliberately took things that I said out of context in order to show that she was complying with new "tougher" requirements. I was forced to abandon all of my teaching methods and run a curriculum I knew to be a failure, and had to live in constant fear of surprise visits, under threat of being dropped from the program. In all fairness, she and her cronies at the university were under pressure from state inspectors, but nevertheless, it was almost beyond belief that the stated purpose of teaching teachers to teach could be so twisted. I am sure my case was not an isolated one.

To make a long story short, I soon left the public system, where I was but a flunky, dropped into battle and had all weapons that could do the job effectively taken away (kind of like in Aliens, when the marines are sent into danger without their heavy weaponry) for the private practice, where so far, I am a lot happier, and so are the kids I work with.

It would be appropriate to look at why it has become so enormously difficult to become a teacher, or even a classroom aide, for crying out loud, but that's another blog entry.

What does it mean to school someone?

2004-07-31T13:18:00.000+04:00

As a public high school teacher in the US for several years, the "mainstream" pupils* that I witnessed were studying on a level that would have been identified as middle school (6-8th grade) in my youth. The dumbing down of schools over the 20-odd years since my own graduation is undeniable. In addition, all efforts by staff, teachers and principals that really wanted to educate the children, failed. While many people have pointed to particular reasons why and have offered what amount to band-aids to fix the problem, none of these cures has ever worked. As my experience expanded to include enforced participation in the state teacher preparation program, I began to perceive that the problems are systemic and universal.

I have more recently read the works of John Taylor Gatto, a 30 year NYC teacher (3-time teacher of the year), and found much that chimed with my experience. In particular, his claims that the school system is actually accomplishing its purpose, but that purpose is not what the people now in the schools believe it to be, really struck me as true. There are many things that Mr. Gatto states, some of which seem a bit far-fetched, which I would need back-up documentation to be convinced of. But on the whole, the logic of those explanations has me quite nearly convinced that he is more or less on the mark.

Basically, his thesis is that approximately 100 years ago, give or take (his historical analysis focuses on the period of about 1850-1930, with historical roots going back quite a bit further), lead businessmen (including Rockefeller and Carnegie), together with radical educational theorists, began the establishment of a new order, one of enforced, mass schooling with the real purpose of remolding society, the purpose being corporate and financial exploitation on the part of the former, and zealous idealism on the part of the latter. But you really should read how he puts it.

While I was initially tempted to write off that idea as crackpot, upon reflection it explained practically everything that I simply couldn't understand when I had been struggling in that system. The thorough enslavement of society as a whole to consumerism, the manifest failure of the schools themselves, the monstrous bureaucracy that works directly against the teachers while pretending to do the opposite, the docility of people today as their freedoms are taken away one by one (most don't realize that this is actually happening), the parroting of state propaganda, ranging from educational terms such as inclusiveness and diversity (without following those concepts through to their logical conclusions) to political/military slogans such as "support the troops" (when people misinterpret into "Be supportive of individuals in the military" ideas actually meant to support policy decisions of leaders - and these misunderstandings are deliberately fostered and encouraged, all of these things are the results of our education system, and the lack of true education. The fact that all of these symptoms of a non-free society are of enormous benefit to the corporate empires hardly seems like a happy coincidence.

The main weakness (to date) in Mr. Gatto's writings for me personally is that it is difficult to verify his claims online, making some of his information suspect, and some of his claims dubious. Nevertheless, much of what he has said fits. All too well.

One brief sample of his work, rebutting conspiracy theory charges: "If you obsess about conspiracy, what you'll fail to see is that we are held fast by a form of highly abstract thinking fully concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond the power of the managers of these institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap we're in, it won't be by removing some bad guys and replacing them with good guys."

For a more thorough one, click here. Whether you agree with this guy or not, he certainly addresses the major problems that aren't going away.

* The word student, in European languages, means a person who professionally studies; specifically, a college student. "Pupil" is the term reserved for school-age children. I would, however, honor any child that actively strives to learn with the title of student.

The voice from beyond the seven seas

2004-06-04T09:40:00.000+04:00

This is the voice of an American living overseas (Russia, to be more precise). Over this past year I have settled in with my family, have bought, paid for and renovated my own apartment, and have gone into business for myself.
It hasn't been easy, but there are many things that compensate for the challenges here. Political correctness doesn't exist, as a teacher, if a child runs up to me and hugs me I don't have to worry about losing my job, and I set my own conditions and schedule. Rather than being hired I can hire a manager (rather like a boxer) for PR and admin. An end to both rent (as such) and house payments is a major relief. I can let my son go to the store to buy bread like I did as a kid and not worry about (what anyone in CA has to worry about). Just as a side note - while I was there, I visited my local CAPD in accordance with Megan's Law and found to my horror that there are anywhere from 100-200 released felons in each zip code, with up to 20% being the worst kind! Well, here, that's not the case.
While there is good and bad everywhere, I have learned that most Americans have a hard time imagining that any aspect of life could be better in a country that is not America, so my Russia ramblings tend to focus a little more on that. There are problems here, to be sure. Journalistic censorship, corrupt cops that take bribes at every traffic stop, poverty… But that’s stuff that The NY Times wastes no time in telling you, and I’d rather give you what the mass media doesn’t.
Just one more little tidbit – there’s this really neat drink called kvass (kvahss), fermented like beer from black bread crust somehow, but essentially non-alcoholic. It is a cross of, and has all the good qualities of both beer and Coke, with the disadvantages of neither. You can get it sometimes in Russian/Eastern European stores in larger cities. Watch out for fakes – “kvass drinks”. The real kind continues to ferment, and has been sold in bottles with little holes drilled in the top to let the gas escape. The FDA would probably disapprove, and it can be a pain to transport, but it’s real, and it’s good.