Good grief, I’ve just talked about my politics.

Your Political Profile

Overall:	40% Conservative 60% Liberal
Social Issues:	0% Conservative 100% Liberal
Personal Responsibility:	25% Conservative 75% Liberal
Fiscal Issues:	75% Conservative 25% Liberal
Ethics:	50% Conservative 50% Liberal
Defense and Crime:	50% Conservative 50% Liberal

How Liberal/Conservative Are You?
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Another stupid internet quiz… and it wound up provoking a much larger rant in which I actually talk about my politics. What was I thinking? Oh well, screw it; you’ve probably guessed what most of those beliefs are already.

According to this quiz I’m a moderate. I could’ve told you that. As I’ve said before, my politics are based on how I understand scripture and Christianity, not conservatism or liberalism. But the quiz results came from 20 questions that only superficially go over my politics. I’d rather comment. Judge my answers for yourself.

1. Protecting the environment is a primary social responsibility we have, regardless of how it effects businesses.

Not exactly.

True.

Duh. If you destroy your environment, you can’t do business there.

 

2. Immigration policies…

Should be less strict. Immigrants enhance this country.

Should be more strict. Too many people enter illegally.

Illegal immigrants take jobs no American would take, use few to no government services because they’re illegal and afraid of getting caught and deported, and make a convenient scapegoat for politicians. I say if they come here to work, let ’em work and give ’em green cards. We need more people in this country who are willing to work, not less.

“Lying in Church” with the worship music.

Is your worship music leading you to lie?

Here’s a fun post called “Lying in Church” by S.M. Hutchens on how Sunday morning worship isn’t always consistent with many Christians’ point of view. I can’t say I entirely agree with it, but I’ll rant about the parts where I do agree.

My problem with worship leaders has always been that they worship more than they lead. (Refer to that rant as necessary.) But I’ve since come to another realization—and gripe—about them.

As I said in that previous rant, worship leaders are, like it or not, the church’s primary theology teachers. The music gets them to memorize the lyrics and unconsciously add those faith-statements to their theology; and because they don’t read scripture, much of their knowledge about God comes from their music. Therefore it is imperative that a worship leader be solidly grounded in theology; but most of the time they’re selected because they are skillful musicians. This need for solid theology is made all the more clear when you think about how often worship leaders interrupt the music so that they can make comments about the songs, or pray, or sing in the Spirit, or give mini-sermons, or do other things to instruct the worshippers. So we can’t have an ignorant person leading the worship!

Now, this isn’t to say there aren’t many people who are great worship leaders, who know what they’re doing when they select songs and lead worship. But I can’t think of any more than two right now. I’m not including Bethany students; they’re still learning. Some of them are great. Others need to learn that anointing and talent are not the same thing, and shut up. Feel free to guess who fits into which category. Humility versus pride should tip you off.

Unfortunately, emotion, not theology, has a lot to do with the song choices. Most of the complaints about worship music (including Hutchens’s complaint) come from the sloppy theology. The rest come from objections to the style of music, which is stupid.

Fr’instance, I used to complain about the song “Enemy’s Camp” all the time; I felt the theology sucked.

♫ Well I went to the enemy’s camp and I

♫ Took back what he stole from me

♫ Took back what he stole from me

♫ Took back what he stole from me

♫ I went to the enemy’s camp and I

♫ Took back what he stole from me

♫ He’s under my feet, he’s under my feet

♫ He’s under my feet, he’s under my feet

♫ He’s under my feet, he’s under my feet

♫ Satan is under my feet

Then repeat, faster, until everyone’s whipped into a minor Holy Ghost frenzy.

Like I said, the theology sucked. I went to no enemy’s camp; I took back nothing; He’s not under my feet. To claim such victory is inconsistent with scripture. I said as much to worship leaders. They said, “Yeah, that’s true man, you’re so right.” But then, three or four weeks later, it would be back in the worship rotation because people like a song you can jump around to. As I said, emotion, not theology, regularly determines our music.

Picking Supreme Court justices.

Now that Justice O'Connor is stepping down, someone asked me if I thought President Bush should appoint a woman to take her place. And of course he should. In fact, he and all future presidents need to keep on appointing women until the Supreme Court is half women, and reflects both society and the current population of the judicial system.

Unfortunately, he's likely to pick someone who reflects his social agenda, rather than someone who will simply say—when faced with the current batch of social-agenda issues before the Court—“The Constitution says nothing about that one way or the other. Talk to the Congress about passing a law on that.”

But that's not the way the conservatives or the liberals are swinging. The conservatives want someone to overturn Roe v. Wade; the liberals want someone to declare that gay marriage is legally binding throughout the U.S.; and I just want a justice who stops treating the Constitution as if it changes with the times. The Constitution was meant to be changed by amendment, not by the loose interpretations of the Supreme Court justices.

Amusing bumper sticker of the day: “Forget Roe v. Wade; overturn Bush v. Gore.”

I’m on iTunes, baby!

Update, 11/21/2024: Well, not anymore I’m not.

Once I got the podcast going, I decided to list it on Apple’s iTunes. It took ’em a few days; I think they had to check it for copyright infringement and profanity and the like. Well, it’s up there now, so I must’ve got away with it.

It’s the freakiest thing to get onto iTunes, look up your own name, and find your stuff there. Now I know how musicians feel; but I’m sure the novelty will wear off as everyone and their evil twin will wind up posting their own podcasts there.

So, if you have iTunes 4.9 (the one with the built-in Podcasts feature) and you want to subscribe to the podcast, here’s how to do that:

1. Go to Music Store.
2. On the left-side menu, select Podcasts.
3. Type “Leslie” into the search feature and it’ll pop up.

The slightly harder way would be to search under Audio Blogs. I am actually in there, but you have to scroll around a lot, and iTunes has to load the 1,000+ other podcasts that are tossed in there as well.

Time to work on the next one.

Climbing off Xanga.

My very last Xanga post.

Nothing against Xanga. It’s a fun place to host your blog. But it doesn’t do everything I want it to; and while it’s easy to leave posts and visit blogrings and such, it’s too full of people who really don’t have anything to say. When it gets right down to it, what on earth is the point of e-props? Personal gratification because someone saw your site and decided to leave their mark on it? Sad. Count me out.

No; I don’t need such features. I need solid, practical features. So I decided to update my Blogger site into something that I can actually work with on a regular basis. Xanga users will, once they access my page, find themselves automatically jumping to this page. Everybody else… well, they’ll just see this page as usual. And there you are. (Or, I should say, here you are.)

Stupid fake reviews.

It’s 107°F (42°C) in Vacaville. No breeze. The family is thinking of retreating to the movie theater. See, this is what’ll get the movies out of their “slump” (so they call it; they’re still making billions). It’s not that people actually want to watch the crap they produce; it’s that the theaters have dark rooms and air conditioning.

My family watches a ridiculous amount of TV (really, it just runs in the background) and I’ve seen way too many commercials for Wedding Crashers, which is out today. I don’t care to see it.

I’ve noticed most of the critics’ comments they run in that commercial could easily have been lifted from the one positive thing in the review. “Wilson and Vaughn have great chemistry” could easily be the sole positive comment a reviewer made right after stating, “I would rather have had my eyes pecked out by a caffeine-addled rooster.”

Or they were taken from things that weren’t reviews, or from people who aren’t reviewers. Every once in a while a commercial comments, “Larry King says, ‘It’s great!’ ” Larry King?

Or, less obviously… There’s an entertainment reporter in Sacramento, Mark S. Allen, who’s always part of the press junkets whenever a movie is released and someone has to interview the actors. He (and every other local TV reporter) gets about 5 minutes with each actor to ask them the same questions that every other TV reporter has to ask (and of course the actor is sitting in front of a giant studio-produced poster of the movie) and after the questions are done, they go back to the TV studio, where he adds a few more comments like, “Yeah, that actor was a really nice guy… and the movie looks like it’s gonna be a big summer blockbuster.” That’s not a review. But I have occasionally seen Allen’s statements in national ads to plug movies anyway.

Kerry has expressed an interest in Bewitched, for which you might have to get me that rooster. But we might watch the DVD of The Merchant of Venice (for me, again) first.

Prayer in schools.

I’m totally in favor of prayer. Just not when teachers and hypocrites lead it.

Kerry got some email about a petition—some idiots want to reinstate prayer in public schools. I say “idiots” for the following reasons:

1. It’s already legal to pray in public schools! They do it all the time, especially during those “see you at the pole” functions where the Christian students come out of the woodwork and join hands around the flagpole and pray. Students also pray before tests, parent-teacher conferences, beatings (if they’re the one getting beaten), and athletic competitions (even though God doesn’t take sides in these things).
2. However, it’s not legal for teachers to lead prayer. If you think about it, this is a good thing. In order to avoid offending anyone, teachers would more than likely pick a nice non-sectarian prayer that addresses nobody. You may have seen such prayers before—prayers that say “We pray for this, that, and the other things” but it’s never stated who the prayer goes to. Or worse—it addresses “the Universe” as if it’s sentient. Or you’ll get some really obnoxious fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, or whatever, who take that time to inflict their religions on the kids.
3. Some of these idiots point to growing rates of student violence and crime and claim it statistically relates to the point when the Supreme Court proclaimed that teacher-led prayer was unconstitutional. I don’t know where they get these stats from; likely from the same place that’s sending around a fabricated email about the top 10 school problems in the ’50s. According to that email, in the ’50s teachers complained about chewing gum and talking back, compared with guns, drugs, and teen pregnancy today. This was obviously written by someone who never grew up in the ’50s. (I’m not that old, but my parents are.) Or even the ’30s. I was talking with my grandmother’s boyfriend some months ago about his growing up in Harlem; and the gangs, drugs, and violence were so commonplace that most kids just dropped out of school. And they had school prayer. So don’t give me that crap about how “things were better back then.” The only people that say this are the people that don’t know history. Things are much better now. (But obviously, we have further to go.)

I also object to school prayer for the same reason I always object to obligatory religion: the hypocrisy. I don’t want prayer led by people who have no relationship with God. Jesus doesn’t want it either. Sure, we could always use more prayer in school; sure, the Christians need to pray for the public schools more instead of abandoning them for the private schools. But if you want an example for how prayer in schools isn’t doing anything for the nation, look at the United States in the early 1900s. Or Saudi Arabia now.