Comparisons to Hitler.

I’ve been reading a bit about Jay Bennish, a Colorado history teacher who got into trouble for bashing George W. Bush. One of his students recorded his classes, and the recording got into the hands of talk radio hosts, and now Bennish is on administrative leave while administrators try to figure out how to not fire him but make it look like they’ve showed due concern.

’Cause that's all they can really do. You can’t fire a teacher for speaking his mind. You can try, but every civil liberties lawyer in the country will come after you, and you can’t win in the courts. The only way to fire a teacher these days is to catch him doing something illegal, and it’s not against the law to compare Bush to Adolf Hitler.

That’s the part that I find particularly stupid. Bennish compared the president to Hitler. Nothing makes people insane faster than when you refer to Hitler. You could compare the president to Satan and not get so strong a reaction.

But what’s so wrong with comparing people to Hitler? I could compare anyone to Hitler. I could compare Jesus to Hitler. Jesus loves the Jews; Hitler not so much. See? That’s a comparison.

But all someone now has to do is take it out of context, say, “Did you hear that Kent compared Jesus to Hitler?”, hand it off to talk radio, and get me excommunicated.

Bennish’s comparison was a valid one, in fact. Hitler believed he was right and everyone else was wrong, and that he should spread the German style of government everywhere. Bush believes likewise. I could find other things to compare: Hitler was against abortion; so is Bush. Hitler’s government built internment camps to house undesirables, and refused to put them on trial; so did Bush. Hitler’s troops tortured prisoners; so has Bush’s. There are lots of ways in which Hitler and Bush are unalike, but it’s the similarities that most of us find disturbing.

The reason people get so riled up about criticisms of Bush is that ultimately politics is their religion, Bush is their messiah, and criticism of him is blasphemy. Even totally valid criticisms, and totally valid comparisons with Hitler.

Coffeepot in the office.

It’s awfully nice to have a coffeepot in the office.

I stole one out of the Vickery Center on Friday. There were three coffeepots in there; the one I used regularly, and two others that I used whenever someone else was using the one I used regularly.

Yes, someone else in the center occasionally made coffee. I could have drank it, but I don’t trust it. I drink decaf, and I insist on it being made with good beans and filtered water. Most office coffees are made with Kirkland (a cheap coffee brand found at Costco) and with Scotts Valley tap water (which tastes like it was squeezed through an armpit). So I bought a filter for the office, and until recently I was drinking Safeway Select beans.

One Monday I discovered that one of the weekend classes had used all my beans. They probably didn’t care for the Kirkland stuff either. I don’t blame them, but I did find it annoying that I had to drink Kirkland decaf that day. I took a great deal of comfort in the fact that my unlabeled bag of coffee beans was decaf, and that they likely didn’t know that, and suffered from it. Serves ’em right.

Since I was out of coffee, I just grabbed my 26-ounce can of Trader Joe’s French Roast from home… and realized Saturday morning that I had no more than two espressos’ worth of coffee beans at home. All my coffee was at the office.

And that’s usually the sign that I need to go to the grocery store. I don’t go when I’m out of milk; I don’t go when I’m low on vegetables; I go when I’m out of coffee. Until then, I slowly empty my pantry and think to myself, “Well, at least I have coffee.” But now I can’t think that. Must get more.

I do not have an addiction.

Doom and gloom.

Ah, secondhand information. Such a wonderful source of crap.

Technically it’s gossip. If you didn’t see it yourself, if you weren’t personally authorized to spread the word, it’s hearsay. It's of little to no value. That doesn’t stop people from spreading it around anyway.

Some interesting bit of it got spread to me, and I temporarily lost my head and ranted at length about it. Not that my ranting was of any value either. Ranting on gossip is just as useless as the gossip itself, and most of the time it just produces hurt feelings on the part of the person who was gossiped about.

But the point is still valid, so I'm gonna make it anyway. I’m just not gonna use any names so that I don’t slander any undeserving individuals. The circumstances, as I understood them, were these.

Someone had recently prophesied a natural disaster. Maybe The Big One (you know, the earthquake that’s supposed to be so powerful that it causes California to split away from the rest of the United States, which will then slide into the Atlantic). This caused a lot of people concern, and now they’re having two days of prayer. Maybe fasting.

I don’t know what they're praying—for God to spare all those poor non-Californians, for God to stop the earthquake, for God to only kill the unrighteous. As I recall, it takes a lot more than two days to get God to change his mind about stuff. Two days is nothing. You don’t even need two days; you just need one righteous person who God talks to regularly to talk him down to an earthquake of 3.4 magnitude. (That’s like a garbage truck driving by.) And since it’s Lent, some of us are already fasting anyway.

Here’s the part what I don’t get: What spiritual discernment has gone into accepting this prophet’s message?

If God is warning people in advance a disaster is going to happen, he’s not just going to warn one guy. He’s going to warn a lot of people. Historically that’s what he’s done. Not everyone listened to them, but that’s beside the point. Nobody paid attention to the prophets who warned us about Hurricane Katrina; and being humble, these prophets didn’t spend a lot of time screaming “I told you so!” after the fact. Unlike some false prophets who tried to grab some notoriety afterward.

I didn’t pay too much attention to the prophets because I live in northern California. Levees break here all the time and it only affects the fools who are dumb enough to live in flood plains. I underestimated the disaster. So did everyone. But I have to admit the prophets were right. I never said they were wrong; I just figured we’d wait and see, and turns out they were right.

But I haven’t heard about this giant disaster thing from anyone else, except maybe the occasional Kurt Russell science fiction movie. So naturally I’m skeptical.

Back in Old Testament days, we used to stone false prophets to death. I say if this person’s disaster doesn’t happen within the next year, we ought to at least tar and feather the dude, okay? Let’s not kill him. But let’s at least hold him accountable for any unnecessary panic he generates. Prophecy isn’t something to be taken lightly, and we ought to tack some obnoxious consequences onto anyone who claims to speak for God and isn’t.

Lots and lots of audio.

I am, unfortunately, the guy who's responsible for putting the sermons at Sojourners Church on the website. That means I have to listen to them, get rid of most of the pops and crackles (as much as I can; the recordings suffer from a lot of static), edit them into a final form, and upload them.

After I preached Sunday, I had a few friends and family members say, “So can we download it?” and I had to point out, “I have four other sermons to upload before I get to mine. It’s not fair to just upload mine and skip the others. This isn’t the First Church of Kent after all.” (Not that the First Church of Kent has sermons to download anyway.)

Anyway. The sermons are finally uploaded. I'm done. Until Sunday.

Update, 12/14/2024: The First Congregational Church of Kent does have YouTube videos though.

Midterm elections #2: Gotta be famous.

If they know you, they’ll vote for you… provided they don’t think you’re nuts.

In California, we have a long history of people spending ridiculous money in order to win elections, only to lose them because Californians aren’t impressed with money. They’re impressed with celebrity. That’s why two actors (Reagan and Schwarzenegger) have managed to get elected governor in spite of never getting elected to public office before. The more famous you are, the better chance you have at getting elected—provided you aren’t infamous.

In the mid-’90s we had two Republican idiots run for the U.S. Senate against our incumbent senators. Both had a lot of contributions. Both had a lot of support from the die-hard conservative Republican base. Both personally had a lot of money. Neither got elected. Why? Not famous enough.

Sounds superficial, but you can also apply this to a whole lot of national elections. Which candidate is more famous? Which candidate has received more name recognition, face time in the press, or even jokes about him on the late night talk shows (provided the comedians take him seriously even while they’re making fun)? Unless the guy who’s the most famous has managed to annoy more people than his opponent, he’s gonna win.

So there’s Kent’s Handy-Dandy Guide to Getting Elected. (1) Make sure everybody knows who you are. (2) Make sure they don’t know you’re a nutjob.

Guaranteed 81.4% accurate.

Amusing comic strip: Guess the burp.

Garfield by Jim Davis, 2/28/2006.

Stupid Internet Survey: My church model.

What is your model of the church?

You scored as Sacrament model. Your model of the church is Sacrament. The church is the effective sign of the revelation that is the person of Jesus Christ. Christians are transformed by Christ and then become a beacon of Christ wherever they go. This model has a remarkable capacity for integrating other models of the church.

Sacrament model	89%
English	83%
Herald model	72%
Mystical Communion model	72%
Servant model	56%
Institutional model	28%

What is your model of the church?
created with QuizFarm.com.

Naturally, internet quizzes are seldom scientific, particularly QuizFarm quizzes. This one was less scientific in that it used typical hymns that people would sing in your church as one of its ways of gauging your model. My church really doesn’t sing hymns. Occasionally someone might drop “Be Thou My Vision” or “Alas and Did My Savior Bleed” into the mix, but most of the songs are worship choruses, and I really don’t remember too many of the hymns from my childhood because our worship leaders often stuck to their own Top 40 list. So the reason I didn’t score higher is because I disregarded the hymn questions.

I do believe one of the main reasons for church is the sacraments. They can’t be done alone. You need other Christians to baptize you, share communion, disciple, confess to, witness a marriage, or pray with. I don’t limit the number of sacraments to two or seven; anything mystical and allegorical and involving God is a sacrament. And most sacraments require other people. Therefore we have the church.

I don’t believe, contrary to the Catholics, that the church is the person of Christ. Jesus is the person of Christ. The church may be his body, but he is the head… and sometimes the body acts as if it belongs to a paraplegic. It doesn’t always do what he wants it to. It will someday, but to say the church behaves exactly as Jesus wants it to is to disregard or misrepresent centuries of killing, stealing, and destroying when evil men took power within it. The church can and must become better, and it will if Christians will spend more time serving in it and less time ripping at it.

As to the other models, I agree with them somewhat, of course. Not so much the institutional model. Government is a necessary evil, and that’s even true of church governments. We’re all supposed to be answering to God, and if we did that, we’d actually love one another, support one another, and submit to one another… instead of the usual knee-jerk attitude of “Who are you to tell me what to do?” that we so often see in Americans.