Apology….accepted.

BD
Plays well with others…

Although most climate scientists agree the earth is warmer than it was 200 years ago and that man has had a hand in that warming, there is little consensus on the effects to the earth; long-term and short-term. These same scientists believe that the media has done a horrible job of reporting the truth concerning global warming.

As evangelicals put on their warm jackets this summer they are scratching theirs heads and wondering if all this global warming fear mongering is true at all. To mix the bag of global warming with the very real threat of trafficking to humanity is, to me, foolishness. I think it will not help the cause at all.

Let’s just deal with the true root causes; lust and greed.

And to Steve: I am on the education end and the actual hands on rescuing and restoring of those in human trafficking, and again, it is the church whose voice and hands are deepest in the mix. I’m just sick of hearing the church trashed on this blog when she’s actually the one leading the charge on this issue.

Bash where bashing is due!

Just wondering if your hard questions on resource scarcity were inadvertently directed at happylad, that is, instead of directed as questions to my post (sloppily indicting happylad by reference?), in my comments on Sen and scarcity? (Where did happylad deal with this? — scratching my head?).

If “no,” then I won’t answer for happylad. If “yes,” then I agree with you and strongly agree with your cite to the pope who is arguing for public education on the limitedness of our resources. We tend to think of omnipotence (or, omni-resourcefulness – a nod to your Boyd) as equivalent to an infinite supply of goodies. When in fact, the real life hand that we’re dealt by Smith’s Invisible Hand in our market-place-earth is limited supply (limited at least in the biological and medical sciences sense). Last I checked my bank balance, anyway. So yeah, the Invisible Hand lays responsibility on us for our limits. IMHO the pope has been right on this since “Pacem in Terris” (1963) – appealing to everyone, everywhere, “of good will.” Talk about “interconectivity.” It’s all over my head, really, because interconectivity is exponentially complex. My brain melts even in my own house. No less, in the pope’s extended family of “good will” among all people, everywhere. How catholic can we get? Alas.

I apologize to you and Southern Baptists for “smearing” them. I know that SoBo’s publicly apologized for their pro-slavery position in a formal apology from their highest body (Convention) a few years back. The Spirit of conviction fell so heavily upon the president that he staggered and buckled in sincerity. So say some of my SoBo friends who attended. I agree that it’s totally unfair to pin the tail on a donkey that’s already fessed up to its failure by pinning the tail of confession on itself. At the local level, I meet regularly for prayer and accountability with groups of local pastors from all kinds of families, who I consider great heroes and examples to me personally, often because of their honesty and humility in confession. And equally because they pay the price for social advocacy. I should have known better. And I should have invoked my better exhibit “A” for thinking about the church as a mixed-bag, namely, the first three chapters of Revelation where the Spirit of Jesus is totally honest in both praising local churches for their virtues, while simultaneously disciplining the same churches for their vices – my favorite picture of Jesus telling the truth both ways – affirming and correcting mixed-bag churches. In a letter circulated publicly. No one got a free hall pass. The Spirit in a public letter, circulating and saying, “let he who has ears, hear.” I’m not Jesus. Nor close enough in likeness to the Jesus Who hits without pulling punches; but, Who stops short of hitting excessively hard. I hope the mixed-bag example of churches in the book of Revelation isn’t too controversial. So again, my apologies to Christians generally and SoBo’s in particular who I have offended by using them as exhibit “A” in the mixed-bag-church department.

And best wishes and prayers for Steve (on trafficking) and Ken (on enviro-science, earth-stewardship advocacy) and for other advocates in local churches doing the nitty-gritty dirty work of banding together in street-wise corps to put heels on heads of local snakes.

Peace.

That’s soooooo true. When it comes to overpopulation and pollution, if only us AMERICAN Christians could be more like, say…

….the CHINESE!!!

haha

B.oundless D.etermination

PS Correction – Blame THE AMERICAN Church First!

If that LUDICROUS proposition is ‘valid’, then it’s just as valid to BLAME GOD for human trafficking. After all, if he would just SMOTE the traffickers or better yet SMOTE the people polluting the water, then all human trafficking would go away. haha

It’s amazing to what lengths liberals will go to poison the well (whoops! bad metaphor) against their ideological counterparts. I thought I’ve heard everything until I now find out that evil polluters are responsible for child prostitution.
Mind-boggling.

But wait. There’s more…

“The record of history shows the “church” equally justifying trafficking in slavery, using every theological arsenal available, to keep the cotton-picking economy robust in the those old cotton fields back home – ever heard of “Southern” Baptists?” -Jim

Yeah…as a matter of fact, I HAVE heard of Southern Baptists. Come to think of it, there’s a Southern Baptist church here in Ann Arbor called Crossroads and I’m friends with some of their members. Why are you SMEARING them with the spectre of slavery?? Shameful.

BTW, the church was where virtually ALL the abolitionists movements were birthed not to mention the Civil Rights and Suffragette movements. And no, the data is not “too mixed” to make such an assertion. But you seem to want to FOCUS on the church’s wrongdoing. That’s curious to me, but I also want to thank you for your post as it answers a longstanding question I’ve had.

We’ve finally discovered where the deeply held liberal doctrine of BLAME AMERICA FIRST is rooted!

———-> Blame THE CHURCH First.

B.reaking it D.own

Steve, thanks for the correction, namely, that your heart is to guide/educate, while feeling and co-learning alongside those in church who have the fire, who want to get the job done, but, who are in the dark for how-to. I apologize for my skepticism/paranoia, reading too much into the comments by the Haitian gov. official, which I took to be a form of dumping the problem on the lap of the church, while local police eat donuts, looking the other way inside donut cafes dotted along the same highways where traffickers drive plain color vans full of cargo. Not that this doesn’t happen. See below, on the new corruption case in New Jersey.

On Happylad’s point, I’m not sure how much or little I can join in the poster boy-ism of the church taking turns on midnight shifts on the underground railway. And other ventures. Mainly because the record of history shows the “church” equally justifying trafficking in slavery, using every theological arsenal available, to keep the cotton-picking economy robust in the those old cotton fields back home – ever heard of “Southern” Baptists? For starters. We really don’t have enough hard data on whether the “church” as a whole church, or just whether some peculiar heroic anomalies and church-freaks really actively laid down their lives (real life risk) to resist slave trafficking, that is, whether our favorite poster-boys makes us feel good about “church.” The real life data is too mixed. And it was this mixed-bag feeling that I had in mind about “church” as much as about “government” in my riff to Steve, learning in the trenches just who his real “friends” (a nod to the Quaker underground) will be, that is, if the church gets real about breaking up a lucrative trafficking trade, guarded by real bullets. Viva Romero.

Laura, I love your point about domestic abuse and battered women. Dead center on: how these women sometimes find the church no-refuge, and for too many reasons to list. I’ve drafted restraining orders for poverty-level battered women for nearly 30 years, and, it can take months, in some cases years, for these women simply to tell the raw facts of their abuse (can’t get a restraining order without facts) in private, one-on-one, settings: no less before small groups in churches, who they fear might re-enforce or not care, or not know how, to break the demonic inner cycle of self-judgment, and self-loathing that God has forsaken them to suffer their abuse – because they “deserve” it. How much moreso the inner self loathing of orphan girls sold in sex slave trade – god-forsaken. Ignored in real life by the same pulpits preaching unconditional love. The irony makes me wretch. I’m guilty of it.

I might disagree in part with your comments about scarcity of resources (maybe I’m misreading you too?) correlated to poverty – I’m thinking of Amartya Sen’s (Nobel Laureate), egg-heady econometric analysis that differentiates kinds of poverty/scarcity ratios, but that basically lays heaps of blame on corrupt governments’ faux claims of scarcity. Scarcity is just the publicized claim to cover up deep government motives to destabilize, impoverish, enslave, or dispossess poor populations. The prose part of Sen’s point (you don’t need to crunch numbers for this) is that scarcity of resources is less a problem than scarcity of good faith and humane conviction. Which makes me think, as I hinted to Steve in my first post, that the governments might really have the resources to fight sex trafficking after all (but, what do I know?). If so, then this dirty filthy job gets tossed back on the laps of churches whose members are already paying taxes to fund the sword of governments looking the other way. Which sucks. Again, when I see real life cases break, like the recent case in New Jersey, with rabbis indicted for money laundering as a lifestyle, and deep in bed (Steve’s original point about “interconectivity”) with government officials, then I’m seeing a mountain to be moved – when it comes to stopping sex trafficking. Who is in bed with whom? – for how much of the cut?

So I applaud guys like Steve, who dig in to move whole mountains – one stinking shovel at a time. If that’s what it takes.