The Bosque Boys

The Pew Foundation has released the latest data from its survey of Americans on religion, including religion and politics.

Some of the data on party affiliation:

38% of Evangelicals identify as Republican and 24% as Democrat.
31% of Mainliners identify as Republican and 29% as Democrat.
66% of those belonging to Historically Black Churches identify as Democrat.
52% of Mormons identify as Republican.
47% of Jews identify as Democrat.
37% of Muslims identify as Democrat.
41% of Hindus identify as Democrat.

Survey results on party identification.

Full results including demographics, state-by-state percentage composition, etc.

The Los Angeles Times has this story the other day on the religious debates surrounding same-sex marriage. I want to engage some of the ideas found in the article.

Nonsense [speaking against the idea that moderns must be bound by the literal message of the text] , says the Rev. Mel White, a former Fuller professor and evangelical author who married his partner of 27 years in a ceremony Wednesday at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena.

White calls the Bible a living document that must be understood in its historical context -- a view shared by reform-minded clergy and theologians from other faiths.

A major issue in the religious debate over homosexual practice is the interpretation of the Bible, specifically, how the Bible is to be interpretted and implemented. The two sides in the issue correspond roughly to the political debates over the U.S. Constitution and its interpretation. On one side are those who think we are bound to follow the text as written, on the other are those who think the Bible is a "living document" whose meaning and application must change as circumstances change. The problem for biblical conservatives is that few are truly conservative in their reading and application of Scripture: witness the NT teachings that women are not to have authority over men, that we are to be content with what we have, are not to remarry after divorce, or that charging interest on loans is a sin. Small wonder that polls show that for young evangelicals, homosexuality is just not an issue. The problem for biblical liberals is the danger that a person or group can make Scripture appear to bless any sort of behavior or practice. One could argue, I suppose, that due to the current situation of world overpopulation we should reexamine those passages that state we should feed the hungry, etc.

More below

» Read More

The Infidel Bloggers Alliance posts this essay which is well worth reading.

It begins with a quotation from the Ayatollah Khomeini whom we'll regard as an expert on Islam, or at least an authority of Shia.

Let me begin with a quote from a fatwa by the late and unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran.
"A man can marry a girl younger than nine years of age, even if the girl is still a baby being breastfed. A man, however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine, other sexual acts such as foreplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed.


A man having intercourse with a girl younger than nine years of age has not committed a crime, but only an infraction, if the girl is not permanently damaged. If the girl, however, is permanently damaged, the man must provide for her all her life. But this girl will not count as one of the man's four permanent wives. He also is not permitted to marry the girl's sister."

The Ayatollah is not simply giving a personal, idiosycratic opinion. For Muslims of all branches, the life of Muhammad serves as a prescriptive example of how a man should live. His is the exemplary life. And, he married his last wife when she was still a child, having sex-play with her until he had intercourse when she was nine. Since The Messenger of God did these things, then no good Muslim can disavow the practice.

Multiculturalism, what a crock.

Religion does not always move public policy in a conservative direction.

Story here from The Christian Century.

Excerpts:

Little noted in the history behind the California Supreme Court decision that gives the "right to marry" to same-sex couples are the bold steps taken over four decades by onetime Pentecostal minister Troy Perry in trying to establish legal and religious rights for gays and lesbians.

Perry, who founded a church 40 years ago that became an international denomination for Christian homosexuals, filed the initial lawsuit with his spouse and a lesbian couple in February 2004 that led to last month's ruling making California the second state, after Massachusetts, to legalize marriage for same-sex couples.
. . .
A sociologist of religion who has studied the MCC movement credited Perry's leadership for the changes. "He has had the audacity and the tenacity to claim for gay and lesbian people the religious and civil rights that most Americans have the privilege to take for granted," said Steven Warner, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois-Chicago and immediate past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
. . .
By contrast, some mainline leaders who have welcomed homosexual clergy into their ranks praised the California high court.

The United Church of Christ, which joined a brief in the California case, approved overwhelmingly in its 2005 convention a resolution supporting legalization of same-sex marriages. Bill McKinney, president of the UCC-related Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, said the seminary "celebrates this historic decision."

Episcopal priest Susan Russell, the national president of the gay-advocacy group Integrity, indicated that supporters for gay union rites should raise these issues at the 2009 triennial Episcopal General Convention in Anaheim, California. She told Episcopal News Service that it is time for the church to "be as prophetic as the state of California has been."

I don't have the skills or resources to research the answer to my question, so I'll lay the question on you:

How big a part in the rise of oil prices is due to commodity futures trading, rather than current supply and demand?

UPDATE: I have located an essay by Raymond P. Learsy, whose bio states that his career was in commodites trading. His argument is that the current price of oil is indeed being manipulated by the futures trading of unkown agents, perhaps OPEC. He offers some evidence. I don't have the skills to do a good analysis of the essay, but, if I were running OPEC, I certainly would do whatever I could to keep prices high and push them higher.

UPDATE 2: Somehow I missed this item before. Congressional Democrats are accusing futures traders of artificially running up the price of oil.

"Legislation has been proposed to make speculation more difficult. But arguing that "rampant speculation" in the oil markets has helped drive up crude prices, Senate Democrats proposed a new measure that would increase the amount of money traders would have to put down when buying oil futures. With gas and oil prices at record levels, it makes no sense to allow this growing bubble of speculation to take place," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who is championing the measure. "By increasing the margin requirement, we will send a message to speculators that they will no longer be allowed to artificially drive up the price of oil and gas." Currently, traders must put down anywhere between 5 percent and 7 percent when making energy futures trades, compared with 50 percent for stocks. The legislation does not specify how high that new margin requirement should be. It would instruct the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to require a "substantial increase" in the amount.

Sounds like reasonable regulation to me.

UPDATE 3: From England, this editorial in The Mail. Mostly invective without actual argument, to the effect that commodities futures trading is behind the run-up in oil prices. Link from Last of the Few. (Last of the Few is NSFW)

The practice of commodites futures trading raises serious questions. From a Christian point of view, I've had trouble with commodity futures trading. I am more familiar with agriculture than petroleum, so I'll use an example from that area. A commodities trader decides, for whatever reasons, that the price of corn will be higher in 8 months than it is now. So he begins "buying" corn futures at a price lower than he anticipates in 8 months. Let's say he is a big and well-known trader. Others follow his lead. Soon, the current market is responding to the demand and prices rise. (The reverse scenario could also happen.) Prices, therefore, in this example are going up not because of current supply and demand for actual use of corn, but because of forecasts.

And it's not like the traders have any intention of eating the corn they are buying, or feeding it to livestock, or making ethanol. These are purely money-making transactions in which the buyers and sellers never will see the product.

Christian economic theories are not agreed-upon dogma, but most of them stipulate that work done should be honest and needful. Does commodities futures trading meet this criteria? Also, I think most Christian economic theories would hold that price increases should reflect real conditions, not speculative ones, and be related to actual value, not merely market value.

Would Jesus be a commodities futures trader?

What determines that there is a larger society, rather than merely a collection of competing groups and tribes? What determines the nature of the larger society? Is it possible to have a nation without having a larger society? That is, can one indeed have a nation without a consensus on shared values? To be specific, is multiculturalism a sufficient shared value that will create and sustain a larger culture, or is it a recipe for devolving into a collection of competing groups and tribes?

My favorite Anglican bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali, Pakistani by birth and rearing, moved to Britain due to threats on his life in Pakistan. As an outsider coming into British society, he sees things that those raised as insiders might miss. One of these things is the degree to which British society and the British nation were based on Christianity, and the dissolution of the larger society and nation as Christianity is abandoned for multiculturalism.

Here is his very thoughtful essay that has provoked some predictable response by the usual suspects.

Have you noticed that positive changes in the world often trace back to an individual, or a small group of individuals, who see a need and then respond courageously and compassionately? And, have you noticed that the most effective positive-change agents are almost always private, not governmental? And further, have you noticed that many, many, positive changes in the world have been the result of Christianity?

I would say the world does not need bigger government, but individuals with bigger hearts.

Here is the story of the founder of Save the Children, Eglantyne Jebb, from Brits at Their Best.

From The Telegraph, this story about Muslims prisoners gaining power in a British prison.

"Staff appear reluctant to challenge inappropriate behaviour, in particular among black and ethnic minority prisoners, for fear of doing the wrong thing," the report adds.

"This is leading to a general feeling of a lack of control and shifting the power dynamic towards prisoners."

Just under a third of the 500 prisoners at Whitemoor are Muslim.

And why would guards feel afraid of exercising adequate control over Muslim prisoners? The attitude of the report answers this question:

The concern about Muslim prisoners is in danger of leading to hostility and Islamophobia, the report warns.

I would say the insane political correctness of the bureaucrats is leading to increased hostility by the Islamic prisoners as they realize they can leverage fear of discrimination into power within the jail.

Bloody insane. Paging Richard the Lion Hearted, your people need you.

From The Telegraph, a UK paper full story here:

The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, accused the Church of failing in its duty to "welcome people of other faiths" ahead of a motion at July's General Synod in York urging a strategy for evangelising Muslims.

However, his comments were condemned by senior figures within the Church. The Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, the former Bishop of Hulme and the newly appointed Bishop of Urban Life and Faith, said: "Both the Bishop of Rochester's reported comments and the synod private members' motion show no sensitivity to the need for good inter-faith relations. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs are learning to respect one another's paths to God and to live in harmony. This demand for the evangelisation of people of other faiths contributes nothing to our communities."

Bishop Nazir-Ali, born in Pakistan, is calling for the Anglican Church (Church of England) to evangelize Muslims in Britain. The Anglican establishment is accusing him of narrow-mindedness and lack of sensitivity. What would they have said to Jesus, when he told the eleven to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit?

A Christian communion that refuses proclaim that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and summon hearers to repentence and faith, is on its way out of Christendom. "Multiculturalism" and "tolerance" must bear distinctive meanings within the Church. As Christian citizens of pluralistic societies we tolerate other religions in the sense that we do not burn down their places of worship, imprison them for their beliefs, or discriminate in the workplace. But, "tolerance" for Christians must not imply that beliefs of other religions are also true in the way our faith is. Christians are multicultural in the sense of welcoming those of other cultures, and recognizing that believers can be Christians while being of another culture. But, respecting other cultures must not imply for Christians that all religious beliefs are equally valid.

George Bush has chosen Southern Methodist University, in the Dallas area, as the site of his presidential library. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth further south on I-35 when Baylor University learned it had lost the competition to host the library.

From the time that SMU began to compete for the library, some faculty, students, and assorted Methodists, begin a counter-campaign to oppose any link between George Bush and SMU.

While locating the library at SMU is probably a done deal, a group of diehard Methodists is still fighting to prevent it. Story here.

I am beginning to think that Bush hatred may be stronger than the Reagan hatred I remember from the 80s.