Three approaches to Malaria

I have an interest in Malaria - having had a bout myself and helped at a funeral of a lively teenager who was taken away in a couple of days by an infection which got to her brain.

There are many approaches to trying to limit the damage. Here are three:

Corporate Route One: Rehabilitate DDT (yes, really!). There are nutty freemarketeers who think that that wiping out invertebrates and birds and leaving rising levels of DDT in humans are a small price to pay for “solving the malaria problem”. This is big news in the USA. If you want to see a “christian” version of the propaganda try this link The Kairos Journal but you will need to register. You can get a flavour of the arguments from this link from Pesticide Action Network.

Corporate Route Two: Fund the big drug companies and sponsor research into less harmful insecticides. This is the approach of Bill and Mrs. Gates. Yes, the man who brought you the Windows 95/8 blue screen of death and the open sesame to viruses and worms that is Windows XP is spending several of his ill-gotten millions on bribing the big drug companies to repent of years of neglecting this poor man’s disease. Here is a good link to that project.

A Human Scale Route: There is a herbal antimalarial that works, is cheap, and does not need a factory or bloated executives to make it work. Have a look at the work which Anamed (a tiny non-profit group) and many others have done. Needless to say, the big drug companies are highly unimpressed and are trying to take over production so that they can sell a highly purified and expensive version of the main ingredient. There is a real possibility that this could end up training the parasite to become resistant as it has to many other treatments (see this link).

Bible Authority - continued

Some searchers were disappointed with my previous post which was just basically a plug for a good article by Don Carson.

Click here for a good article by N T Wright on Bible Authority.

This article is much better than his later book.  He seems to be slowly turning into a Roman Catholic and now seems to see “the Church” (by which he seems to mean the Hierarchy, the teaching elite and their adherents) as being much more important than mere congregations .

You have probably guessed that I take an opposite view.

Nevertheless, his emphasis on the way God’s Authority works through the Biblical Story is refreshing and rings a lot of bells.

Thoughts from the Dentist’s Couch

Lying under the drill today, I was playing the man and trying to show that it did not hurt at all.

While there, my thoughts turned to torture.

The project to provide a Christian rationale for war and oppression in the USA (and here in the Daily Telegraph - the NeoCons have hijacked my favourite paper) walks down the old sick road of defining “the lesser of two evils” and then turning that into a positive justification for evil.

As with the “Just War” so now moderate torture is now OK.

Experience shows that the torturer quickly regresses into going beyond official guidance just as “Just Warriors” in combat soon go beyond the decent limits which the intellectuals love to imagine.

“Do unto others as you would have them do to you”.

Which part of that sentence is too hard for our Christian friends in the moderate torture camp do you think? Perhaps they just lack imagination?

A few minutes in the dentist’s chair without anaesthetic might remind them what pain plus helplessness feels like.

Playing at preaching?

There is a superb article on William Tyndale at a  John Piper website.

This paragraph really struck me:

I linger here with this difference between Tyndale and Erasmus because I am trying to penetrate to how Tyndale accomplished what he did through translating the New Testament. Explosive reformation is what he accomplished in England. This was not the effect of Erasmus’ highbrow, elitist, layered nuancing of Christ and church tradition. Erasmus and Thomas More may have satirized the monasteries and clerical abuses, but they were always playing games compared to Tyndale. (Semper’s emphasis)

It was the reference to “playing games” that struck a chord.  I have been so concerned lately about how poor the preaching is in ALL churches but particularly among Reformed Baptists since I am of that species.

It is sometimes self-indulgent, usually safe, mainly repeating dull nostrums and couched in uninspired lazy language - it is often delivering second hand theology than a first hand experience of the Bible text.  Who can blame people for turning to the exciting or novel experiences available elsewhere?

But the thought occurs to me that the dull brown preachers and the bright coloured peacocks have something in common.  Maybe it is just a game?

Sick unto death - What is wrong with evangelical thinkers?

A few days ago an amazing article by Wayne Grudem (US evangelical theologian) was being flagged in blogspace.  It was Prof Grudem inviting people to pray for a Republican victory in the recent elections.  What I found remarkable was the way he credited the President with successes using a grid of understanding which was astonishingly right wing.  Extremely liberal economic theories tied to a taste for legislation in areas of morality and medical ethics.

Here is the link to Wayne Grudem’s post.

Like Errol Hulse’s pro war rant I refered to earlier in the year it is the enthusiasm for the Iraq war and occupation which startled me.  He seemed to feel it was a reasonable response to Islamic terrorism and even believed it would help with Gospel proclamation!  The Prof really is in a high Ivory Tower if he thinks that.

Like so many Evangelicals he gets lathered up at the homosexual agenda and embryo research but seems to think that maiming and killing tens of thousands of people in a pointless war is just a peccadillo.  Trigger happy American kids are winning neither heart nor minds in Iraq and they just should not be there.   The same faction which predicted the war would be popular with ordinary Iraqis now tell us there will be a bloodbath if the troops leave.  They were wrong last time and that prediction may be wrong too.

There seems to be a belief that you really can figure out every matter of right and wrong from first principles and an assumption that warfare and oppressive legislation are easily justifed by such a process.  It is the rationalism of the madhouse.