Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

At 544 pages, Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore looked a little daunting. It was. I’m proud to say I finished it, but it was a long hard slug. I think the unfamiliarity with the history and names between the Biblical time and modern time bogged me down.

That being said, I definitely learned a lot about the history of the city of Jerusalem. 

Montefiore begins the story in the beginning. He begins with Joshua’s conquering of Canaan and march towards Jerusalem. However, he states early on that while he doesn’t find the Bible reliable as a source, it’s pretty much all we have. (He uses the two “contradictory” creation stories found in Genesis as one proof of this assertion. Strike one against him in my book. My bias is showing!). Yet he follows Biblical history and moves quickly into King David’s capture of Jerusalem. “After an extraordinary career that united the Israelites in cast Jerusalem as God’s city, David died, having ordered Solomon to build the Temple on Mount Moriah.” From this history the Jews have claimed Jerusalem as their heritage ever since.

Shortly after Solomon’s death, the kingdom of Israel split into Israel and Judah. The two tribes of Judah retained Jerusalem as their capital. The ten tribes of the northern Israel were conquered by the Assyrians and lost to history. The Kingdom of Judah remained, forming the basis of modern Jewish history. Later this southern kingdom was likewise conquered, but by the Babylonians who destroyed Solomon’s Temple. It was these exile conditions that turned the Jews into a distinct people. “Away from Judah, the Judaens were becoming Jews.” When the Persians conquered Babylon, Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and their homeland. Nehemiah led the rebuilding efforts and successfully defended Jerusalem against neighboring warlords. 

Soon Persia was crushed and Israel found itself under a new empire. Alexander the Great conquered the known world, but dying young, left the region of Israel in the hands of his general Ptolemy. “Jerusalem remained a semi-independent statelet within Ptolemy’s empire... She was not just a political entity but God’s own city ruled by the high priest.” But caught between the Ptolemy dynasty and that of the more northern Seleucid kingdom, Israel would be constantly under attack. Enter a Macedonian challenger, bent on reclaiming the whole of Alexander’s Empire, Antiochus the Great.  His son, Antiochus Epiphanes, would conquer Jerusalem and commit the infamous Abomination of Desolation, desecrating the Temple built by Nehemiah. The Maccabeans scored the famous victory celebrated by Hanukkah, but their power was short-lived.

Another empire, the Roman empire, soon entered the picture and ruled over Israel. They set up a lackey figure, Herod, as a puppet governor. The family of this half-breed Jew would continue to reign for generations. The cunning family knew how to pull the levers of power and ingratiated itself into with whoever was currently heading Rome. 

Into this cauldron of power struggles Jesus is born. Looking at the magnificent temple, rebuilt and remodeled by Herod, Jesus proclaimed, “And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the  desolation thereof is nigh... Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” Jesus foresaw a cataclysmic future for Jerusalem in which the temple was destroyed and the city was in the hands of the Gentiles for some period of time. Yet He appears to prophecy a day at the end of that time when the city would return into Jewish hands. Sure enough, in AD 70, the Romans, in order to quell a Jewish rebellion, destroy the Temple and send the Jews on a world wide diaspora. The gentiles owned Jerusalem. But the scattered Jews vowed year after year at the Passover celebration, “Next year in Jerusalem.” The dream never died.

But the Roman empire would not last forever either. A few hundred years later the empire split in two. Constantine took the reins of the eastern half, and became a Christian. His devout mother traveled to Jerusalem to visit the city where Jesus walked. She led a Christian devotion to the ancient city that exists to this day. As the Christian Roman empire battled to hold onto its land with the neighboring Arabs and Persians, “Jerusalem was about to suffer a rollercoaster epoch that would see her ruled by four different religions in twenty-five years: Christian, Zoroastrian, Jewish and Muslim.” 

The Persians triumphed in the region, but their reign over Jerusalem would soon be contested by the perennial assaults the Christian crusaders, anxious to return the Holy city to Christian hands. Throughout the history of the Crusades, Jerusalem would become ground zero of a perpetual tug-of-war between Christians and Muslims. In fact, because Jerusalem had become holy to the Jews, Christians and Muslims, many times, whoever was in power had to figure out a way to share the city peacefully. Since the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock sit where the Jews Temple once was, many Muslim overlords made sure to allow Jews and Christians times and places to worship in and around these Islamic treasures. Jerusalem would see itself overrun and disrupted time and again over the next several centuries. Peace was a chimera as the three biggest groups of believers, as well as smaller sects like the Armenians, constantly fought for control and access to the holy places. Religious pilgrims constantly flooded the city, leading to chaos and cacophony, while experiencing moving religious awakenings for those who basked in the holiness of the rubble.

This is the part of the book that became overwhelming to me. The writing was brilliant, and the research top-notch, but I simply couldn’t keep track of which faction was which and who was in charge. Basically, I believe that after short-lived Christian victories in the area during the Crusades, the Muslims and specifically the Ottoman Empire came to control Palestine. Some of the rulers were fair, others mistreated the minorities within their borders. But at no time did the Jews control their ancient capital. In fact, while a small contingent of Jews have always lived in Jerusalem, the Jewish concerns became quite secondary to those of the warring Christians and Muslims. 

By the 1600s, Puritan Christians in England began to take up the cause of the Jewish people, torn from their homeland centuries prior. This nascent Zionist movement believed the return of Christ would not occur until the Jews returned to Israel and were converted to Christianity. They glorified Jerusalem and imagined the prophesied return of the Chosen. “As the real Jerusalem decayed, the imaginary Jerusalem ignited Western dreams, encouraged by napoleon’s nasty little Middle eastern war, the decline of the Ottomans -- and the book that Chateaubriand wrote when he got home. His Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem set the tone of the European attitude to the Orient with its cruel but inept Turks, wailing Jews, and primitive but ferocious Arabs who tended to congregate in picturesque poses.” The Zionist fever swept over Britain and soon “a belief in a sacred return of the Jews to accelerate the Second Coming was almost British government policy.” The Prime Minister of the U.K., Benjamin Disraeli believed the best thing to do was buy the land from the Ottomans and restore it to the Jews.

Once again, Christians began flooding into the Holy Land. This time, not as Crusaders, but as evangelists and reformers. The 1800s saw a rise not only in British Protestant evangelism to the Jews, but in Russians protecting the Orthodox and the French protecting the Catholics. Quickly, the city took on international importance as many European nations, all of whom proclaimed Jerusalem under their protection, sent consuls and officials to meddle and reconfigure Jerusalem to suit their own vision. The tensions in the Holy City played out in the Crimean war against Russia by the British and the French. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the European nations fought a world war for control of the region. At this time, wealthy Jews from around the world began to take an interest in restoring their homeland and helping their besieged brethren. The Jews of Jerusalem had been relegated to potential converts or poverty cases. International Jews sought to rectify this injustice and create a strong Jewish faction in the city.

“Throughout her history, Jerusalem existed in the imagination of devotees who lived faraway in America or Europe. Now that these visitors were arriving on steamships in their thousands, they expected to find the exotic and dangerous, picturesque and authentic images they had imagined with the help of their Bibles, their Victorian stereotypes of race, and once they arrived, their translators and guides.” The real Jerusalem of the Arabs and Sephardic Jews was dismissed.  

As anti-Semitic violence grew in Europe at the turn of the century, leading Jews concluded they could not be safe without a homeland. The victims of pogroms, with visions of a utopian Jewish nation began to make their way to Palestine to organize a Zionist nation. One such Zionist, Dr. Chaim Weizmann was able to speak with the most powerful British ministers and win the backing of Britain for a radical plan - to carve out a Jewish nation from the ruins of the declining Ottoman Empire. As WWI commenced, it became in the best interests of the British to make Zionism their official policy. They needed the Jews of Russia and America to keep their respective countries on the side of Britain and against the Germans and their Ottoman allies. By the end of the war, the British troops had routed the Ottoman troops of Jerusalem and controlled the city.

Of course, in Jerusalem, nothing is easy. Riots broke out when the resident Arabs refused to surrender. After Britain regained control, established the Mandate and quieted the city, immigration exploded, both of Arabs and Jews. The large influx of Jews upset the delicate balance the city had enjoyed while the Jews were a small, persecuted minority. A new power-sharing arrangement was in order, but both sides became more entrenched in their respective desire to control the land. The unrest among the Arabs and Jews led the British to try to limit the Jewish immigration and offer the Palestinians their own state. This infuriated the Zionists under Ben-Gurion and was rejected by the Arabs. Now each group had a reason to hate each other as well as their British overlords. British attempts to stop the flood of Jewish immigrants into the territory in order to quell the rage of the Arabs occurred exactly when the Jews most needed the protection of a homeland - 1939. 

World War II raged in Palestine as well as the rest of the world. The British found Jerusalem to be ungovernable as the warring factions continued to attack them and each other. Once the war was over, and the horrors of the Holocaust known, the UN formed a committee to determine the fate of Palestine. David Ben-Gurion announced to the world, “The Declaration of the establishment of the State of... Israel. The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. We did it!” While the Jews of Jerusalem were overjoyed to be granted a UN sanctioned homeland, even one with indefensible borders, the Arabs immediately rejected the UN’s authority to carve up the land. The British departed, leaving the Jews to their fate. 

The surrounding Arab nations immediately attacked. After a nothing-short-of-a-miracle victory in the modestly named Six-Day War, the Jews settled into the business of governing their first sovereign homeland in almost 2000 years. The city of Jerusalem proper presented a challenge. While it was controlled by the Jews, the Arab holy sites sat on the Temple mount. The Israelis decided to give control of the mount to the Arabs while keeping the Western Wall for the Jews. After subsequent battle to retain their sovereignty over the land, the situation of the Jewish nation remains essentially unchanged.

Montefiore sums us the history of Jerusalem thusly: For 1,000 years, Jerusalem ws exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years,Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic; and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer.

To me, the astonishing thing is that the Jews finally regained their homeland after thousands of years out of power. The Bible prophecies this would happen. "So the LORD gave Israel all the land which He had sworn to give to their fathers, and they possessed it and lived in it. And the LORD gave them rest on every side, according to all that He had sworn to their fathers, and no one of all their enemies stood before them; the LORD gave all their enemies into their hand.” Joshua 21:43-44 Today some Christians claim the prophecy is not quite fulfilled because they do not have “rest on every side.” But I believe that today’s Israel is the most secure it has ever been in its 3,000 year history. Their army is feared and respected around the world. They have nuclear technology. Their scientists and engineers consistently rise to the top, world-wide. They have never had this level of control over their destiny since the time of Solomon. 

I think these verses sum it up:

      "Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things?

       Shall the Earth be made to give birth in one day?

       Or shall a nation be born at once?

       For as soon as Zion was in labor, she gave birth to her children."

       (Isaiah 66:8)   

  

     "He will set up a banner for the nations,

       and will assemble the outcasts of Israel,

       and gather together the dispersed of Judah

       from the four corners of the Earth."   

       (Isaiah 11:12)

     "Thus says the Lord God:

     ' Surely I will take the children of Israel

       from among the nations,

       wherever they have gone,

       and will gather them from every side

       and bring them into their own Land."

       (Ezekiel 37:21) 

    

     "And you, son of man, prophesy to the mountains of Israel,

       and say, ‘O mountains of Israel,

       hear the Word of the LORD ...’"

     "But you, O mountains of Israel,

       you shall shoot forth your branches

       and yield your fruit to My people Israel,

       for they are about to come . . ."

     "For I will take you (the children of Israel) from among the nations,

       gather you out of all countries,

       and bring you into your own Land."

       (Ezekiel 36:1, 8, 24)

     "Thus says the Lord GOD:

      ‘Surely I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, 

       wherever they have gone,

       and will gather them from every side

       and bring them into their own Land;’"

       (Ezekiel 37:21)

Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

I LOVE DOWNTON ABBEY! So when I discovered that the creator, Julian Fellowes, was an author, I immediately went to the library to check out one of his books. The first one available was entitled Past Imperfect. 

The novel is an interesting look at the time period just as the society portrayed in Downton Abbey began to collapse, contrasted with today. 

The main character is sent on a mission by an old “frenemy” to discover which old flame of his might or might not have had his baby. If the child, now 40 or so, exists, this eccentric millionaire plans to leave his estate to this heir.

Our narrator accepts the mission because he realizes it will give him a chance to re-encounter old friends and see what’s become of the group that played a large role in his life as a young man. 

As Fellowes jumps back and forth from the past to the present and back again, we encounter two very different worlds. In some ways, we are much the worse, but in others, we realize it was time for some changes. The manners and traditions and time-honored rituals have much to commend them, but the constrictiveness of the old ways certainly hamper those who do not fit in.

I like the book very much. I got somewhat confused by who was who. I should have kept a list of characters and salient facts. I was saddened by the loss that occurred without reflection. Change can be good and is necessary in some instances, but one needs to reflect on the costs incurred as a result of change. To give up that with is not perfect is not necessarily to replace it with the better. It’s possible to lose in the quest for the better and not realize the ramifications of the change until the loss is felt most painfully. 

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Reading The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, a self-described liberal atheist, is a breath of fresh air. He understands conservatives better than most conservatives understand themselves. I love truth and I love clarity (therefore I love Dennis Prager) and for those reasons, this book comes highly recommended. 

Jonathan Haidt is a social scientist, dismayed at the deepening differences between people on the right and left. Being a good liberal and atheist, he believed if only conservatives could be made to understand the liberal position, they would surely shift to the left. What he found however changed his life. Conservatives actually DO understand liberals. It is liberals who are limited by tunnel vision and do not understand conservatives. 

Jonathan Haidt believes humans possess what he calls a Righteous Mind, meaning, “human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical and judgmental.” The task he set for himself was to discover where this moralistic, critical and judgmental mind came from. How did it happen? Was it necessary and could it be changed? His scientific and evolutionary background kicked in as he researched and did his own studies to answer his many questions. Much of the book details those studies and the results. 

Being a good liberal, he assumed most people’s overriding moral concern was whether something was harmful or not. Yet this did not seem to encapsulate all morality. He started studying the source of the righteous mind by telling people “harmless” stories, meaning no one was hurt, yet they sounded wrong for some reason. His first set of stories included one about a family, whose beloved dog had just been accidentally killed by a car, deciding to eat the dog in the privacy of their home. No one else knew. Despite the lack of harm, he was curious about the immediate, visceral reaction of the participants. Without being able to say why, most just KNEW it was wrong. Maybe moral judgments weren’t as rational as scientists liked to think. 

He came to the conclusion, after much research, that moral judgments were far more instinctual than many believed. He developed the metaphor of a rider on an elephant. The rider is our rational brain. The elephant is our instinctual behaviors and beliefs. The rider can try to influence the elephant, but ultimately the elephant is in charge. In fact, most of our moral reasoning, comes AFTER belief, to justify it, and is mostly intended to convince others. Yet it rarely convinces the opposing side. They have their own elephants. It’s why George Will could write, “Hitherto, [conservatives] have thought that the most efficient way to evangelize the unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still shrouded in darkness to read conservatism’s most light-shedding texts. Now they know that a quicker, surer method is to have progressives wield power for a few years.” Rational arguments do not convince. Experience and instinct usually lead to moral beliefs. TIme and again, in study after study, he found that rationality was not the way humans reach moral conclusions. Intuition, instinct and “groupish” concerns play a far bigger role.

The more he studied this instinctual morality and looked at studies from around the world, the more he realized that the Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) society he was raised in was too narrowly focused when it came to moral issues. The rest of the world and those in America who were less WEIRD had a much fuller moral realm that consisted of far more than simple harm concerns. 

In fact, he came to discover six areas of what he called Moral Matrixes. These are values that often come into conflict and it is our instincts which naturally lead us to value one over another at a particular time and provide a hierarchy of values. However, while these moral matrixes seem universal to all humans and all cultures, different cultures place different emphasis and priority on different values. The WEIRD culture in particular valued what he labeled “Care” - that is reducing harm. Yet he found others also esteemed other values that liberals had neglected. 

His six matrixes are: 

Care/harm - Is someone being harmed?

Liberty/oppression - Is the government or some other group oppressing another?

Fairness/cheating - Are people being treated with proportionality and getting what they deserve?

Loyalty/betrayal - Does the behavior exhibit signs of loyalty, like patriotism?

Authority/subversion - Is someone subverting authority?

Sanctity/degradation - Are we violating something we as a society hold in high esteem?

Now the dog story could be explained. While no one was harmed, a family engaged in degrading behavior, subverting the community standards, and betraying the memory of their pet. 

The most interesting finding was that while liberals overwhelmingly valued Care/harm, and to a lesser extent Liberty/oppression (when a victim group can be found), and Fairness/ cheating (yet for liberals “fairness” is usually defined as equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity), conservatives valued all six, equally! Conservatives used a much broader matrix when deciding basic morality and weighed each concern against the others. So while liberals claim it is conservative who view the world in very black and white terms, it is actually liberals who judge two-dimensionally. (Yet another example of liberal projection.) He discovered that conservatives, far from simply being mean by not appearing to care about people who are being harmed, are actually concerned with a much farther reaching array of issues. They see “harm” occurring on multiple levels, not just to individual people. 

This explains why a good liberal will decry the use of “Merry Christmas” because it might harm a non-believer, whereas a conservative will understand that society is fragile and tearing down those things that unite it may cause much greater harm to the whole. Conservatives are the guardians of the group, while liberals bemoan the unavoidable injustices that occur to individuals in any society. It’s not that conservatives don’t recognize the harm to the individual. They do. It’s that conservatives see the trade offs involved in rectifying some of those harms. 

Interestingly, he did a study in which he asked people to describe their own views and also the views of the opposing group. Conservatives consistently nailed the liberal position while liberals consistently misunderstood conservatives. Because the moral calculus of the right includes the concerns of the left, the right understands those concerns. The left fails to even acknowledge that the other moral matrixes of the right even exist! So they have no way of empathizing with the positions.

After all his research into studies and philosophers, and his subsequent rethinking of his previous positions, he stumbled upon a book entitled “Conservatism” edited by Jerry Muller. He discovered that “conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed (yes, I thought...see chapter 4). Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience (yes...see chapter 2...and chapter 6). Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize but if we strip these institution of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie [lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group] and social disorder (yes...see chapters 8 and 11)”

He described conservatism perfectly and was surprised to discover that conservatives were RIGHT!

Conservatives believe in the idea of moral capital. This refers to “the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.” Haidt further states that, “Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy. When we think about very large communities such as a nation, the challenge is extraordinary and the threat of moral entropy is intense . There is not a big margin for error.” 

This explains the panic conservatives feel when they see our nation turning from basic moral principles. The whole group is threatened. Liberals do not understand this because they do not see the bigger picture. Haidt believes, as a leftist, that the “fundamental blind spot of the left” is that they do not consider the effects of their changes on the moral capital of the group.  

In fact, contrary to the left’s usual description of the right as SIX HIRB [Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, Bigoted], he states, “A more positive way to describe conservatives is to say that their broader moral matrix allows them to detect threats to moral capital that liberals cannot perceive. They do not oppose change of all kinds, but they fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family) Preserving those institutions and traditions is their most sacred value.” In fact, he comes to the conclusion that by focusing on a very narrow subset of the population that may be harmed by a tradition or institution, liberals risk lowering the overall welfare of the society and may actually hurt the very people they are intending to help.

As a good conservative, I say, “Duh!”

In a nutshell, here are his main points:

1. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. (Think: rider and elephant)
2. There’s more to morality than harm and fairness. (Beware of moral monists who claim there is only one morality)
3. Morality binds and blinds. (The groupish parts of ourselves ties us to our “team” and it’s hard to separate that out)

Finally, he uses the concept of Yin/Yang to show that the left and the right need each other. The left is good at pointing out the places where the valued traditions and institutions of society may be causing harm. But the right is needed to protect that precious and fragile moral capital. This is a beautiful concept, but it only works if each side clearly sees their role. The left needs to understand that they have a role pointing out harms, but at the same time recognize that the right can have real qualms about the trade-offs involved. The left needs to recognize that it’s not that the right doesn’t care. It’s that the right correctly perceives additional problems can result from the left’s solutions. We are far from this understanding. I think the right basically understands this. After all it is the right that is highly demonized. The left is simply thought to be bleeding-hearts and naive. The right is continuously portrayed as evil.

The right has warned for decades that our social fabric is fraying. They see society as a Jenga tower. If you continue to pull out the pieces, eventually the whole thing crumbles. But we seem to believe the warnings will continue indefinitely. Yet if conservatives are right, one day the final piece will be pulled and the whole thing will crumble. I fear that day has past. Unfortunately Frank Luntz, the famous researcher of attitudes and beliefs, has fallen into a deep funk since Obama’s reelection. He is starting to grasp that we may have gone too far. We may have finally sunk this ship. The attitudes of entitlement he is seeing has him scared and hopeless. Unfortunately all the warnings begin to sound like the boy who cried wolf. So we shut them off and drown them out. We won’t know it’s too late until it’s too late.

Proof of Heaven by Dr. Eben Alexander

I’m fascinated by stories of the afterlife. So when I heard Dr. Eben Alexander being interviewed by Dennis Prager about his book Proof of Heaven, I paid close attention! The subtitle is “A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.” That pretty much explains the premise of the book.

This short, quick read begins with the immediate cause of his near death experience (NDE). He experienced flu-like symptoms, a splitting headache, and back pain out of the blue. After being rushed to the emergency room when a slight touch caused overwhelming pain, he slipped into a coma. The cause was determined, after much testing, to be the extremely rare bacterial meningitis caused by E. coli. With the seriousness with which he presented, his odds of dying shot up to 97% by his 6th day in the coma. His odds of full recovery were so slight as to be called a miracle by his doctor.

Because of the bacteria invading his spinal system, his brain was “bathed in pus” and inoperable in all but the most basic functions. For all intents, the parts of the brain that made him human and himself were inoperable. Therefore, his experiences cannot be explained by some kind of random firings in the brain producing strange visions. (He goes into extensive medical hypothesis for what happened and then debunks them in an appendix.)

He first passed through a very earthy level and time ceased to have meaning. He called this the earthworm view level. He moved to another level, what he called a kind of brilliant darkness filled with living sound. And although he heard no words, he was immediately filled with the thought “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.” In fact, he felt bathed in love. Soon he was able to move to an even higher level full of orbs of light and joy and more music. This is where he felt he experienced God. At some point in his journey, he realized he had a mysterious guide with him. A beautiful girl riding with him on the wings of a butterfly. Yet he felt no sense of himself either. He had no memory of earth or family or even his own identity. He was just part of and connected to the whole universe.

He began to understand things as he had never understood them before. He experienced answers to questions before they could be asked. He felt that truth was so much bigger than we on earth had ever even imagined. And this from a highly educated man. 

Upon his return, he states, “To say that there is a chasm between our current scientific understanding of the universe and the truth as I saw it is a considerable understatement... The physical side of the universe is as a speck of dust compared to the invisible and spiritual part. In my past view, spiritual wasn’t a word that I would have employed during a scientific conversation. Now I believe it is a word that we cannot afford to leave out.”

Although he begins as an unbeliever, he comes back with a deep knowledge of God, whom he refers to as Om. “One of the biggest mistakes people make when they think about God is to imagine God as impersonal. Yes, God is behind the numbers, the perfection of the universe that science measures and struggles to understand. But -- again, paradoxically -- Om is ‘human’ as well -- even more human than you and I are. Om understands and sympathizes with our human situation more profoundly and personally than we can even imagine because Om knows what we have forgotten, and understands the terrible burden it is to live with amnesia of the Divine for even a moment.” 

The ramifications of this statement in light of Scripture are very interesting. Hebrews says we have a High Priest who understands us. Jesus, for the brief moment He is disconnect from the Father on the cross, cries out in despair. That forsakenness is worse than the physically pain He is enduring. Yet we live disconnected from God on a daily business. Oh how much we have lost. 

After 6 days in the coma, Eben’s family began to prepare for his death. They went into his room to pray once more, begging his body to kick in and restart his brain. As they looked deeply into his face, looking for any sign of recovery, he suddenly opened his eyes! 

While it took a little while for him to regain his previous state, he is now fully recovered and determined to share the reality of what he experienced. He first wrote all he experienced and then began to research the phenomenon of NDEs. He wanted to document what he went through before being tainted or influenced by others’ experiences. 

While sharing his story with a doctor friend, most of whom had reacted the way he would have - with skepticism, he saw a strange look pass the man’s face. Finally the friend felt free to detail his own experience with a NDE. His father, dying and in pain for years, suddenly became lucid. He began speaking to the air, but it became clear he was conversing with his long-dead mother. At this point, the friend told his dad it was O.K. It was time to go. The old man closed his eye, fell asleep, and never woke up. Up until this time, the man had no one to share this bizarre story with. Now he had found a kindred spirit.

One thing, however bothered Eben. He did not see anyone he knew on the other side. No one greeted him. No long-dead relatives welcomed him home. He attributed this to the complete loss of identity he experienced and wondered if that was what allowed him to bypass that stage. 

Two years before the coma, he had contacted his biological family (he was adopted as an infant) and found he had full siblings. One had died before he had a chance to meet her. Four months after recovering from the meningitis, they finally sent him a photo of the lost sister. He realized he was looking into the face of his angelic guide! He now felt whole and that he had come full circle. 

His book is a very quick read, very interesting, and very believable. Although his experience on the other side sounds quite fantastical, could it be any other way? Does it meet up exactly with our preconceived notions of heaven? Nope. But parts of his journey ring true to Scripture and serve to illuminate phrases like “caught up into the third heaven” and “being in the spirit.” We see why Paul said it was unlawful for him to describe what he saw when he experience an NDE. How could he accurately describe something that conforms to no known laws on earth? His experience was quite literally “unlawful.” Will we all experience what Dr. Alexander did? I really don’t think so, but he discovered what he needed to discover and returned to spread what he calls, the good news!

The End is Near and it's Going to be Awesome by Kevin D. Williamson

I’m not sure where I got the recommendation to read “The End is Near and it’s Going to be Awesome” by Kevin D. Williamson. Maybe it’s another instance of choosing a book by its cover. This one has an awesome cover! Plus the idea of America after the collapse, is a compelling one. I’m not sure there will ever be another America as we know it after a collapse, but one can wonder.

He begins with the understanding for something to evolve and change and adapt, death must occur. Business fail, scientific hypotheses fail, ideas fail, and new and better ones rise up to take their place. But he ends starkly with, “But politics does not die. Politics is the Immortal Corporation.” Therefore, is it even possible for politics to adapt and become more efficient, or does America have to die first?

No, politics cannot evolve. Certainly not in the way business have. It therefore chokes on its own contradictions. All other entities have to figure out how to get “less wrong” over time, and the imminence of their own demise is a powerful motivating factor. “The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.... Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business.” It is isolated and therefore incapable of learning how to adapt. It cannot be tweaked to account for a changing world. It cannot update itself with regularity as new problems and out-of-date solutions are discovered. In fact, by its very nature, politics tends to become more wrong.

But if government is the only monopoly allowed to operate in our country, what is it a monopoly on? It is a monopoly on force. “Government is the machinery of violence, and political power is the license to operate the machinery.” All violence is not negative. Our armed forces are examples of violence used to protect us, as are police and judicial powers. But when violence is used to harm and coerce, well, we call that criminal action. Unfortunately government uses most of its monopoly on force to commit criminal acts. It coerces us through laws backed by the power of violence to force us to do what politicians deems best. In fact, he emphatically states, “What [the government] is is structurally indistinguishable from organized crime.” Pretty powerful claim! 

But you might claim the government does lots of things that don’t require force. It educates, provides for the indigent, and engages in scientific research. Yet at the end of the day, government can ONLY use force to get to its objectives. Government has no resources except what it takes at the point of gun. We need to ask ourselves if violent means are the best way to get to our desired end, namely a prosperous and happy society. 

So if government is only force, why do we let it get away with so much? Because we believe government has a responsibility to tell us what direction to go. Government tells us the fuels of the future, government tells us what drugs and medical procedures are to be available in the future, government tells us the best way to educate our children in the future. And we believe this is correct because we believe government can be a moralistic force for good. “The concepts of legitimacy and consent are the foundation of the moralistic view of politics, which converts government from a machine for doing things into a directorate for telling us what to do. This happens on the presumption that there is some valid, underlying moral theory behind politics, based on an ethical standard to which we all implicitly consent.” The Social Contract. The problem is that there is no broad-based, inherent morality to which we all agree. There is not one-size-fits-all definition of right and wrong. Therefore, force MUST be used to control the dissidents.

“If government does not exist to provide an ethical foundation for society, then, what is its role, if it has one?” In short, the job of government is the production of what economists call ‘public goods’” Public goods are not simply things that the public wants. They have a specific definition. They are first of all “nonexcludable” meaning that there is no practical to keep people who have not paid for it from using it. (i.e. sidewalks or the military) Public goods must also be such that when an individual uses it, the availability to another individual is not reduced. Television programming, education, and scientific research do NOT fall into these categories. They can be and are produced by the private market. That is, someone can charge for them and therefore exclude who uses them.

Two areas which consume the lion’s share of our federal budget are Social Security and health care. Neither are under the purview of what the government SHOULD be doing, and both will cause our doom. These two programs, along with education, are made worse by the intervention of government. The incentives to do them more efficiently simply are not there. They exist to serve the political establishment, not the citizens. Therefore they serve the politicians very well when it’s time to buy votes, but the sick, elderly and students, not so much.

He then goes on to detail example after example of how the free market is dealing with so many issues the government has usurped in a more efficient and more fair way. There are many, many better ways to do what our politician claim only they, with a gun in hand, can do.

He ends with this, “... as we have seen, whether the question is education, providing for health care, funding pensions, or providing for the poor, this presents us with many opportunities to make the world a much better place -- for everybody.”

I remain skeptical that America will rise like a phoenix from the ashes. I rather think we are too far gone. Americans are too uneducated and too dependent. The fact that we CAN create a much better place, and the fact that we ARE creating much better systems in some areas gives one hope. But the doing of it is another thing. Our behemoth government can put the kibosh on anything it wants, so who’s to say any of those wonderful innovations will survive the death throes of the monster?

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

I decided to read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright after hearing it recommended several times. The book traces the roots of Al-Qaeda and “the road to 9/11” so it seemed quite relevant to today and the war on terror.

The story starts in November 1948 with an Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb. He is on his way to America to study and must decide whether to fit in with the alien culture or stay true to his Islamic beliefs. Focusing on only the worst parts of American culture, Qutb became quite radicalized in his Islamic beliefs. After returning to Egypt and preaching revolution against the moderate Nasser, he was arrested, tortured and eventually killed. He was the first Islamic martyr.

The story continues with Ayman Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian born into the middle class, able to see the wealthy but never get there himself. His uncle had been a student of Qutb’s and regaled young Zawahiri with tales of the martyr and his call for purity. 

After becoming a doctor, he was asked to help the Afghan refugees fleeing into Pakistan during the Afghan war in 1980. He made furtive trips into Afghanistan to witness the courage of the Afghan mujahideen personally. After returning home, he began to recruiting brave young Egyptians to join the freedom fighters to defeat the Soviet invasion. For his radical efforts, he too was arrested. But his fame grew and his message spread during his years behind bars. He worked with his fellow prisoners to create a group called al-Jihad which would purify the Muslim world.

Once he was released from the Egyptian prison, Zawahiri moved to Saudi Arabia. Here, the bin Laden family had risen to prominence in the backward, desolate country. The patriarch, Mohammed bin Laden had deep connections to the royal family and subsequently became very wealthy with construction contracts. He took full advantage of the Muslim male’s ability to marry and divorce with ease, fathering 54 children from 22 of his wives. His most famous offspring, Osama, deeply bothered by increasingly modern Saudi Arabia, would go onto a career in terror.

Before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Islamic rebels invaded the newly remodeled Grand Mosque in Mecca. While they were eventually subdued and executed, Osama was inadvertently accused of being one of the rebels. Although the connections of his father and name protected him and he proclaimed his innocence, years later, after joining the holy fighters, he would claim allegiance to those rebels.

Bin Laden and Zawahiri were both drawn to Pakistan to help the Afghan refugees and to see how they could become involved in the struggle. They began working together to recruit young, disaffected Muslim men from all around the region to join them in the fight for Afghanistan. Political and familial obligations kept them for joining the fight directly, but they worked behind the scenes raising money, weapons, and an “army.” Eventually, after engaging in crude training exercises, they tried to slip into Afghanistan and work with the mujahideen, but were ill-treated and humiliated. 

The whole experience left many of them as men without a home. Their native countries did not want these radicalized males in their midst, and the Soviet-free Afghanistan did not welcome them either. They were forced to remain in the caves of Pakistan on the Afghanistan border. With nothing else to do, they began to train even more extensively and organized themselves as a new entity, al-Qaeda.

When bin Laden’s home nation of Saudi Arabia found it necessary to turn to the United States for arms and military help, bin Laden felt further humiliated. He hated America and hated that his nation partnered with the “enemy.” He found America weak and believed he and his men could strike a blow against the United States. 

After a stint in Sudan, a relatively peaceful existence, failed business dealings, and the bombing of a hotel wrongfully thought to be housing American troops, bin Laden and his people realized they needed to become even more radicalized and decided even killing innocents in the name of Islam was permit able. The global terror organization was born. Knowing only America had the capability of stopping their goal of a world-wide caliphate, they turned their sights on the Great Satan. America, around 1995, was clueless. 

With nowhere else to go, bin Laden traveled to the now Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. From his rudimentary abode, and with nothing but failure and humiliation behind him, he plotted war on America. “You are not unaware of the injustice, repression and aggression that have befallen Muslims through the alliance of Jews, Christians, and their agents, so much so that Muslims’ blood has become the cheapest blood and their money and wealth are plundered by the enemies,” bin Laden declared while seeking to build his army.  One person attracted to the training camp was Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. His nephew had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and he was a wanted man. Americans remained largely unaware and uninterested in the group housed in the caves of Tora Bora. 

Bin Laden did everything he could to scare up some publicity and spin even defeats and humiliations into victories. As various terrorists, trained by bin Laden, or under the influence of Zawahiri in Egypt, engaged in acts of terror, the U.S. finally began paying some attention. However, internal turf wars and ego problems kept those assigned to national security from seeing the whole picture. The bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya got their attention. America’s feeble and failed response of bombing the Pakistan training camp only elevated bin Laden’s position. 

After the wildly successful bombing of the USS Cole failed to spur the U.S. into action, Al-Qaeda began to plan what KSM had dubbed his “planes operation.” The plan was to strike America’s homeland flying hijacked planes. Hints abounded but because the CIA and the FBI, with their different focuses, would not work together, the plan was not discovered. One FBI agent, John O’Neill, did his best to wake up the bureaucracy to the threat al-Qaeda represented. He finally quit on August 22, 2001, and took a job as head of security at the World Trade Center. Only a couple of weeks later, he did not make it out.

As to the importance of bin Laden, Wright states, “At a time when there were many Islamist movements, all of them concentrated on nationalist goals, it was bin Laden’s vision to create an international jihad corps. It was his leadership that held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile. It was bin Laden’s tenacity that made him deaf to the moral quarrels that attended the murder of so many and indifferent to the repeated failures that would have destroyed most men’s dreams.” He had the ability to “enlist the imagination of the men whose lives bin Laden required.” Eventually bin Laden would be hunted down and killed by American Navy Seals. But the war with this deadly, yet pathetic bunch of malcontents, continues.

Who's the Fairest of Them All by Stephen Moore

President Obama is constantly pressing for “fairness.” At least his definition of the word, which generally means take from the rich and give to the poor. O.K. So he wants to help the poor and he’s obsessed with fairness. He should read Who’s the Fairest of them All? by Stephen Moore. 

He begins the book with, “The left argues that conservatives don’t care about poor people, and this is why they oppose income redistribution in tax policy, welfare payments to the poor, higher budgets for social programs, regulations like higher minimum wages, and so on. But the premise of this book is that it is equally (maybe even more) plausible to say that liberals don’t care about poor people.”

He then goes on to state with vivid clarity the myriad ways the left have hurt those they claim to care the most about. The programs and policies have led to rising poverty, higher unemployment, dismal education, and increasing fatherlessness. This from the friends of poor. With friends like these...

With charts and graphs and an array of statistics, Moore makes the case that in the most economically free nations the poor are always better off. “So in other words, if we judge society by how well it serves the poor, then free enterprise is far and away the greatest anti-poverty program known to man.” 

The most fair society is the most free. By clamping down on our freedoms and attacking free-enterprise, those on the left have doomed the poor to poverty, never to rise out. 

Here's a video which illustrates the principles (quite literally!)