Crusades circa 2001

I can't wrap my head around the recent GQ story by Robert Draper about Rumsfeld's use of Bible verses in daily digests of military intelligence prepared for Pres. Bush. The story includes a slideshow of the actual memos. Example here:
I'm not sure which frightens me more: to imagine that this reflected the view from the top at the Pentagon (i.e. that the U.S. military really was fighting a religious war); or that it doesn't reflect Rumsfield's view but was used to manipulate the President (and that we had a president that could be manipulated this way).

Notably absent are slides labeled with these Bible verses:

Matthew 5:39: But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Matthew 5:43-44: You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...

Exodus 20: 13 Thou shalt not kill.

Re: Curfew

I can't remember exactly what my curfew times were. They must have been reasonable, since I don't recall it ever being an annoyance. I think it was 1:00 on weekends. I was so obnoxiously well-behaved in high school that I could have stayed out all night and still not found any trouble to get into. As I was reflecting on this question, I was remembering how we spent late night hours: sitting at Perkins drinking Cokes; sitting in someone's family room drinking Cokes; sitting around a piano singing; holding impromptu Bible studies for FUN; OK, maybe an occasional episode of toilet-papering someone's house. It sounds dull, but my friends were smart and creative and funny, so all of these activities were infused with laughing to tears.

I didn't drink until college, with a few exceptions: 1) wine with pizza or steak at home with parents; 2) trip to Germany; and 3) one shared bottle of champagne, sitting on the hood of a car, parked in the middle of a field on the prairie, under the enormous North Dakota sky filled with stars on a warm spring night. During #3, we kept saying, "This is fun! Why haven't we been doing this all these years".

Childhood Bible Stories

I have no idea why this came to me today.

Remember this story you learned as a kid? Jacob, the third of the Old Testament Patriarchs, gets flimflammed by Laban when Jacob asks to marry Laban’s daughter Rachel.

“Work for me for 7 years,” says Laban, “then you can marry Rachel.”

Jacob does so, but is somehow hoodwinked by Laban and marries Rachel’s sister Leah instead. Jacob then had to work another 7 years for Laban to get Rachel.

Laban: inventor of the Bait-n-Switch.

Slate Editor David Plotz on reading the OT

I post this link and the quoted paragraphs not for the religious aspects dicussed later in the article (Plotz is an agnostic Jew) but for the aspects of the OT as literature.

When I was reading Judges one day, I came to a complicated digression about a civil war between two groups of Israelites, the Gileadites and the Ephraimites. According to the story, the Gileadites hold the Jordan River, and whenever anyone comes to cross, the guards ask them to say the password, shibboleth. The Ephraimites, for some unexplained reason, can't pronounce the sh in shibboleth and say "sibboleth" instead. When an Ephraimite fails the speech exam, the Gileadites "would seize him and slay him." I've read the word shibboleth a hundred times, written it a few, and probably even said it myself, but I had never understood it until then. It was a tiny but thrilling moment when my world came alive, when a word that had just been a word suddenly meant something to me.

And something like that happened to me five, 10, 50 times a day when I was Bible-reading. You can't get through a chapter of the Bible, even in the most obscure book, without encountering a phrase, a name, a character, or an idea that has come down to us 3,000 years later. The Bible is the first source of everything from the smallest plot twists (the dummy David's wife places in the bed to fool assassins) to the most fundamental ideas about morality (the Levitical prohibition of homosexuality that still shapes our politics, for example) to our grandest notions of law and justice. It was a joyful shock to me when I opened the Book of Amos and read the words that crowned Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

I probably shouldn't even post because of all the links to Slate's Blogging the Bible but loved the article and couldn't help myself. Tragically sad comments like this sum up his view:

You notice that I haven't said anything about belief. I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn't really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I'm brokenhearted about God.

Again, I don't want to get into theology, but I thought I needed to be fair to Plotz's position.