Civil Commotion

I’m guessing that John Piper’s church is among those that will be holding Christmas morning services.

Britain still used the Julian calendar in 1642, and according to that calendar it was on Christmas Day that Isaac Newton was born. There is no question whatever that Newton actually existed and, what is more, he did a lot more for human progress, and therefore peace, than Jesus ever did.

So I am celebrating the birth of Isaac Newton — and if you actually want Peace on Earth, rather than the triumph of some discreditable vengeance cult or another, so will you.

Newton’s calculus, and kinematics, are the backbone of an engineering education; there is no such thing as an engineer of any variety who hasn’t solved hundreds, possibly thousands, of permutations of the block-on-an-inclined-plane problem, and the modern world could not exist without Newton’s genius.

Believe it or not, engineers don’t kill each other over Newton’s equations, either. They have been tested, proved, and universally accepted — they work. There are no embarrassing schisms we must pretend never happened, or others we must pretend don’t exist. A Muslim, Christian, Mormon, or Scientologist engineer uses f=ma as confidently and sure-footedly as a Buddhist engineer. An American engineer can look at a Chinese engineer’s calculations and understand them at once.

All civil engineers, regardless of their religion or nationality or ethnicity, agree that the discharge of a full-flowing pipe, Q, equals the product of fluid velocity and the pipe’s area, Va. There are no reformed hydraulics.

Here is the secret: Every bit of it has been tested, tested again, chewed-over, debated, refined, re-tested. Not any of it is … revelation, knowledge mysteriously dispensed to a select few, and in engineering there are no Holy Men.

You want Peace on Earth? Then take to heart the concluding words of Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not A Christian:

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

We are s-o-o-o doomed.

What do you know? The State of Michigan has brought felony charges against two of Flint’s former Emergency Managers for that city’s tainted water.

A criminal investigation into this city’s water crisis reached into the top ranks of supervision over Flint on Tuesday as Michigan officials announced felony charges against two former state-appointed emergency managers, accusing them of fixating on saving money rather than on the safety of residents.

The managers, who were appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder to lead Flint out of fiscal distress, were charged over their roles in the public health crisis prompted by the city’s switch to a new water source, as well as the delays in responding to residents’ complaints as they suffered the devastating effects.

[ … ]

Charges of false pretenses, conspiracy to commit false pretenses, misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty lodged against the former managers, Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose, were lauded by Flint leaders, some of whom said they had feared that blame for the city’s contaminated water might ultimately be pinned only on low-level workers.

So far as I’ve been able to piece together from the news stories, a consulting engineer and the water plant’s chemist improperly permitted a regulator to overrule their judgment and pump water without chemical additives that would have prevented corrosion of the pipes. When residents complained they were treated dismissively, a cover-up was launched, and there was no correction of the water problem; the reach of the cover-up hasn’t been published.

I understand why the engineer, chemist, and regulator have all been charged. The regulator is a plain-vanilla idiot, and the engineer and chemist should never have submitted to him. Nor should they have kept quiet when residents complained.

But why, exactly, are the Emergency Managers facing prosecution? For the cover-up? Certainly they didn’t know anything about the technical decisions taken by staff at the check-off meeting.

At worst:

• They contributed to a political environment in which the state regulator was able to displace the city employee and city consultant. But the city’s chemist and consultant have the lion’s share of responsibility for allowing that to happen. Seriously: If there was ever a case where they should have pulled their light sabers and made an honest-to-God he-man fight over something, this was it, for they are the responsible professionals who sign and seal the drawings.

• They failed to knock-heads and get answers to the city’s obvious water problems.

Both are firing offenses — but criminal offenses? On what has been published so far, that looks like an overreach.

I guess we’ll learn more when it all goes to trial but, so far, I’m not seeing it.

Russell Moore, the head of the Southern Baptist’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, is watching donations to his organization go over a cliff because of his vocal opposition to Donald Trump.

A prominent evangelical leader who harshly criticized Donald Trump during the presidential campaign now faces a backlash from fellow evangelicals who backed Trump.

Russell Moore, who presides over the political arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, called Trump “an awful candidate” and criticized “the old-guard religious right political establishment” for supporting him, notwithstanding Trump’s “serious moral problems” and a Southern Baptist tradition of opposing politicians whose personal behavior is considered un-Christian.

Seriously: How can you not love this? The only Southern Baptist leader who had the nerve and moral compass to say frankly that voting for Donald Trump is to disgrace oneself is being publicly eaten by other Southern Baptists — the overwhelming majority of whom did vote for The Donald.

As I said a long while ago, to be an evangelical Christian is a social identity, not a theological stance.

Mohler and Moore are struggling to enforce a meaningless distinction, hewing to evangelicalism as a theological stance while sniffing piously at the doomed and dying culture in which it is embedded and from which it draws its strength — chiefly (though of course not exclusively) the racist, anti-intellectual, anti-modernity, misogynistic, south. I am not kidding y’all: That sweet old lady who hasn’t missed a Sunday since that glorious day she was saved 60-years ago once delivered picnic-baskets of sandwiches to the menfolk who stood at roadside and threw rocks at the civil rights marchers — and she doesn’t know bupkus about what’s in the Bible, or what ‘evangelical’ means theologically. What she knows is that the world is changing, that the culture of her community, even her church, is changing, and in a way that she doesn’t like — and that it’s all the fault of those uppity dark people who don’t even speak good American half the time, and those sluts who went to college, and those snooty smarty-pants perfessers, and those newspaper people, and those gay people who want to get married and adopt kids and be a family.

And Donald Trump, bless his heart, hates them all just as much as she …

Russell Moore, I’m afraid, is learning why no decent adult has anything to do with his ridiculous club: Evangelicalism is simply malice with a smile.