I know that many conservative Christians probably don't like the author, Robert Wright, but this article is well worth reading a bit...
Every morning President Bush reads a devotional from "My Utmost for His Highest," a collection of homilies by a Protestant minister named Oswald Chambers, who lived a century ago. As Mr. Bush explained in an interview broadcast on Tuesday on Fox News, reading Chambers is a way for him "on a daily basis to be in the Word."...
There's a kind of optimism in Chambers, but it's not exactly sunny. To understand it you have to understand the theme that dominates "My Utmost": committing your life to Jesus Christ - "absolute and irrevocable surrender of the will" - and staying committed. "If we turn away from obedience for even one second, darkness and death are immediately at work again." In all things and at all times, you must do God's will...
But what exactly does God want? Chambers gives little substantive advice. There is no great stress on Jesus' ethical teaching - not much about loving your neighbor or loving your enemy. (And Chambers doesn't seem to share Isaiah's hope of beating swords into plowshares. "Life without war is impossible in the natural or the supernatural realm.") But the basic idea is that, once you surrender to God, divine guidance is palpable. "If you obey God in the first thing he shows you, then he instantly opens up the next truth to you," Chambers writes.
Some have marveled at Mr. Bush's refusal to admit any mistakes in Iraq other than "catastrophic success." But what looks like negative feedback to some of us - more than 1,100 dead Americans, more than 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians and the biggest incubator of anti-American terrorists in history - is, through Chambers's eyes, not cause for doubt. Indeed, seemingly negative feedback may be positive feedback, proof that God is there, testing your faith, strengthening your resolve.
Now one could spend too much time psychologizing Bush, but, if Bush is "sincere" about his "faith," (and anybody who's read Being and Nothingness knows why I put the quote marks there), it is clear that this "faith" itself will in fact lead to wrong decisions. They may "ultimately" be "revealed" to be what they are: bad decisions. Uh, but don't we already know that? Isn't the meta-lesson here (whether you're Buddhist, Christian, atheist, or a Jain) that you don't use this method of thinking about your world?
I could go off on a big tangent on "volition" here, but heck, this is a blog...anybody who'd want that should make a comment to that effect.
I will however, note that Jeff Clinton is right, in a kind of way. This election is about worldviews- and a worldview that insists on not using everything - one that doesn't even roughly parallel Dogen's Tenzo Kyokun is not an effective worldview when put into practice.
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