Blogwatch: Slavery Reparations, Living Biblically, Belgium, and Identity Theft
Hathor-Sekhmet points out the Afrospear November Carnival. Afrospear Carnivals focus on a different question each month, and this month’s question is on reparations for slavery. It’s a small, but varied, set of posts from African-American bloggers on the topic; Hathor-Sekhmet has a submission.
I think I’ve linked before a review of the book The Year of Living Biblically, in which an agnostic spent a year trying to follow all of the laws of the Bible. My husband just pointed me to where The Friendly Atheist interviews the author. A lot of the crazier laws are ones that no Quaker feels bound to follow, and the critique of fundamentalism aspect of trying to follow all the laws literally doesn’t so much apply to us, since we don’t tend to be fundie. One part that’s more of interest to Quakers, though, in view of our testimony about letting our yea be yea and our nay nay, is what he has to say about telling the truth.
Hemant: Did any rules turn you into a worse person?
A.J.: I don’t think stoning adulterers made me better. Also, telling the truth all the time isn’t really a good idea. I wrote an article on it for Esquire called Radical Honesty and the chaos that occurs if you never, ever lie.
The Esquire article goes consirably beyond what Quakers would say. Our queries on integrity, for example, say,
How do I strive to maintain the integrity of my inner and outer lives?
Do I act on my principles even when this entails difficult consequences?
Am I honest and truthful in all that I say and do, even when a compromise might be easier or more popular?
This is a challenging standard of honesty, and, frankly, my own answer is that I’m not honest and truthful in all that I say and do; sometimes, even frequently, I lie. But “Radical Honesty” as it’s proposed in the Esquire article goes beyond not lying, to not even concealing your thoughts, but blurting them out, even the ones you yourself disapprove of. As you can imagine, that makes for a great deal of trouble, to the point of sexual harrassment. But it still raises interesting questions about the whole matter of white lies.
Belgium still doesn’t have a government.
Identity theft allows a homicide suspect to get out of jail.