A G K Y R A

Starving Econ Grad tagged me to participate in a meme. The meme is: (1) Pick up the nearest book and turn to page 123; (2) skip the first five sentences and post the next three sentences (i.e., sentences 6-8); (3) tag five more people.

I happen to have at hand The New Oxford Annotated Apocrypha, which I was using last night to double-check some citations in Lloyd Gaston’s disastrous (in my opinion) Paul and the Torah.

Page 123 opens to Sirach 17:6, so following the meme, I will post verse 11-13, which is about God’s creating all the nations of the earth:

He bestowed knowledge upon them, and allotted to them the law of life. He established with them an eternal covenant, and revealed to them his decrees. Their eyes saw his glorious majesty, and their ears heard the glory of his voice.

There’s something freaky about this: these are the exact verses I was looking up while reading Lloyd Gaston’s book. On page 39 of his book, Gaston cites these very verses as evidence for a Jewish idea that the Gentiles are subject to God’s law but are not party to his covenant (he’s wrong, but that’s beside the point). Isn’t that weird that the meme led me to precisely what I happened to be working with anyway?

Another weird thing happened this morning. About an hour ago, I logged onto the Encyclopedia Britannica website to look up information about Robert Mugabe, the “President” of Zimbabwe. After putting in my user name and password, the Encyclopedia’s home page greeted me with a notice about the biography of the day: ROBERT MUGABE. What are the odds!

I tag Brad Edwards at Confessions of a Seminarian, Kyle Wells at Blue and Wonder (maybe this will spur him on to write more), Nick Gleason at Boondoggle for Free (he needs to be spurred too), Shaun or Danielle Spencer at their daughter Eva’s babyblog, and Bobby Griffith at his blog. And number six: Dane Ortlund at Strawberry-Rhubarb Theology.

It has now come out that Obama’s rousing speech at the Wisconsin Democratic Party — you know, the “words don’t matter?” speech I just wrote about — is plagiarized from a speech by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. Here is Deval Patrick’s original speech from 2006:

Now here is Obama on Saturday night:

It is profoundly ironic that in his chance to rebut critics who say that his speeches are emotionalistic fluff — just words — he doesn’t even use his own words!

Obama is basing his whole campaign on his superior ability to inspire people, to get them excited about “change you can believe in.” His ideas aren’t really very different than Hillary Clinton’s, and in fact, people have pointed out that a lot of “his” ideas come from legislation that Hillary Clinton proposed long before Obama ever came on the scene.

I wouldn’t bother to point this out about any other candidate, but since Obama’s whole candidacy is based only on the importance of getting you inspired, this is directly relevant. My point is this: Obama wants to inspire you to believe in him — he says policies don’t matter if you aren’t feeling inspired! — and yet he relies on stolen material to inspire you. I wonder how inspired you’ll feel when he runs out of new or borrowed material and goes into re-runs. I bet then you’ll wish you had given more thought to the important issues.

P.S., If you ask me, Deval Patrick’s is the more inspiring version. Maybe Obama supporters should draft him as their candidate instead!