Why are we a people worth saving?

On Facebook, one of my friends posted Lt. Col. Allen West response to the marines urinating on dead Taliban:

“I have sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah. 

“All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq? 

“The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter. 

“As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.”

My friend's post was met by a rousing chorus of "likes" and comments to the effect of "piss on them all" and "the only thing they did wrong was get caught."

In the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries, Commander Adama asked in his speech at the decommissioning of Galactica, "You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question, why? Why are we a people worth saving?"




That question resounds loudly in this situation.

Lieutenant Colonel West has instructed those of us who are not being shot at to "shut your mouth." If we are "the good guys," why does West's command sound so much like the Taliban - "the bad guys" we are fighting?

And of course there was no "self-righteous indignation" or "media outrage" when the 'bad guys' desecrated the bodies of American soldiers.  That type of behavior is exactly why the Taliban has been deemed "a people not worth saving."

So if America decides to lower herself and treat others in the same barbaric and backward way as the people we are seeking to destroy (limiting the speech of dissenters or desecrating the bodies of enemy soldiers), it begs that question: Why are we a people worth saving?

I think America is worth defending and saving because we choose to stand for human dignity, even when that human disagrees with us or is our mortal enemy.  As we fight the enemy, let us not become them - a people not worth saving.

Why I'm reading the ESV (until I get my Babel fish)

I want a Babel fish.  For the unenlightened, in the book The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we learn that:

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix.

Until the Babel fish is discovered, we must do with our imperfect efforts to translate.  There is a great interview at NPR about the difficulties of translation (with a reference to the Babel Fish!): 'A Fish In Your Ear': What Gets Lost In Translation.  The interviewee, David Bellos, author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, explains the tension saying:

For translation to exist, you have to accept the fact that languages are all different and they don't describe the world in quite the same way. You also have to accept that languages are all the same in that anything you can say in one language can be said in any other.

So until the discovery of the Babel fish, we endure the tension and imperfections of translation. This means that for those of us who seek truth in the Bible, we must either learn Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek or rely upon one of the plethora of English translations available today.

Every Bible translation has its strengths and weaknesses - some translate more "word-for-word" making them awkward to read in English while others translate more "thought-by-thought" and are easier to read English but are not as close to the original languages.  You can read more about some translation difficulties and decisions in one of my other posts: Brothers, sisters, and the inside of the coconut.

In 2012, our church is reading through the Bible together and I've decided to try a new translation - the ESV (English Standard Version).  Why?

This pdf article, Why our church switched to the ESV by Kevin DeYoung, offers an excellent summary on the strengths of the ESV especially in comparison to the translation I have most often used, the NIV.  Don't get me wrong, the NIV remains an excellent translation, but as I have begun using the ESV I have come to appreciate the 7 points that Kevin DeYoung makes in his pamphlet:

1. The ESV employs an "essentially literal" translation philosophy
2. The ESV is a more transparent translation (which means the ESV leaves interpretive ambiguities unresolved, so that the reader can determine the most accurate meaning).
3. The ESV engages in less over translation (other dynamic translations tend to add extra interpretative words that aren't necessary)
4. The ESV engages in less under translation
5. The ESV does a better job of translating important Greek or Hebrew words with the same English word throughout a passage or book.
6. The ESV retains more of the literary qualities of the Bible
7. The ESV requires much less "correcting" in preaching 

So that is why I'll be giving the ESV a try this in 2012... at least until I get a Babel fish that can read.