AMP: Hanging up on Dagmar Herzog

My former partner who lives in London once asked me, if Doctor Mohler doesn't know this blog. After I showed him my blog and he had a look at Doctor Mohlers blog he realized that he never mentioned me. And this is true. A couple of my questions have already been read by him or Russel Moore on an "Ask Anything Wednesday" but he never mentioned or dealt with his critics on his program. (And I hope that I am not his only one).
Does that mean that he doesn't know me or my blog? Most likely he knows me and my blog. I might be a harsh critic when it comes to him and his program (at least I hope to be) but I respect the rules of fairness when it comes to an intellectual debate over the Internet: I keep him, or better his team, informed about any article I post on his program. After some articles (those in which I called him Comrade Mohler for his idea of allying with the Far Left) Google-Analytics which I use to get statistics about the use of this website, showed visits from Louisville, Kentucky where his show is located.
The reason that he doesn't mention me is a different one, and as I listened a lot to his programs I suppose it is this: The show is about Intelligent, Christian Conversation. Whether the listener perceives this program up to intelligent should be up to him but this isn't the point. The two other words are more important to understand this program: Christian and Conversation. It is the goal of Albert Mohler over everything else to save souls. I remember that in one of the first shows by him I listened to he spoke about one appearance on TV in which he more or less said that the debate was secondary to him and his main goal was to get the Christian message out. He bragged about that he had to wait until the host used the name "Jesus Christ" in order for him to introduce that even the host can not even say this name without acknowledging that Jesus is Christ. Totally out of place, and I guess quite a frustrating experience for the host, but soundly what Doctor Mohler is about.
The word Conversation seems pretty clear. It is when two or more persons talk together. But especially when it is used on Christian Radio it has a further connotation. Then the word also implies that it is a friendly Conversation in opposite to a Debate in which two different ideas confront each other. The whole program might be conversational in so far as two or more persons talk but it is pretty much mono-directional when it comes to the message.
For this reason he would not endorse me on his show by mentioning my blog. I guess one thing that was either said by him or on the Way of the Master program describes his attitude towards engaging with other world-views well: I would not allow a bad preacher to preach in my church but I would always follow the invitation to preach at a bad preachers church. I am fine with this and I am always surprised when looking at those statistics how many people find my blog by searching for criticism of Christian Radio on Google.

That was a really long preface to open this blog article. But I deem it necessary to understand why I am in retrospect in some aspects surprised and it some aspects not how the show went.
I was really surprised that they had a guest on that didn't agree with most of what is said on this program. If it would have been just a usual program in which someone who is supposingly an expert on a matter of Christian life talks with Dr. Mohler or Dr. Moore it would have just been one of the less interesting standard programs. When after a couple of minutes it was clear that there was a sound dissent between the host and the guest I got really intrigued.
I can give Dagmar Herzogs point of view as far as the short but very interesting excerpt from her Book: Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics allows me to. She is a vocal and witty critic of the anxiety that many feel towards sexuality caused by a combination of the influence of the Christian Right and the influence of the recent sexual revolutions around issues like Viagra and the constant lure of Sexuality. The conversation could have been quite a classical one if they would have focused on the second part of what Prof. Herzog thinks causes all this anxiety about sex. But then again I think that she underestimated the anxiety that conservative Christians towards sexuality. In this sense it proved her point almost perfectly when Dr. Moore hang up on her.
At this point I ask my readers to realize that they edited quite some things she said out and that the show that you find on the site right now does not have anymore the point in it at which Dr. Moore hung up on her. I listened to it live on the web as it happened and it could be that my memory betrays me, but as I remember she was talking quite technically when the conversation with her was ended.

I agree with Dagmar in so far as I also believe that the sexually loaded environment can raise our expectations of sex so far that we won't be satisfied anymore with the sex we have. In so far as I can extrapolate the point she wanted to make it is very true that the abstinence only campaign of the political right in the United States contributed largely to the anxiety that many people feel towards sex.
Human beings are also sexual beings. Sexuality is a big part of what and who we are. I was raised in Germany in an area that is predominately Catholic. Catholicism, a religion that embraces celibacy and abstinence only, is a good example how much anxiety it creates to suppress your sexuality. In the course of this your whole environment will get sexualized beyond the point it is. There was this story once told to me about this nun, who just allowed the girls in the Catholic school she was leading to wear white shoes since every other color would be sexually arousing to men around.
Over here in Germany I can not fully imagine how it is to live in a country that advertises abstinence only on a larger scale. I can just speculate what it would be like. Coming in combination with an already sexually charged world around me I would feel really pressed to find the right partner, since this partner will be the only one I could ever experience sex with. A sex that I would expect to hope to be as good as the one shown in all the culture around me. That would cause me a lot of stress, anxiety towards sex and frustration if the sex I one day get isn't quite as perfect as the world around me shows.

I agree with her that the images of sex around us raise our expectation of sex to a level that isn't healthy or normal anymore. I also don't think that the approach of the Christian Right helps to lower this anxiety. In some very unexpected way it makes it even worse. Until I listened somewhat longer to Christian Talk Radio I never got the idea that the union of a man and a women represents the union of Jesus and his Church. That is already quite weird. Adding to this that the act of sexual intimacy symbolized the intimacy between Jesus and his Church is seriously deforming a wonderful shared experience. To make out of this wonderful intimate experience a sacred, perhaps even ceremonial, act is deeply sick.

>From those things I read about Prof. Herzog I suppose I also disagree with her on some points. I'm not afraid of sex and I also don't think it needs to be perfect but other than she I tend to also have a functional view on this issue. Sex is a wonderful intimate experience but it can also be a good mean to help you relief stress, to build self-esteem and to overcome a mild depression. If you choose to have sex for the three last mentioned points you should just make sure that your partner also does not expect more out of it. As long as you have this sex safe (condoms, since just those also protect from STDs and not just from pregnancies) it can be a wonderful as well as helpful experience.

If you are now appalled by this confession of mine, I ask you to turn again to this Program I was writing about. If you host a radio program and you invite a guest in, you should know what this guest wants to say beforehand. If you don't know this exactly you are running with the risk the he or she might say something that doesn't really please you. But cutting him or her out, wasting by this their time and don't letting them make their point is exceedingly rude and morally wrong. I would advise Dr. Moore to listen again to the program of last Thursday in which they praised and proclaimed the virtue of chivalry. In my opinion it makes no moral difference whether you do that to a woman or to a man, but if he is in accordance with what was said on the program he sits in last Thursday, then an even higher amount shame should be upon him. He wasn't even host enough to thank his guest for her appearance at the end of the show.

I at this place want to thank Prof. Herzog for her quick reply after this show in which I asked her whether Dr. Moore really hung up on her during the program.

Learn a foreign language

Barack Obama is absolutely right to demand of his fellow citizens to learn a foreign language. But I he is not necessarily right for the reasons he mentioned. Very few Americans need to speak a second language for their trip to Europe. From this point of argumentation his point was somewhat elitist.
The reason that it is very useful in our modern world to speak at least one other language is that the world become much smaller with the rise of the Internet. While Germany was thousands of kilometers away just 2 decades ago, now almost every part of the world is just one mouse-click away. While you needed to board a plan and travel for several hours to get involved with a different language and a different culture you nowadays just need to switch on your computer and visit the chatrooms of other nations. For the same price you pay for talking to people from your nation.

I see the Internet as the great opportunity of the 21th century. While in the decades that lay behind us the public forum was limited to the local districts and by national media in some way to the nation as itself, the public forum will become global by the rise of the Internet.
If the people of over the world will be able to talk to each other, ideas will start to cross borders in a pace they never did before. And that is a good thing. As long as we are talking we won't fight. My biggest hope that I place into the Internet is that it will crush the prejudices by which we perceived other nations for centuries. And there are deep differences between the differences that are around within the different language communities. The German speaking nations have a prevalent set of ideas that is distinct from the ideas in the French speaking nations, which are again different from the ideas in the English speaking nations.
There is this illusion of being international in the English speaking world, caused by the fact that so many people in so many nations speak English. You know your nation, Canada, Australia, Great Britain and so on and see that all those western nations are all that similar in culture and nationally prevalent ideas. What is then commonly done is that this experience from the English speaking world is extrapolated to other modern non-English-speaking nations in Europe or Asia.
By the difference of language the flow of ideas is interrupted. There might be an idea that catches within the English speaking community that never catches within the French speaking community simply because it never got translated. On the other hand: The might be other ideas prevalent within the French speaking community that a not common within the English speaking one. Ideas that might impede the rise of ideas that were translated into French.
Getting to know a different language community is something that is personally very beneficial, but also something that might be necessary in the world to come.

As it stands now ideas flow better from Europe to America than vice versa - why? Because Europeans can engage into political debates in America. How many Americans could engage by writing a foreign language blog in the political/social debates in France or Russia?

I can engage into a political debate with English speaking people. When I do it, then in the hope to get humanist and social-democratic ideas to flow over the Atlantic into the American debate. When it comes to translating the ideas of the Evangelical Right back into German than I can just say: Ich werden den Teufel tun, evangelikal-konservativ politische Ideen ins Deutsche zu übersetzen.
I simply won't harm my own political aims by helping opposed ideas to catch in Germany and I guess you never expected that. If you would want your ideas to catch over here, you would have to do the work of translating them and arguing for them in a foreign language yourself.