I Have Seen Rep. Anthony Weiner And He Is Us (Plus the Pope and A Baptist Chime In)

I have not talked hardly any on this blog about Anthony Weiner and the current scandal. I have a lot of thoughts on the various issues relating too it such as as his character , should he resign, etc

However as always in these cases I am tad emphatic when a public figure "private" (of course Catholics believe no sin is truly private and thus one reason for Confession ) sin becomes known.

I get sort of turned off by the OUTRAGE machine. That does not mean there should not be outrage or talk of consequences. But the tone of it turns me off.

Two things that come to my mind when I observe this.

First the Confession Lines at Church are WAY WAY WAY too small.

Further Stats and studies show us that what Weiner did is in fact becoming very common. Wiener I bet in his mind was able to divorce himself into two different realities just as many do. In fact I bet some yelling the loudest about this in fact do the same thing he did. So to repeat again the Confession lines at the Catholic Church I attend tends to indicate me that lots of people are living in dual realities virtual or not.

It's a complex and broke world.

So that is why I like this piece at National Review. That is The Weinerization of America. I agree with most of it while you can quibble of course with some details.

The comments in the inbox by some of my fellow conservatives are very depressing. For some it's not an American but a Liberal American problem? Really? Like I said the lines for Confession are too small at my Church and I am not sure every "conservative" Catholic I know is a Saint yet.

He says in part:
He is a product of the age of the digitized body. Marketing yourself isn’t just for celebrities anymore. Now, we all market ourselves, choosing just the right Facebook profile picture and photo albums to tell the story we want to about our lives. We start to divorce our “self” from our actual body. This phenomenon reaches its extremes in avatars and sexting: The digital me becomes the exciting me.

Thus we are create a society where a member of Congress is able to carry on inappropriate relationships with half a dozen women he has never met and send his body’s constituent parts to the four corners of the nation from the privacy of his TV room.

Now Pope Benedict chimed on this in a way last week. See 45th World Communications Day, 2011 - Truth, Proclamation and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age

In the digital world, transmitting information increasingly means making it known within a social network where knowledge is shared in the context of personal exchanges. The clear distinction between the producer and consumer of information is relativized and communication appears not only as an exchange of data, but also as a form of sharing. This dynamic has contributed to a new appreciation of communication itself, which is seen first of all as dialogue, exchange, solidarity and the creation of positive relations. On the other hand, this is contrasted with the limits typical of digital communication: the one-sidedness of the interaction, the tendency to communicate only some parts of one’s interior world, the risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence....

...Entering cyberspace can be a sign of an authentic search for personal encounters with others, provided that attention is paid to avoiding dangers such as enclosing oneself in a sort of parallel existence, or excessive exposure to the virtual world. In the search for sharing, for “friends”, there is the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and not give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself...

Well Pope Benedict is not just talking to the heathens out there. He is a smart man. He knows 99 percent of people that read this are Catholic. In fact they are the sort thoughtful Catholics that will search this out and read it. So from that I am taking it he is just not talking to the devout "Liberal" Catholics either.

But he lied!! Well yes he did. How he actually went about that lying is getting me concerned. In fact what sort of starting pushing me TOWARD a but into the he must resign camp was this article by Kirsten Powers .

The very well regarded Baptist Preacher and Theologian Russell Moore I suspect that does not have on the average an congreation that looks like "liberal America" . He chimes in. See Are You Smarter Than Anthony Weiner?

..........Almost every adultery situation I’ve ever seen includes a cheating spouse who honestly believes that he or she is not going to get caught. The cheater often doesn’t want the marriage to end in divorce. Instead, like the characters in today’s headlines, he or she instead wants to keep everything the same: spouse, kids, and lover too. That’s irrational and completely contrary to the way the world works. Anyone can see that.

But you can convince yourself…or be convinced…that it will work for you. You’re special, after all. That’s the way temptation functions. We put consequences out of our minds, both temporal and eternal consequences. We start to believe that we are gods, with power over good and evil and life and death. And then we do crazy things.

This doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence. Satan is hyper-intelligent. And yet, even knowing that he will ultimately have his skull crushed, he rages all the more against Christ and his people, “because he knows his time is short” (Rev. 12:12). In terms of the most basic principles of military strategy, that’s crazy. What we need is not intelligence, but wisdom. Wisdom includes seeing where the way I want to go will lead (Prov. 14:12).

I don’t know who you are, reader, but I know you are probably not smarter than Anthony Weiner or Arnold Schwarzenegger or John Edwards. And neither am I. Both of us, you and I, are on the verge of wrecking our lives. We’re probably not on the verge of a situation quite like any of those men, but the gospel tells us we have vulnerabilities just the same, and they all can lead to destruction.

The answer isn’t found in talent or in strategy or in brilliance. It’s found in fear, the fear of the Lord and the vision of his future.

Well so true. Now I am not saying all these things should not have consequences for Weiner after we get all the fact. But what Pope Benedict and what Dr Moore is saying looks a lot like "US" and to be blunt ME at times in my life.