I get mad at the TV lately.
As a kid, it always amazed me that people would get angry about what was depicted on television, or on the internet... hearing people with that attitude, I always thought, who cares if Babylon thinks that fornication and drugs and violence are acceptable? "The world" will always be hostile to the gospel--God has been telling us this for thousands of years. Why should we expect any different? Why rage and fume at it?
The answer, I find, is fear. I never hated those temptations before, because they seemed foolish to me, obvious. When I was a kid, most of what God said to do was obviously the smart thing to do anyway, whether it was God saying so or not. Don't do drugs, don't have sex until you're married, be good to people. And I got to feel a little smug, too--nobody else was reading the books I was reading, having the experiences I was having (as far as I knew). My spiritual life was an exciting secret, like being a superhero. Even the mission was not that hard of a decision: I loved teaching, and it sounded like an adventure.
In those days, the difference between my life and the advertised "good life" was inconsequential. Most people agree that they'd be better off without the addictions and poor decisions and fumbling adolescent sexual embarrassments that they accrued in their teenage years. Living the gospel always seemed "smart".
But now, living the gospel means making choices that the rest of the world would consider extremely foolish; and I'm reminded of it every time I turn on the television. To choose just one person to be with for the rest of your life--and worse, to choose that person without living together first--nothing about that decision sounds smart, unless the gospel is true. To make, really any promise at age 23 that will define your life for the remainder (and beyond)--that's optimistic to the point of insanity, unless the gospel is true. Especially if you intend to keep that promise.
The world says that kids my age are supposed to be living for themselves, making money for themselves, figuring themselves out while backpacking in Europe or something. They're not supposed to be halfway through undergrad, married, living at home and uninsured. For the first time, the life I chose doesn't sound like such a smug, pat proposition. If the gospel isn't true, I'm missing out. It's scary.
But I got this answer this morning, and it seemed worth sharing.
In Numbers 14, twelve Israelite spies have just delivered their report after infiltrating the promised land. They say Canaan is beautiful and fruitful, but that a race of indomitable giants--the Anakim--occupy it. Ten of the spies say that invading the land would be foolhardy--"We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we... we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight" (Numbers 13:31-32). They call it a land "that eateth up the inhabitants thereof." The other two spies, Joshua and Caleb, see things more clearly--knowing all that God has done to deliver Israel to this point, they testify that God will still deliver them, and keep His promise.
But Israel weeps, saying, "Would God that we had died in Egypt, or in the wilderness!" Having endured so much in their journey, they seem to believe that it has all been for nothing. And if Moses had been merely a charismatic desert sheikh--seeing the situation from a worldly point of view--it would be true. They took the Holy Land with a tiny force, upheld by miracle after miracle throughout the conquest. It was an impossible task, with their strength.
Israel attempts to select a leader to bring them back to Egypt (to what end? To hold out their necks again to Pharaoh's yoke?) and Moses, Joshua, and Caleb fall on their faces and tear their clothes in mourning for the shortsightedness of their people.
It's hard to see myself in the scriptures, because my heart is more often with the wayward children of Israel than with their prophets. I am ashamed to say how often I look back with longing on Sodom and Gomorrha, or the "flesh pots of Egypt." I know God lives, of course; just as surely as if I had walked through the Red Sea with them. But it is so easy to forget, to lose heart; to see only a land "waiting to devour you", not one flowing with milk and honey.
It is encouraging to note that Israel did not go back to Egypt. They feel certain that the Canaanites will destroy them; but, like me, their fear of the Canaanites is overpowered by their fear of God, and He carries them, kicking and screaming and backsliding, into the promised land. But the tragedy is that they had to endure all their trials with such despair. Their distrust of God led them to seek security in idolatry and foreign exploitation--but also, paradoxically, to hate and fear their neighbors, whom God had commanded them to love as themselves.
When faced with that kind of fear, it is surprisingly easy to become paranoid--to see even mild criticism or contradiction as a threat, even when that criticism is only implied--or even unintentional. In that mindset, even a TV show that depicts immorality as wise, sane, and enjoyable gets interpreted as a personal attack on my tenuous spiritual life. And maybe it is, in fact; but it never bothered me before.
It's one of our culture's favorite platitudes that fear breeds intolerance; I don't think I'm saying anything new here. What is surreal is to experience it for myself.
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
God is not obsessive-compulsive.
The other morning I was reading in Leviticus (chapter 13, on leprosy), and struggling to understand why this was a worthy inclusion in our scriptures. What spiritual merit is there in reading the half-understood (and mostly ineffective) diagnosis of a disease that has been largely eradicated from the modern world?
What came to me was a beautiful metaphor of the supremacy of Christ's new covenant--a simple set of principles, to replace a vast and byzantine arrangement of rules.
Leprosy is not an especially infectious disease; it could have been easily prevented, even in Moses' time, with basic hygiene. Essentially, a person who bathes regularly, drinks clean water, and properly cooks his food, has almost no risk of contracting leprosy.
Moses (or at least God) understood this--the very rules he prescribes betray an understanding of the basics of epidemiology. These principles would have been easy to obey and even easier to explain; but what Israel got was an encyclopedic laundry list of rules , which only poorly contained the plague and ruthlessly ostracized its victims.
Leviticus makes sharp distinctions between of clean and unclean--but was anybody in those days clean, in any meaningful sense? No, they were all filthy; that's how societies get endemic leprosy. But the ritually "clean" got to live normally (even if, as in Lev. 13:13, they were literally leprous "from head to toe"), while the "unclean" were forced into a life of humiliation and desperate poverty on the fringe of Israelite society.
Worse, there was no concept of treatment--you were simply cut off from the congregation, for life, unless by a miracle your illness resolved itself naturally.
Why does this matter? Because the same dilemma can be found in the Mosaic law governing sin. Rather than an explanation of justice, mercy, faith, repentance, etc. (the principles of salvation, which a child can comprehend), Israel was given an endless list of commandments that took an army of lawyers and rabbis to interpret.
Every aspect of life was governed by a surprisingly specific and encyclopedic code of laws. You knew what you were to do, and what you were not to do, in almost any situation--but only occasionally did you understand why. As with leprosy, God did not teach Israel the principles underlying His commandments.
There was almost no room for repentance and rehabilitation--for most sins, the penalty was death. For the few exceptions, there were sacrifices prescribed--but the law did not purport to heal the sinner any more than it could claim to cleanse the leper. The law did not deal in healing--its purpose was to cut out social malignancy. The sinner was not a patient to be healed, but an infected limb to be amputated.
The saddest thing about this policy was that, for all its specificity and cruel rigidity, the law of leprosy was actually less effective in treating leprosy than even a rudimentary explanation of germ theory would have been. Likewise, the law of carnal commandments--a tedious, oppressive extrapolation of a few blessedly simple principles--could do nothing to fight the causes of sin. Sinners were destroyed, rather than healed, and many fell ill who would have remained healthy if they had known how to keep themselves clean. The most drastic and brutal treatment is not always the surest.
Instead of fearing and ostracizing lepers (and sinners), a more enlightened people could have rehabilitated the afflicted, with no risk at all to themselves. Why, then, did God give the law this way in the first place?
For the same reason that children aren't told exactly why they can't cross the street by themselves. Obviously there's nothing intrinsically morally wrong about crossing the street; and if a child could truly comprehend the danger, and could be trusted to remember, to be aware, then such a rule would be unnecessary.
But children can't really understand such rules, so we tell them "You are not allowed to cross the street by yourself, ever" until they're mature enough to understand. Obviously it is not our intention that children live this way forever, and it was not God's intention for Israel to remain under the law any longer than was necessary.
The problem is, Israel never learned that it was okay to cross the street. Instead, they wrote long treatises on what exactly constitutes "crossing the street", and delivered impassioned sermons about the manifold immoralities to which crossing the street inevitably leads. In short, they completely missed the point.
The law of Moses has been called draconian, and certainly it was. But the mainstream Christian idea that God somehow "grew up" into a loving and compassionate Father is ridiculous. We raise small children with rules and penalties that would be ludicrous and tyrannical to impose on adults. Is it because we love adults more than children? Is it because we get nicer as our children get older? Of course not. It's because they become capable of comprehending principles, and no longer need the rules.
What came to me was a beautiful metaphor of the supremacy of Christ's new covenant--a simple set of principles, to replace a vast and byzantine arrangement of rules.
Leprosy is not an especially infectious disease; it could have been easily prevented, even in Moses' time, with basic hygiene. Essentially, a person who bathes regularly, drinks clean water, and properly cooks his food, has almost no risk of contracting leprosy.
Moses (or at least God) understood this--the very rules he prescribes betray an understanding of the basics of epidemiology. These principles would have been easy to obey and even easier to explain; but what Israel got was an encyclopedic laundry list of rules , which only poorly contained the plague and ruthlessly ostracized its victims.
Leviticus makes sharp distinctions between of clean and unclean--but was anybody in those days clean, in any meaningful sense? No, they were all filthy; that's how societies get endemic leprosy. But the ritually "clean" got to live normally (even if, as in Lev. 13:13, they were literally leprous "from head to toe"), while the "unclean" were forced into a life of humiliation and desperate poverty on the fringe of Israelite society.
Worse, there was no concept of treatment--you were simply cut off from the congregation, for life, unless by a miracle your illness resolved itself naturally.
Why does this matter? Because the same dilemma can be found in the Mosaic law governing sin. Rather than an explanation of justice, mercy, faith, repentance, etc. (the principles of salvation, which a child can comprehend), Israel was given an endless list of commandments that took an army of lawyers and rabbis to interpret.
Every aspect of life was governed by a surprisingly specific and encyclopedic code of laws. You knew what you were to do, and what you were not to do, in almost any situation--but only occasionally did you understand why. As with leprosy, God did not teach Israel the principles underlying His commandments.
There was almost no room for repentance and rehabilitation--for most sins, the penalty was death. For the few exceptions, there were sacrifices prescribed--but the law did not purport to heal the sinner any more than it could claim to cleanse the leper. The law did not deal in healing--its purpose was to cut out social malignancy. The sinner was not a patient to be healed, but an infected limb to be amputated.
The saddest thing about this policy was that, for all its specificity and cruel rigidity, the law of leprosy was actually less effective in treating leprosy than even a rudimentary explanation of germ theory would have been. Likewise, the law of carnal commandments--a tedious, oppressive extrapolation of a few blessedly simple principles--could do nothing to fight the causes of sin. Sinners were destroyed, rather than healed, and many fell ill who would have remained healthy if they had known how to keep themselves clean. The most drastic and brutal treatment is not always the surest.
Instead of fearing and ostracizing lepers (and sinners), a more enlightened people could have rehabilitated the afflicted, with no risk at all to themselves. Why, then, did God give the law this way in the first place?
For the same reason that children aren't told exactly why they can't cross the street by themselves. Obviously there's nothing intrinsically morally wrong about crossing the street; and if a child could truly comprehend the danger, and could be trusted to remember, to be aware, then such a rule would be unnecessary.
But children can't really understand such rules, so we tell them "You are not allowed to cross the street by yourself, ever" until they're mature enough to understand. Obviously it is not our intention that children live this way forever, and it was not God's intention for Israel to remain under the law any longer than was necessary.
The problem is, Israel never learned that it was okay to cross the street. Instead, they wrote long treatises on what exactly constitutes "crossing the street", and delivered impassioned sermons about the manifold immoralities to which crossing the street inevitably leads. In short, they completely missed the point.
The law of Moses has been called draconian, and certainly it was. But the mainstream Christian idea that God somehow "grew up" into a loving and compassionate Father is ridiculous. We raise small children with rules and penalties that would be ludicrous and tyrannical to impose on adults. Is it because we love adults more than children? Is it because we get nicer as our children get older? Of course not. It's because they become capable of comprehending principles, and no longer need the rules.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Provo is badly oversalted.
Is it weird to say I miss Texas for the diversity? Back home, I took for granted the fact that I had friends from all over the world, from so many different faiths. Now, I can't remember the last time I talked in person with someone who wasn't Mormon. In the rest of the world, I suppose the Church is viewed as a tiny, peripheral minority--I still remember being galled by my high-school government teacher discussing the electoral impact of the United States' 5 million Jews, and then telling me that the six million Mormons in the US were "not statistically significant". Here in Provo, however, "we" are suffocatingly numerous.
I'm reading this book, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations", by David Landes; and there's a chapter on the intellectual decline of Portugal and Spain in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition. Obviously the Church is not the inquisitorial Moloch that sixteenth-century Spanish Catholicism was; institutionally, the Church is carefully, self-consciously tolerant. But there is an intellectual dearth that seems inevitable when you surround yourself with ostensibly like-minded people.
I didn't expect it to be this way. One would think that having so much of our intellectual foundation in common, we would save time arguing and be better equipped to explore the frontiers of what we don't know; but unfortunately, it seems that the uniformity is more pretended than real. We are supposed to believe the same things, but our worldviews are far more colored by upbringing, cultural milieu, socioeconomic status, and political leanings than one would hope.
Faith permeates every aspect of our intellectual life, so that you'll find it wherever you cut--and this is a good thing--but it breeds a kind of polite silence on certain issues. Since we use all the same religious materials to defend radically divergent points of view, discussions have a danger of becoming uncomfortably personal.
The beauty of growing up in Texas was that I didn't expect anyone to agree with me. I could talk to my friends about almost anything, and because we acknowledged our vastly different intellectual origins, we could just relax and enjoy it. I want to have that again.
On the other hand, my education is currently 70% subsidized by tithing, and it's hard to say no to $2,000 a semester.
I'm reading this book, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations", by David Landes; and there's a chapter on the intellectual decline of Portugal and Spain in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition. Obviously the Church is not the inquisitorial Moloch that sixteenth-century Spanish Catholicism was; institutionally, the Church is carefully, self-consciously tolerant. But there is an intellectual dearth that seems inevitable when you surround yourself with ostensibly like-minded people.
I didn't expect it to be this way. One would think that having so much of our intellectual foundation in common, we would save time arguing and be better equipped to explore the frontiers of what we don't know; but unfortunately, it seems that the uniformity is more pretended than real. We are supposed to believe the same things, but our worldviews are far more colored by upbringing, cultural milieu, socioeconomic status, and political leanings than one would hope.
Faith permeates every aspect of our intellectual life, so that you'll find it wherever you cut--and this is a good thing--but it breeds a kind of polite silence on certain issues. Since we use all the same religious materials to defend radically divergent points of view, discussions have a danger of becoming uncomfortably personal.
The beauty of growing up in Texas was that I didn't expect anyone to agree with me. I could talk to my friends about almost anything, and because we acknowledged our vastly different intellectual origins, we could just relax and enjoy it. I want to have that again.
On the other hand, my education is currently 70% subsidized by tithing, and it's hard to say no to $2,000 a semester.
Monday, February 15, 2010
No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but Whitey's on the moon
Am I the only one who thinks the Olympics are just a little bloated and self-important? The luge is cool, I guess, but when I hear that somebody has died in the lifelong pursuit of an otherwise absolutely useless skill, I don't understand our need to romanticize it. As much as the commercials try to feed you the idea, one's ability to go down a hill on a plank really is not a compelling metaphor for human achievement.
I imagine that guy getting to heaven, and the other dead folks asking him, "So, how did you go?" And when he explains it to them, they say, "...Oh. You woke up at 4:30 every morning and trained all day for twenty years so you could do that? Like, you really couldn't think of one field of human endeavor that might have been a better use of all that time and discipline? A world eating itself alive with war, famine, hatred, disease... you could have worked in a thumbtack factory, and at least then you'd be making thumbtacks. But no, you picked luge."
The strength of character and will required to make it to the Olympics (or, really, any professional sport) only deepens my misgivings about it: these are people who clearly could have accomplished something more meaningful.
And it isn't just sport; this McQueen guy spends his life making weird-ass costumes for waifish cocaine addicts to wear (once), and then when he dies you hear interviews from industry people talking about all his "great contributions", and all he accomplished before he was taken from us too soon.
You can work your whole life to become the best dog groomer or cake decorator or wedding planner in the business, but don't expect the rest of us to pull long faces and talk about how meaningful it was that you "dedicated your life" to your ludicrous profession.
Whitey On The Moon
I imagine that guy getting to heaven, and the other dead folks asking him, "So, how did you go?" And when he explains it to them, they say, "...Oh. You woke up at 4:30 every morning and trained all day for twenty years so you could do that? Like, you really couldn't think of one field of human endeavor that might have been a better use of all that time and discipline? A world eating itself alive with war, famine, hatred, disease... you could have worked in a thumbtack factory, and at least then you'd be making thumbtacks. But no, you picked luge."
The strength of character and will required to make it to the Olympics (or, really, any professional sport) only deepens my misgivings about it: these are people who clearly could have accomplished something more meaningful.
And it isn't just sport; this McQueen guy spends his life making weird-ass costumes for waifish cocaine addicts to wear (once), and then when he dies you hear interviews from industry people talking about all his "great contributions", and all he accomplished before he was taken from us too soon.
You can work your whole life to become the best dog groomer or cake decorator or wedding planner in the business, but don't expect the rest of us to pull long faces and talk about how meaningful it was that you "dedicated your life" to your ludicrous profession.
Whitey On The Moon
Friday, January 08, 2010
Like Tarzan, but the gorillas are in people-suits.
The grocery store was flooded with young married couples this Monday, many of them younger than myself. It was terrifying. I can't expect a mundane chore like grocery shopping to reflect the deep beauty of their marital union or anything, but their expressions and posture just seemed to epitomize banality: a long, slow death. How could you possibly need two minds at a time dedicated to the choice between Skippy and Jif?
The problem with a woman who claims to enjoy domesticity is that all that nonsense is actually important to a person like that. I can't imagine the boredom of shambling through a department store behind such a woman, being consulted about which shower curtain "we" want.
Likewise a woman who really knows how to paint her face and tousle her hair just right, and does it absolutely every day; that can be admirable, until she opens her mouth and you find out everything she isn't thinking about in the time it takes her to get that done.
Or those kids who kill themselves to get into business school or law school or medical school even though they couldn't give a crap about business or law or medicine; who somehow manage a 3.95 GPA while learning absolutely nothing interesting (I'm looking at you, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.)
I have some admiration for tight schedules and early mornings, the stuff we are told temporal success is made of--but in conversations with that sort of person, I have to wonder just what occupies their thinking in quiet moments. We have sixteen hours of consciousness in a day, and it can't all be aimed at accomplishing your five-year plan.
These are not unintelligent people; are they really just endlessly running over their to-do list and mentally checking their pockets, all day long? Even on the john, or at the bus stop? Certainly they aren't thinking about anything else, or they'd be more interesting to talk to.
And if that's the case, can such a creature really be classified as sentient? No matter how sophisticated the solution may be, amoebas and crustaceans and roundworms have for millions of years managed the same problems effectively enough. Ants know how to get things done. I need to get out of BYU.
The problem with a woman who claims to enjoy domesticity is that all that nonsense is actually important to a person like that. I can't imagine the boredom of shambling through a department store behind such a woman, being consulted about which shower curtain "we" want.
Likewise a woman who really knows how to paint her face and tousle her hair just right, and does it absolutely every day; that can be admirable, until she opens her mouth and you find out everything she isn't thinking about in the time it takes her to get that done.
Or those kids who kill themselves to get into business school or law school or medical school even though they couldn't give a crap about business or law or medicine; who somehow manage a 3.95 GPA while learning absolutely nothing interesting (I'm looking at you, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.)
I have some admiration for tight schedules and early mornings, the stuff we are told temporal success is made of--but in conversations with that sort of person, I have to wonder just what occupies their thinking in quiet moments. We have sixteen hours of consciousness in a day, and it can't all be aimed at accomplishing your five-year plan.
These are not unintelligent people; are they really just endlessly running over their to-do list and mentally checking their pockets, all day long? Even on the john, or at the bus stop? Certainly they aren't thinking about anything else, or they'd be more interesting to talk to.
And if that's the case, can such a creature really be classified as sentient? No matter how sophisticated the solution may be, amoebas and crustaceans and roundworms have for millions of years managed the same problems effectively enough. Ants know how to get things done. I need to get out of BYU.
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