Church on the Liminal Fringe

more aphorisms

2011-01-16T10:11:00.000-08:00

Fashionable skepticism is a species of gullibility

Giving good advice and good council is a high art. For those who meet the challenge of that art, their council will be received by others as music. For those who do not meet the challenge, their council will be received as clanging gongs.

Common Sense

2010-06-04T23:08:00.000-07:00

There are two competing ideas of "common sense". The first idea of "common sense" is an understanding that is commonly held by most people. The second idea of "common sense" is an understanding that does not require special/difficult/esoteric knowledge for one to hold, regardless of whether most people hold it. The latter may be better described as "commonly available sense".

aphorism

2010-05-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

The one engaged in strenuous thought is creating the future before it is revealed.

Aphorism on clothing

2010-05-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

The clothing that I appreciate on others the most is the clothing I notice the least.

A word to dog owners

2010-05-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

I don’t fear dogs or dislike them, but I am cautious around them. I have vivid memories of being a kid of going into another kid’s back yard for the first time and standing there happy to meet Scotty, their Scottish Terrier, just as it ran up to me and bit my ankle. I don’t mind a dog wanting to be petted but I don’t like a dog putting paws on me uninvited. I enjoy taking walks around my neighborhood from time to time. One of the unpleasant aspects of the walk is when I am occasionally confronted by random aggressive behavior by various dogs.

It is an unpleasant experience to know that the only thing between you and an aggressive dog is a fence or an owner’s leash. There is an added element to this unpleasant experience when the owner witnesses the aggressive behavior and reacts in a nonchalant or even patronizing manner, and says "Sorry" as if to say “Aw don’t worry about fluffy”.

There are times when a dog owner has seen concern on my face and I see a patronizing smile or smirk from the owner – as a parent might give a child who is fearful of an animal behind a cage in the zoo, or one machismo man’s contempt for another man’s fear. If you are a dog owner, be reminded that not everyone loves your dog as “fluffy” and it is narcissistic to expect that every passing stranger will have all of your same affections towards your dog. Your cute little fluffy still is part wolf with the capacity to be a strange aggressive beast to an undeserving stranger.

Akin to the human to human narcissism of many dog owners is the human to dog narcissism of those who chastize their dog in English as they would a child, saying “No fluffy, stop that!”. Certainly the owner would be chastised if someone said “No, (owner’s name) stop that!” therefore their dog must be the same.

Your dog’s behavior is a reflection on the quality of you the owner, and whether you have invested any time or thought to how to properly train your dog. At a minimum it is inconsiderate you for you to allow your dog to be aggressive and to willfully neglect to train your dog to where those displays of aggressive do not occur. Beyond it being anti-social it is a safety hazard and a potential liability if the only thing stopping your dog from biting someone is your fence or your leash.

Another aphorism

2010-05-13T21:40:00.000-07:00

A wise man knows when he is ignorant. A fool does not.

blog comments

2010-04-06T20:15:00.001-07:00

This is directed to whomever is leaving blog comments in a foreign language. This blog is in English and that must be respected. If I nor other readers of English can understand the comment you want to post it will be rejected.

The problem with “name it and claim it”

2009-12-01T23:19:00.000-08:00

There are many ways to broach this topic. The bottom line is that a “name it and claim it” approach to faith will leave one intellectually and spiritually unequipped to fully invest in the continual quest for godly wisdom.

To begin, I need to define some terms that will take greater elaborating on in later essays. What I call God’s perfect intent are the general goals and intentions of God that are clear from Scripture: basically put, that we operate in sinless and perfect trust and enjoyment of God in relationship and that we love and bless each other. From there God’s perfect intent is that all people are healed, all good desires are met. God’s ultimate intent is the realization of God’s perfect intent which is promised at the end of history.

What I call God’s existential intent is much trickier and works upward from the failings of gritty human reality on earth. The question of God’s existential intent in general form is: “What does God intend from one point in history to the next as He works within the confines of free will, sin and fallen humanity”. As a personal prayer, God’s existential intent can be stated as follows: “What does God want for me right now, what should I dwell on and what pitfalls should I avoid in regard to my own sin, the sin of others and the danger of life.”

With that quick introduction to a theology of God’s intent, here is what a person with a “name it and claim it” theology of faith believes: “If I have a specific desire that is generally consistent with God’s will, God will back it up and see it through to realization if I A) commit that intent into words and B) hold on firmly to the belief that what I have committed to words in God’s name will come to pass. My faith is to be certain that this specific thing will happen even as it does not appear that it will happen by natural or human means. Anything that stands in the way of that specific goal is the adversity of the devil and of human faithlessness. In the face of adversity I must cast out the devil and confess my sins so that there will not be a sin in my heart that gives the devil permission to thwart my desire.”

Depending on one’s maturity and experience in listening to and following God, this is more often than not an immature, juvenile approach to faith. The central problem is that while God’s perfect intent is clear, God’s existential intent is much more complex and mysterious. We know generally what to pray for but not specifically. We must be ever more knitted into the heart and mind of the Spirit to know exactly what to pray for and how from one moment to the next.

A correct understanding of faith in God’s promises is as follows: God has given us the following promise that is largely unequivocal and a guaranteed endowment of grace: that we will grow in deeper knowledge, enjoyment and love of God. The following promises to us from God flow directly from this central promise: A) the wisdom to follow God in a dangerous world, B) deeper and richer human relationships, C) using us to advance his Kingdom in the lives of others and D) provision of our needs as God sees our needs and not necessarily as we see our needs. I will refer to these as first tier promises.

Nothing else – not, wealth, fecundity, health, career success, long life, and not even good specific ministry intentions – are promised to us with any of the same certainty as the first tier promises. Beyond what God promises to us as first tier promises, we are generally unwise and do not even know what to specific thing to pray for / think about from one moment to the next and need the guidance of the Spirit. Generally speaking, God does intend to reward us with the specific desires of our hearts, but they need to be treated as a “second tier desires”, not having the same gaurantee as first tier promises.

This does not mean that a good and godly desire in our heart won’t come to pass or that God has not invited us into a special vision of his will, but the desire must be treated with different spiritual gloves. Our first and foremost act of faith is listening to God continually to orient our heart and mind to gain wisdom from God. In doing so we put our specific intents – however godly we think they are – on the altar and let God either crucify them or give them back to us. We are to hold onto them with the right grip that is neither too loose nor too tight. Learning to be supple in our grip on our desires is a life long process. The greater maturity we have in our faith the more accurately we are able to interpret the meaning of the desires God has placed in our hearts.

God often uses us to advance his kingdom in ways far more mysterious and creative than any our specific intentions, no matter how godly they may be. God’s work in our lives and the use of lives to advance his kingdom is often more visible more on the look back than the look forward. God’s breath of a new vision of His Kingdom into our minds often arrives as an unexpected turn of a corner.

The immature Christian arrives at his understanding of faith by proof-texting certain Scriptures, knitting them together into a name it and claim it approach to faith at the expense of other Scriptures (dealing with all of the Scriptural specifics would require more detail later). The immature Christian believes that a good or even godly desire is every bit as certain to come to pass as God’s first tier promises. The immature Christian will often lack the wisdom to see his needs in exactly the same way as how God sees his needs, and may mistake his “want” for a “need”. Inevitably, the immature Christian is more invested in the realization of a concrete second tier desire than a more difficult and abstract first tier promise, and treats his faith as persevering in an expectation of a particular outcome in his life rather than the premise that he is unwise and requires Gods wisdom which God promises to give.

By properly seeking wisdom, we are able to better execute those “second tier” desires when it becomes God’s appointed time. When we are properly illumined by the Spirit in the internal quest of our personal discipleship— we are able to be properly illumined in performing our God ordained external goals and objectives. As we are properly on track gaining wisdom continually from God, the same wisdom enables us to be shrewd and interpret people, dangerous situations correctly. As we operate with the right leaning on God’s continual direction we are able to navigate around life’s pitfalls in prayer, thought and godly action, all of which all different expressions of the same fundamental act of following the leading of the Spirit.

The execution of our godly desires requires the full investment of our minds pressing into God to gain God’s problem solving insight into matters. Lacking a discipleship of continually seeking and gaining wisdom and lacking a theology of faith that pre-disposes him to this quest, the immature Christian will often have a tendency to “punt to the Holy Spirit” – expecting God to solve problems for him that actually require the investment of his own mind in problem solving. This Christian gets the “be innocent as a doves” but neglects the “and as shrewd as snakes” teaching of Jesus and ends up using his understanding of Christian faith to arrive at what I call “Pollyanity”, which is the abdication of the responsibility to be shrewd in the name of faith.

The immature Christian will put an almost magical faith in the power of his words, which is another part of his failure to fully invest himself to be ever more knitted to the mind and heart of God. It is not the fact that we have committed something into human words per se that matters, though putting something into words is an important way in which make shape our intentions for our own minds and for others. What actually matters is the intensity and clarity of our intent before God which may or may not always be expressed by words. The first orientation our intensity must be to seek God’s will so that it can be shaped into godly wisdom. If not our words will not necessarily have any meaning or backing from God.

The immature Christian is not equipped to properly interpret the true meaning the adversity lying in the way of the realization of his second tier desires. Any crisis on earth is not first and foremost the adversity of the devil, though there may be very well be spiritual forces involved in our obstacles. What is of greatest importance to our walk with God is that adversity is first and foremost a crisis of our own wisdom.

God is plenty big enough to deal with any obstacle when it is the appointed time and place for an obstacle to be removed from our path. Until then, our primary pre-occupation should not be with the size and power of the spiritual forces against us but with seeking the vision and will of God. There may be wisdom encoded into the adversity we are experiencing – that God is allowing the adversity so that we must loosen our grip on a second tier desire so that God can advance to use a first tier promise of His grace in a new way.

a poem

2009-11-13T21:16:00.000-08:00

We used to know each other by name
now I see you sitting there
in the café as I walk in
almost a complete stranger
perhaps it would be social of me
to rekindle our acquaintance
and rescue my memory of you
from its fading twilight
or perhaps that would obligate each of us
into forced pleasantries
momentarily popping each of us out
of our minds grooves
like an old vinyl record player
for better or worse
I let your face fade into oblivion
and let the sun set on our acquaintance.

A couple more aphorisms

2009-11-12T15:44:00.000-08:00

When you treat a social reality as having a simple moral problem with a simple fix, you often ignore other moral realities that exist in the true complexity of the matter. When that happens the cure you created for the one problem becomes the poison that causes other problems.

To those who say "There's talk and there's action!" I say this: Serious talk is a form of action and is often necessary before any other constructive action can begin.

You can be "you"

2009-11-01T19:41:00.000-08:00

I’ve seen more billboard ads than I can count the past couple of years that use the word “you” or some overt target of the first or second person --- “the you wide web” “It’s all about you” … “the bank of me” … and on and on. I think that as Americans (or Usonians if you prefer) we have a tradition of valuing individualism. In our films we celebrate the individualist individual who breaks out to do it his own way, whatever “it” is. In the drama of film we enjoy watching this person make the painful choices to go it alone and subvert/fight against the bad guys and wet blankets. We watch them cut through the gristle come out on top in the end and cheer.

In the actual function of most Americans daily lives, most are not individuals in this way in any real heroic sense. To actually become an individual requires that one be willing to walk in a valley of aloneness, which is often a long valley. To even begin the journey one needs a compulsion to begin it and then one needs a vision to guide one along the way.

I think most Americans live in the tension that they are not true individuals and for better or worse and aren’t on any real hard or productive path to becoming one. Americans live in a culture that lionizes the successful individual in myth but that is hard on true individualism in practice. Most Americans for all truly important matters in life stick as close to the ideas and modes of their chosen peer group with whom they identify -- this is true no matter what age. So many an American harbors an angst that he/she wants to feel like a truly special individual but knows deep down that he/she is not all that terribly special. Even if you get the most radical tattoos you are only an “individual” when you are alone in the company of non-radically tattooed people.

Here to fill the emotional void of this American angst are products, courtesy of corporations, that you can buy. With these products you can medicate your need to feel kinda sorta like an individual by buying a certain product or flavor of product. That way you can be a sorta kinda individual without any real path into loneliness. Even better, if you may feel that if you buy a cool product before it is super popular then you can even be a bit cool and edgy and therefore be kinda sorta like a leader among men. If you believe that then I know a brand of whiskey that’s looking for you.

If you don’t know or care that it is fake and you are not living in the conscious management of your deep down American angst, then I suppose there is a certain bliss to being ignorant and/or oblivious. If any of you really feel that “you can be you” by your choice of which ring tone or bank then you are in a sense blessed by not having the angst that I often feel. When I see those ads I’m offended. I’m offended that someone out there thinks that I’m such a nincompoop that I would find one scintilla of my emotional needs for individuality from my choice of a bank, car or cellphone. I’m also sad for the state of our country that there are people for whom this advertising actually works – there have to be lots of those people since there’s lots of that kind of advertising.

I say if you’re going to be an individual then do it the hard way or not at all. If you are not then be honest with yourself. Not everyone is meant to be a trailblazing individual. Getting your individuality from buy-decisions without walking through the valley of aloneness will get you as close to individuality as playing guitar hero will get you close to playing guitar.

Fighting a hacker

2009-10-12T14:47:00.000-07:00

These past few days if you’ve come to my blog here you will have noticed occasional spam and even porn blog posts. I’ve been having a problem with my blog being hacked into by some posting these “articles” that look like I posted them. I have deleted these articles of course and reported this problem to Blogger. The problem continued even after I changed my Blogger password twice.

I even set my Blogger to account to send me an email alert when “I” have posted a blog article. When the spam hacker posts these articles my e-mail recognizes them as spam. So I've needed to check my spam box to see when my blog has been hacked into!

When I posted this problem on their Blogger help someone who asked me whether someone was merely posted comments vs. posting a blog article. When I did a key word search of this problem in the help forum I found that other people have posted this same problem and not have gotten any serious response from Blogger.

So today, Monday 10-12-09, when I found that my blog had been hacked into again in the morning, I promptly deleted the blog article and then googled “blogger hacking” and finally found an article that got me closer to the real problem. It turns out that there is a Blogger e-mail address for every blog that follows this default pattern: (your blogger name).(the first word of your blog title)@blogger.com. These e-mail accounts are created automatically by blogger whereby one can post a blog article through email.

If you use this feature you can be hacked if you have listed the Blogger e-mail addresses in your e-mail address book and someone hacks into your e-mail. I have never used this feature and these addresses are no where on my computer, but somehow these addresses were hacked and someone has been using them to post spam messages. I think in my case it's possible that the hackers know that the Blogger e-mail addresses follow enough of a pattern that they can successfully guess your blogger e-mail address if you don't manually change the address to something other than the first word of your blog title. Since the default setting is to have the feature enabled for automatic instant e-mail posting, the hackers can go to your blog site, find your public user name, the first word of your blog title and get lucky.

Later I found a link in a reponse that was posted to my Blogger help question that explained more about the problem of spammers guessing your Blogger e-mail address.

For now I have disabled this automatic instant e-mail posting feature. Let’s hope that works!

Even more aphorisms

2009-09-18T01:52:00.000-07:00

Beware the offhand remark -- it is the serious point that one feels no need to defend. It is a window into a subterranean world of pressure to conform to the belief system that assigns truth and value to what is being offhandedly said.

Beware one who makes a serious point/argument wrapped up in jokey talk. If you challenge his point he will try to shame you for being humorless.

Beware the national leader who attempts to charm you out of your desire for specifics on a topic of national interest.

2009-08-19T18:33:00.000-07:00

Most of what is said on Twitter is pointless babble? What a shocker!

More aphorisms

2009-07-05T19:19:00.000-07:00

When discussing a sensitive topic, one must be capable of making a distinction between raw truth and useful truth.

A morally serious person will find more of a sense of community among the grass and the trees than among morally unserious people.

Some seeds require fire to break free of their husk to germinate. So it is with our moral and ethical sensibilities.

Is the grass green? Or is it many shades of yellow, green, brown and black? Or is the color of the grass subject to cultural perception? The truth is, each facet of the grass represents a different setting of a zoom lens on life that will be more enlightening to certain discussions and not others.

exploring "post rational"

2009-06-15T13:24:00.000-07:00

I was exploring on the internet the word "post rational". Last year during the presidential campaign, Rachel Maddow used it to describe Hillary Clinton applying a campaign strategy that may have been rational to try at one point in the campaign but was irrational at a later point. Others have used "post-rational" offhandedly to describe a society that has rejected depth and analysis in favor of that which gives satisfying emotional appeal.

I have a working definition of a "post-rational society" as a society that does not value a person’s individual journey of rational effort but considers itself to be above and beyond having such a value. This society is "post-rational" because it considers much personal rational effort to be passe and outdated -- that life has become too complex for an individual person to sort out. This society simultaneously favors experts, like scientists while also valuing collective expressions of emotions that express themselves through trends.

Sometimes I surf the internet and post comments on someone's blog post that interest me. I'll leave a long enough post and link it to my blog post here that it becomes a de facto post on my own blog site. On a site called Us and Them, I posted comment to a question that the author posed, which can be summed up as follows -- what are the government / institutional implications of a society that considers the individual to be irrational and that only experts are qualified to sort out what is best for us?

More aphorisms

2009-06-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

A thing has value if someone values it, no matter how mean or insignificant the item is or how mean and insignificant the person appears to be.

While a certain degree of cerebral maturity comes with age, moral maturity is not guaranteed by age. One must work at gaining moral wisdom.

A lizard can be fearless, but it takes a human to have courage, since to have courage you must have the capacity to see your fear within and put it aside.

Show me one who thinks that those on the other side of a controversial issue from him are thoughtless and I’ll show you one who likes to think that he thinks more than he actually thinks.

That which is a source of your pleasure is that which is gaining your allegiance.

You commit an original sin the day you first promote yourself at another's expense. It remains as a mark on your soul and character until the day you are contrite about it. It remains and outstanding offense until you apologize.

When someone denies the existence of an evil, remember that it is often a tactic used by those who wish to promote it.

Making a false distinction between people leads to injustice. So too does making a false equality.

Thinking "in Stereo" on Gay Marriage

2009-03-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

I have a whole philosophy of what the process of sound thinking requires. It requires that one is certain and uncertain simultaneously. Specifically it means that a thinking person allows himself to be confident that his initial hunches and hypothesis contain substance, that they represent a “pre-articulate” understanding of something real. It also means that a thinking person is continually evaluating counter-arguments in order to understand the domain of his pre-articulate wisdom: in other words, in what realm the original hunch proves to be true and in what realm it gives way to another idea.

This realm, this cross section of reality that is best understood by a particular idea is that idea’s “domain”/“jurisdiction”. This jurisdiction may be simply academic or it may also affect social and legal jurisdictions.

A thinking person does not have the obligation to chuck his hunches out the window and let his opinion drift whenever he’s presented with a contrary opinion. A thinking person does, however, have the obligation to continually refine his opinion. He has the obligation to better and better understand the contours and boundaries of where his idea’s jurisdiction begins and ends.

With our human vision, we have a “dominant eye” and a passive eye. Our dominant eye goes squarely in the direction where we wish to look, while the passive eye follows. As a result, the passive eye sees what the dominant eye sees at a slightly different angle, giving us depth perception.

This principle of vision applies to actively thinking. My hunch/my sense that I am developing from a hypothesis into a thesis is the “dominant eye” of my thought. My willingness to allow myself to consider contrary views is my “passive eye”. Together, the two bring the intellectual equivalent of depth perception, which in the case of ideas, is having a correct understanding of how the jurisdiction of one idea fits with the jurisdiction of another. As we see in stereo, this is what it means to “think in stereo”.

So I have been applying this principle of “thinking in stereo” to my thoughts on gay marriage. This is a debate I’ve had with myself, imagining myself talking to a tough opponent. So as to have intellectual honesty I have held nothing back in imaging the best and most articulate and intellectually honest advocate of gay marriage I can think of as an opponent. Here it is:

A DEBATE WITH MYSELF

ME – “If gay is the new black”, do you believe that gender is as superficial as skin? Do you intend to have the raising of the American flag symbolize the end of the meaning gender as it now symbolizes on Martin Luther King Day the end of the meaning of skin color. If so, why isn’t this statement of human design “gender is as superficial as skin” put forward front and center? I think you don’t make this bold of a statement because it makes you face a wide body of naturalistic, commonly available evidence for the value and meaning of gender.

IMAGINARY OPPONENT – Gayness is no better or worse than hetero from a natural perspective. They are both naturally occurring realities that both have a place in a human ecosystem as they do in the animal ecosystem.

ME – But human society doesn’t function by mere instincts. We create the conceptual, social and physical tools to survive. You can’t look to an animal ecosystem of pure instinct as a moral compass for human society.

IMAGINARY OPPONENT – If you’re going to look to naturalistic evidence to put hetero unions on a moral pinnacle above a gay union, you open the door to all of what is contained in nature.

ME –Any idea of what is “good” is selective about nature, subdividing nature into “raw natural” and “archnatural”. It is OK to look at nature for evidence from nature that there is an archnatural aspect of nature that suits us best, that is good. A hetero-union is archnatural and good, and there is plenty of naturalistic evidence that points in this direction. On the other extreme, there are less idea expressions of nature such as naturally occurring diseases.

IMAGINARY OPPONENT – If you’re going to look to nature at all as the basis of any division between “archnatural” and “natural”, you need to look at this way: human’s tendency to oppress and constrain his fellow man with prejudice is “raw natural”/bad and tolerance of his fellow man is “archnatural”/good. Therefore, the only concept of the good that is relevant for the organizing of human society is maximum freedom and minimum intolerance.

Humans require freedom unless they are doing something that directly hurts the freedom of others. Any attempt to extrapolate harm beyond what is imminently hurtful to another’s freedom will lead to people imposing their moral views on others. We should be blind to the question of marriage, and we should raise our American flag to symbolize this idea of “moral minimalism”: that whatever is not an imminent harm to others is a justly entitled privilege to myself.

As for understanding nature, we move beyond fears and prejudice of others when we appreciate the broad endowment of diverse human instincts that aren’t imminently harmful to others.

ME –The flaw in a “moral minimalist” approach is that you are blind to a host of moral hazards that are real while at the same time being diffuse and slow to mature. If you were to destroy the original color of the Declaration and replace the museum that houses it with low income housing, there would not be imminent harm. The harm would be hard to pinpoint other than the fact that it is a sacred document of our founding and meaning as a people.

Not all harms are imminent and “spreadsheetable”. There is a cost to re-interpreting the American flag as backing a sacred moral idea that gender is irrelevant in order to make the law blind: it uses the American flag to make gender meaninglessness into a sacred moral truth.

Furthermore, you don’t merely believe that the harm of gay marriage is simply not imminent. You believe there is no harm at all by any yardstick of measuring harm.

IMAGINARY OPPONENT – The sacredness of the meaning of gender is sacred only to religious people and people of a certain worldview. If I am not religious why should I have sacredness imposed on me and at my expense of being able to marry? Gay marriage will not stop hetero marriage but your moral vision will stop me.

When too much sacredness with vague harms comes at the expense of imminent and tangible limitations on others, that parochial view of sacredness must give way to freedom. The Declaration is not standing in anyone’s freedom. If it were, perhaps we should do something about it. On the other hand, your “hetero exceptionalism” as the law of the land is standing squarely in the way of my freedom.

ME – We are blind to skin color because we have a sacred moral truth that skin, like bloodlines is irrelevant. In the name of advancing freedom, you are trading one idea of sacredness and replacing it with another: the sacredness of gender meaning with the sacredness of gender blindness. It is a realm of conflicting impositions. This is a moral pivot point in the law that is not merely a legal adjustment on par with adjusting a speed limit. You are replacing one moral imposition with another. If you are intellectually honest, you say that you believe that your moral imposition is a better trade-off for our society.

IMAGINARY OPPONENT – Let’s say that we, gay marriage advocates, wish to define gender blindness as an American principle on par with “skin blindness” that by default will result in certain legal, cultural and moral impositions; an advancement of a “sacred” moral idea to use your term. The end result will be more tolerance, less prejudice and a wider and broader tent for a greater cross section of experiences, orientations and personal goals. It is necessary for a nation to be “blind” to the sacred meaning that you wish to invest in gender for a nation where it is possible for the maximum number of people to pursue the maximum happiness.

ME –Human sexuality is a complicated “both/and”. There is a dimension of sexual orientation that is fixed and there is a dimension of flexibility to human sexuality. To the extent that there is any dimension of flexibility it should be encouraged toward committed one man-one woman unions. This encouragement is enhanced by putting man-woman unions on a legal and moral pinnacle.

There have been societies where the flexible dimension of sexuality has been directed away from man-woman committed unions, where gay and pederasty behavior became normative.

IMAGINARY OPPONENT – Societies where men turned to a certain degree of gay and pederasty behavior are societies were men were kept away from women for long and extreme periods of time and space. It was a consequence of less freedom not more freedom. Furthermore this happened in societies that still only recognized marriage as a man-woman union on an institutional level. Therefore, in those societies, the institutional recognition of “hetero-exceptionalism” by way of only honoring male-female marriages was obviously not enough to offset the problem you are concerned about.

There is fluidity to sexuality in a free gender-mixed society, but it is whether one is promiscuous within one’s orientation, not whether one has one orientation or another. It is whether you are a committed gay person or a promiscuous gay person, whether you are a committed hetero or a promiscuous hetero person.

A free society will not cause someone to “flip a script”. People should be encouraged to commit in marriage. It is commitment, and commitment period, that should be encouraged in the institution of marriage, not just hetero commitment.

ME – As I said, we humans do not act soley act out of instincts but must guide our instincts with good conceptual tools that we have a hand in creating. Healthy committed sexuality is one seeing a part of one’s humanity that is both alien and familiar in the other sex. In a committed hetero sexual union one is nurturing that alien aspect of ones own humanity by caring for another, allowing the other to live out that part of ones own humanity as an extension of oneself. Our sexual orientations give us the raw material to begin this process, but it must be consummated by good choices, good concepts and good conditioning in our society and environment. A society that has made gender meaningless in order to make gender blindness a sacred social truth will sow confusion into this process.

That is the moral hazard to denying meaning to gender that will take long to mature. The harm is not “spreadsheetable” but real. Of course having hetero-exceptionalism on a legal pinnacle is not the only part of this healthy gender conditioning process but it does matter, and it is a necessary part of a social matrix for encouraging people into healthy man-woman unions over the long term.

I agree that a gay committed relationship is better than a promiscuous one, but the gender nullity required for a legal and social blindness of gender for gay/hetero marriage equality is based on a worldview that borrows too heavily from “raw natural”/animal and instinct ecosystems in order to construct its moral compass for managing our sexuality.

While it is true that not all gay marriage advocates are pro-promiscuity. In the end the advancement of the gender nullity worldview contributes to and justifies promiscuity because it is fruit from the same tree if not the same branch of the tree. Promiscuity operates in the animal ecosystem as does a lot of not ideal things as “natural endowments of instinct”. The civil religion of a gay marriage worldview is a civil religion that is oriented to an animalistic/desire-based raw natural view of the world.

In terms of flipping scripts, a society of enforced gender nullity will, over time, create new forms of peer pressure and “experimentation”. This will occur as people operate with their natural instincts to bond and follow each other while adopting a "times change" and "who's to say?" philosophy in order to avoid the sin of being intolerant.

(This debate could go on and on, but I’ll stop it for now)

2009-03-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

Here is a blog site where I got into a debate with the "Science Avenger" on gay marriage.

Gay marriage - When Gay is the new Black part 2

2009-03-07T09:16:00.000-08:00

I'll say one thing about the gay marriage debate. Generally speaking, Christian Evangelicals have not been good at arguing their point. To the extent that they have argued "…Judeo-Christian values…" and "…5000 years of marriage as the backbone of civilization…", these points may contain truth but they make poor arguments when presented as talking points. As talking points they only state the opinions of those who already agree and speak nothing to those who disagree.

Not every one agrees on the “5000 years” analysis and the patent importance of Judeo-Christian values, but no one wants to be “hater”. Questions of truth aside, the gay marriage advocates have succeeded in putting Evangelicals on their heels. In my opinion, Dennis Prager, a Jewish commentator has made the best and clearest public arguments. So if here, along with my Part 1 post, is my attempt to explain the concerns of those now opposing the legal sameness of gay unions and hetero unions. My ideas are an elaboration on things that Dennis Prager has said. Here is one Prager article on this topic and here is another.

As I’ve said before many gay marriage advocates put forward the position that they are merely widening the umbrella of freedom, expanding marriage from something that hetero people enjoy to something that gay people will be able to enjoy. The gay marriage crowd say that they only wants to expand a freedom that straight people have. On the face of it, gay marriage advocates don’t seem to want to impose anything. But there is a much larger and more total imposition that can be redacted from other aspects of their rhetoric.

Allow to explain. If I were to say that I was OK with the law being blind to the question of gay marriage but I still wanted,

A) Christian adoption agencies allowed to prefer hetero couples
B) Churches that only married hetero couples
C) Churches that only allowed hetero people into positions of leadership
D) Evangelism into my church
E) The public expression on a university campus of an idea that a hetero union is uniquely special

Would I have crossed completely into the realm of non-hatred? Or would I still be hating except only in a more limited sphere and therefore represent an unfinished revolution? On the one hand I would be allowing legal freedom to marry. On the other hand I would be working against some of the essential gay marriage moral ideas through other means.

After the legalization of gay marriage, the unfinished revolution of those who allowed gay marriage “despite their personal beliefs” will be finished with more lawsuits against discrimination and hate speech and for affirmative action. Why? because that is what “gay is the new black” means:

The law not to make someone royalty is not merely a law like a speed limit. It is a law that is backed by everything that it means to be an American – backed by every resource that the country has to symbolize the moral importance of that law. Every time you see the U.S. flag, see a coin, see the name of street or city named after a Founder, every memorial carved in granite on the mall of D.C. you are reminded that we as a people are founded on a moral idea that it is fundamentally repugnant to see specialness in a family that would require that they be made royal.

If you actually believed in your heart of hearts that a particular family should be the royal family, you would have the right to your conscience as an American citizen. But for all practical purposes, this would be an exceedingly difficult country for you to practice your belief – it would be profoundly un-American.

We in 2009 recognize that the civil war was an extension of the War of American Independence. The Black civil rights movement of the 60’s is an extension of the Civil war, being Part 2 of the reconstruction that was begun after the civil war. When we celebrate Martin Luther King day, we raise the American flag and retro-actively assign the blood of patriots on Bunker Hill to the cause of the Black civil rights movement. We recognize that holidays, street names, city names, monuments in granite, flags, currency and textbooks all attest to our moral narrative as a people that we now see repugnancy in seeing specialness in a skin color as we do to seeing specialness in a particular blood line. This is at the core of what it means to be an American and we use every public resource that we have to symbolize this meaning.

If you actually believed in the specialness in a skin color, you would have the right to that belief in the deep recesses of your conscience, but for all practical purposes it would be hard to practice. While defacto segregation is still real, every national symbol is designed to point to a different moral narrative, very much including what children are taught in school. Furthermore, you would be barred from practicing your belief in any sphere of life other than clandestine meetings in the woods. Even uttering your belief in the wrong place would be the end of your career and possibly illegal under hate and discrimination laws.

If “gay is the new black”, we have adjusted the moral narrative of our people to a narrative where seeing specialness in a man-woman union is now as morally repugnant in seeing specialness in a skin color as seeing specialiness in a blood line. If gay is the new black, we now back this new moral narrative with our flag, currency, national monuments, street names, city names, holidays, etc… In addition to all symbolical resources, we will now use every available legal resource to marginalize those who still believe that there is specialness to a man-woman union, as we marginize those who oppose other sacred moral ideas that we have as a people.

So I want to be clear even if the gay marriage activists are not always so clear: if "gay is the new black", the movement does not merely want the legality of gay marriage, it wants the raising of the American flag to represent the day when we as a country vanquished the idea of the specialness of a man-woman union into the dust-bin of history.

A QUESTION OF CIVIL RELIGION

As a Christian I am very careful about how I defend “Judeo-Christian Values” from my personal practice of Christianity. I am not happy when Christians elide from one into the other without making careful distinctions. I'm also mindful of pantheists (worshippers of natural forces) who elide from a civic argument for maximum freedom of personal expression into the evangelism of a pantheistic worldview.

As I've said before I define a "morality" as an idea of right and wrong that flows from an essential idea of design. A "moral narrative" is a moral idea that is seen through the lens of past, present and future.

A country is more than a set of laws: it has places and objects of public and even sacred importance that identify it as a people. It is these symbols – whether a coin or a monument – whereby a country indicates its moral narrative and in which it invests moral meaning. And where there is a moral narrative there is a hint at that the "design source"; the source from which the moral design derives from that makes the right right and the wrong wrong.

Any publically owned item, such as the design of a coin or national monument, that is capable of containing symbolic meaning has the potential to communicate symbolically the moral narrative of a people and the design idea behind the narrative. In this way, every public symbol is in some way a “sacrament” has invested in symbolical importance indicating the ultimate source of its moral narrative. This sacrament of moral ideas invested in public symbols is a society’s “civil religion”.

All societies have a moral narrative and all societies have some sort of a civil religion even if it is very minimal in its presentation and does not require that you attend a church on Sunday. Even a country that said that it did not have a narrative would have the moral narrative of nihilism.

Discussing the “separation of church and state” in all of its forms from the verbatim text of the First Amendment to its modern interpretation would other writings. Suffice to say that his idea was designed so that the government cannot press you into going to a church. However, we do not and have never had a complete separation from an idea of a God above nature that resembles the Judeo Christian God. What we have is a moral narrative that is consistent with a God-belief in a God above nature vaguely reminiscent of the Judeo Christian God. We have some minimal references to this God in our symbols.

As a result we have a country that generally allows the easier and fuller expression of conscience to those who believe in a Judeo Christian God, especially so than those who belief in a god that requires human sacrifice, allegiance to a blood line or a skin color. You and I both agree that we don't want to grant largess to the conscience of one who believes in a God that requires regular child sacrifice. But as a nation we are at a pivot point between a society that will either give largess to those who believe in a God above nature or those who do not believe in a God above nature. One party will be the loser.

Many argue that the representations of and references to God in our country national symbols represent an unfinished revolution in the separation of church and state. But if you were to remove every reference to this God above nature from anything that is touched by the government you would not actually separate government from religion. This is true especially in a modern world were government touches everything from sidewalks we walk on the school ciriculum requirements established by the government. For better or for worse the modern government touches almost everything.

Now if you treat a force in nature with the same allegiance that god-believers treat God, then you have a religion of a different form. And if you significantly alter the moral narrative of a country, you alter the idea of the "design source" behind the moral narrative.

If gay is the new black in all the ramifications that I have described above, we now have a moral narrative that is not consistent with a design source being a God above nature. Rather we would have a moral narrative that is inconsistent with a God above nature but that is thoroughly consistent with a god-like force of Nature expressing its wisdom in the warp and woof of human opinion and desire. All public granite, silver, holidays and flags would now point to this form of god.

This is the same god-like force that is revered when a certain cross-section of emerging opinion is taken as the ultimate and final source of all moral wisdom. As George Will pointed out in his column on Jerry Brown, Brown takes this view of Natural Law expressed as the god-force of the emergence of libertine opinion as the ultimate source of all moral truth that judges can use to over-ride any other moral idea.

So if you removed the reference to the Judeo-Christian God with a moral narrative that vanquished the idea of man-woman specialness into the dustbin of history, you would not separate government from religion: you would simply be replacing one civil religion with another.

This is what is behind the gay marriage debate are conflicting impositions rising from conflicting ideas of moral fundamentals. Many Evangelicals, me included, would impose on gay people a legal position of a union that is inferior to a hetero union—even if it’s a slight distinction: this so that the symbolism of freedom and the blood of patriots is not used to make repugnant the idea that there is something special in a man-woman union. This specialness of a man-woman union can be seen from certain evidence in nature but is seen most completely in the light of a God above nature. We want to have a land where it easy to express conscience that is consistent with a Judeo Christian God.

The hardcore gay marriage advocates are seeking to impose a moral vision that re-interprets the moral narrative of our country and orients it toward a "god as nature" civil religion. This imposition is not stated boldly but can be redacted from the rhetoric of the gay marriage movement. This imposition in its full form will make it harder to express a conscience that is consistent with a Judeo-Christian idea of God

If this imposition occurs I will accept it and face whatever marginalization / persecution follows, but that does not mean that I will not attempt to articulate what is at stake.

Gay Marriage -- When Gay is the new Black part 1

2009-03-07T09:12:00.000-08:00

In the Gay marriage debate there are important shades of distinction to be explored. There are those who A) demand that gay marriage be legal and those that are B) OK with it being legal. Gay is the new black represents one aspect of the rhetoric that represents the group A. Despite your personal opinion, (gay) marriage is a fundamental right is an appeal from those in Group A to those on the fence to join group B.

“Gay is the new black” is a summation of a gay marriage argument that makes a direct comparison to banning mixed skin marriages as gay marriage, saying that the ban of the latter is as morally repugnant as the ban on the former in the era of segregation. Gay is the new black is a way of saying that gender is as unsubstantial a human reality as skin color. “Gender is as superficial as skin” is not stated in so many exact words but it can be redacted from of the rhetoric gay is the new black. For a Group A person “gender is as superficial as skin” is what they mean when they say that gay marriage is a "fundamental right" as a "right of design": that the moral imperative flows to view a gay union as the same as a hetero union and that seeing difference is as bigoted in seeing difference in race. I will explore this more depth a little later.

A person in Group B may or not believe in a complete one-to-one comparison of the black movement to the gay movement. The common belief of Group B is “that which cannot be compellingly made illegal by imminent and easily measurable harm needs to be left in the realm of choice”. For a Group B person, gay marriage is a "fundamental right" as a "right of utility" only in the sense that a certain privilege of choice is fundamental even if the choice is not necessarily ideal.

There is another way to describe the relationship between groups A and B – is that "gays are the new feminists". As in feminism the same debate occurs as to the meaning or lack thereof of gender. In Christina Hoff-Sommers book, Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, she delineates a “equity feminism” from “gender feminism”. Equity feminism is feminism that seeks to advance the cause of women without attempting to remove the idea of gender differences. Gender feminism sees it necessary to advance the cause of women by denying consequential gender differences and denying meaning to gender.

Gender feminism has a deeper worldview agenda than equity feminism. In the gay marriage debate, Group A is an extension of the gender feminist position, seeking to advance the cause of gays by denying meaning to gender. Group B is an extension of an equity feminist position that seeks mere equity under the law without regard to the question of sameness.

I am definitely not in the Group A but I have seriously considered the B position. Let’s explore the validity of the B position, most of our laws are very eye for an eye and are based on easy ethical questions of imminent harm, “if everyone did it there would be a problem…” Gender, though is a complex reality. Whether one sees the harm of denying meaning to gender depends largely on whether one has a worldview that requires that gender have meaning. The harm of gay marriage is not imminent as allowing people to steal from each other. Jerry Brown, a gay marriage supporter, has made the point regarding that there is not enough compelling imminent harm to a gay marriage to make it illegal.

Why am I still not supporting the gay marriage movement? Because I'm convinced that the gay marriage movement – including Group A with Jerry Brown included— will use every available means of the law to advance a package of moral views and intentions from the "gender is as insubstantial and superficial in its meaning to human existence as skin color" worldview. This is not a matter of those who have a parochial narrow worldview who see meaning in gender vs. those who have the broad interest of maximum freedom for the common good. Rather this is a matter of one worldview vs. another competing worldview.

My interest in this debate is to explain why this debate is not between those who would impose their moral vision on other vs. those who want maximum freedom. Rather it is a battle between competing moral impositions based on competing moral visions.

THE DESIGN OF GENDER

If gay is the new black, why have you not seen “gender is as superficial as skin” in a billboard? As a sheer design question, the statement on its face is easy to attack with science. You don’t need a Bible to see profundity to gender as a part of human design. If I examine the topic from an evolutionary standpoint I can find copious evidence for the meaning of gender and I can make a naturalistic argument for the specialness of a man-woman union.

Race is genetically insiginificant and gender is pre-human. We could have been designed by nature to reproduce as where each individual is “bi-gender” like certain amphibious animals that can switch genders as needed, but we reproduce with male and female genders that largely set. Nature has selected us according to a benefit to male and female and nature rewards that union with reproduction, something that the two together create that is not duplicated in the union of two gay people

Many of those with a naturalistic/evolutionary worldview believe that our needs that were forged in evolution are hold-overs/relics from our times surviving on the Savanah of Africa etc… There is an idea that we can take mastery over our evolution to suit the modern world shaping our evolution in the direction of minimum carnage and maximum harmony. This is only possible to a point. However we came to be, we were stamped. Even looked at from an evolutionary perspective, base needs were a crucible in which something more than base needs came about. We do not "need" art to survive but we nevertheless need art and we need it for needs far beyond impressing the chicks in order to reproduce.

In regard to gender, men and women do not simply need each other in the primitive sense of men being physically strong biological organisms needing to reproduce and women needing providers. It is not true that modern technology has freed us from essential emotional needs. We have been designed to get our emotion needs met with a sexual union across male and female and to have that be of benefit to kids.

Sexual attraction exists to attact the other, and the pleasure of sexuality is vicarious experience of a part of ones own humanity that one sees in the other that is both alien and familiar. The bond of sexuality in its full power is explained only as complementary needs being met, where the palate of human experience, the different aspects of what it is to be human are brought together for the best nourishment of each other and of children. No other view does justice to the awesome power of the sexual appetite than to recognize that there is a relational nutrition across male and female that the sexual appetite was made for.

Not all of life is a dispensation of perfect sameness and being gay is not the same as being hetero. In a gay person, the appetite for the experience of the other gone askew due to having a portion of a gender dis-order. Being gay leads to gay sexual experiences that do not join body parts in their best union of design and do not join people across the full spectrum of otherness that exists across male and female. Yes gay people can lead rich lives but their condition is not the best exression of human sexuality; it is not the same as being heterosexual.

Even if being gay is entirely naturally occuring as result of pre-natal exposure to hormones in the womb, it is the occurance of a partial version of what in its full form is a gender disorder. In a similar manner that Asperger’s syndrome is a lesser form of Autism, being gay is a lesser version of what in its full form would make one feel like a man in a womans body or vice versa. The latest science indicates that a gay mans brain has more female characteristics than a hetero man’s brain and that a gay woman’s brain has more male characteristics than a hetero woman’s brain.

The reason why this issue boils down to the meaning of gender is that if there is meaning to gender than there is a complementary union in a man woman union that isn't duplicated in a gay relationship. I have not given an exhaustive naturalistic argument for the superiority of hetero committed unions. I recognize that there are naturalistic counter-arguments. I'm not saying these things because I think it will convince those who disagree. I am certainly not saying them with the intent to inflict hurt and hatred on gay people, but to explain that there is commonly available naturalistic evidence for the profundity of gender cannot be dismissed as ridiculous, and there are consequences to this meaning.

THE SOCIAL TRUTH

How superficial and insubstantial is gender? Whether it is true in every dimension of truth the gay marriage hardcore absolutely believe is that we must “act” and operate as though the statement is true in every dimension. “Gender is as superficial as skin” may be a fiction from a purely objective standpoint but it is considered necessary to believe. In other words, if not a total “design truth” it is a total “social truth” that everyone must remove gay difference from one's moral vision of the world as one removed black difference. It is in the crack between objective truth and "social truth" that we get the idea of "politically correct". If it is socially true but not necessarily objectively true, then it is "correct", in the sense of being a "correct social orientation".

Here’s the problem with the gay is the new black rhetoric in regard to the question of design. The black civil rights movement made clear unequivocal statements of design. There is famous picture of black marching in the streets with “I am a man”. A clear four word statement of design that black men were every inch men that white men were men. “I am a man” was not merely a "social truth" or "necessary objective fiction" or "PC". Rather, the black movement was advancing clear unequivocal statement of objectively true design, and they were absolutely right. “I am a man" is a total social truth and a total "design truth." You would never hear Martin Luther King prefacing a speech with "despite your personal beliefs…” as in "despite your personal beliefs, all racial equality is a fundamental right" or "despite your personal beliefs, all men are created equal". Either they are all equal or they aren't, and you either believe it or your don't.

If Group A in the gay marriage debate wanted intellectual honesty in their comparison the black movement, they would need to clarify their social truth and how it relates to design truths. I have attempted to redact it, which can be stated as follows, "Gender is as superficial as skin. Is this a total design truth? We won't say. What we will say is that the question of whether there are or aren't design aspects of gender is irrelevant to any examination of human relationships and is irrelevant to any moral question involving human relationships. Therefore all decent people must operate with "gender is as superficial as skin" as a total social truth, as much as we now treat the black sameness with white as both a total social truth and total design truth."

The closest that the gay marriage advocates have come to this statement is making their movement co-equal to the black movement by harnessing the sympathy to that movement (“gay is the new black”) while also seeking the partnership of people who may find some narrow meaning to gender but who are willing to allow the law to be blind (“despite your personal beliefs…”). So how do you harness the same interest that was harnessed for the black movement without making as clear statements of design as the black movement made? Aside from calling people to bracket their "personal beliefs”, many in the gay marriage movement have compensated by labeling those who disagree as “haters”.

It is the charge of hatred that colors how one is to interpret Group A's appeal to Group B: that appealing to the "right of utility" crowd has current tactical value to a movement that seeks to advance "gender is as superficial as skin" as a total social truth. For Group A the “despite your personal beliefs, gay marriage is a fundamental right" slogan is a way of saying, “If you do have a personal belief that is contrary to this it is to be vacuumed sealed in the container of your thoughts, while the narrative of our culture and law goes squarely in the direction of "gender is as superficial as skin". If Group A is intellectually honest, it is not enough that the law is blind, for the total social truth, all pubic conversation must be "blind" and all discourse in school and universities must be "blind".

If you take the personal belief out of the vacuum container of your thoughts you are a hater. This is true even if you would stand up for a gay person in the street who was being bullied. In regard to the gay marriage debate it doesn’t' matter: having the opinion that a hetero union is superior to a gay union is tantamount to the bullying. The position opposing total sameness of gay marriage and hetero marriage is thus a pre-crime for all violence done to gays, and is violence of a different form.

The Group A tactic of identifying a position contrary to gay marriage is "hate" is penultimate to making it illegal as "hate speech". With this, any point of view that questions "gender is as superficial as skin" can be labeled as fundamentally harmful to society. In the name of stopping harm, the imposition of moral thought has already begun, as on can see here in this article.

So how will Adam and Steve getting married affect your marriage? In the context of the current debate, it is intellectually dishonest to put a microscope on a couple of individuals named Adam and Steve in order to make a "right of utility argument". The legal and social apparatus of Group A to advance the "gay is as superficial as skin" worldview for the collective "Adams and Steve's" to be married will have a profound effect on what forces one must counter to raise one's kids according to a belief that gender has meaning.

I don't like the law "sheparding people into goodness". There is a part of me that is sympathetic to a "right of utility" argument. On the other hand, there are aspects of law that are pivot points where people will either be sheparded into one view of goodness or another view of goodness in an alternate moral paradigm. I see this gay marriage debate as a realm that goes far beyond mere utility: it is a crossroads of conflicting impositions where the law will either shepard people into the "gender is as superficial as skin" worldview or the "gender has some degree of meaning" worldview.

Most all of us in this debate are equity feminists in the sense that we all agree that gender should be largely blind in the human resource departments. Those opposing and/or questioning the total legal sameness of gay unions and hetero unions say that the degree of gender blindess that is being asked of society is gender blindness gone too far; that it requires too much non-acknowledgement of something real in human reality; that marriage cuts closer to the bone of sexual meaning than the human resource department – and has implications that radiate beyond the privacy of marriage beds ; that enough imposition of gender blindness is an imposition not of a more generous legal vision but of an alternate moral vision.

If you believe that there is any substance to gender, the Group A agenda within the gay marriage movement is the imposition of "gender nihilism" in the face of evidence of profound meaning to gender.

2009-03-04T10:50:00.000-08:00

On a very different note than my posts on philosphy and culture, from time to time I am going to post different random ideas that I have. Among my other areas of interest are developing non-profits and green/eco/fair trade. Here is an e-mail that I sent to a local commercial bank in Pasadena, CA.

--My name is Greg Wertime. I am a resident of Pasadena and I have an idea that I wanted to share with a local commercial bank.

I decided that if I’m going to invest anything that I wanted to have as much involvement as possible in what I'm investing in. There is an idea that I am promoting for my own interest as an investor and perhaps as an organizer too.

Lots of people are interested in green investing, but green investing for “small time” investors is limited to certain mutual funds and publically traded companies. Local green investing is limited to larger venture capital. I’m convinced that there is a lot of under-tapped interest in green investing among common “small time” local people that could be pooled together for green venture capital.

What if one of the local commercial banks had a “green banking” division where local residents could invest in local green/sustainable/and fair trade businesses.

Imagine a website where you could purchase CD’s at a minimum of $500 which would be pooled to make loans for local green start-up or green renovations. On this site you would see the local businesses featured that were receiving these green loans. Also imagine if on the site there would be an invitation for “green meets” every month that would be hosted by different loan recipients. “Green networking” among people interested in investing and promoting green business is a hot thing right now.

In this way local investing, advertising and green-networking would all be wrapped up with each other. This would a very innovative, banking concept – where the bank is the catalyst for the advancement of the green movement and thus for the benefit of those businesses that it is lending to. It would be a new vehicle for people who wanted to marry their investing with their interests.

I would be grateful to know your thoughts.

Sincerely,
Greg Wertime--

2009-02-23T17:26:00.000-08:00

Every week the Week magazine has a puzzle contest where they provide a story/scenario and invite their subscribers to try to complete it, offering a years free subscription to the winner. This week the puzzle is about the Dalai Lama and his new twitter account. The contest was to come up with a wise saying within 140 characters that the Dalai Lama might send his followers.

So here is my entry:

"If you surf the internet too much you will not download wisdom. Take the time for reflection for the internet is only as big as your imagination."

I thought it would be fitting if the Dalai Lama questioned the very medium he was using to enlighten his followers with. It is an aphorism that will lead into a set of essays that I am working on about modern technology and the inner life.

A Question of Rights -- Part 2

2009-02-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

As I explained in my previous post, people often have very different ideas of what is good when they are debating a question of rights. Depending on what someone means when they say something is a "right" they will, without fully knowing it, state their moral view and how they believe that it relates to the law, which itself is part of their moral view.

There is what I will refer to for convenience here as BELIEF A, that generally what is immoral should be illegal. In this idea, a legal right supports the good and people need the law to shepard them into a realm of goodness that lies beyond the law and transcends the law. Here the question of what is legal works backward from the question of what is good.

And then there is what I will call BELIEF B, wherein that which is moral and legal exist as overlapping but separate realities and the law has only a very limited ability to shepard people into goodness. In this idea, a legal right is separate from the good, and some legal rights can be a reflection of the good while other things can legal without being necessarily good. This belief is a "legal minimalism" that only works backward from what is imminently bad and harmful to society to decide what should be illegal.

There is another idea of the law and the good that I will call BELIEF C, that the question of what is moral generally follows what is legal. In other words, the legal right is the good. BELIEF C is based on the idea that the collective moral intuition of people operating in a particular time and era figures out the best calculus of what is good and what is legal at any point in time is generally a reflection of what is the best negotiation of a situational morality. Whereas BELIEF B is merely a "legal minimalism", BELIEF C is a moral minimalism wherein anything that is not harmful is good. In this idea, as in BELIEF B, the law should only “shepard people into goodness" in the sense of protecting people from the clear and present harm of others.

These beliefs are not always mutually exclusive. It is also possible that a person may have all of these different dispositions toward the law, operating in paradox and/or cognitive dissonance with each other. There may be certain areas of life where a person holds one view of the law and another area of life where they hold another.

It is also possible for the ideology of one idea of the law to elide into the practice of another. For example, it is possible for a person with a BELIEF C or BELIEF B to come full circle to the practice of BELIEF A when the expression of certain ideas and thoughts are seen as toxic and as "pre-crimes' for bad actions. A broad enough idea of what is “harm” will render that which is not harmful as a de facto a narrow vision of the “good”.

A Question of Rights -- Part 1

2009-02-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

Here is a Miriam Webster dictionary definition of a "right".

2: something to which one has a just claim: as a: the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled b (1): the interest that one has in a piece of property —often used in plural (2)plural : the property interest possessed under law or custom and agreement in an intangible thing especially of a literary and artistic nature 3: something that one may properly claim as due

Here is a link to an online legal dictionary that parses out several variations on the idea of "rights".

The general principle of a “right” seems simple enough: a right is a justly entitled privilege or power. The law does not create rights but acknowledges them as naturally existing. But what are the boundaries of our "justly granted privileges"? For legal purposes, those things not explicitly forbidden in law are considered in the realm of "just privilege".

Just because something is or should be in the legal realm of "just privilege" does it also mean that it is also good? Different people can be asserting that something is a "right" with very different ideas of what is good and how goodness relates to the law. To help bring more precision to this question, I am going to offer my own vocabulary of “right” to help parse this out.

It is possible to believe that something must be legally within the realm of "just privilege" because it is fundamentally good and proper. I will refer to this as a "right of design", which is a legal right that is derived by working backward from a best use of our human design. My right to vote is an example of a “right of design” which is derived from my naturally endowed rational powers, which are generally good to exercise.

It is also possible to believe that something should be legal within the realm of "just privilege" not because it is good but because it is impractical to use the law to stop it. I will refer to this as a "right of utility". In the realm of legally allowed “just privilege” a “right of utility” touches the realm of design only the very limited sense that a free person needs to be able to make bad choices in order for that person to have freedom. A right of utility works backward from what is merely impractical to enforce.

I have the right to get drunk in the privacy of my home. This is not a good use of design, since it is better of me to not get drunk even in the privacy of home. However, as the era of Prohibition taught us, it is not practical to make a law against it. Making a law against getting drunk at home would cause more problems than it would solve and be too intrusive to try to fix, so the right to get drunk at home is a right of utility as is the right to hit myself with a hammer.

It is this vocabulary of rights that I think will aid in our debate over hot button topics. It will reveal that there are several debates rolled into one:

DEBATE A) Those who believe that the issue involves a right of design vs. those who believe the issue would make something legal that is wrong and should not be made legal. These two parties are at fundamental odds with each other.

DEBATE B) Those who believe that the issue involves a right of utility only vs. those who believe that what is at stake is a right of design. These two parties have agreement on what should be legal but have different ideas of what is fundamentally good.

DEBATE C) Those who believe that the issue involves a right of utility vs. those who believe that the issue should not be a right at all. These two parties have some agreement on what is good but do not agree on how the law should be applied.

Very often in a hot button issue, the debate A) is front and center, but the debates B) and C) are equally important, even if they go on behind the scenes. Having this vocabulary will help organize what is being debated by whom.

What is Art?

2009-02-10T20:42:00.000-08:00

I have thought from time to time on the nature of, beauty, smut and "transgressive art" and the public license that should be afforded to these. I once had a debate with someone about whether smut advertising was art or propaganda. I argued that the intent of the image had something to do with whether it could be considered “art”. I argued that advertising smut was aimed at subverting the viewer’s attention to distract him to buy something and was therefore to be considered propaganda and not art.

I argued that enough smut becomes and "unchangeable channel" (Gil Reevil) that one cannot ever choose to avoid. An environment of smut advertising as an “unchangeable channel” had the effect of dull the senses not to enlighten the senses. I explained that despite that artfulness with which certain Saddam Hussein pictures may have been made throughout Iraq, their intent was to be an instrument to subjugate and brainwash. Even ancient Egyptian megalith sculpture, while wonderfully made and enjoyed in 2009, was originally intended to intimidate and awe its ancient viewers into worshipping the Pharaoh. Art that may be explored as beautiful later can still be used to hurt and dull the sense of people in the present, depending on how it's used.

The person I was debating with said that it's too hard to tell what art is and isn’t art, so it’s not possible to make any such judgments. After all, what is considered art in 2009 is not necessarily what was considered art in the past. This person argued the postmodern position that everything and anything can potentially be seen as art. Since art is ultimately enlightening and enriching to human existence anything that might possibly be considered art at some point in the future should receive no constraints. In other words all objects are either art or “proto-art”.

In this view, life of the present moment is always and continually a foundry, a sometimes brutal foundry for the beautiful and enlightening art that the future will be able to perceive. For postmodernists, art cannot be crisply defined, but we know it when we see it, and our eyes in the future will be better than our eyes in the present. Therefore it is necessary that we in the present sublimate an inclination to judge and suppress art or proto-art so that future generations will be able to see its beauty, even as we in the present now enjoy the fruits of the past's brutal art foundry.

Joy for the sake of Joy

The question of art cuts deeply at what is means to be human. The question of "why is art" is inseparable from "what is art". What makes us human is that we are designed to seek joy for the sake of joy. We are not designed merely to seek the pleasure of sated base appetites. We experience the joy for the sake of joy, which is an emotional nourishment for its own sake, as we experience our ability to see infinite levels of abstract order and as we see the complexity of our selves reflected in that order. We find joy in the perceiving and find joy in the discovering previously undiscovered forms of order in the world.

Beauty is that aspect of order that is enjoyed for the sake of joy and not merely for what particular survival utility the particular form of order has for us. There is an extent to which it is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is as much an experience as it is anything else, but it cannot be wholly imparted to the subjective experience of one human vs. another human. We collectively experience beauty because our innate ability to find joy in order is being met with something that has a unique form of order, even as each person may not experience it equally.

We have a profound need to discover ever more forms of order in ever more realms of abstraction. It is our joy and our calling. The need to discover new lands is but one form of the quest to understand terra incognita. A scientist, mathematician, philosopher and artist are all operating on the same basic impulse – they are all seeking to discover previously undiscovered forms of order. These are all fundamentally, efforts to quarry the order from reality.

An artist is only "creative" in the sense that the quarrying is a more exclusively inward focused process. An artist, mathematician, philosopher, or scientist is capable of finding joy for the sake of joy in those forms of order which have been quarried out of reality, even as the newly discovered order can also have utilitarian uses. When those new forms of order are quarried out of the efforts made in the lab, the study or the studio, they are brought into the world and our met and recognized by our collective ability to see and enjoy the order. The presentation of the order has now caught up to our ability to see the order that was always there as a latent potential.

A spear tip may be a form of order, a technological form that has a utility in hunting for food. I may enjoy the fact that I gain material benefit in the form of food from a spear. When I enjoy the beauty of the streamlined artistry of the spear tip and wonder at the hands that flint-napped it, I am experiencing beauty. In the case of the spear, I am enjoying a facet of the spear's reality that is not mutually exclusive to its other facets. The utilitarian facet may even enhance the beauty facet. It may be an experience of beauty whose intensity and mystique is enhanced by the reality that it is also very deadly useful. Here, the beauty of beautiful spear is the experience of the order that is represented by that spear tip that exists on different levels of life and reality.

I can find joy for the sake of joy in the order that is presented in a Japanese sword, a joy that resonates with the profundities of an object that has been used to slice bodies in half. I can find joy for the sake of joy in the shape of an airplane wing. I can find joy for the sake of joy in a form of music that was created to find joy in God. Art may be in the natural realm, such as a sunset. Art may be a side benefit of a utilitarian goal of making a more useful object as with the shape of a boat or a mathematical formula.

With this in mind, art is any thing that meets our ability to perceive order in such a way that it produces joy for the sake of joy and the wisdom that goes with it. Potentially, everything and anything can be art. Even the natural world can be enjoyed as art. Here, art is the object, and beauty is the quality of order that the experience of the object begets in us.

"Art" that fills our art galleries, as we normally define it, is actually "art created intentionally and exclusively for the sake of beauty, as I have defined beauty: "art" as we generally define as "art" is a work of order that has been quarried out of reality for the express purpose of generating some form of joy from the perception of some form of order. Later generations may take an object that was not created intentionally to be "art" and may nevertheless treat it as "art". Advertising ephemera and toys from the past are collected and admired for an unintentional mastery of a certain order that was not appreciated at the time it was created.

Art and Wisdom

When we perceive a new aspect of order in the realm of our emotional experience we gain a form of pre-articulate “proto-wisdom”. Later when this experience develops into articulate knowledge, the wisdom takes on a linguistic form and is useful for the realm of words and becomes Wisdom proper, defined as first-hand articulate knowledge of the world.

Joy in the perception of order and the accumulation of wisdom are inseparable. Joy itself is the union of wisdom and pleasure. Entertainment is a form of the joy of perceiving new forms of order unfolding before our eyes. The joy may not be "happy happy": it may be a turgid and dark joy in the gaining of painful wisdom. Very frequently joy is both bitter and sweet, sometimes with different combinations of both. Gaining the perception of order and wisdom can be a painful and expensive process.

It is the process of gaining wisdom whether pre-articulate or articulate that is enjoyable as a form of perceiving order. But proto-wisdom that is not on its way to becoming articulate knowledge of the world is an arrested form of joy, which is actually not joy but merely pleasure. Not all that contains nutrients is nutritious. I think of how chocolate can be nutritious in the right time and place, but too much of it is malnourishing. It is possible to be malnourished by experiencing pleasure in art by only being able to enjoy a certain form of the perception of order without consummating it with thought.

It is possible to malnourished with an experience of a proto-wisdom that never becomes wisdom. Here, art is merely experienced as "hedons" of pleasure, as a shallow sensory experience never blossoms into a more mature form of exploration. That which could nourish us will impoverish us if our senses are dulled. This is a hazard with art that is too ephemeral or art that is too imposing and impossible to avoid or art that comes at profaning/exploiting other good things in order to be. Here, the experience of art is thus only pleasure divorced from any purpose and progress and never becomes full joy.

Appreciating our Appreciation

How do we appreciate order that has been wrought from violence without condoning violence past, present and future? Here the violence may be the hard violence of swords and Pharaohs past or the subtle violence of the present of having sensitivity drummed out of us. While we appreciate the artistry of ancient pharaohs and spears, we also enjoy a history of certain victories in the cause of the justice and the rule of law that freed us from much of the tyranny of pharaohs, spears and swords. And so the development of our sense of justice and rule of law through history is another part of the order that we have found joy in uncovering.

Now there is another aspect of order that we must bring to light, while we must be open to the mysterious unfolding of new forms of artistic order, but we must not lose our joy of the journey. The joy of experiencing order is the substance of our appreciation of art. Our very capacity for appreciation is part of the order that we must appreciate. This is appreciation of our appreciation is the meta-artistic view of the world of our self knowledge. It contains an ethical requirement to work to protect it from harm.

You can’t explore what’s in your face. The joy of exploration requires distance so that there is space for reflection. We must savor art and make sure that those things that are used harshly to dull our senses need to be held in check: this, so that there is contemplative space for the practice of actually harvesting the proto-wisdom of artistic experience into articulate wisdom.

To appreciate our appreciation, the creation of art owes as much a debt to the present as to the future. A Japanese sword it not art when it's slashing you. Borat is not art when he's humiliating you. Smut propaganda is not art when it is dulling your sense, shocking you with irresponsible intentions. The justice that is owed to the appreciation of our appreciation can't happen in an environment of un-mitigated violence, whether the hard and obvious violence of swords, or the subtle violence of propaganda that subjugates us by desensitizing us.

The casualty of this subtle violence on our sensitivity is the diminution of the “dialogue” (i.e. the accumulation of wisdom) that artists always claim to want to stimulate that will never happen. So much of the dialogue they want to stimulate is in the activist direction of making the world better. To that I say, "Fine, don't make the world worse in the process. Don't make art irresponsibly in the name of getting people to be more responsible and sensitive".

Transgressive and the unchangeable channel of smut advertising needs to be held in check to allow for contemplative space, even if the trangressive art and propaganda might somehow be "proto-art" that might be one day refracted into a form of beauty and wisdom. This, so that whatever kernel of nourishment therein will actually and eventually nourish us and not rot us out in the meantime in the midst of an "evolution too slow to save our souls".

Putting boundaries on transgressive art and propaganda gone amok is an extension of and refinement of our call to justice whose lineage extends all the way back to the first rule of law. There are those who will argue that transgressive art needs to transgress in order to be, in order to cut and do what it must and that putting bounds on art hurts art. To answer this (I know I open up a large can of another topic by saying this) putting bounds on art can often enhance the quality and creativity of art. I want to give trangressive artists more to chew on when they think of mocking or tearing down a boundary to make their point. I want to push back against trangressive art when it is a form of tyranny.

The War on the No Cussing Club

2009-02-06T13:21:00.000-08:00

Read here about the No Cussing Club

If you read the link above, you will see something that caught my attention when I heard about it on the radio. A teenager started a "No Cussing Club", a group of people who simply decide that they will abstain from cussing. There are those who see this club as a direct threat to their First Amendment Right and see that this threat must be confronted with anonymous death threats.

When I first heard about this on the radio, the radio host made good point saying, "…what about the First Amendment rights of the teenager who believes that cussing is bad?..." I want to explore the deeper reason why a "No Cussing Club" would pull death threat makers out of the woodwork. The impulse to cuss without restraint and then confront the Cussing Club with death threats are related impulses that connected by an underlying worldview that needs to be exposed and brought to light.

We all value bathroom stalls and bedroom privacy. We have a natural desire for a certain verbal prudence which is an extension of the privacy that we value in having bathroom stalls. Uttering a cussword is the equivalent of momentarily ripping down the walls of everyone's bathroom and sexual privacy and putting a private matter onto a screen for all to see. The F-bomb is rightly called a “bomb” because there is violence to it: it is an act of verbally tearing down the wall of our privacy, and it has the effect on our sense of prudence what scratching a needle across the record has when it halts a song un-expectedly.

In the rarest instances when exploring philosophical ideas, I've used off–color language to make a point (Here is my WWAD post which is relevant to this post). In Letter to the FCC I defended the FCC banning "fleeting indecency" during the hours of 0600 to 2200. I argued that people need to be apprenticed in simple ideas of decency and considerateness before they can navigate moral complexity with an eye towards what is ultimately good and decent. I argued that one must reckon with this need when considering what is best for the common good, and that this need demands a pocket of common time and space where simpler ideas of decency are upheld. The First Amendment right to express adult concerns on issues can be exercised freely without cussing, and people should be held to this standard on the airwaves.

I argued that people must be long apprenticed moral arithmetic to ever be able to use profanity in a moral calculus of "creative violence". There is a very big difference between

A) a rare and conscious use of profanity to shock an audience into seeing something when that audience has proven themselves in need of such a shock when all other means to wake that audience out of a slumber have been exhausted

and

B) using profanity without regard to boundaries says that privacy and boundaries of time and place do not matter.

Using profanity at will between the hours of 0600 to 2200 on public airwaves is an expression of a B) worldview and not an A) worldview. Unbound cussing is one form of the advancement of and evangelism of a worldview that is denuded of any idea of the sacred or even the special, and unbound porn is another. With this worldview the inclination to guard what is sacred is seen as an expression of human ignorance and fear. In the name of authenticity and naturalness, the power that comes from exploding our impulse to sacredness can be profaned for anyone's banal purposes of self promotion.

There is power to cussing and there is a cost when this power is used selfishly and habitually in a banal way. Banal, habitual, selfishly used cussing begets cynicism and numbness. Unbound and banal cussing can resemble creative violence but really isn't. It not a refinement of moral arithmetic but a replacement of it: it is based on a wholly competing idea of what is "authentic" and 'real" and "natural". Unbound cussing works backward from numbness and ennui as that which is natural and authentic.

In my Open Letter to Big Kids post, I explained that destructive people want the trappings of danger to command respect from people more innocent and more gullible than themselves. Wearing these trappings of danger is what I call "wearing a lion's mane", like a member of a tribe who wears the mane of the lion he has killed to show his bravery and prowess. Cussing is one way among many (gang fashion, etc…) that people try to give themselves the trappings of toughness and danger. Wearing the trappings of danger is a way of saying "Awe me, for I know the ways of the world! Entrust me with your respect and allegiance"

As lion's manes go, a cuss word is not necessarily creative or brave, and is therefore somewhat of a cheap, second hand lion's mane. When everyone is wearing some sort of second hand lion's mane as an expression of coolness, it can take real personal courage to not to wear a lions mane at all. When people lack this courage and lack the vision of a better world that would summon this courage, it can feel very natural to follow a crowd who are all wearing some form of cheap second hand lion’s mane, all seeking to command some low grade admiration from each. This low common denominator is "natural" for those who operate with a worldview that doesn't summon them to anything else.

To suggest any boundaries on cussing, or its cousin, porn, is the counter evangelism for a this worldview with a wholly different idea of what is “natural” and “authentic”: that some sacred time and space is required to make us better human beings and that profaning it is an act of nihilism. To be concerned about nihilism is to value a reality of goodness/ideals and hope that is being denied by nihilism. It is based on a view of human beings needing special times and places for different experiences to nourish a diet of spiritual emotional and mental needs; a diet that is as broad as the physical dietary needs that we have. In this paradigm to be fed junk is malnourishing to the soul: it is bad to even be fed too much of something that could be a good in a different portion.

To blend metaphors, these nutritional needs of the soul and mind demand the acknowledgement of a sort of "moral geography" in society, relationships and personal choices – a moral geography of boundaries of time and place that negotiates the meeting of these varied needs. The idea of a "moral geography" takes the idea of “moral hierarchy” of virtues and vices and places the hierarchy in the realm of multi-dimensions, a moral landscape of heights lows, middles and cliffs and boundaries. In a moral geography of varied terrain, not all paths are equal: paths that avoid the cliffs and lead to the heights are better than those paths that don't. It is this sense of special times and places in this moral geography that can be summed as the idea of the "sacred" and the "special".

It is with a moral geography of varied terrain that the classical distinction between License and Liberty distinction makes any sense. As I explained in my Naked Smoke post, License is the sheer ability to do something. Liberty is the license exercised with the discretion of acting in good faith to shoulder the responsibilities that come with the license. The idea of Liberty makes sense in a varied moral terrain where common good is something that transcends mere personal advancement.

“Freedom” and not “Liberty” is the rallying cry for those who do not believe that there is a moral geography with a varied moral terrain. In my Porn Moralists post I mentioned how the idea of the "Superflat" culture was used by a Japanese Philosopher Murakami to describe the obliteration between high art and low art in postmodern culture. The idea of the “superflat” can be taken beyond art and used to describe the flatness of moral geography to those who do not perceive that humans have needs that require a varied moral terrain. In a flat moral geography, Liberty is collapsed into License such that distinctions between the two are irrelevant. In superflat land, all you need is "freedom" since the common good is not elevated higher than personal advancement. It is in the broader realm of moral flatness that the consumption of art-- particularly the “low art" of disposable and consumable products and entertainment -- is denuded of “dietary” considerations, as I have defined a diet of spitiritual, emotional and intellectual needs. If the art is pleasing you somehow and not causing imminent harm, then it's perfectly good.

With the First Amendment, the Founders understood that there is a moral reality that transcends the First Amendment that makes the right a right: that the right to free speech operates in an unbreakable package with other moral truths, particularly that rights come with responsibilities to act in good faith to advance the common good. There is a moral geography that Founders understood that lies behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Bill of Rights; that there are the dialectics of rights and responsibilities, personal advancement and common good that operate in a Helenistic sense of balance and proportion to each other. The Founders believed that citizens of a free society needed to invest effort to properly navigate this moral geography and that it took effort to apprentice oneself in moral consideration and reflection.

Those who want unlimited right to cuss and make death threats would hurt the speech of those who disagree are holding the First Amendment as a form of Secular Scripture while they reject every other moral principal that the Founder stood for. For them, the Founders were the secular equivalent of Moses for the First Amendment but can be dismissed as slave owning bigoted white men for every other moral consideration that led to the First Amendment.

For the death threat makers and those who want unlimited license to cuss, the First Amendment is the only remnant of the Founders moral vision that has any place in the moral geography of the superflat. This is based on a hyper rejection of sacredness and an extreme rejection of humans needing a particular emotional/spiritual diet that requires certain pockets of time and space free from the intrusion of cussing. If you don’t believe these needs exist, you don’t have to factor them into your consideration of common good.

In the superflat, the First Amendment it is denuded of any other consideration of common good and so the mere advancement of the morally denuded First Amendment therefore becomes the highest common good. When you flatten the reality that makes the First Amendment right a right, you elevate the unlimited porn and cussing as the highest and only expression of the common good. And so Larry Flint can wear the American Flag as one out to do us all a favor.

So the First Amendment in the superflat world is the right to cuss without limits. In this flat terrain, the engine is of one’s intentions revved for maximum freedom to go full steam ahead like a car, speeding, careening, doing donuts on the dessert floor. All pleasure is morally equal, so you are “free” to do whatever you want where-ever and whenever.

Any moral system must manage how people interact with each other and the “superflat” moral system is no exception. Trying to create moral freedom by creating moral flatness makes it necessary to enforce a low common denominator of behavior. Part of the underlying idea of "authenticity and "realness" is that there are not higher ideals that people must aspire to in their thought and language. In this realm, "I cuss therefore I am", since all people are fundamentally animals who's only motive is to pleasure themselves by gaining dominance over others. Since people are essential domineering animals, all thoughts and ideas can be decoded for certain "dominance instincts" and thus certain conspiratorial dominance intentions. Those thoughts and ideas that will lead to bad dominance equilibrium among brutes must be policed.

Anyone who aspires to live according a vision of a more varied moral terrain is the potential domineer of others. Since people cannot be entrusted to think through nuances they must their thoughts policed to make sure that they do not ever impose their thoughts on others. The only acceptable imposition is to impose the superflat that is seen as promoting maximum instinct expression. In the superflat, maximum cussing is the calculus of maximum diversity of instinct expression among brutes. You must keep your non-cussing values to yourself. If you evangelize them in any way, it would upset the equilibrium of brutes and give domineering animals the idea of dangerous moral hierarchies. Even if you keep to yourself while quietly practicing your values you can be persecuted for having incorrect thoughts that have the potential to poison the PH balance of society with potentially toxic ideas.

While I have argued for the FCC 0600 to 2200 hrs ban on cussing/profanity on the airwaves, the leader of the no cussing club has stated that he is not trying to impose a law and that he and others are only trying to put a personal value into practice. From the moral view of the threat makers, it does not matter that the No Cussing Club isn't promoting law since law has its genesis in thought. Therefore thought must be policed. People cannot be trusted to have thoughts that may end up in laws they don't want, even if they say they don't want to impose laws. Those thoughts might put brutish people to march in goosestep formation so they must anticipate this brutish goose-stepping with their own pre-emptive total war against a "pre-crime". Any thought that can challenge the superflat must be nipped in the bud by any means necessary, using any available cyber weapon, threat and assassination of character.

Such an extreme rejection of sacredness has lead to this view of human brutes needing violent thought policing. This impulse to thought policing it is not a generous enough view of human potential to be worthy of democracy and to be worthy of the government of by and for the people that the Founders bequeathed to us. The Founders said, “…we've given you a republic if you can keep it…” In bequeathing a democracy to us that bequeathed to us a place where different views were allowed to be expressed where the parties make a good faith effort to be civil. Democracy is a civic matrix for dialogue that, if heated, makes every effort to be civil and peaceable. In bequeathing Liberty the Founders bequeathed the freedom to undermine it and choose tyranny.

Many of the death threat makers are advancing/protecting their idea of freedom in the name of protecting it from something that is religious or at least connected to religion. In fact, the superflat is its own alternate religion that seeks not only to make exposure to cussing a freedom but a requirement. The death threat makers have become the Inquisition of the superflat religion. Its in the force of their thought policing that they make the force of their allegiance to their religion known.

Those who think A) that an anti-cussing club is an affront to their First Amendment and B) that they can enforce that right with death threats will not be remembered well by history. They owe their debt to terrorists and not to the Founders. To have any integrity these anonymous people making death threats need to stand up and be counted. Until then they are cowards who must hide in secret to promote ideas thought threats because they know they will look stupid defending their actions in public.

The audacity of 22,000 death threats against the No Cussing Club is a dragon breathing down the neck of those who value sacred space, who question the superflat moral vision and those who would impose it with force. It is a dragon that will grow if it is not confronted. To the No Cussing Club: keep it up and don't back down.

An open letter to big kids in 2009

2009-01-24T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is an "open letter" to any kid old enough to try to philosophically subvert the discipline of his/her parents in order to follow the crowd.

--
Dear Big Kid,

You may or may not understand everything that you read here. If you don’t get all now, let it be a seed that gets planted in you for later.

You have heard it said, “Just say no to drugs” and "Save sex for marriage". But I tell you that by the time someone is saying yes to drugs and yes to pre-marital sex, they have already been addicted to something else: the approval of destructive people. Seeking the approval of destructive people is as much a drug as any drug and as much a religion as any religion.

You were born with a sense that life is precious and that the future has hope for a better day. It is the sense that is entrusted by God for you to keep your whole life. It is that aspect of being “like a child” that God calls all of us to be like. This sense is your innocence, which gives you the capacity to experience joy and hope. It is this innocence that will take effort to maintain.

Joy is the union of pleasure and purpose, the union of pleasure and truth, and the union of pleasure and meaningful relationships. There is joyful pleasure and there is joyless pleasure. Both are pleasing but one feels different than the other. When we allow ourselves to experience enough joyless pleasure the experience is stamped into us to the point where we can actually forget what joy is/feels like. To use food as an example, food that is good for you will be good going in and going through. Junk food will only feel good going in. As with food and any other pleasure, God invites us into a journey where pleasure and meaning are always wedded together.

To live a healthy life you must expand your idea of what a "drug" is: a "drug" is any use of pleasure for the sake of pleasure that is removed from any purpose. A drug is anything that is used in an attempt to artificially squeeze pleasure sensations out of life. Food can be a drug, sexual pleasure can be a drug. Approval from bad people is a drug. Even wanting too much approval from good people can be a drug.

An idol is a created thing that we worship instead of worshipping the Creator. An idolatry is the practice of worshipping an idol. Many people believe that since they are not bowing to Tiki gods carved in stone they are not participating in idolatry. But think again. Finding pleasure in a drug – in any form – as an "emotional idolatry" because it is a source other than God which one gives allegiance to and seeks emotional comfort from.

Most people do not move forward into "emotional idolatries" by joining the weekly Idol worship and reading the five points of Idol doctrine. Rather, they walk backwards into the comfort that a created thing/being seems to provide in place of finding joy in God and His purposes. People participate in "emotional idolatry" whenever they separate pleasure from purpose.

Character is the ability to forgo a lesser pleasure of the present to gain a greater pleasure in the future. Wisdom is truth met with experience. Wisdom is truth that can be felt, tasted and pieced together in your mind, that can be seen three dimensions. A vision is that wisdom that paints a bright picture of the future.

A temptation is a crisis of wisdom and exposes a poverty of your wisdom and vision. When the truth is only a "finger wagging" in your head it’s not enough to keep you from doing something you shouldn’t do. When you are tempted to do something that you shouldn't do, you need to recognize that your temptation is a poverty of your vision and your wisdom.

Seeing truth as a finger wagging in your head is like seeing one face of a cube that thus only looks like a square. Ask God for the vision. God promises to give us wisdom when we ask. When you know what joy feels like, tastes like and when you know the difference from joyless pleasure you will have the heart to receive God's vision. When you grow in God's wisdom and vision for your life, you will know the truth in all of its dimensions so that it is impressed on your neurons with enough force to counteract the call to joyless pleasures.

This quality of wanting to know the truth is a 'godly curiosity"; it is an act of seeking wisdom that God promises to reward. It is this quality of godly curiosity, where one wants to know the whole of God's truth while in the mean time having the faith and discipline to be faithful to what you do already know. God requires us to have the discipline, faith and shrewdness to wait for a fuller picture as we are faithful with the truth he as given us.

When your parents hem you in and inhibit your 'freedom", you are being hemmed so you don't do something destructive to yourself before you have the capacity to exercise "godly curiosity" with the right mix of innocence and shrewdness. When you become fully adult you will be able to operate with godly curiosity on your own and you will be able to handle the freedom. For a season of time and within certain boundaries, your parents must be "shrewd" for you.

That part of us that is innocent wishes to be led through the sometimes dark and confusing and dangerous aspects of life. A true leader seeks to lead as a representative of God on earth. A true leader protects the innocence of others, while a false leader cares not about innocence.

If we are not conscious of protecting our innocence, we can be fooled into giving allegiance to fake leadership. You can be fooled into seeking glory, safety, companionship and approval in destructive people. Navigating life will take innocence and shrewdness to deal with people who would trick you out of it. These people would try to get you to make your allegiance to them more important than maintaining your innocence for your long term journey with God.

There is a dangerous and risky aspect to life, and there is a certain "creative destruction" that is needed to make hard, costly decisions to manage the innocence of ourselves and others. As you follow Gods call you will be called to take risks at God appointed times. You will be called to make complex decisions in life decisions between good, better and best or between bad and worse. One can only be a good leader on complex matters when one is long apprenticed in keeping one's innocence in simpler matters.

It is in being curious in a godly way that one gains the wisdom to lead oneself and others. It is in being curious in a godly way that one maintains one's innocence by being shrewd. When you walk with God, maintaining your innocence, you will face dangers correctly and earn the respect and admiration of people. You will be equipped to lead them as a godly leader, and you will lead people in Godly ways and have healthy relationships.

A destructive person who is not able or willing to walk with God enjoys making sure that other people know that they are acquainted with danger and moral complexity. This tricks those who are innocent into thinking that this person is capable of being a leader to their innocence, so that those more innocent than himself will be fooled into giving him respect and admiration and allegiance. It is these fake leaders who give away their innocence in exchange for being dangerous enough to command the respect of foolish people. These false leaders want to command more respect and admiration than is merited by their wisdom.

These false leaders have given up the conscious management of their innocence/their joy in order to avoid being lonely and unsafe. This is true even as they are still driven by fundamental elements of innocence that they are managing wrongly. For these people, the sense of innocence has gone from something that they once enjoyed and recognized within them to something that their conscious mind has forgotten while a deeper part of their selves still needs.

Having forgotten the true nature of their own innocence, these people will try to trick you into thinking that the good "childlike" qualities of your innocence are "gay" "childish" "un-hip" "fake" or any number of adjectives. These people are simply angry at you for reminding them of the part innocence that they have given up and want to soothe their own consciences. They are taking the wagging finger away from themselves and pointing it at you. Do not fall for this.

God holds us accountable to manage our innocence correctly to forge a relationship with Him. God allows us the room to stumble as we are earnestly seeking. When you are given the choice to give up your innocence for the approval and safety of others it is in this moment that you must seek to know God more deeply. You must seek His wisdom and His vision and seek a relationship with a God who fills your heart with joy. Here you will enjoy God's "full course meal" and not be the one who gets filled with the "junkfood" of the present.

We live in an age of disposable pleasure, pleasures that are not part of a journey of our Godly purpose. Disposable pleasure, emotional idolatry, emotional junkfood are things that you will be pressured to take part in at every turn. You will be pressured by your peers so that you can be "dangerous" and "cool" enough not to be lonely and outcast and considered "babyish". This is the religion of "cool" that you must watch out for and not bow to, even if you are persecuted by your peers.

You need to know that much of today's media and the technology is largely programmed to hook you into a realm of disposable pleasure and emotional idolatry. This does not necessarily mean to cloister yourself and to always avoid all media and technology. Rather, it means to think critically and to do nothing without first asking whether it will injure your innocence. Always walk forwards into things, never backwards. All those who put their desire to be safe and un-lonely before their call to seek God will embrace these things without thinking. They will be those who take the path to destruction that is wide and broad by walking backwards.

People will justify the world and its pleasures for many reasons, including that it "sells". You need to have a value system that is higher than finding safety in crowds and making money. It is God who will make that journey possible and who will provide for your needs as you seek him. This is the test of every person. Every person must walk through a valley of aloneness and be proved worthy of not giving up their innocence in the face of pressure. –

More Aphorisms

2009-01-19T20:17:00.000-08:00

There are habits of casual cruelty that will make one a schoolyard success but that will cause one to fail at meaningful endeavors later in life

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Fear that is not taken captive to curiosity is a tyrant

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A temptation is a crisis of wisdom

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People often have good reasons for having bad or flawed beliefs

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Pictures and artistic renderings from the ancient past of revelry and celebrating always seem darker to our eyes than they appeared to those enjoying it at the time. We are privy to all of the fierce things that happened afterward, and so we see those celebrations through the lens of sobriety.

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Much of life’s detritus and ephemera is pregnant with meaning but covered in a shell of banality that one must crack so that its beauty and/or its darkness can be taken captive.

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Social climbing is the pursuit of vapid excellence.

Gay hating vs. Troop hating

2008-12-21T15:50:00.000-08:00

I remember an episode of the Colbert Report where Tim Robbins, and actor and anti-war activist who has produced an anti-war play, arrived to be interviewed. Stephen Colbert says to Robbins, "I have a two part question…What is the most favorite move you’ve acted in and why do you hate the troops?" Tim Robbins laughed. It was a ridiculous example of an accusation wrapped in an un-answerable question wherein you must attack the premise in order to answer it.

Now in regard to the Iraq war, it made me cringe when those on the right accused those who opposed the war of "hating the troops". It is true that opposing a war may have some negative consequences for those troops in the midst of the war in the form of propaganda for the other side, less money and support for the effort on the home front etc… But that's a very far cry from "hating the troops", which indicates that one has a malignant intent to inflict harm and difficulty on the troops or harbors a willful and cavalier disregard for their well being.

Some people have a conscience that believes that confronting a problem of leadership in the war is worth some of the secondary negative consequences for the war effort that may result from being vocal. Some people believe that these consequences are to be avoided during the midst of a war. These are both rational position of conscience and it is important for either side to recognize the other as a valid position of conscience, even if there are substrata of worldviews at work in each party that are profoundly alien to the other.

I remember John Stewart in his interview with John McCain who appropriately called the charge of troop hating a "cudgel" to suppress a dialogue that our nation needed to have. The charge of "troop hating" does not allow for a nuanced position that allows for an individual citizen in a democratic society to voice a concern that says, "I think that there is a problem with the war and the way it is being prosecuted." I've often thought that the charge of "troop hating" was an attempt to allow incompetent war bureaucrats to hide their incompetence behind combat boots. Dealing with the rhetorical and philosophical dimensions of society and war is a huge topic that I will deal with more in depth later.

Suffice to say for now that the charge of "troop hating" is leveled by those who have a peculiar worldview that says that any vocal opposition to a war in the midst of a war is fundamentally immoral and twisted. For one who harbors this worldview to ask another person who vocally opposes the war "Do you hate the troops? The answer is "Yes. -- if your worldview conflates war opposition with troop hating." Here, "Do you hate the troops?" is not actually a question in search of an answer but a self-referential worldview disguised as a question seeking confirmation for its own existence.

The same problem that characterized the right in regard to the troops is now the characterizing the left in regard to gay marriage. If I support Prop 8 do I hate gay people? The answer is Yes – if your worldview conflates Prop 8 support with gay hatred. Nuanced positions on the topic need not apply.

The accusation of "hate" seeks to utterly obliterate any speck of validity of any position of conscience of the other side. The accusation of "hate" is toxic to dialogue and has benefit only in the short term as the rhetorical equivalent of a rhetorical spear thrust in the phalanx war. The charge of "hate" may win a battle temporarily in a climate where people are too afraid to be labeled as "haters", but it will not ultimately win hearts and minds. When people resort to throwing "slogan bricks" at each other, they have eschewed dialogue and are scarcely worthy of being afforded with a civic matrix that supports dialogue, which is what a democracy is.

Morality, Law and the Gay Marriage debate

2008-12-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

I care about the quality of the debate on gay marriage. I value more the words of a thoughtful person who disagrees than a thoughtless person who agrees. I support the limitation of the word "marriage" to one male - one female unions, so I do support some form of a ban on "gay marriage" though not on civilly recognized gay unions. I am intellectually honest enough to admit that I am imposing my moral view on others. I am also convinced that those who support it are imposing their moral view on me.

That said, I don't think that the gay marriage movement as a whole has achieved the full measure of intellectual honesty as to what it wants. The gay marriage advocates say that hetero-only marriage advocates are imposing their morality on others while the gay marriage crowd is not imposing a morality but simply acknowledging a fundamental human right. I'm not saying that the gay marriage movement is being intentionally dishonest in this regard, rather that the gay marriage movement needs to admit that it is imposing a moral view on society.

A morality is, at its core, based on a view of human design. The moral precepts of what is right and wrong then flow from this basic assumption of our design. As for the law and morality, there is more complex relationship between the two that many people acknowledge. The law enforces that aspect of morality that is considered necessary and fundamental for people to co-exist. Most people agree on the fundamentals and may quibble over the legal details. For example, most people believe that theft is fundamentally wrong and may disagree over how the law should be applied or how other competing fundamental ideas should be negotiated in regard to the laws against theft.

It is in a dispute over what is and what isn’t "fundamental" that puts the law in the center of a fundamental moral debate. When there is dispute as to what is fundamental, the law that must choose one moral vision over another. Those who have a view of what is fundamental on the wrong side of the law will feel that the law imposing a moral system. If there is enough of a chasm of disagreement some form of conflict or even war is inevitable. If you have a moral system that believes in the fundamental need to sacrifice young children on an altar, the American system of law will gladly and forcibly impose a moral system on you, with the force of the military if necessary.

In regard to gay marriage, I’m not saying that gay marriage will cause armed conflict, but that the issue of gay marriage is such a moral pivot point in the law that one party will feel that a morality is being imposed on them. The gay marriage advocates do not admit they are legally imposing a moral view on the grounds that what they are proposing is fundamental. The problem is that the question of what is fundamental is being debated. In this context, declaring that their view is "fundamental" is a way of claiming victory in a moral debate without fully admitting that they are in a moral debate. This elision from A) not admitting that they are promoting a moral view to B) declaring victory in the moral debate is a consequence of sloganeering, trying to condense a moral debate that they have not fully acknowledged that they are having into sound bites.

The overt rhetoric of the gay marriage movement is that marriage between any two willing parties is a fundamental right, but that is only the "bright side of the moon" of their moral view. The full moon is this: the gay marriage advocates have a fundamental moral view that there are no consequential differences between a gay marriage and a hetero marriage. From this flows the moral imperative that each must be seen as equal in every meaningful way. Gay marriage is a right of design and to believe otherwise to have an "un-fundamental" and "idiosyncratic" belief that must be sealed away from its intrusion into society where "fundamental" beliefs must have the day.

This was the moral vision of the black civil rights movement that there are no consequential racial differences. Since the vast majority of us agree with the black civil rights movement, it can be hard to see the force of the legal pivot that was created to wrench people out of their racial bigotry and/or their ability to practice it. For those people, the law was very much a force that was imposing a moral system on them.

It is in the comparison to the black civil rights movement that the gay marriage moral vision is available to be plainly seen even if it is not always stated as boldly as it needs to be by the gay marriage advocates. The gay marriage movement wants the law to catch up to and validate its moral vision so that the when the law enforces certain aspects of morality, which it does, it will enforce the moral vision of the gay marriage movement and not the moral vision of the anti-gay marriage movement. The law will, to a certain extent, enforce moral thought.

If I may digress. In regard to the question of what is and isn't fundamental, I have wrested with the question of how and where law and morality do and do not overlap. Even though I consider believing in Jesus fundamental to my moral system, I do not consider it fundamental for a person to believe in Jesus to be able to function in civil society and therefore do not make it law to believe in Jesus. Rather, I join a self selected group known as a church who have their own ways of rewarding Jesus-belief with a certain hierarchy of preference and privilege.

My belief in Jesus is an "idiosyncratic" belief that must be, in a certain sense, kept in a sphere separate from public discourse, even as my belief in Jesus may have a great gravitational force of influence on my public discourse. In a similar manner I allow people to drink legally in a wider society though I don't condone it in my self-selected circle. Society can only make laws on alcohol to protect people when there is certain degree of verifiable harm caused to themselves and others.

Is the belief in hetero-marriage exclusivity aka “man-woman exceptionalism” a religious belief that belongs in the compartment of creeds, away from all civil society, wherein its claims to harm are too unprovable as to require laws to protect people from that harm? Or is it something that has claims on civil society? I have begun to explore these issues in other writings here and here. For this writing I'm simply trying to focus on the issue of imposing morality. I do think that there are realms of law and morality that need to be kept separate when it is possible for the law to be neutral in an area of thought, which is the case for many aspects of religious belief. There are certain aspects of differences between people and that the law must be blind to and other aspects of difference that the law is not blind to.

At what lengths will the law go to enforce "marriage blindness"? Can I have a private belief in man-woman exceptionalism as part of a church that chooses not to endorse homo marriages, while accepting a wider society that is "marriage blind"? Perhaps. But in regard to gay marriage I’m convinced that I’ve been given a choice to have my moral vision imposed on others or have a moral vision imposed on me by the force of the law.

When the law imposes a moral vision in regard to the gay marriage issue, the opposing moral vision will be the wrong end of many forms of law that interact with the public far beyond the reach of any two individuals bedroom including hate speech laws, harassment laws, textbooks, tax dollars. In the black civil rights movement when the law pivoted in favor the moral vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., the apparatus of the law and government pivoted to enforce it.

The schools were a major battle ground for enforcing the moral vision of the black civil rights movement. Of course the issue of schools was directly involved in the Civil rights legislation and is not directly involved in the Prop 8 gay marriage debate. Nevertheless, it is valid for the anti-gay marriage movement to raise the topic of schools. For the anti-Prop 8 people to say that the laws to legalizing gay marriage do not mention schools is merely a technicality to the issue.

All children, by law, must attend some sort of school, all pay tax dollars to support public schools, and not all parents have the resources to send their children somewhere other than a public school. It would take another long essay (or set of essays) to get into this in depth, but public schools are heavily invested in promoting a politically correct moral system. That imposition may not be obvious if you fully agree with it, but it's there and it's obvious if you don't agree.

Many schools have become heavy handed "zero tolerance" zones where judiciousness for common sense and age-appropriate punishment can suffer. For example, I care greatly about schools dealing with bully behavior including those who would bully a gay person, but zero tolerance one-size-fits all sledge-hammer on-a-gnat policies are scary and often lopsided in their application. In this Alice and Wonderland, schools have been capable of trying to remove the title of “winner” and “loser” from sporting games, prosecuting young boys with age adult sex offender laws for harassing girls, suspending a child for drawing a gun on a piece of paper, and changing their name to remove Thomas Jefferson from the name of their school by being so concerned that Jefferson owned slaves that they do not recognize the value of what he did contribute to U.S. history. It would not surprise me when various zero-tolerance policies come into effect to expunge all that is not agreeable to the moral vision of the gay marriage advocates in schools.

A consequence of not admitting that they intend to impose a moral vision has meant that the gay marriage movement has been eliding between two elements of it’s rhetoric: A) that it simply wants to expand a limited legal freedom that will impose nothing on outsiders (how is Adam and Steve's getting married going to affect your marriage?) and B) that it sees itself in the tradition of the black civil rights movement wherein the law was completely re-arranged to enforce the black civil rights fundamental moral vision via a whole suite of laws including affirmative action, hate laws, discrimination laws, etc...

The goal to impose a moral vision is also indicated by those who have the gay marriage moral vision who consider it "hate" to not have that vision. This ups the ante beyond saying "I disagree with your belief that man-woman exceptionalism has any legal claim structure of society". The accusation of "hate" is another way of declaring victory in a moral debate without fully admitting that one is in a moral debate . You don’t have to acknowledge the debate if you simply dismiss those who disagree as being haters, like mere barking dogs or mere lunatics being frightened by phantasms. It is the charge of "hate" that most strongly betrays a goal not merely to allow for a moral salad bowl where gay marriage is simply legal, but to force the idea of man-woman exceptionalism out of the public sphere as much as possible with the force of law.

For the gay marriage advocates to fully present their opinions out in the open the need do the following:

A) As Martin Luther King, Jr. unequivocal stated (with a different choice of words, of course) that there were no consequential racial differences, the gay marriage advocates need to declare unequivocally, "This is my moral vision. There are absolutely no consequential/important differences between a homo marriage and a hetero marriage"

B) Instead of accusing the anti-gay marriage as being the only party imposing a morality, the gay marriage movement needs to say "I believe that my moral vision is the correct moral vision to be considered as "fundamental" and want the law to impose my moral vision because I think that my moral vision is right and yours is wrong. I want the apparatus of the law to use every means at its disposal to enforce this moral vision as the law does for every other moral vision that is within the law".

2008-11-09T08:26:00.000-08:00

Here is a letter to the editor of The Atlantic that I sent in back in April 2008 in response to this article in about Britney Spears and her Paparazzi.

--Re: The Britney Show

If Britney can be described as a moth in the night headed toward death by the big bright bug zapper, the paparazzi can be described as helping to drive the moth to the zapper and then making a fine art out of capturing the flames at just the right camera angle.

Britney’s bubble-gum girl next store slut image is perhaps a product of needing of father she never had and of willing to accept any sort of male attention even if it is really bad and exploitative. Like an addict to this attention, she has developed a craving for this nasty and destructive attention, even if she must “Eat it!, Lick it, Snort it! F*ck it!” to get it. As an addict, Brittany simultaneously loathes and craves the exploitative attention of the paparazzi and of the online chat room fans who cluck over her every insane act and who love to see her stardom toppled.

Here, the paparazzi are more than just the vehicles of this miserable attention. The paparazzi are directly contributing to Britney’s insanity as direct actors on the stage of Britney’s drama. They are so violative of the sort of aloneness and privacy that she would need to even begin to sort herself out. When this need asserts itself in her, she rages at what has become a miserable existence and breathes "like a bull” out of fury desperation to be left alone. Of course, as Brittany rages out, she is only ever more fascinating to the paparazzi, who want to capture the next crazy antic.

Instead of dwelling on the macabre idea of profit off of the combustible flames of her self-destruction that they have had a role in creating, the razzi have dwelt on the “art” of this exploitation and speak in almost hushed tones about the sublimity of the art of their craft. If Britney "fulfills her apparent and dies in a fiery car crash”, they will revel in the camera angle and the lighting that they photograph her corpse and may not spend a moment meditating on their role in it all.

If that happens there should be a "righteous outcry against the paparazzi and those who publish their pictures". There should be also be a moment of introspection at our culture that has allowed the paparazzi to become profitable. At this level of patent exploitation, merely saying that "paparazzi exist for the same reason that the stars exist: we want to see their pictures" and being glad when "we are confirmed in our belief that it is better, after all, not to be one of them" is no excuse and no good. Those who revel in seeing Britney in her current condition courtesy of the paparazzi are living out their own complicit form of sickness. --

I’ve become more and more convinced that celebrity obsession is one of the “axis of rot” in our culture along with “fleeting indecency”, slut fashion, and a host of other things.

TMZ, in particular, is a hugely successful paparazzi company with a TV show that makes money off of harassing celebrities. It adds nothing of value to the culture, and only services the voyeurism of people who need the “tear’em down so that I can feel better about my miserable life” aspect of celebrity obsession.

The end of celebrity obsession needs to start with Christians. To the extent that we Christians participate in the culture of celebrity worship, we need to repent of admiration/envy of celebrities as an idolatry that uses humans to medicate holes in the soul that only God can heal.

Let’s take an indefinite fast from media celebrity voyeurism. For those who can’t imagine a complete break with products of the paparazzi, how about starting with a fast from celebrities for lent.

letter to the FCC

2008-11-05T18:21:00.000-08:00

Here is an e-mail I sent to the Kevin J. Miller, Chairman of the FCC

-- I’m writing this to encourage the FCC not to back down on the Supreme Court battle regarding "fleeting" cusswords or nudity. Either the indecency is harmful or it isn't. To split hairs between the "fleeting" and the “not fleeting" is to put the concern for indecency on a slope to irrelevance.

The logic that allows for "fleeting indecency" is based on the idea that a little surprise indecency is harmless and that only a long/endless stream of profanity is a problem. By this logic saying “F*ck” once is only 1/10 as damaging as saying it ten times in a row.

Fleeting indecency does not operate as a “step function”. Part of the power of fleeting indecency is that it is sudden and un-expected. Its power lies in the first instant the indecency violates the boundary, which is as harmful or more than any subsequent stream of indecency that may follow from that instant. The instant that the indecency is brought into the world, the toothpaste is out of the tube and it is already too late to change the channel.

To illustrate the point, it’s like saying that it’s OK for a child to get a fleeting glimpse of a man flashing himself in the park on account of the idea that if he only flashes for a 1/5 of second, it’s only 1/5 as damaging as a full second. To say that one can “change the channel” is like saying that the child can simply close his eyes when presented with the flasher. Fleeting images have power, which is why it is not allowed for commercials to have subliminal messages that are flashed for a fraction of a second on the screen.

It is dishonest for a station to argue that “fleeting indecency” is too hard to catch. Stations have the power to deal with “fleeting indecency” if they are held accountable to do it.

If the debate is over whether decency matters, which is what I’m convinced that it is, then a deeper “worldview surgery” is needed. Despite those intellectuals who would argue that kids only moved by biology or by what their peers are doing, kids are actually affected greatly for better or for worse by the environment that adults uphold around them. Kids benefit from an environment where a certain “moral arithmetic” is upheld.

One needs to be grounded in a certain moral simplicity before one can enter a realm of moral complexity and “creative violence”. Kids who mimic the profanity of adults are not wise, they are only clever, and are not able to comprehend the moral complexity of using profanity as an act of “creative violence”. If one has not arrived at a sense of moral complexity after one has been fully apprenticed in moral simplicity, one’s use of profanity is simply an expression of nihilism not creative violence.

Adults have a collective responsibility to uphold certain pockets of time and space where a certain “moral simplicity” upheld for the benefit of kids and for benefit of people’s moral development with a value for a bedrock of moral simplicity. All adults have this responsibility to uphold these pockets of time and space and all adults are in some way role models. Saying “I’m not a role model” is not an option. This is part of what it means that “it takes a village to raise a child”. It is not OK for adults to have unlimited license to “piss in the pool we swim in” -- to act like jerks in our society where kids may be present and then simply punt responsibility to the parents.

Yes, there need to be pockets of time and space for adults to have full license to be “creatively violent” and have permission to use profanity. But this space is not unlimited. It is also true that parents to have a great responsibility. However, requiring parents to monitor what their children watch and listen to in a day and age that doesn’t care about public decency is to require that parents go to extreme lengths to cloister their kids. No man, nor home, is an island and no home can vacuum seal out the indecency of the culture. To not care about “fleeting indecency” is to help advance what Gil Reevil, the author of Smut, calls an “unchangeable channel”. And the herculean effort required to try to shield one’s kids from the flood of indecency has its own consequences, leaving kids with less room to explore and play in the world.

To address those who would make the comparison of a child hearing profanity on the radio/TV vs. to a child walking in on Mommy and Daddy having sex, this is a disingenuous comparison. It is very different for a child to accidentally bump into the adult world than to have the adult world intrude where kids are because the adults don’t care to begin with. In the former scenario, a boundary is valued and in the latter scenario the boundary is not valued.

As for the First Amendment, the First Amendment clarified a pre-existing moral reality, it did not grant a new right with the authority of the pen. It acknowledged the right that a free people have to speak when they are entrusted with the responsibility to care for the common good. Those who want to argue that it’s their “First Amendment right” to unlimited expression of profanity are using the parchment of the First Amendment as a shield to protect their actions which have no interest in the common good.

It is a reasonable exercise of the common good -- which includes the common good of children -- that the public airwaves have a pocket of time and space from 0600 to 2200 hrs where the value for a certain degree of moral simplicity is required. It is reasonable exercise of the common good to require that outright profanity be prohibited during that time while allowing adult topics to be discussed in a responsible way. --

Instinct Underdogs

2008-08-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

In my exploration of the issue of gay marriage, I want to examine one of the salvos in the debate over gay marriage from those who oppose it: that to expand the definition from being one man one woman to being two people of any gender sets a precedent for further definition expanding later.

Those who defend gay marriage say, as KFI radio talk show host Bill Handel says, "Society draws a line!" For those who defend gay marriage, the concern that expanding the definition of marriage will set a precedent for further definition expanding later is "alarmist" aka absurd/paranoid/kooky. Here at this website with arguments in favor of gay marriage, the author posts this argument,

"Same-sex marriage would start us down a "slippery slope" towards legalized incest, bestial marriage, polygamy and all kinds of other horrible consequences."

And then rebuts it by saying this,

"A classic example of the reductio ad absurdum fallacy, it is calculated to create fear in the mind of anyone hearing the argument. It is, of course, absolutely without any merit based on experience. If the argument were true, wouldn't that have already happened in countries where forms of legalized gay marriage already exist? Wouldn't they have 'slid' towards legalized incest and bestial marriage? The reality is that a form of gay marriage has been legal in Scandinavian countries for over many years, and no such legalization has happened, nor has there been a clamor for it. It's a classic scare tactic - making the end scenario so scary and so horrible that the first step should never be taken. Such are the tactics of the fear and hatemongers.

If concern over the "slippery slope" were the real motive behind this argument, the advocate of this line of reasoning would be equally vocal about the fact that today, even as you read this, convicted murderers, child molesters, known pedophiles, drug pushers, pimps, black market arms dealers, etc., are quite free to marry, and are doing so. Where's the outrage? Of course there isn't any, and that lack of outrage betrays their real motives. This is an anti-gay issue and not a pro marriage issue."

As for this person's argument about child molesters, drug pushers and murderers, our law recognizes a distinction between A) the person who is no longer practicing crime and has paid his debt to society and B) the person who is still committing crime. A person with an established "criminal orientation" belongs in extended or even permanent custody. Perhaps there should be prohibitions against marrying while in jail, but that's something to explore for a different day.

You may believe that expanding the definition of marriage may very well set a precedent for future definition expanding, and that it's OK if it does. What I'm interested in is merely this question. Is it being kooky and unnecessarily paranoid to believe that it will? The paranoid man isn’t always wrong. There are consequences of a having a worldview that appeals to moral intuition and the “emerging consensus” as so many advocates of gay marriage do.

The “emergent consensus” is the collectivized expression of an idea that moral truth is located in our instincts. Atheist thinkers like Sam Harris call this the natural endowment of “moral intuition”. Even for those advocates of gay marriage who are not atheists, the critical force of the movement comes from a worldview that assigns moral weight to a phenomenon of human opinion emergence.

Moral intuition works as a moral “calculus of instinct”: a certain confluence of altruistic instinct, sexual instinct, survival instinct, etc… that rises to the surface at any one time in the life of a person as a “way that makes sense”. This “calculus of instinct" is a “bottom up” moral system that looks to nature as its ultimate author, as nature expresses itself rising up from the well of our instincts.

Those who look to “moral intuition” do not completely trust the instinct calculus of any one particular person -- as the street postmodernist says “Who’s to say?” What they do trust is that cross of section of “a way that makes sense” that is believed by a critical mass of people at any one snap shot of time. It is the emergent consensus expressed as a snap shot of collectivized moral intuition that is esteemed as “times” – the manifest instinct wisdom of the day. With this comes a certain narrative of progress: that the unfolding wisdom of nature is the process of hitherto repressed instincts coming out from under repression. As hidden instincts come out from under repression, humans are lead into the wisdom of their accidental creation.

In order to facilitate this unfolding of hitherto repressed instincts, instincts that repress instincts must be repressed. Instincts are thus divided into A) the instincts that are seen as being able to co-exist in the realm of other instincts B) those instincts that will result in a less maximized diversity of instinct experiences. Those who value the narrative of ever unfolding instinct experience see it as an act of spreading diversity to maximize instinct experience by suppressing the “bad instincts”.

Since there are certain thoughts, expressions and behaviors that are seen as being linked to the “bad instincts”, suppressing these expressions and behaviors with the force of law and taboo is seen as necessary to promote diversity. The desire to express oneself sexually in any manner is generally considered a “good instinct”. Believing in a transcendent moral order in regard to sexuality is considered to be a belief that emanates from bad and regressive, fear based instinct.

The “times” represent a particular increment of progress in the realm of instinct expression over “times previous”, and any opinion on instinct expression that is not considered to be up with the “times” is considered regressive. Social evolution is the advancement of “good” instinct experience and the receding of “bad” instinct experience. Emergent instincts are treated with special priority as they are expressed by new trends, new artists, and youth. By the force of taboo, and by the force of law when possible, these “instinct underdogs” are given “expression privileges” against the “dominant” system.

Values Paradigms

Even those who are “instinct followers” have a hierarchy of instincts that results in them suppressing certain instincts. A heavy dose of instinct suppression is characteristic of any moral system. That which separates the instincts we value and those we don't is our “values paradigm". Unless we are very conscious in the personal construction of our own values paradigms and meta-values paradigms, we will absorb the values paradigm of the culture around us as a certain cultural hypnosis, allowing certain instincts to be expressed and suppressing other instincts without fully knowing it. When the culture’s value paradigm changes we will change with it, and will not remember completely what it was like to have operated in a different paradigm.

There are those in 2008 who, like Bill Handel, are certain that society will always draw the line separating marriages of two people from more than two. Operating with a moral distinction between two person marriages and marriages among more than two people is values paradigm that makes sense to many people who appeal to the emergent consensus and “moral intuition” as a reason to make gay marriage legal. They are convinced that a particular values paradigm of 2008 is a self evident conclusion of moral intuition that will last the ages, and that it is alarmist to suggest that expanding the definition will set a precedent for future definition expanding.

The problem is that the worldview that makes gay marriage OK now is largely based on a “meta” values paradigm of instinct following and instinct progress. While many may hold that there is a line between two person marriage and more-than-two-person marriage as a particular values paradigm, they hold a meta values paradigm that allows for the constant tectonic shift of values paradigms. It is a meta-paradigm that has and will continue to facilitate values paradigm shifts along the vector of “progress” to bring more instinct expression into the fold of normalcy.

To say that societies in 2008 that current have legalized gay marriage do not also have legalized multi-person marriage is to simply say that there is not a critical mass of people ready to give way to a new instinct expression. When enough people are ready to normalize a greater palette of instinct experience with the force of law, broadening the definition of marriage will be the new emerging consensus.

I think that expanding the definition to include polygamy and polyandry and increased normalizing and expression of gay and bisexual behavior is ahead “ahead of what comes next”. From the perspective of those who hold to instincts as the key to moral wisdom, my opinion is a regressive opinion rising from the stinky swamp of bad, backward and bigoted instincts. But my opinion is drawn from the observing the “envelope pushing” of our sexual culture already fully underway in 2008 that is occurring as an expression of a worldview that holds that any sexual distinction that puts one expression in a hierarchy of meaning or value above another is fundamentally bigoted. This worldview has a narrative that society needs to evolve incrementally towards “superflat” sexual expression as the expungement of any significant moral distinction between one sexual behavior over another. It is from this goal of having superflat sexual expression that a society is measured according to its progress, with societies with more flattened sexual hierarchies being farther along.

2008-08-16T13:03:00.001-07:00

Here is a link to Brad Hightower's 21st Century Reformation where I comment on Adam and Eve and the "sin before the sin"

2008-07-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

The issue of gay marriage is newer ground for me to explore and codify ideas.

Here a couple of links to well reasoned arguments

Pro and Against

In the fray

2008-07-21T10:39:00.000-07:00

I have inserted myself here into a debate about modesty in church on Facebook.

An Examination of Gay Marriage

2008-07-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

This represents my current thinking on the incredibly controversial topic of gay marriage.

Those who are in favor of gay marriage are intensely concerned about people operating out of knee-jerk hatred and bigotry toward homosexuals. There is the knee-jerk fear/hatred of gay people to be concerned about. There is also a subtler bigotry in believing that all people who have an opinion in favor of limiting marriage to man-woman are bigots. There is a concern that an argument in favor of limiting marriage will encourage bigotry for the sheer fact that it is an argument of the same conclusion as those with bigoted tendencies. I am convinced that the bigotry or lack thereof of an argument on this loaded topic of gay marriage needs to be evaluated more as a consequence of the substance than the conclusion. It is for this reason that both sides of the fence on this topic need to present arguments that are as thorough and honest as they can be.

There are many deaf people want to believe that they are "differently-abled" and not handicapped. This is a very human tendency, to want to make the best of things, to see things in the most positive light. This tendency, as understandable as it is, cannot be allowed to do injustice to the truth; there is something lacking in being deaf. Even as there is a richness to life one can experience despite ones deafness and maybe even somewhat because of one’s deafness, being deaf is at the end of the day a handicap.

There is an aspect of human experience that is only available across the experience of male and female. There is something experience of the otherness of the other sex that cannot be duplicated. Male to male and female to female will not do even if it is "butch to femme". At the end of the day it is a sexual handicap. As Dennis Prager has said, there is an element of lack, of loss of tragedy to a homosexual relationship, and parents who learn that their child is gay have a right to process a certain sadness.

Those who feel like a woman in a man's body's and vice versa have a disorder, that by definition is not the best expression of nature. Being gay is sometimes a result of having a full blown version of this disorder or it is a result of having a lesser version of a gender disorder. Gay men have a more a female orientation to their brains than straight men and lesbian women have a more masculine orientation of their brains than straight women.

Those who are gay/gender disordered have a balance of tendencies that is out of sinc with their bodies and the experiences that the body is best designed for. Penises are designed to fit into vaginas and it is a tragedy when they don't. A baby is best brought into the world from the womb of a woman who is married to a committed man. From the perspective of the best and most naturally ideal expression of sexuality, a gay union is a tragedy of nature and a tragedy of choices, even as a gay committed monogamous union can be fulfilling and be better than gay promiscuity, and may be the best choice that a gay person can make with his/her life.

There is an aspect of being heterosexual that is a mere gift of nature that endows one with the ability to be horny around the opposite sex. Being heterosexual does not make one a responsible husband or wife. A person needs to consummate his/her sexuality with good choices. It is this dimension of choice that gives sexuality a fluid aspect to it that can be affected by society and/traumatic circumstances.

Sexuality in men and women can be understood as an apportionment of lesser and dominant tendencies. Men have masculinity as a dominant tendency and femininity as a lesser tendency. Men bond with women as a way to live out a part of their humanity (what is described as an anime) vicariously through the women that they are attracted to. The reverse is true for women.

The full and healthy expression of one’s tendencies, dominant and lesser, is found in a committed monogamous covenanted relationship with the opposite sex. There is natural raw material for this, but the natural raw material for this is not enough; it must be consummated by choices. The marriage ceremony is a ceremony of ones choices, as are other ceremonies that indicate rites of passage.

Under particular stresses, traumas and/or cultural pressures, men and women can turn away from a wholesome expression of their dominant tendencies and even turn from the dominant tendencies themselves. There are gay people who have felt gay and/or gender disoriented from as early as they can remember. There are people who act out in homosexual ways as a result of trauma. I have met both.

Those who do not recognize any dimension of choice to one's sexuality are of the philosophical bent that there is no real "free will" to begin with, that we are conduits of much larger natural forces. This thinking is the basis for promiscuous and adulterous behavior by people who say "it happened" and not "I chose to act". This thinking undermines the integrity of any marriage, whether gay or hetero.

There is a value to the ideal, to recognizing a hierarchy that places one human expression above another. To honor the ideal is not merely to honor the natural gift of having hetero tendencies; it is to also honor a particular set of choices within the dimension of choice that is a component of sexuality. Honoring the ideal by giving a special significance to a male-female union is not by any means a complete bulwark against any particular person’s choices to the contrary. Nevertheless, it is an important component of a society’s expression of a value system toward the goal that men and women bond in covenanted monogamous relationships.

And yes, there are hetero unions that do not bear children, that must adopt or use science to assist in becoming pregnant. One could argue that these unions are no more or less ideal than a gay couple adopting. This line of thinking is making a false equality that is based on a failure to recognize any ideal. Hetero unions with obstacles in having and/or bearing children are closer to an ideal that is expressed both in biology and choice. Of course it is true that a particular gay couple may have more to offer in certain areas than a particular a straight couple. The ideal is based though on this generality: a man and woman experience a unique richness in each other's otherness and so too does a child benefit from this richness, regardless of how "naturally" the child came to be in the relationship. Honoring the ideal is something that needs to be done by paying a cost.

There are understandable benefits that two committed people of the same sex can gain by acquiring the legal priveleges that now included in the legal package of a man-woman "marriage". However, our society needs a place to be able to acknowledge that there is a hierarchy of value the places a man-woman union at the top. It is true that a loving gay couple will be better parents than an abusive/neglectful hetero couple and may be better than a lot of non-ideal family-raising environments. Nevertheless, adoption agencies should have the right to give preference to man-woman unions. Our society needs to be legally protected from those who would advance the charge of "discrimination" for those who would use the legal equality of a gay marriage to demand that a gay marriage be treated as %100 equal in every dimension. Protecting those who would honor the hierarchy of value from the charge of discrimination requires that a man-woman marriage be given some sort of legal distinction from a gay marriage, even if it is a very slight legal distinction.

The problem with suggesting this is that the gay movement sees itself as a civil rights movement that sees itself in the tradition of black civil rights, where the legality of gay marriage is merely the legal wing of a moral, cultural and philosophical agenda. For much of the current movement to legalize gay marriage, the goal is not merely a legal triumph. It is an attempt to advance a moral system that understands it as being bigoted not to regard gay marriage as being every inch as ideal as a hetero marriage, only different. In other words, the force of opinion that is striving to make gay marriage legally equal to hetero marriage is the same force that is striving to make it 100% morally equal. -- and therefore morally repugnant to believe that there is a hierarchy of value placing a hetero marriage above a homo marriage.

Dennis Prager has also discussed a larger "meta-civil rights" agenda at work to deconstruct the very idea of gender, to thoroughly divorce gender from biological sexuality (“meta-civil-rights” is my term). Not all, but many of those who are interested in gay marriage are not interested so much in "marriage" as they are interested in advancing all forms of poly-gender expression, and gay marriage is merely the cause that has incremental practical value for the moment. Later on, the "times" will change and a new envelope of progress will be pushed.

It is this force of the gay marriage movement's deeper moral agenda that will operate as a cultural force to push that margin of flexibility that exists in human sexuality to in the direction of increased homosexual and bisexual expression. That is why I think it is misleading to say that studies have shown that kids do not have a greater tendency to be gay when they are raised by gay parents. In this day and age our society is not yet dominated with gayness. Straight kids raised by a gay couple in 2008 will still have a society to cross-reference their sexuality with that is still dominated by hetero-sexuality (even if it is promiscuous). With enough culture force, it is possible for societies to be dominated with normative gay behavior and pederasty "above the surface", such as the ancient Greeks and Celts. It is also possible for societies to have a lot of normative gayness and pederasty "on the down low".

Some Visual Aids

2008-07-05T07:10:00.002-07:00

I was asked to create a Cartesian diagram of my three axis of a worldview that I described in my last post, so here it is.

As I explained in my last post, a worldview/belief system operates in three inter-related axis in three dimensions. The Y axis is the belief's relationship to what is ultimately true in the universe. The Z axis represents the manner in which a belief takes what is ultimately true and uses it to organize past present and future into a meta-narrative. The X axis is the ethical system, the one-human-to-another code of behavior that results from the Y and Z axis.

As I was thinking of more visuals, I thought of my examination of the philosophical archetypes of Male and Female that I have referred to my most recent post and in my “but it’s natural” post. I referred to the idea of the Female as that which represents mystery, liminality and fecundity; and the Male as that which represents truth, order and the attempt to reify truth and order. These ideas of Male and Female pop up in Western philosophy and feminist criticism. Male and Female are not limited in their expression exclusively to actual men and women respectively, but the philosophical archetypes are not totally unrelated to certain qualities/tendencies of men and women.

The Chinese philosophical archetypes of Male and Female are conceived of within the idea of Yin and Yang forces/realities, where Yang is the Male aggressive force and Yin is the Female attractive force. Like the “Western” Male/Female dichotomy, Yin and Yang are not limited to the exclusive province of actual women and men, respectively. Nevertheless there is some relationship of Yin and Yang to actual men and women, as a generalization of certain sex qualities/tendencies.

It occurred to me that the Western Male Female philosophical archetypes should have their own special symbol as does the Yin/Yang symbol. Here is the beautiful Yin and Yang beautiful symbol that everyone has seen:

And here is a symbol for the Western Male Female philosophical archetype that I came up with. It is, admittedly, not nearly as cool as the Asian one, but it gets the point across.

The white space and the circle shape is the mystery, liminality and fecundity of the Female. Of course the Red is the truth, order and reification of the Male. The Male still retains some of its circular shape since it originated in the Female. Both complete each other. The Male is advancing into the Female but never completely overcomes it.

(Hey, If you can come up with a better symbol for the Western Male/Female philosophical archetypes, go for it.)

Popular Science, Evolutionary Nihilism and Gender Feminist PC

2008-06-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

The Problem of Popular Science

When one is presenting a series of facts about humans, especially about human sexuality and gender, one cannot avoid also presenting a system of beliefs and values about the topic. Of all scientific topics, the topic of human sexuality is one where having a bias toward a particular value system is impossible to avoid. It does not mean that there are not facts. The bias lies in which facts are presented, which aren't and how the whole presentation of the facts is "editorialized" into conclusions.

In the same way, a newspaper cannot fully hide its editorial opinion; it is evident in the news it chooses to cover and not cover and the angle and perspective with which it covers the news. As with any "news" facts, scientific facts are pixels on the screen that together end up being used to construct someones over-arching view of life. This is especially true when the facts are "editorialized" into conclusions. Popular science is the editorializing of scientific facts into conclusions and speculations for mass consumption. Popular science is popular precisely because it invites lay people to place themselves in the realm of science by bringing science alongside their lives and imaginations.

A popular science book invariably paints pictures of values and beliefs from the facts presented. The more editorialized the popular science is the more this is true. A newspapers/magazine article about a popular science conclusion from a book all the more clearly displays the values and beliefs about that popular science conclusion. This is a consequence of condensing the facts and conclusions from a book into the space of an article, wherein magazines and newspapers must primarily highlight the conclusion while touching on the facts. And when a magazine, like The Week, is summarizing another magazine/newspaper in a tabloid style, the raw display of the values and beliefs of the popular science in question is even more enhanced and can even be distorted.

In the realm of popular science, especially where popular science conclusions about human sexuality and gender are summarized in book conclusions and in newspaper and magazine articles, one can no more avoid presenting a value system when presenting scientific facts about human sexuality than Charles Barkley can avoid being a role model. Many scientists who are quoted in the press and who write books for mass consumption like to present themselves as merely offering the "facts". The are not. They are "fact artists" who allow their beliefs and values to shape how they view the facts and how they present the facts. When they begin to draw conclusions about the facts, they are "opinion artists". Being a "fact artist"/"opinion artist" is not a bad thing, since every writer is one. The problem lies in not admitting that one is neck deep in presenting a value system.

The problem of Atheism

With that in mind, allow me to discuss atheism. The best summation of atheism was stated by Simon Winchester, a popular author, whom I heard in passing while watching TV and that I can't now find in the Internet so I must paraphrase it (ARRRG!). He said something to the effect that life though ultimately meaningless, is a richly rewarding journey. Atheism is, by definition, a belief in a certain ultimate nihilism about the ultimate purpose of life. Atheists like to believe that they can nevertheless construct a sense of meaning for themselves. The problem is that the ultimate nihilism that an atheist has sits atop his optimistic atheist's belief like stagnant rain water sits on a tin roof – it finds a way to leak in.

Here is how it leaks in. Beliefs exist in three dimensions, along three axis. The vertical axis of a belief system is that aspect of a belief which is rooted in what is ultimately true and real about the universe. The Longitudinal axis of a belief is the teleological aspect that interprets reality through time. The Horizontal axis of a belief is that axis which interprets the vertical and longitudinal axis for the purpose of operating ethically from one to another in the here-and-now.

The ultimate nihilism of atheism on the vertical axis finds its way into the life of an atheist and into the lives of those he influences by way of the longitudinal axis. Specifically, an atheist's nihilism about life's ultimate purpose becomes an atheist's nihilism about our origins and about where we have developed from those origins. This atheistic nihilism is presented in its clearest and rawest form in the popular science narratives regarding human evolution. The evolutionary nihilism that derives from the ultimate nihilism of atheism is the belief that humans are ultimately the product of accidental and amoral raw natural forces colliding into each other – the need to reproduce being one of them – with consequences beautiful, fun and tragic and ridiculous.

It is in a narrative of history that the ultimate nihilism of atheism is editorialized into this conclusion: we are the beautiful and tragic confluence of colliding natural forces far beyond our control – forces that were there before us and will continue after we're gone and over which we have little or no mastery. For an evolutionary nihilist, there is no facet of human reality that cannot be fully explained by these raw confluence of impersonal, amoral natural forces.

Evolutionary nihilism and PC/Gender Feminism

From this evolutionary nihilism, an ethical system arises as a horizontal axis: we humans are bound to contain and the harness the natural forces that operate through us and within us for our maximum peace and harmony. The Id, especially the intuitive, artistic and sexual id that manifests itself individually and collectively is the seat of maximum wisdom and harmony, and this Id needs to be experienced with minimum inhibition.

The greatest threat to this containment, harmony and equilibrium is male aggression, especially male aggression in the realm of moral violence. From the perspective of a nihilist evolution, there is no place to contain a transcendent idea of what is "right" that justifies any such violence/aggression/assertion. A man who thinks that he is right is merely projecting his raw sexual id and inflating it into a means to subjugate others.

It is the Gender Feminists who wish to advance women by deconstructing manhood. For PC/Gender Feminist belief, the history of evolution contains an ethical lesson that humans must acquiesce to the Female – the wisdom of the Id and to the fluidity of what is "correct" where in the collective id continually recalibrates the calculus of ethical harmony ("times change"). The collective id is the wisdom of evolution in motion through the generations.

The Proctologists view of reality

Dennis Prager describes the "proctologists view of reality" when someone is only seeing the worst aspect of something to the exclusion of seeing the whole. It is OK to take a protologists view when A) one is fully conscious that one is excluding other aspects of reality and B) when one has a particular, limited need to exclude those aspects of reality from the analysis and C) when one up front with one's readers about this. For one to take a proctologists view and to fail at A), B) and C) is to present a jaundiced and nihilistic view.

The June 27, 2008 Issue of The Week

With all of that said, there are two editorialized presentations of popular science that came out in this weeks The Week magazine – two tabloid caffeinated powershots of evolutionary nihilism – wherein the worldview begs to be exposed and deconstructed. The proctologists view of reality is also apparent if you have the worldview to see it.

First there was the article on page 22 entitled "How to make fools of men" about Belgian researchers who discussed men's responses to seeing women in bikinis. The Week magazine's article was based on this livescience.com article

Here is The Week magazines's article:

"Just seeing a woman in a bikini so discombobulates men that their judgement is impaired, leading them to make foolish decisions…"

"so when men are sexually stimulated but not rewarded with sex, researchers said, men crave an alternative reward. The findings explain why so many advertisers use photos of sexy women…".

Of course there is a serious kernel of truth to this article. It is a bit comical that it takes a "scientific findings" to verify this. The problem is that the article does not make a distinction between what men have the potential for and what many men actually do. Men have the potential to see that they are being manipulated and operate with a certain mastery over what they are being presented with. It is this consciousness potential that makes a male human a man. This article though, is imbued with an evolutionary nihilism that makes no distinction between that aspect of a man that is animal and that aspect of a man that transcends what is animal.

So the article is true about men when looked at from a primal facet of men's nature. And since many men don't transcend their base nature, many men are predictably discombobulated by bikinis.

The evolutionary nihilism lies in not acknowledging the other facets of a man's nature. This animalistic determinism leads to a second moral problem with the article. The article is very matter of fact in stating that advertisers use sexy women to draw men to seek an alternative reward by buy their products. Many sexy women, of course, use their sex appeal to get men to find an "alternative reward" by doing something the women want. From the perspective of an evolutionary nihilist, harnessing this primal aspect of men's nature is allowed in a moral paradigm that seeks the containment of natural forces. Men get a certain pleasure from being "discombobulated", women get a certain pleasure from the power to discombobulate and advertisers get to sell their products. From an evolutionary nihilist perspective, all parties involved are getting their basic desires so the cost benefit outweighs any concerns about men's judgement being discombobulated.

It is only in believing that male human animals are summoned to being men – in a way that transcends being an animal – that the willful effort to manipulate their base nature to "discombobulate" them is a moral problem.

Then there is the "Author of the week" article on page 25 about Faye Flam's book The Score which was reviewed here in Salon.com

"… Men, Flam says, "are more likely to get completely frozen out of reproduction" so they "chase after sex" more frantically and feel "more evolutionary pressure than women to stand out from the crowd." That explains why women exhibit "a little more common sense" when it comes to drinking, driving, weapons use, and other high risk activities."

The article then discusses how Flam believes that hunting was less important in ancient tribal societies than previously thought and how women weren't dependent on men for survival and how the pickiness of women has a long history. From there the article discusses how Flam believes that "men shouldn't curse their fate" because animal species capable of choosing their sex choose to be male to avoid parenting responsibilities since "everyone wants to do less work...it's a universal laziness".

Again, from an evolutionary nihilists perspective on male nature, the only purpose and drive for being male is to reproduce. In this article and in Flam's world, men are not recognized as having identity needs that transcend these base desires in any way. Male aggression is reduced to the expression of mere sexual anxiety, which makes men prone to bad judgement like imbalanced tires are prone to tread problems. Flam does not recognize men has having any meaningful “work” other than to copulate and live out their sexual anxieties.

The women, lacking this anxiety are endowed with the greater ballast of common sense. It is the women and their child bearing who are given “more work”. With the consolation that everyone is inclined to laziness, Flam believes that women are, in fact, less lazy on account of their being busier with naturally endowed duties. She stands on her analysis to counsel modern men, who might otherwise feel slighted by her analysis that they should be simply glad that they have less work.

Of course, If anyone were to take this seriously it would also grant “guilt trip” rights to women, “See you men have it easy! You should be grateful that we, the more even keeled sex endowed with more natural responsibilities are here to pick up the slack.” Giving herself the privilege to apply her science into the world of modern gender, Flam confers on women the status of being more productive creatures who have been compelled by nature out of their laziness into what is a more noble existence than men.

All this is fine if you are an evolutionary nihilist who doesn't believe that that is any essence or substance to being human than being merely human animals. If men have a primal laziness, is that the sum total of manhood vis-à-vis women? Aggression for the sake of a moral, intellectual and artistic reality beyond sexual anxiety does not factor into this analysis because the evolutionary nihilism of this article does not recognize that these realities exist. If these realities are allowed to exist, men's aggression -- taken as a whole reality and not merely as a primal reality-- may actually make them less lazy in the pursuit of these realities. Even the primal laziness of men itself may actually make them ultimately more productive in certain ways, seeking to invent easier ways to do things.

There is nothing in Flam that even hints at anything that is uniquely noble in men. This fits hand in glove with a “gender feminism” that, for a political agenda, is disinclined to acknowledge any gender differences unless the discussion frames women as being better. As I have discussed in other writings, my drawing attention to this lack is not for the purpose of giving men big heads. Rather it is for the purpose of confronting women to deal with men as they actually are. As I’ve said before, male bashing is relationship bashing, even when the male bashing is subtle and backhanded.

Flam owes it to modern men and women to be more aware of the feminism that bridges the gap between her narrow scientific analysis of the past and her pontificating on the now. Until then, the evolutionary nihilism of popular science that has been condensed into these glance-able articles helps to reinforce a proctologists view of male nature that serves the interests of Gender Feminists and their PC fellow travelers.

More aphorisms

2008-05-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

Here are some more of my aphorisms. Some of them are "thesis embryos" that I want to develop later.

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Democracy is a civic matrix for dialogue

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Intellectual freedom requires the permission to be certain and uncertain simultaneously

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If believing an idea will make you a better person, then for you it is true.

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If you lend a friend money, treat it as though you were giving him a gift. If he pays you back, be pleasantly surprised.

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The one who is alone in his beliefs is not always wrong.

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An idea must be allowed to be before it can be constructively deconstructed.

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Any philosopher who claims to have the key to how ultimate knowledge is either known or not known is a high priest and prophet of his own religion.

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It is possible to use Scripture to spin godless, empty god-talk

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It is often better to be alone imagining the company of good people than to be in the actual company of bad people

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Being precise is a large part of being sensitive

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“Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words only when necessary” – St. Francis

“Speak the Scripture at all times, quote it verbatim only when necessary” – Greg Wertime

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If you’re presenting an idea at a meeting, you must do at least one of these three things to avoid criticism from me: 1) express gratitude for what is already being done 2) present an idea that has been thought through 3) be willing to do it yourself

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Loving others and doing what is right: these are things that are both simple in essence yet complex in execution.

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There is a pleasurable side to seriousness and a serious side to pleasure

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The common idea of efficiency is a method that results in a task being completed more quickly. My idea of efficiency is a method that allows me to perform a task in a way that is peaceful and friendly to my inner life.

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There are leaders and there are blusterers. The problem is that those who are sheep can’t tell the difference.

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Overly optimistic people are as much an enemy of true joy as overly pessimistic people

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People who believe that there is no purpose, ultimately, to life, will nevertheless construct a sense of purpose out of the purposelessness and hold to that sense of purpose fiercely.

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People whose strength of will is not matched by a strength of competence are a burden to work with

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Social boundaries contain an element of folly and an element of wisdom

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It is more intellectually difficult to defend the wisdom of a social boundary than it is to intellectually attack the folly of a social boundary.

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Those who are twisted enough to claim that the Holocaust did not happen are twisted enough to be glad deep down that it did happen

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He who says, “What can you do?” will probably do nothing and encourage others to do the same.

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He who says, “Who’s to say?” as a rhetorical question is attempting to pass off his ignorance and lack of curiosity as enlightenment

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Though I may use the ideas of quantum physics and relativity to philosophically deconstruct the “is-ness” of matter, I must still attend to the bruise on my shin when I bang it on the coffee table.

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Much knowledge is gathered like wheat for wheat silos. It is the skill of a great teacher to make a biscuit out of it to be digested and enjoyed.

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It is a teacher’s duty to try to make the material being taught as interesting and as relevant as possible. It is the students’ duty to persevere during the times when making the material stimulating is not possible.

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Sexual expression is barbaric when lacking warmth, thought, artfulness and restraint.

Love your neighbor with all your heart soul mind and strength

2008-03-23T12:39:00.001-07:00

In Matthew 22:37-40, Jesus teaches us,

(NIV) "37 … 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

This has sometimes been called the "Shamah".

From time to time, I like to discuss religion and other related topics with a hard-core atheist beatnik named Michael who likes to prowl Old Town Pasadena. One day we were discussing the Shamah, and Michael said that he thought that the verse concerning loving one's neighbor as oneself allowed for a narcissistic interpretation. He asked about the child molester who interprets the verse as a license to pleasure a child as he pleasures himself.

Michael's critique is ridiculous, but it raises interesting questions about the verse that I want to explore. The passage is based on the premise that we all, on some level, pursue our own self-interest with all of our heart soul mind and strength, and we all know it. Since the passage begins with the command to love God, I want to examine the command to love God from the perspective of our self-interest, which will bring light to what the passage means when it commands us to love ones neighbor as oneself. As I will attempt to explain, there are many facets of what it means to operate with the force of “all our heart, soul, mind and strength”.

We are to operate in an enlightened self-interest with respect to God, pursing God with all of heart, soul, mind and strength. It is casting our full self-interest onto God, giving him final authority, that we succeed in loving God and placing faith in him. We naturally pursue our own self-interest as we perceive it with a forceful investment of heart, soul, mind, cunning and strength. It takes an exceedingly extra application of our resources to consciously redirect those onto God in a relationship with Him, and it is this conscious redirection of our self-interest away from our attempts at Godless self-management that will take all of our heart soul mind and strength. It is when we succeed in connecting to God that we will actually operate in what is truly our self interest in the long run – thereby advancing our enlightened self-interest.

Now, in examining “Love your neighbor as yourself”. There is an aspect of this that is patently obvious – we all pursue our self interest with great force, whether we are doing it in a Godly way or not. The verse is intended to help us call attention to what we all know that we do and is calling us to invest the exceedingly greater investment of our resources to pursue the self-interest of others with the same degree of force that we apply to the advancement of our own self-interest. It is intended to jar us out of our self-evident selfishness.

Now if you only read the second verse and did not place it hierarchically under the first and did properly contextualize it with the rest of Scripture, you could twist it into pursing the ungodly self-interest of others with the same force as you pursue it for yourself. If you were really perverted, you could twist it even further into conflating pleasure with self-interest and therefore should please others as you do yourself. And if you were really, really perverted, you could twist it even further into the idea that you were being called to give other’s pleasure in the same manner that you give yourself pleasure – and on your terms. Needless to say, you would need to twist the verse quite a bit to use it to justify child molestation.

So lets untwist the verse to what it really means, placing it properly in hierarchy under the first – it means to pursue the Godly self-interest of others with the same force that you pursue your own Godly self-interest, employing all of your heart, soul, mind and strength in the endeavor. Now there is another pitfall in understanding the Shamah – far more subtle that the molester ---- one that Christians are more prone to fall into. It is the idea that the particular thread of God’s ministry to oneself is necessarily the exact same thread of ministry that God has intended for another person.

With this fallacy, one interprets the second half of the Shamah that we are to pursue the Godly self-interest of others employing the same ministry strategies, ideas, vocabulary, timing that were successful in our own discipleship. In fact, there is a great gap that we must cross to get from advancing our own Godly self-interest to advancing the Godly self-interest of another person with the same force and effectiveness. We must come out from the poverty in our understanding of another person, understanding that particular person's unique background, experiences and needs – and seeking to unravel the mystery of what God’s doing in that person – and in the culture/cultures that they belong to. It is overcoming this poverty of understanding that the Shamah places an often overlooked claim on our resources --- we are to love our neighbor with all of our heart soul mind and strength. Specifically, we are to employ the full force of our resources to understand and participate in God’s unique thread of ministry to that person and to the environment that person is operating in.

But it's natural

2008-02-17T09:45:00.000-08:00

This past week, I’ve been composing another response to an objection to my call to modesty that I make in A Crisis of Modesty in the Evangelical Church , which is organized around a long series of objections that have come from fellow Christians. Soon, I am going to post an updated version of a Crisis of Modesty in the Evangelical Church with this response added along with a couple of other things added.

“But sexual desire is natural”

The battle for “natural” is a thread that runs through this whole discussion on modesty.

For someone to state that a person’s behavior is “natural” is for that person to offer their moral philosophy without admitting it. In the realm of human behavior, “natural” is a word that people use to assign an idea of good to something but they don’t want to admit their complicity in making a statement of faith or value. Instead, one calls it “natural” in order to give the idea that something else outside of his/her own value judgment, has imbued it with goodness, inevitability and necessary for instantiation. If something is “natural” it is therefore immoral and/or impossible not to have, and not having it violates our innate human design, producing unhappiness and conflict.

Depending on ones metaphysical understanding, “natural” can mean a vast array of things. Depending on how one looks at “natural”, even technology can be natural outworking of humanity. If one is saying, “Sexual desire is natural” as an objection to this criticism of public sexual tease and titillation, the idea of “natural” being defended is that lust is good or at least thoroughly inevitable human reality. Here, A) the desire on the part of men to look is natural and B) the desire of women to show is “natural” and that any outworking of A) and B) in fashion trends is therefore a natural as a good and/or inevitable and unstoppable thing.

As I mentioned earlier in this pamphlet, street postmodernists do not believe that we have an eternal self that is accountable to God’s claims on our sexuality. Rather, they have a Freudian idea that our authentic self is the Id that needs to come out from under the attempts to suppress and repress it. This Freudian idea operates in what can be described as a street postmodernist “reduction sauce” that has reduced many 20th century philosophies – ranging from Freud to Positivism to Deconstruction to Feminism to Marxism and Critical Theory— to a fundamental worship of nature, as nature expresses itself through the id, individually and collectively.

Street postmodernists do not worship the Id/Nature as a traditional deity that provides a path to eternal life of the soul. However, they do elevate the Id/Nature as the path to maximum wisdom and happiness in this short life that we have on earth. The metaphysical idea behind this is that Nature was “impregnated” with the fortuitous accident of circumstances to produce human experience as a reality that operates thoroughly outside of any higher Divine law. Nature—as nature is expressed through the unfolding of human desire via our DNA— is the path to the wisdom of our accidental creation. The role of humans is to sublimate the inclinations of our ego and super-ego that would get in the way of the id’s wisdom.

In all that is mysterious, unknowable and fecund, the Female takes priority as the seat of ultimate wisdom, as the unchanging fulcrum on which all weak and transitory “phallic” ideas of truth perish. This fulcrum is what the deconstructionist philosopher Derrida referred to as the “Hymen” as a metaphor borrowed from female genitalia. This is part of the idea that the Female, as the pulsating motion of mystery and nature, operates beyond the realm of any higher law.

For street postmodernists, the Female is the source of wisdom, and the Id of actual females is understood as having special “priestess” power to channel wisdom of the Id. Maleness, as it is defined philosophically as the quest for truth and the reification of law, is seen as obtrusive to the wisdom of the Female and must be suppressed as a force in the collective consciousness to make way for the Id. Actual men must give up the Male find redemption as the dutiful servant of the Female. Men can organize their aggression not around the Male but around the worship of the Female via a machismo, a male aggression that is relegated to performance and spectacle and is denuded of moral authority.

As a topless pantheistic tribe has a more communal and less private experience of female sexuality to complement its theology of Nature/goddesses, so too does a street postmodernist society have a public, communal experience of female sexuality that compliments the street postmodernist metaphysical understanding of the Female. In street postmodernist society, the awe of the Female must over-ride the Male, so sexuality of females is harnessed subjugate and envelope the Maleness of men in a gauzy haze of disposable sexual thrill and pseudo-validation.

Complementing the visual subjugation of men, Street postmodernism is compelled to silence any assertion of the Male by saying “who’s to say” which means “who are you the lone individual to say?” Though it may seem counterintuitive, this is fruit from the same intellectual tree as women who declare “I’m always right!” as the basis of their relationships with men. Both assertions are appeals to the wisdom of the Id. It is these ideas of the Male as being anything but a source of gentle dominion that have characterized Feminism and have characterized the Politically Correct Street postmodernism that has applied feminism in the realm of social taboos and relationships.

In an effort to not be legalistic, which can be defined as a wooden and inept attempt to apply the Male, many Christians have syncretized Christianity with street postmodernism’s elevation of the Female. The problem with this approach to confronting legalism is that it Christians are actually syncretizing a form of Id-worshipping pantheism to their Christianity. It is this street postmodernist Id-worshipping pantheism that makes claims on what is “natural” that are in direct contradiction to what Scripture defines as natural.

It is “New Testament 101” to say that Paul discusses our old man and our new man, the former being our self that is in bondage to sin and the latter being are true authentic self in Christ (… it is not me but sin within me…). Encapsulated in this passage is Scriptures organization of “natural” into what is “archnatural”/unfallen and what is sinful/fallen.
For a Christian to employ a Street postmodernist idea of “natural” is to flatten the hierarchy of old man and new man, lowering the status of what Scripture says is archnatural and raising the status of what Scripture says is sin.

When Jesus says in John that we are to “worship in Spirit and in Truth” Jesus is recognizing that what we consider to be deeply and fundamentally true will be what we worship. Jesus’ call to “worship and Spirit and in Truth” is a claim that Jesus makes on our efforts to understand what is true, particularly in those realms of understanding that intersect with our feelings. To fulfill Jesus claim on our hearts and minds, we must take all of our feelings captive to see how we are justifying them, and examine those justifications carefully in the light of Scripture.

Dealing with the anatomy of Godly and ungodly sexual desire would take a much longer essay. Suffice to say that there is a form of sexual desire that is consistent with God’s claim on our hearts. It is the nature of the cut-to the core intensity of sexual desire as God has designed it that it is idolatrous if it is not submitted to God. No fleeting feeling of horniness is to escape our scrutiny because every feeling carries a justification with it, and with every justification comes a larger system of belief that the justification appeals to. Every feeling is connected to a larger thought system as mushrooms on the ground are connected to the rhizome underneath.

It is a pastor’s role to judiciously and carefully employ the Male, which in the context of Scripture is the truth of Scripture, as a shepherd uses the staff to guide sheep. It is street postmodernism that seeks to employ the idea of “natural” as it defines “natural” within its metaphysic to elevate the Female and emasculate the Male from the pastor. In regard to modesty, many Christians have allowed themselves to employ street postmodernist ideas to confront modesty legalism. The consequence of Christians defending women from modesty legalism in this manner is that they have also defended street postmodernism. In doing so, many Christians have defended the culture of disposable sexual experience and have introduced a doctrinal gangrene into their Christianity.

The Porn Moralists

2008-01-20T09:35:00.000-08:00

A porn sight found The Naked Smoke post and tried to mock it with a post-rational porn collage with my name thrown in. If you're the site you know who you are. Hi, it's me Greg.

In my post on Morality and Ethics, I defined a moral system as a belief system of values that flows from a particular metaphysical understanding. With that in mind, for the porn nihilists who want to label me a Christian moralist, it is important to remember that they too are trying to advance a moral system.

The porn nihilist says it's no big deal" to porn the way a drug addict says that his drug is "no big deal". Porn, like drugs to the junkie, is a very big deal and those who traffic in it need their porn fixes. They not only need it, they believe that the craving for it is "natural/primal", defending it as part of their innate design. Porn nihilists will use the language of "liberation" to defend their access to porn, thereby claiming porn as a right of design and a moral freedom.

If you notice what I wrote regarding Larry Flint, I am critical of any defense of porn that is not self-limiting to boundaries where it is out of public right of way. Being criticized for this position by porn nihilists is an indication that they want it to be given public right of way. To advance their metaphysic and the value system that flows out of it, porn nihilists want the right to harness the visual power sex to operate as a sort of "porn evangelism".

So what, exacly, are they evangelizing? As nihilists, they believe that there is no higher meaning to life than to experience "hedons" as they are defined as valueless units of pleasure. From this point of metaphysical understanding, they flatten all metaphysical and moral questions into a "superflat" realm (the term superflat was coined by Japanese philosopher Murakami to describe the flattening of high and low art hierarchies). Pop-culture is the theater of superflat moral, metaphysical spiritual reality, and porn is just one corner of it. In this realm, joy is not possible, since joy by definition is the union of pleasure and meaning. The only pleasure possible is what the French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard described as a nihilistic state of delirium.

The porn nihilist lives in a Beaudrillardian delirium of sex hedons, walking backward into the physical, emotional and spiritual costs of disposable sex, and only reckoning with those costs when forced to by tragic circumstance. Seeking maximum sex hedons is the porn nihilists' only purpose that is left standing after all other ideas of meaning have been rejected and deconstructed.

Enforcing their nihilistic metaphysic, the porn nihilist feeds his latent need for meaning and purpose by finding meaning in the forceful rejection of any claim to higher purpose, something I discussed in my very first post, My lust makes the world go 'round. As the latent need for meeting operates in him like a void, creating the spiritual suction that bonds his murky sense of honor to intellectually defending disposable pleasure. To suggest that there is a moral, intellectual, relational and/or spiritual poverty in this is to threaten the porn nihilist's purposeful purposelessness. It also threatens his jollies.

As I have discussed in other posts, sexual jollies and our need for meaning are intimately connected. That which pleases is us sexually is that which we find our validation in, since the pleasure is the pleasure of being validated, or in the case of porn and other disposable sexual encounters, being psuedo-validated. For this reason, we will bond our selves to the values that are held by those to whom we are sexually attracted, whoever they may be.

I would welcome a porn nihilist to engage in debate. But many a porn nihilists may not bother with words to defend his actions, being as he is a denizen of the super-flat post-rational realm, he'll often rely on post-rational slogans and images.

The Naked Smoke

2008-01-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

I often work out my thoughts having imaginary debates with adversaries, and I have from time to time imagined myself having a debate with Larry Flint, having read his book The Naked Truth. You can read it for yourself. I just want to share some thoughts on it in the context of my discussion of the First Amendment.

For starters, I am not a Dominionist who says that all porn should be outlawed in the Christian nation. I think that people who want porn should have access to it, in like manner that adults should have a negotiated access to certain junky or harmful things like tobacco and alcohol. In porn, the physical and emotional gravity of sex is relegated away from the realm serious living and into the thrill of sexual danger as a disposable, voyeuristic pleasure. Porn also has a "snuff" aspect to it that traffics in the danger that porn actors traffic in with STD risk among other things. It was Susan Sontag who said, "What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death." That said, free people need to have the opportunity to choose sin – even Adam and Eve had the opportunity to choose sin.

The problem in regard to porn is whether all parties agree that porn is actually an unhealthy "junkfood" version of sexuality. If all parties agree that A) porn is unhealthy and junky and B) all those who want the freedom to have porn should have access to porn it, then those who want the freedom from being exposed to porn need to have that too. Porn should have a "soft prohibition" imposed on it as something that is limited to particular places that adults can go to get it and not be given any public "right of way".

If Flint were to agree to all of this, then it would follow that Flint would impose limits on the availability of his own porn. In other words, if all barriers to Flint's realm were removed, and he had full access to all media, he would impose these boundaries on his enterprise. But Larry Flint is not self-limiting. For Flint to be capable of limiting himself would require that he have some idea that sex is precious and exists for more than disposable pleasure.

The hardcore porn that Larry Flint promotes stems from Flint's view of sexuality that sex is merely something that is available for pleasure, and wherein the emotional dangers are to be dismissed and the physical dangers are to be mitigated with STD technology. In his book Flint says that he doesn't feel a "spiritual" dimension to sexuality. By relegating all notions of sexual gravity to those who feel “spiritual”, he defines any idea of the preciousness of sexuality as belonging to mysticism and not to the realm of rationality. In his book, Flint does not lay out a compelling argument for the ontological un-preciousness of sexuality nor does he seriously take on any of those who have argued for the harm that is associated with porn.

What Flint does is cleverly point to certain hypocritical actions from certain members of the religious right in regard to sex and porn and then offer his unfettered porn and sex as the antidote to hypocrisy and inhibitions. It’s a clever “if the thing I attack is bad, the thing I offer must be good” rhetorical strategy. For this reason, Flint is not merely trying to offer a "tree of temptation in the garden" where people who want to can go and choose a temptation. Rather, Flint is offering a worldview that will pave the way for the expansion of his porn wherever it is believed.

Another clever thing Larry Flint does is to make the First Amendment central to the cause of advancing his porn enterprises. In doing so, he is not only doing his porn enterprises a favor, he is also, ostensibly, doing us all a favor as well. Who, after all, would want to hold back the precious freedom that is guaranteed in the First Amendment? By claiming to be a First Amendment advocate, LF has wrapped his struggle in the grandeur that the First Amendment has because of the ideals that are woven into the Constitution that the First Amendment amends and clarifies. So why is this a problem?

As I discussed in my last blog post on First Amendment Responsibilities, the U.S. Constitution is built on the principle that those who are granted rights are also granted responsibilities. Though the statement “with rights come responsibilities” does not exist as a verbatim phrase in the Constitution, the principle is woven into the very first line. The Constitution begins “We the People…” and proceeds to grant the People ultimate control and, also, ultimate responsibility for the government. Having responsibility for the government also, by direct corollary, includes having responsibility for the Common Good in all the ways that that the caring for the Common Good can be performed whether via the government or not.

The idea of Liberty that is contained in the Declaration of Independence is the classical idea that Liberty is a combination of “license” and responsibility. The Framers knew this precise definition of Liberty even though most people walking the street today probably do not. Most modern people confuse license and liberty together within the word “freedom”, and their idea of “freedom” is usually the same as the classical idea of “license”, which means, simply, the ability to do something without restraint. When Thomas Jefferson said that people were endowed with the right to Liberty in the Declaration of Independence it was understood that they were endowed with a combination of rights and responsibilities for the Common Good in the broadest sense. Liberty in this sense is a choice that is available to citizens as to how they choose to advance the common good not whether to advance the common good.

While the common good has many aspects to it, the essence of Common Good is that it extends beyond one’s immediate self-interest to include the broadest interests of others and the society at large, though it may also include one’s immediate self-interest as a form of “enlightened self interest”. Common Good that includes one’s self-interest is a far cry from stating that ones self-interest and the interest of the common good are inseparably one and the same.

Throughout the past two centuries since the days of the Founders, there have been many attempts to conflate common good and self-interest so that one is rendered indistinguishable from the other (dealing with all of the ideas that have conflated self-interest and common good would require a different essay). It is the conflating of self-interest and common good that has contributed to the modern vocabulary of “freedom” at the expense of the vocabulary of license and liberty. The problem with this is idea of “freedom” at the expense of “license and liberty” that it muddies the very concept of "Common Good".

To truly care about the Common Good in the most magnanimous sense is to examine an issue from the manner in which it may harm or benefit many different sorts of people at different stages of their lives. It requires working making a good-faith effort to have the broadest intellectual lens on an issue. For Larry Flint to take the Common Good seriously in this manner, he would need to examine his actions from the broadest intellectual lens possible, which would be impossible to do without examining the dark side of his enterprise. Flint, however, has made it his goal to “push the envelope” of what our culture and society will tolerate in order to advance his own self-interest.

In order to win a debate over Common Good, a First Amendment advocate like Flint must make Tolerance the highest moral idea for the civic organizing of society, trumping all others. For one seeking a broad vista of common good, caring about Tolerance is a value to be cared for among other considerations. The question of Common Good, however, needs to be a higher question than mere Tolerance, because that act of merely being tolerant cannot sort out all of the moral realities that need to be examined by diligent people to facilitate the Common Good. The Constitution itself is designed for partisans to debate and for one particular view to prevail as law in an an environment of negotiated Tolerance. For those who have A) conflated self-interest and common good and B) have defined Tolerance as the highest common good, Tolerance of their self-interest is therefore the Common Good. They would like you to believe that to question their self interest is to put the American Flag in peril.

Specifically for Flint, vaunting Tolerance of his envelope pushing as the highest common good would define non-criticism his actions or any other similar action as the highest good. In other words, Flint has two choices. He admits that A) he is an advocate for merely the license aspect of the liberty of the First Amendment that is attached to the Constitution for the advancement of his porn enterprise or B) is operating under the pretense that he is an advocate for the whole Common Good, which would mean that he was borrowing from the moral gravity of the Constitution and its First Amendment to lend moral force to the act of with-holding criticism from his porn enterprise. Either way, it is a fish wrapped in the American Flag.

This is connected to the larger problem. Conflating self interest with the Common Good in the name of freedom has come at the expense of many peoples' personal commitment to diligent intellectual honesty in examining the Common good from a magnanimous vantage point. It has degraded the quality of our citizenry.

In regard to the Constitution, I am not a strict “originalist” when it comes to interpreting the Constitution in that I don't believe that we are hidebound to the original meaning of something on a particular issue when that meaning no longer makes any sense for the promotion of our common good. I do, however, think that we need to keep the original purpose of the constitution in mind, and doing so requires an originalist understanding of the meaning of Liberty and common good. In regard to a particular Constitutional issue, we need to see how the original meaning was intended to advance the common good/liberty in its day, and, from there, adjust our modern day interpretation of and application of it in order to arrive at an understanding that is relevant for promoting the common good in this day and age.

As I have said, the First Amendment was originally created with the idea of having freedom of assembly and freedom of the press for a citizenry who had been given the charge to seek to advance the Common Good. A later Supreme Court decision said that expression is a form of speech and is thus protected by the First Amendment. And expression truly is a form of speech. Expressions in whatever venue or context comprise a form of "language" in which ideas and values are encoded and encrypted. Though interpretations will vary, these expressions can be decoded and un-encrypted into linguistic speech. It is for this reason that expression speaks, and it is for this reason that an expression should be scrutinized for what it is "speaking" to see whether that expression is advancing the common good. In regard to porn, I think that it is an expression that speaks a message that the pleasure of sex can be enjoyed as a commodity without conscious regard to its gravity.

The problem, of course, is that expressions are harder to decode than speech and are subject of more and varying interpretation. It is for this reason that those who are merely expressing and not speaking have often not held themselves accountable to whether their expressions are advancing the common good, as opposed to advancing the interests and pleasures of a particular clientelle. For this reason, diligent personal intellectual honesty has been somewhat of a casualty of amplifying the First Amendment's verbiage of "freedom of press" and "freedom of assembly" to include anyone's verbal or non-verbal expression.

Even as expanding the original meaning of "freedom of speech" to mean "freedom of all verbal and non-verbal expression" has caused problems, it is not to say that we should not recognize these expressions as forms of speech. As I said before, I do not believe that we are necessarily hide-bound to originalist meanings on specific Constitutional issues, even as we are bound to its original purpose. Rather, as the range of expression has increased and the intent of expressions farther removed from the original intent to directly facilitate the advancement of the common good, there has arisen a need to negotiate these expressions when they have dubious value with regard to the common good.

Employing a "soft censorship" to such expressions is not necessarily a violation of the First amendment. Rather, it follows reasonably from the manner in which the meaning of the First Amendment has been amplified and altered from its original context. We are not hidebound to the original meaning of idea of "speech" or "freedom of press and freedom of assembly" when it comes to all of the sundry expressions that are not written or verbal speech. In a similar manner, we interpret the "right to bear arms as part of a state militia" for the modern era as the negotiated right for one to have certain fire arms in one's personal possession irrespective of one's membership in a state militia. In the service of the common good, we do not interpret the second amendment to mean that one may personally own cruise missiles if one is a card carrying member of a state militia. In this case as in many others, the modern day restrictions result from honest attempt to extract the elements of the original Constitutional ideas that will best promote the greatest the common good in the modern day and age.

In regard to the "freedom of speech", as the idea of the "speech" has been broadened from the original meaning to include a much broader range of expressions, so too has the idea of what "freedoms" needed to be broader and more nuanced to accommodate all of these sundry expressions. These freedoms/licenses are negotiated within a range that spans from A) where you can say anything anywhere and 2 ) where you can only express things in certain times and places. Some expressions are "self-censoring" in that they are necessarily limited to particular times and places (like seeing play or going to an art gallery). Other expressions are not self-censoring, and if they are harmful to the common good, need a restriction imposed upon them from the outside. It is those expressions that lay serious claim to attempting to advance the common good that should, and do, receive more generous freedom from restriction. It is those expressions of dubious value to the common good that receive less.

It is within this nuanced spectrum of "freedom" that we need to decide where to place "porn". In the case of porn, as I am convinced that porn is junky and unhealthy and that its only claim to exist in our society is that of a "tree of temptation in the garden" and nothing more, and has no tenuous claim to the common good of society beyond that. Therefore, it is no violation of the promotion of the Common Good—nor the of the First Amendment— to delineate boundaries to place around porn as are that are placed on other unhealthy and junky things and on other unhealthy and junky forms of expression.

Larry Flint needs to have his porn enterprise limited to a "tree of temptation in the garden" in our society by forces outside of himself. And any effort that Flint makes to use moral gravity of the American Flag to advance his enterprise beyond that boundary needs to be confronted by those who have a broad enough vista of the Common Good to see the dark side of porn.

First Amendment Responsibilities

2007-12-01T18:01:00.000-08:00

Sex sells. I saw another smutty “Bebe” fashion billboard in the bus stop shelters in Pasadena. I thought to myself that I could complain again to the Viacom PR representative, who I was eventually referred to a couple of years ago after having made numerous calls to the Los Angeles County MTA. Of course the MTA, which is under the auspices of LA County whom I pay taxes to support, will say that they don’t actually own the bus shelters. But that’s just a technicality, since the MTA has control over the bus stops and profits from those whom the MTA decides can own the shelters that cover the bus stops. Responsibility is so densely layered in the County/City/MTA/Viacom bureaucratic labyrinth that, finding the ultimate source of responsibility is like finding the source of a mysterious river.

It is always good for people who make the decisions to place those ads to feel at least a little heat. However, in the absence of any torrent of criticism from the public, the Viacom representative, who is only the public mouthpiece of the Viacom chiefs, would merely refer to Viacom’s corporate First Amendment trump card -- Sex that sells is a protected form of expression granted by the First Amendment for a business to make a buck.

This got me thinking about a larger problem with the First Amendment as it is applied by the “sex sells” crowd of professional corporate defenders. I have cycled through many attempts to crisply explain the moral problem with their First Amendment mentality. Then it occurred to me, if rights and responsibilities go together, which is a simple moral arithmetic for any reasonable person, our First Amendment rights must come with First Amendment responsibilities.

It also occurred to me that “First Amendment responsibilities” sounds odd. I haven’t actually heard that phrase before. I daresay that far more people in our country are far quicker on the draw in defending their First Amendment rights than in explaining their First amendment responsibilities. So what are our first amendment responsibilities? Our First Amendment responsibilities emanate from something that is implicit in both the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence affirms our existence as beings that have been granted “moral patent” by a Creator. In the same manner that a landlord has been granted a “deed” that give him A) the privilege to do with his land what he wishes (within reason) and B) the responsibility to the law and government and inhabitors of his land, so too do we as moral “patent” holders have both freedom and responsibility as human beings that comes with our “moral title”. As “moral patent” holders, we are acknowledged to have a moral right to pursue Liberty, as that moral freedom wherein freedom and responsibility are inseparably wedded together.

It is the Preamble of the Constitution which is established by “We the People” for the advancement of the “Common Good”. Built on the moral foundation of the Declaration which recognizes our “moral patent”, the Pre-Amble defines our collective and individual moral responsibility as American citizens to bear the “Common Good” on our shoulders. An American citizen might read the Preamble superficially and think that his responsibility for the Common Good begins and ends with voting, and that the Bill of Rights exists merely to protect our rights from the schemes of government.

However, the Preamble is operating in a more complete and more demanding moral picture. The representative government outlined in the Constitution outlines one medium by which We exercise our responsibility to the Common Good, by voting for our representatives. Our subsequent rights to speech, bearing arms, etc… amend and elaborate on the Constitution and its Preamble in this way: the Bill of Rights outline yet more mediums of action for us to shoulder our burden to advance Common Good, mediums of action which were intended to compliment voting.

Contained in the Declaration and the Preamble is an implied “American Great Commission”, which can be summed up as, “Go forth, citizen, to exercise your rights so as to make the most good faith effort you can to shoulder your responsibility for the Common Good via every means available to you.” Our First Amendment responsibilities are therefore to advance this “American Great Commission” through the medium of the spoken word, and were are to be protected from the government infringing on this exercise of our moral freedom.

The Framers wrote the Bill Of Rights because they were acknowledging the existence of “moral patent” and the “American Great Commission” as pre-existent moral realities. The Framers did not see themselves as granting us the rights, but as acknowledging rights that were endowed to us at the beginning of our existence/creation. For the Framers, history at then end of the 18th century was merely catching up to what had always been a moral truth.

This is important for this reason. If Person A is exercising his First Amendment right as merely a legal right, he is appealing primarily to the parchment of the First Amendment and to his good fortune that a Framer’s pen touched the paper in a certain way. In response to criticism, Person A, like any corporate “Sex sells” defender, will hold up the First Amendment parchment as a shield, and when his critics walk away he’ll say to himself, “Whew…dodged a bullet!”

Meanwhile, if Person B is making an earnest, good faith effort to advance the common good of our country, he is exercising his First Amendment right as part of the two faceted moral reality recognized by the Founders, with freedom/discretion as one facet and responsibility as the other facet. Meanwhile, Person A is merely exploiting the benefit to himself and his corporation that was bequeathed to him by the Framers’ attempt to reify a moral reality in law.

The moral dimension of the law is the foundation of our nation. The technicalities of the law only supplement the moral dimension of the law, when the parties involved are acting in good faith to advance the deeper moral idea. A mentality that merely looks to the legal words on paper to justify actions at the expense of looking to the deeper moral reality is a mentality that will eventually weaken the law, severing it from its moral foundation.

Sex sells. It’s good for profits of Viacom and the MTA for the time being that the Framers made smut a technically legal use of the First Amendment in our licentious, morally somnambulant society of 2007. While it is a legal use of the First Amendment, it is not a moral use of it. The mentality that defends “Sex sells” as a First Amendment right is a mentality that does not rise to the moral calling the American Great Commission, and the spread of that mentality signals a decline in our nation.

An open challenge to Christians in 2007 regarding Christian Modesty

2007-11-09T13:00:00.000-08:00

I want to share some new thoughts and summarize old thoughts on one of my oft discussed topics – Christian Modesty, based on some discussions I’ve had of late. First, I want to re-iterate some facts: 1) Men are visually oriented to be sexually attracted to exposed women’s body parts. 2) There are generally recognized body parts that have special intimate energy, as A) recognized by the law and B) harnessed by those whose express desire is to titillate. 3) Exposed and partially exposed intimate parts are harnessed by the marketplace to the tune of uncountable amounts of money in a vast “distraction industry” that traffics in men’s sexual nature. 4) Any serious attempt to take a culture captive to the Gospel cannot be evaluated merely on what people say. A culture must be evaluated based on what people both say and do – simply examining a culture by what people say is to examine it superficially.

There is an idea that has taken root in our world that either ignores and/or exploits the above mentioned facts. It is this idea that women find their liberation in the exposure of intimate body parts and that men’s capacity to be distracted by it is a thing to either be ignored or harnessed for money and pleasure. This is an idea so powerful and so pervasive that it has acquired all the Orwellian power that political correctness can endow it with. It is the very intensity with which people believe this that they simultaneously act upon it and silence the critique of it from discourse.

The narrative of feminism and sexual liberation behind this idea is so powerfully believed that it has entered, un-challenged and un-examined into vast swaths of the church and has become syncretized with ideas of Christian virtue in the minds of many Christians. Many Christians have embraced and/or accepted this idea and have advanced the unquestioned tolerance this idea as even being a form of Christian maturity.

As I’ve said before and I’ll say again, this aforementioned idea emanates from a view of liberation that is not based on any calculus of being freed from the bondage of sin. It is not based on any serious effort at discerning God’s voice or His will as per Scripture. It is not based on any serious understanding of moral freedom as it exists within the claims that God makes on mens’ and women’s sexuality, including all heart behavior. It is not based on an idea that a fashion choice to expose an intimate body part is a sexual act, and it therefore not “just fashion”. Rather, this fashion is falsely believed to be a “value-neutral” aspect of the culture that people are to accept in order to participate in the culture in order to relate to it as Christians. It is upon embracing this latter fallacy that many in the church have considered the fashion trend of partially exposing intimate body parts as being beyond the scope of culture that the Gospel is called to challenge in people’s lives.

I have observed that there is a spectrum in the manner that Christians are accepting and appropriating partially exposed intimate body parts into the realm of Christian behavior. On one end of the spectrum, I have met Christians who accept the feminist/sexual revolution narrative as wholesale truth, who will say that when a man is distracted by a woman’s partially exposing intimate parts, he is the one who is objectifying her and is threatening her moral freedom to wear whatever she wants. In this idea, there is no responsibility whatsoever that women have for the social environment wherein men must negotiate their call to sexual holiness and purity.

As I have reflected on this idea, it has occurred to me that hookers on the street do not express any regard for my inner life with God with their fashion. Then, again, I don’t have any expectations of Christian community from hookers. For a Christian woman at church to say that she has absolutely no responsibility to my inner life in regard to her clothing as an obligation of Christian community and fellowship, I take this to mean that she wants to me to have no more expectation of her than a hooker in regard to what I can expect my eyes to have to confront at church.

For those Christians who do not go quite so far as to fully and out-and-out embrace the feminist/sexual revolution narrative of fashion as being thoroughly compatible with Christian virtue, many of them will say that it is a virtue of manly Christian maturity for a man to not distracted/bothered by what a woman wears, even in church. In this idea, men must give a woman the room to arrive on her own idea of modesty based exclusively on her own intellectual journey with God and not by ever being confronted by men. In other words, it is beyond the purvue of pastoral guidance to ever suggest openly that God is making claims on our clothing as an arena of sexual holiness. Of course, it is for the very reason that men may be distracted that a woman may realize the value of proper dress. With this notion of immodestly tolerance though, a woman must arrive at this knowledge without ever be informed of it directly by men.

And then there are Christians who do recognize that there is some sort of problem out there in the world and in Christendom, but that the church is many years, or even decades, away from being ready to be confronted on its modesty problem as a topic of sexual holiness. Now I have some sympathy this notion, in the limited sense that, generally speaking, there is some latitude that Jesus provides as to how and when to deal with the topic of clothing and sexual holiness with a group of people. I recognize the value of having a vocabulary for dealing with culture and with complexity as a pre-requisite for this topic, and I do not necessarily support the Victorian missionaries of old who made it first priority to clothe the savages. However, I am convinced that the church in the modern cosmopolitan world of 2007 is in a crisis in regard to modesty and to all of the beliefs and justifications that undergird the unmitigated acceptance of worldly dress standards, and that the church requires an urgent addressing of the topic.

As I’ve said before, when the line regarding clothing is not defined as what is intimate and not intimate, the line will be defined as “what can I get away with where no one will say anything to me”. In the current mechanics of PC in our culture, PC has powerful taboos that keep people from questioning the feminist/sexual revolution narrative. In our current culture, for a Christian to make clothing decisions that is bound only by that which people will risk make an issue out of is for that Christian to allow PC to filter important considerations from his/her decision making. As I’ve said before and I’ll say again and again, one cannot look merely at “what people are willing to make a stink about” as a means to take a culture captive to Christ.

I have asked myself, why the church has been so willing to accept PC and so unable to challenge it in regard to this topic of modesty. I have written an extensive analysis of this in my Crisis of Modesty in the Evangelical Church. At the core of it all, though, is a profound desire on the part of many Christians to fit in with their fellow Christians and to fit in peaceably with the world. It is a desire that is so deep and pervasive that Christians will give PC ideas a gloss of Christianoid wisdom and maturity. To challenge the feminist/sexual revolution/PC notions of modesty is to risk entering into a “social Siberia”, a form of death to ones ease and social acceptance. I have found that it is only those Christians who utterly are desperate for real answers, desperate enough to enter an utterly lonely quest for wisdom, who have the force in their lives to be willing to break from the PC sacred cows.

One interesting bit of Christianoid wisdom I’ve encountered regarding this topic Christians who regard the seriousness with which I take modestly and the lengths that I am willing to go to confront it in the church as being “my choice”. Well, in a sense, they’re right, but not for the reason that they’re thinking. For me, facing the topic is a matter of doing something that is essential to my inner life and to the calling that God has placed with force on my conscience. For me, my choice is to either act or to allow my heart to be cozy with the cognitive dissonance of our sexual culture. Those Christians who present to me as “my choice” are doing so with idea that I can choose my conscience, and that I can choose to have a conscience that is less confrontation and demanding of my fellow Christians. Upon this fallacious idea, these Christians believe that I can thus choose to have a conscience that is happier and more socially adaptive to the current norms around me. Encountering such Christians, I must simply dust off my feet and seek those Christians who crossed a certain threshold of intellectual seriousness.

I recognize that dealing with modesty properly is very hard. Modesty is a very easy thing for one to present merely as a rule, as a “that is just what we do and we don’t question it, and what you should do too” form of legalism. It is very difficult to deal with modesty in the more multi-dimensional context of cause and effect, and textured cultural analysis. That said, I am convinced that underneath the various intellectual deficiencies in the church in these times is a fundamental laziness that must be addressed, lest immodestly -- and the justifications for it-- be allowed to grow and become an ever bigger “elephant in the room”.

Modesty needs to be presented to Christians as an invitation to pick up their cross and be willing to be “baptized” into entering the “social Siberia” that will inevitably enter when they begin questioning something that our culture holds as a sacred cow. As for pastors, it can be very hard to tell the difference between A) pastoral leadership that is not now dealing with the topic of modesty and the feminist/sexual revolution/PC narrative as a genuine God-lead strategy of ministry timing and B) pastoral leadership that is not dealing with the topic for reasons of the fear that they would simply annoy too many Christians, and therefore lose their careers as pastors. It is my concern that in 2007 in regard to Christian modesty there is more far more social fear, laziness, incompetence and cognitive dissonance on both sides of the pulpit than there is any genuine interest in facing the difficult topic.

The Image of God and the purpose of having a body

2007-10-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

We are made in the image of God, and we have been given the Image of God for the purpose of being able to experience God as we experience ourselves. As we are able to translate our experience of ourselves into correct knowledge of God, we are better see the reflection of God in our Image. As this happens we are better relate with God as friend and Father and are better able to relate with our fellow Image-bearers. To put it succinctly, we are made in the Image of God so that we can be conscious of how we reflect His image for the benefit of our journey into His wisdom and into His joy.

It is with this basic understanding that every component of each person’s Image can be understood has having been given to that person as a teacher that instructs the “I” within that person. These the “teaching components” and “teaching whole” of the Image do their “teaching” as we live and experience life with the God-made selves that we have and that we are. The knowledge that is gained from these ‘teaching components” and “teaching whole” of the Image we possess are gained as marks that are written by the pen of intimate experience onto the page of our hearts, thoughts, memories and emotions.

God is inviting us to journey of learning from the “teaching components” and “teaching whole” of our respective Images so that each of us gains an accrual of relationship-with-God-worthy-wisdom throughout our lives. It is for the goal of enjoying and knowing God better that we are called to take our “teaching components” captive to a journey of learning His wisdom from the Image he has given us.

Having wisdom involves having an understanding that unites word knowledge and real-world, emotional and tangible experience. In regard to our Image of God, the “teaching components” of our personal selves speak to us in a non-linguistic language of emotional, visceral experiences. As such, there is an inherent vagueness whereby the “teaching components” of our Image teach, as they do not teach with words. As such, it is possible for a “teaching component” of our Image to be misinterpreted and even harnessed to craft a message that is anti-God.

So why doesn’t God make it easier and more obvious for us to receive wisdom from the Image that we have been endowed with? It is necessary requirement for our free will that God endowed us with an Image of God that contains “teaching components” that are not didactic, that require one to have a willing relationship with God Himself for one to fully understand. God has created a world where beings are free to rebel against Him, and he has created the resources of that world, including those aspects of it that directly reflect His Image, to be available for the purpose of rebellion, should willful beings choose to be rebellious.

I believe that God reserves his wisdom for his friends, and that he wants the joy of revealing his wisdom to us as a Friend for the same reason that we find in our own character as humans-- it more satisfying to give a personal gift to a personal friend than to give an impersonal gift to an acquaintance. Part of journey to grow in the “wisdom of our Image”, involves us finding the Godly words that reify the non-linguistic messages that these “teaching components” of our Image speak to our character. It is when we find the words for the “lessons of our Image” that we are re-introduced to what we’ve always known, and we are able to fully relate with God as Friend and Father with our lips and thoughts.

It is as a general rule that we experience God and knowledge of God as we experience ourselves in the motion of life. Of course, a fool learns only from himself, and it is not necessary for a person to experience every sort of heart-ache first hand to gain wisdom. It is not possible for every person to learn all the wisdom that there is to know from scratch, to re-invent the wheel. In God’s infinite wisdom, he has allowed many people to fall into various forms of peril and destruction so that those who seek wisdom can learn from their mistakes. Even so, there will always be a large element of personal discovery and experience that will characterize anyone’s journey.

God Himself has a character and so do we, so that our character can interact in relationship with God’s character. We have a character that is designed to find joy peace and fulfillment in the things that enhance our relationship with God and we are designed to find emptiness and heartache in the things that don’t. In this way, those aspects of our selves and psyches that lead to heartache and emptiness are “teaching components” of our image.

While there is a one-to-one correlation between those elements of our character and God’s character, there is not a one-to-one correlation between God’s body and our body, since God does not have a body. Nevertheless, our bodies are too made in the Image of God, and, as such, the body is a “teaching component” of our Image, since our body is so thoroughly connected to our selves and to the development of our characters. Precise manner in which our body is made by God to reflect His Image for our journey into His wisdom is found in the manner in which our body affects our character.

As a “teaching component” of our Image, our body is part of an inseparable feedback loop between the other “teaching components” of our being, which include our character, body, will, thoughts, emotions. As with the other “teaching components” the body provides input into the feedback loop with trans-rational, non-linguistic communication.

One’s behavior can communicate to one’s own deepest being as well as to others. There are certain behaviors that communicate positive, relationship-with-God-worthy and loving messages to our deepest being and other behaviors that communicate degradation and hatred to our deepest being. Everyone knows that a caress can speak affection without words, though the affection can also be communicated with words. It is also part of the nature of our body that certain behaviors that communicate degradation and hatred can have certain pleasing elements to them in the moment.

The body and its behaviors can be said to communicate God’s truth via a symbolic language of consequences of cause and effect. The human body is made in the Image of God to affect character in a certain way, and there are certain universal rules of cause and effect in regard to the way that the body affects people’s character for better or worse. Positive bodily induced consequences will result in built-in positive messages being communicated about God and about other people. Negative bodily induced consequences will negate the body’s built-in potential for positive messages and invert it into negative messages about God and about other people.

So what does it mean to take the body’s God-messages captive to words across the consequences of character? What combination of personal experience, cautionary tales, Scriptural truth and wisdom will harness the power of one’s body so that it is an instrument of one’s joyful relationship with God and an instrument of his/her accruing wisdom? What aspects of any person’s body are unique to that individual person and what aspects are of a universal nature, subject to universal rules of cause and effect? What does it mean to be “introduced to what you’ve always known” in regard to the encoded wisdom of the Image in the human body that God has provided for our benefit? It is with these questions in mind that I want to later begin to unravel the question of the body as it relates to human sexuality.

Civil Rights and Meta-Civil Rights

2007-10-11T18:51:00.000-07:00

From time to time I have mulled over the white-hot, hot-potato question of gay marriage. In trying to organize my thoughts on the issue of gay marriage, my thoughts have meandered down several paths. I've decided that I want to begin to explore the topic and other related topics by carefully examining the idea of civil rights, to engage in the dangerous task of stepping outside of the phenomena of civil rights to examine it, even as I live in the world of civil rights and as I profoundly value many civil rights.

"Civil rights" is a loaded term, pregnant with meaning. If one invokes "civil rights", one cannot claim to be merely advancing a legal agenda. Making a "civil right" legal is not the same as making a new increment in the sales tax legal. Making a "civil right" legal is to advance a peculiar arena of law that has meaning far beyond merely the law; having profound cultural, moral, philosophical and symbolic meaning. The goal of civil rights is not simply to make it something legal, but to win a profound moral, spiritual, cultural and philosophical battle through the strategic use of the law and moral and cultural persuasion. It can be said that the successful advancement of a "civil right" confers both "legal rights" and "cultural rights" to the beneficiary.

In the Black civil rights movement, those who advanced the idea that "separate but equal" was unconstitutional were not doing so merely as a technical constitutional argument. Challenging the constitutionality of "separate but equal" was an act of finding the thread of constitutional law that hangs directly on the moral "Jesus bolt" (the bolt that holds the propellers to a helicopter) of the Constitution. This “Jesus bold” is found in the pre-amble of the Declaration of Independence – that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The specific issues of constitutionality combined with the powerful rhetoric of Martin Luther King, who invoked the Declaration in the context of being an echo of Scripture. Through a combined moral, Scriptural, legal and cultural attack, the Black civil rights movement sought to expunge any idea that Blacks were inferior and in any way unworthy and to advance it into the mainstream of our cultural that to think otherwise was to be bigoted.

Of course, the Black civil rights movement was right. It is the genuine moral force of the Black civil rights movement that has been harnessed to lend moral authority to other civil rights movements. Following the basic template of strategy and rhetoric of the Black civil rights movements, other civil rights movements have sought to incrementally expand the meaning of the term "all men" to include all races and ethnicities, both/all genders, lifestyles, all degrees of physical ability, etc...

In addition to expanding the term "all men", civil rights movements have also laid claim to the meaning of Liberty. It is has been the goal of civil rights movements to make the advancement of a legal right not merely to be the advancement of "freedom" but the advancement of liberty, which is moral freedom. To advance Liberty is to advance a class of freedom that is required for the innate design of human beings for their happiness and fulfillment and is therefore immoral not to grant to people. What is at stake with those who disagree over a question of civil rights is a fundamental difference of opinion over what is the innate, self –evident nature of humans, a question that lies at the core of any moral philosophy. In the context of a civil rights movement, the debate cuts to the core of how, exactly, the "Jesus bolt" of our nation is to be understood as the Jesus bolt that it is.

That is why those on either side of a civil rights debate so fiercely oppose each other. By advancing a legal right as a moral freedom, a civil rights movement does not seek merely to be tolerated, living peaceably in a "moral salad bowl" among those who differ in society. It is not good enough for those who disagree to tolerate with each other with a veneer of pleasant appearances. Rather, a civil rights movement seeks to employ a combined legal, moral and philosophical strategy to prosecute the ideas of those who disagree as being fundamentally backward and bigoted ideas.

Since the legal issues and the culture issues are two wings of the same animal, those advance a "civil right" will not only prosecute direct legal action, they will prosecute via a form of cultural "law" expressed in the advancement of cultural taboo and social pressure. For a civil rights movement, the "person is political" and the "cultural is legal". This is made all the more important by those areas of law that are set up to be determined by the culture. Aspects of discrimination law, sexual harassment law, and obscenity law come to mind.

Having taken a hard stance on the moral value of a particular civil freedom/license/liberty, there is a tension in every civil rights movement between the question of sameness and equity. A civil rights movement is organized to expunge a particular idea of difference from law and culture. A civil rights movement will say that for all practical, legal and social purposes, a difference either does not exist or is irrelevant to most, if not all, aspects of public life.

As such, civil rights movements have imposed a particular moral idea on how, if at all, the idea of a difference is allowed to be broached in the realm of intellectual debate, art and conversation. For this reason, it has become more and more of a delicate matter to openly discuss the idea that there are differences between people, their ideas, their character and their choices that matter. To broach an idea incorrectly is to be vulnerable to the charge of being called a "bigot" or some related term.

As this has happened, "civil rights", has been incorporated into a broad moral, social, legal and practical realm of thought. The collective power of all of these civil rights ideas have lead to the advancement of a certain "meta-civil rights" moral philosophies, which are cultural and moral philosophies that are designed for the maximum assimilation and re-organization of ever more and ever civil rights ideas in law and culture. Political correctism is the primary term to describe A) the sum total of all of the cultural "civil rights" that have been added to the mix of mainstream thought by the various civil rights movements and B) the renegotiations of these civil right ideas within prevailing meta-civil rights philosophies.

A meta-civil rights philosophy that operates within political correctism, which I have defined as primalism, is the idea that differences between people are beyond the capacity of an individual person to fathom and must be sorted out by the collective intuition, as expressed by the "times". Within this meta-civil rights idea, differences, having been expunged from common discourse, have their place to be explored in the realm beyond that which can be articulated – the world of art and pop art. In the realm of not-quite-articulated art, catchy slogans and transgressive art, both consumable and non-consumable is understood as a medium of protest and advancement of cultural civil rights. Purchasing consumable pop art in the market place is a key way that the "times" ratify a particular aspect of the working out and the renegotiating of differences that have been barred from common discourse.

Yet another meta-civil rights moral idea is that only those people that a civil rights movement considers as the offended party in history have the right to set the terms as to how and when the idea of a difference may be discussed. This meta-civil rights idea establishes this right as a sort of "cultural affirmative action" that is granted to members of the offended party. This "cultural affirmative action" is part of a larger politically correct meta-civil rights calculus of how and when to discuss a difference that negotiates the flux that exists in the moral force of civil rights taboos. The calculus is this: whether suppressing the discussion of difference serves the cultural civil rights of those considered to have been oppressed. If discussing differences in a certain time and place is not friendly to the cultural civil rights cause, which is considered essential to the legal civil rights cause, it is suppressed under the force of taboo. Since this calculus will vary as it is adjusted by the "times", the politically correct taboo on the discussion in any moment in time may be as much as a "necessary fiction" as a truth; a fiction whose truth is found more in context than in pure, objective content.

Yet another related meta-civil rights idea is that civil rights, and all of the moral freedom associated with it, are only continually advanced through the mainstreaming of meta-civil rights ideas. For primalists, the broad acceptance of meta-civil rights philosophies is understood as the achievement of our current collective moral intuition as a human race, originally endowed to us through evolution, that has been arising in history as the "emerging concensus". For primalists, to question an aspect of meta-civil rights it is to move to a more backward, less evolved, less enlightened and darker age of human existence.

Books I've been reading

2007-09-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

Nation of Rebels: Why Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. This is an interesting book on how capitalism thrives on the so called "rebels" who try to "culture jam" the capitalist system. While capitalism has remained resilient in the face of culture jamming, other aspects of our culture--- for better or worse-- haven't.

Can't Stop Won't Stop about the history of hip-hop by Jeff Chang. Hip-hop, as with early rock n' roll before it, has the moral authority it has because it has been a force for a certain amount of cultural integration across the races.

from the other side of the pond:

Herd: How To Change Mass Behaviour By Harnessing Our True Nature by Mark Earls. I'm always interested in the brand marketing crowd's ever more sophisticated ways of trying to influence us.

Willing Slaves: How The Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives by Madeleine Bunting.

The faith of atheists -- examining the Dennis Prager/Sam Harris debate

2007-08-25T09:59:00.000-07:00

Here is my analysis of a debate between Sam Harris, an evangelical atheist, and Dennis Prager, a Jewish theist, that took place back in November, 2006.

Here is Sam Harris' day 1 opening salvo to Dennis:

In the beginning of this debate, Harris declares all religion to be jihadist, loony, and/or prejudicial. Only later in the debate does Harris, hypothetically, consider the value of some sort of religion (which he will later call "Scientismo" in day 4 of the debate). This colors how one is to interpret Harris' statement, "there is no good reason to believe in a personal God", since it can mean two different things: A) there is no good evidence for believing in God and B) there is no good usefulness for one believing in God. In the beginning of the debate, Harris is clearly stating both A) and B). In the course of this ensuing debate, Harris will relinquish assertion B) in favor of assertion A).

Here is Dennis' day 1 reply to Harris:

Here is Harris' day 2 reply to Dennis:

(Harris) Atheism does not assert that “it is all made by chance.” No one knows why the universe came into being. Most scientists readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not.

"No one knows why the universe came into being" – that is the statement that needs to be unpacked. It can mean one of two different things A) that no one can have absolute scientific certainly as to why the universe came into being – or B) that it is not possible for anyone to have the slightest clue why the universe came into being. The former assertion leaves room for religious faith, the second assertion doesn't.

If a scientist is operating with intellectual honesty within the limitations of science, he would offer assertion A). However, an atheist is not merely scientific, but is rather scientismist, believing that science is the key to any and all metaphysical questions. As such, an atheist will either firmly believe that 1) the universe was not created -- on account of science or 2) firmly believe that it is not possible for anyone to have the slightest clue as to why the universe came into being -- on account of science.

The first statement is plainly a statement of faith regarding the origins of the universe that asserts a certainty over an uncertainty. The second statement is also a faith statement, albeit more subtle, in that it places faith in the idea that science is the key to all metaphysical understanding and that all knowledge is to be made real/unreal, relevant/irrelevant within limitations of science.

It is also important to note that statement 1) and 2) are tantamount to being the same thing. The first statement plainly says that God does not exist, thereby denying the existence of any sort of God. The second statement says that God knowledge is completely unknowable, and therefore completely irrelevant to questions of truth and knowledge. The second statement thereby denies the existence of a "personal God" who, by definition, has made himself knowable to people. It is on the matter of a "personal God" not existing that Harris asserts total certainty.

And it is not a far leap from the certainly of statement 2) – that no personal God exists-- to certainty of statement 1) – that no God exists at all. At this point in the discussion, Harris is claiming statement 2) in order to downplay his claims of certainty in the face of Prager's charge that Harris is claiming too much certainty. Harris will indicate that he does in fact believe statement 1).

(Harris) Why can’t I say that the cosmos is uncreated?

Of course, Harris can say that the cosmos is uncreated. That is, in fact, what Harris believes, which is why he states it in the first person. Harris is now admitting to having the certainty regarding statement 1) that he did not admit to having earlier. This is part of the reason why Prager will later, in day 4, redirect the blame on Harris for "making maneuvers" in the course of the debate and not owning up to the true extent of his certainty, and therefore, his faith.

Here is Prager's day 2 reply:

Here is Harris' day 3 reply:

(Harris) But it is clear from our debate that you and I differ on the location of the problem. In your view, the problem must be that Europe has lost the moral backbone that only religion can provide (and Islam just happens to be the wrong religion.) In my view, our world has been shattered, quite unnecessarily, by religion itself. As I said, even if you were right, and the only people who could summon the moral courage to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world were the religious lunatics of the West, this would suggest nothing at all about the existence of the biblical God. It would only show that a belief in Him might be politically necessary, in a given time and place, to motivate people to fight (as our inimitable President says) “the evildoers.” I am reasonably sure you are wrong about this. But again, this is quite irrelevant to the question before us.

The question whether religion is useful is relevant to Harris' original salvo "there is no good reason to believe in a personal God".

Here is Prager's day 3 reply:

Here is Harris' day 4 reply:

(Harris) While the usefulness of religion might be worth debating in another context, it is completely irrelevant to the question of whether God exists.

Again. The question whether religion is useful is relevant to Harris' original salvo " there is no good reason to believe in a personal God". If A) one cannot prove whether or not God exists with scientific certainty, as both Prager and Harris have admitted, and B) believing in God is potentially useful, as Harris has admitted, then there is a good reason, under certain circumstances, for one to believe God as a matter of faith. That is why Prager, in day 1, made a distinction between bad God-belief and good God-belief.

If I believe that there is an afterlife, and believing in that afterlife gives meaning to my struggle to be moral, then there is a good reason to believe in the afterlife. In a similar vein, if I am moved by listening to Beethoven, there is a good reason for me to believe that it is beautiful.

By "good reason", I do not mean "a good scientifically verifiable reason", since I recognize that the question of "good" lies outside the realm of science to answer, whether in the realm of faith, morality or art.

If I believe that there is a moral order to the world, and I believe that an idea of God is the key to that moral order, then there is a good reason for me to believe in God. If someone else does not see that belief in God is important to moral order, then for that person, he/she may not possess a good reason to believe in God in regard to the issue of morality. As someone who believes that believing in God is important to having morality, it is my perogative to state my case and leave it alone for each to decide on his/her own.

Here is Prager's day 4 final reply:

I have more to say on the matter of "moral intuition" which Harris raises in day 3.

Morality and Ethics

2007-08-14T13:19:00.000-07:00

This past week I was exploring a classic dorm room philosophical question: what, if any, is the difference between "morality" and "ethics".

As I've been reflecting on various moral and ethical issues, I've realized that it's actually an important question. It matters in terms of how to properly classify, compare and contrast morals and ethics across the boundaries of belief and skepticism. It matters, as a Christian, in regard to many of these inter-related questions in terms of how to discuss morality and ethics with the world at large:

-- Is what is moral also ethical?
-- How much does any one else's moral system fit in with "ethics"?
-- What do these terms mean to those who are hailing from a different ideology or different belief system?
-- What is it to have a moral debate or an ethical debate?
-- How much is a question of Christian morality "exportable" into the realm of ethical inquiry beyond Christianity?
-- Do I have a Christian ethical system or a Christian moral system, or both?
-- Where, if at all, do moral considerations and ethical blend in?

As with any important philosophical inquiry, I went to the internet. In freedictionary.com, it offers these definitions:

eth•ic ( th k)
n.
1. a. A set of principles of right conduct. b. A theory or a system of moral values: "An ethic of service is at war with a craving for gain" Gregg Easterbrook.
2. ethics (used with a sing. verb) The study of the general nature of morals and of the specific moral choices to be made by a person; moral philosophy.
3. ethics (used with a sing. or pl. verb) The rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession: medical ethics.

mo•ral•i•ty (m -r l -t , mô-)
n. pl. mo•ral•i•ties
1. The quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct.
2. A system of ideas of right and wrong conduct: religious morality; Christian morality.
3. Virtuous conduct.
4. A rule or lesson in moral conduct.

So to what extent are these terms interchangeable? Here, a gentleman named Lawrence M. Hinman gives his effort at making contrast:

"Ethics. The explicit, philosophical reflection on moral beliefs and practices. The difference between ethics and morality is similar to the difference between musicology and music. Ethics is a conscious stepping back and reflecting on morality, just as musicology is a conscious reflection on music.

Morality. "Morality" refers to the first-order beliefs and practices about good and evil by means of which we guide our behavior. Contrast with Ethics, which is the second-order, reflective consideration of our moral beliefs and practices. "

Here is wikipedia contrasting morals and ethics:

"Morality (from Latin moralitas "manner, character, proper behaviour") refers to the concept of human action which pertains to matters of right and wrong—also referred to as "good and evil"—used within three contexts: individual distinction; systems of valued principles—sometimes called conduct morality—shared within a cultural, religious, secular or philosophical community. Personal morals define and distinguish among right and wrong intentions, motivations or actions, as these have been learned, engendered, or otherwise developed within individuals. Bycontrast, ethics are more correctly applied as the study of broader social systems within whose context morality exists. Morals define whether I should kill my neighbour Joe when he steals my tractor; ethics define whether it is right or wrong for one person to kill another in a dispute over property. "

Notice that the two sites listed above distinguish ethics from morality by defining ethics as the disciplined, conscious study applying the broadest examination of society. Morality is portrayed as being more instinctual, reflexive and provincial. Here, below, is a professional trade publication weighing in on the topic. The distinction made here is similar to that made by Wikipedia that morals are personal, and that ethics are global.

"Morals and the expression, “moral values” are generally associated with a personal view of values. Personal morals tend to reflect beliefs relating to sex, drinking, gambling, etc. They can reflect the influence of religion, culture, family and friends.

Ethics is concerned with how a moral person should behave. Ethical values are beliefs concerning what is morally right and proper as opposed to what is simply correct or effective.
i.e.

An individual may personally believe that drinking is immoral. However, drinking is not, in and of itself, unethical. Further, it is unethical to impose your personal moral values on another.
Ethical values transcend cultural, religious, or ethnic differences.

Ethical values embrace a more universal worldview. The Josephson Institute of Ethics recommends six, core ethical values to abide by: Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring and Citizenship. "

Here is a link to an atheist at atheism.about.com who gives a good breakdown of the different ethical disciplines, defining "ethics" in broad enough terms that it could be used to describe any feature of "morality". He does not explicitly define "morality", though in his writing he uses the term "ethics" more in regard to the disciplines of study and "morality" more in regard to their application.

Here are his categories of ethical inquiry listed as links:

• Descriptive Ethics
• Normative Ethics
• Deontology and Ethics
• Teleology and Ethics
• Virtue Ethics
• Analytic Ethics (Metaethics)

Here is a link to a philosopher who draws no distinction, but who is open to others attempting to make a distinction.

"I draw no distinction between ethics and morality. For me, the difference between the two terms is simply the difference between Greek (ethos) and Latin (mores). That is to say: in my lexicon they are stylistic variants of each other. If someone uses these terms in such a way as to suggest a difference, I have no objection as long as the person explains what difference he has in mind. But one should not assume a difference without explaining it."

So with this peek into the web, allow me to take a crack at this question of morality vs. ethics. I recognize that there is a certain value to all of the above attempts at comparing and contrasting ethics and morality, however, all of the above distinctions between ethics and morality, or lack thereof, leave something to be desired. I want to build on the categories of ethical inquiry listed at atheism.about.com to define "ethics" and "morality" in a way that encompasses the way that these words are commonly used, but that allows for a more disciplined understanding of how these terms blend together. So I define

Ethics as the realm of inquiry into questions of right conduct and virtue wherein a common metaphysical understanding among the debating parties is not a pre-requisite.

Morality as a particular value system that is oriented around a particular metaphysical understanding. It is the value system of a morality that will inform matters of right behavior and virtue.

By my definition, ethics is not the only province of conscious examination, nor is it the only idea that is non-provincial. Rather, an ethical discussion/debate occurs when the parties involved do not necessarily have an agreement on a metaphysical principle that serves as an ultimate truth. A moral discussion/debate is an inquiry in which the debating parties agree upon a metaphysical principle and are debating the correct application that flows from that principle.

My definition allows a superficial similarity to some of the definitions offered above, since a system of morality as I've defined it will be more idiosyncratic to individuals, since individuals can have a differing view of what is ultimately true. A system of morality will also be more likely to be connected to religion, since religious beliefs provide people with answers concerning ultimate truth.

It is a tendency among philosophical cognicenti to define morality as the "petri dish" that is examined by the objective "microscope" of ethics. The hierarchical relationship that places ethics above morality that is created for the inquiry elides into the conclusion -- that "ethics" is the meta-morality above morality. The trade publication's definitions of these terms are representative of this tendency.

Based on how I've defined "morality" and "ethics", no one can claim to be a member of a cognicenti that has risen above questions of mere morality. Saying that there is no ultimate truth is, in itself an ultimate truth which functions as the basis of organizing a moral value system. Even those who claim that they have no settled metaphysical understanding, in fact, have one by default. It is also possible for people to have un-examined beliefs and therefore have deeply held moral systems that are in conflict with their overtly stated moral/ethical positions.

A moral system may encompass ideas of right conduct and virtue that are amenable to many others who have differing moral systems. It is these common denominator questions of right conduct and virtue that exist in the realm of "moral overlap" and are considered to be the realm of what is "ethical" by many. Ideas of Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring and Citizenship would fall into this category.

In regard to the blend of morality, morals, ethics and an "ethic", "morals" are generally referred to those principles of behavior and value which are not subject to any debate within a moral system. A "(fill in the blank) ethic" is a term that may be used by moralists to describe conclusions that certain members of a moral system have made in regard to particular chosen code/patterns of mind and behavior. For example, it may be moral in my moral system for me pray, and I may have a "prayer ethic" of praying in a certain way. Based on my definitions, if I am having a discussion on ethics that is informed by moral view in a way that can be commonly understood among those with different moral outlooks, I can be said to be discussing ethics.

It is this breakdown of ethics and morality that I will be using when I refer to "ethics" and "morality" in later blog posts. If I am echoing anyone else who has opined on this topic, please let me know.

My Comment at ChristianPost.com

2007-08-05T06:39:00.000-07:00

Here is a comment that I made at ChristianPost.com on the topic of modesty using the moniker GW. I respond directly to a person's comments. This person does care about modesty and that's good. However, based on her comments, if she is ever in charge of a ministry, I will be sure not to send men to her church who are struggling with lust, since she expects men of God not to have those struggles.

Female Chauvenist Pigs and their defenders

2007-08-01T09:51:00.000-07:00

This post is also my 3rd post as a "review of a review", criticizing the book reviewers opinions. Book reviews are an important part of the opinion media, and are an important place where secular apologists of ennui let their opinions hang out.

Ariel Levy's Female Chauvenist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture is a book that I refer to in my Crisis of Modesty in the Evangelical Church. Despite Levy's faults and naivete in certain areas of her analysis, Levy was one of a couple secular authors who began seriously questioning and confronting the raunch culture at large. I am particularly interested in writers like Levy, since secular writers arguing for social sexual boundaries cannot look to Scriptures to back up their arguments. They are often forced to construct better arguments from available evidence in society at large, often doing a better job than many Christians who care about the same topic.

While researching for my Modesty writing, I found that Levy coined the term, "Female Chauvenist Pigs", while it was Christine Smallwood who actually coined the term "raunch feminism" in her 2005 review of Levy's book entitled "Girls gone wild". There are many aspects of Smallwood's review that have vexed me, and I wanted to examine Smallwood's review in greater depth as part of my ongoing look at raunch culture and its apologists.

Here is the book review by Smallwood that was featured in Salon.com in 2005

Girls Gone Wild

The second half of Smallwood's review has been copied to my post and is featured in blue. My comments are interspersed throughout it in black. Notice that Smallwood acknowledges certain aspects of Levy's analysis while disparaging/questioning others aspects of it. It is my critique of Smallwood that most of her criticisms of Levy are contradictory and are "red herrings" for a central viewpoint of Smallwood that is not contradictory to any other of Smallwoods remarks.

…Levy extrapolates from her research subjects to all women, relying on a "we" without clearly defining who she's speaking about, or for. We revel in the porn aesthetic. We fetishize strippers. We do cardio striptease workouts. We have no real erotic role models. We are female chauvinist pigs.

But are we? It's clear that "we" live in a culture permeated by raunch and pornography -- at least white women do. Levy doesn't take account of black, Asian or Latino culture. She doesn't look at booty shakers pouring champagne on themselves, dripping with gold on the music videos on BET, or thumb through Confessions of a Video Vixen, the bestselling book about a hip-hop video dancer. She doesn't think about Japanese anime and manga, with their double-D heroines.

Smallwood accuses Levy of failing to look at non-white women, but it is not clear what the consequence is. At the beginning of the paragraph, Smallwood seems to be questioning whether “we”—in regard to the idea that “we” live in a culture permeated by raunch and pornography—is a tent that includes all women or merely just white women. Ms. Smallwood then promptly fills in the gaps to say that non-white women do live in their own versions of raunch culture.

After second-wave feminism was accused of being a white movement, women of color assumed an important position in academic and activist debate. "We" could have a lot to teach each other about the ways that we are uniquely, and commonly, misused across media. Female Chauvinist Pigs ignores that possibility.

Again, Smallwood is not criticizing Levy’s fundamental analysis that women are misused across the media, she is criticizing the fact that Levy has not done more to weave non-white women into the discussion. While this is not a bad suggestion, to conduct this cross-cultural comparative analysis Levy would have had to have written a longer book, maybe a much longer book. Levy is giving herself permission to be a bit polemic. Perhaps Levy should have described her current as an analysis of white culture and then write a second follow-up book that includes all of the other bits of analysis that Smallwood wants.

It also neglects any mention of class. Male-identified FCPs are financially successful. Even if they're not at the top of the ladder, if they're bartenders or registered nurses, they're not struggling to get by. They would never be forced to strip for money, for instance, which is one reason it's easy for them to dissociate themselves from women who do.

Who are these indentifying males and these dissociating financially successful Female Chauvinist Pigs? It's Smallwood's red herring and a meaningless pronoun minefield that has no bearing on Levy's analysis. If Levy wanted to deal with class nuances—a tangentially important area to her analysis-- she would need to have written a bigger book.

Aside from the question of "white-ness" and class, Levy is writing to and about those women who have the means to consume, who are knowingly or un-knowingly driving raunch into the mainstream by their consumption choices. As it relates to women who have the means to consume, Levy's "we" covers most of the bell curve of consumerist Western culture, and only excludes, perhaps, the utterly destitute poor, who might feel that they were "forced" to strip.

So you have to wonder why Levy doesn't take the time to interview strippers or sex workers. She quotes Jenna Jameson, but she doesn't get an analysis of raunch from the perspective of an actual sex worker. Presumably such a thing falls outside the scope of her subject matter, but you'd think that a G-string diva would have an idea or two of her own on her new role as cultural heroine.

Again, Levy could have written a massive tome to include every angle of cultural analysis that Smallwood criticizes her for not including. We can read Jenna Jameson’s book, How To Make Love Like a Porn Star to learn about Jameson’s own personal cocktail of pride, bravado, denial, ambivalence and cognitive dissonance.

Levy takes it for granted that Jameson's lifestyle is destructive. There are other things that one can read if one is unconvinced of this. If porn women like Jameson were interviewed so that their opinions could be taken seriously in answering the question whether porn as destructive, most would be in some degree of denial. If it is taken as a given that Jameson's public image is destructive as Levy does, then Jameson represents a proverbial "flame", and mainstream girls who aspire to be like her in some way represent proverbial "moths".

Levy's book is about the motivations of the "moths", and so it is actually far more important for Levy’s over-all analysis of mainstream culture to interview “normal” girls like Erin and Shaina than to further probe into what Jenna actually thinks of herself.

Raunch, whether or not we like it, is tangled and complicated, fraught with pleasure, voyeurism, mimicry, excitement, revulsion, exploitation -- a whole host of contradictory impulses.

Smallwood’s description of raunch also sounds like an addiction. At certain points in the midst of an addiction to drugs and alcohol, an addiction includes all of the impulses that Smallwood mentions – pleasure, mimicry, excitement, revulsion and exploitation. To admit that something is an addiction, though, requires that one be capable of super-imposing a higher and better and more wholesome image of health over and above the pleasure, mimicry, excitement, revulsion and exploitation.

While raunch is indeed a tangle of contradictory impulses, the question is whether it can be untangled. Is there is an image of health and wholeness that one can superimpose over and above the pleasure, mimcry, excitement, revulsion and exploitation of raunch or are the contradictory impulses are necessarily and inevitable linked in a sort of yin and yang, held together with an umbreakable centripetal force?

(There's a reason this stuff tore the women's movement apart.) But all is not a matter of false consciousness. Many women are savvy enough to recognize those contradictions and see through the charade that is broadcast into their lives 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The advance of raunch in our culture has come from the tandem forces of A) women at large and B) the men who pleasure from and consume raunch and C) the media who profit from raunch. Perhaps there are some women who are able to see this "through the charade”. There are also a lot of women for whom the media and the culture at large is a “super-peer” ("super-peer" was a brilliant term coined by Jane D. Brown, et. al. in an article in Pediatrics). Even if some women are able to see the manipulative element of the media’s involvement in raunch, many of them are not strong enough to resist the pull into raunch behavior and fashion, or they have thoroughly embraced raunch culture.

The essential drive toward raunch behavior in our culture is a destructive drive, and Smallwood has not denied its destructiveness. There is an element to this drive into raunch that Levy has correctly identified – that women, on some level, view it as an avenue to having power equity with men, or even power over men. As a mutated post-feminism that can bear little resemblance to earlier forms of feminism, raunch feminism is feminist in its essential belief in that women demand power equity with men. Raunch feminists seek this power even at the expense of doing destructive things with their sexuality, often aping and even one-upping various forms of male sexual conquest.

This tacit affirmation of power in raunch culture is “false”, in the sense that it is not a true and constructive measure of a woman’s value.

The ways that they consume and digest endless streams of newspaper stories, television shows, magazine covers, books, advertising campaigns, billboards and Internet pop-up ads would have been worth investigating.

Again Levy could have written a book the size of War and Peace, or could write a follow up book.

After all, being a woman faced with infinite images of other women taking their clothes off, gyrating, tittering, moaning and pushing product can be exhausting and demoralizing. (Shockingly, there are those rare mornings that the New York Times online goes down better without the Victoria's Secret pop-up ads.) Raunch, like so much of mass culture, is both out of our control and impossible to ignore. We must develop a smarter strategy for living with it than simply wishing it would go away.

Who’s "simply wishing" it will go away? Is it Levy? Surely Levy desires that it will go away, and which decent person wouldn’t desire that it went away? Smallwood seems to be implying that Levy has not done something constructive in trying to usher the end of raunch. In fact, Levy has done something in her effort to raise consciousness, and raised consciousness is always penultimate to action.

Raunch is a fungus that grows of a critical mass of popular ennui and blasé. If that ennui and blasé were to end, then raunch would diminish. If we believe that it is out of our control then it is. As Andrew Carnegie said, "Whatever you think, you're right", and any reform movement seems like an impossible dream to those who first dare to conceive of it.

Levy's book diagnoses, but it doesn't prescribe. After carefully documenting the sale of female sexuality, Levy closes with the call for readers to believe they are "sexy and funny and competent and smart." Apparently the solution to a system of objectification in which women themselves are complicit, in which feminism has been co-opted by and for profit, is for us to be ourselves. It's a little hard to swallow.

Smallwood seems to be saying that self objectification is in the very nature of womanhood. That for women to "be themselves" is to necessarily live out this impulse to self-objectification, and that to tell women to "be themselves" at the expense of self-objectifying is nigh impossible.

Unless there is a political dimension to our personhood that extends to other women, we will never be more than marketing niches.

"A political dimension to our personhood that extends to other women" that Smallwood suggests would require that women as a group presented a clear objective to the world that could be advanced through the peculiar medium of politics. Feminism was just such an attempt to define a political dimension to the personhood of women that extended to other women and, so says Smallwood, it was torn apart by the contradictions of raunch. So the raunch sexuality that split the political unity of feminism will be fixed by the political unity of feminism? Generally speaking, if this is the "smarter strategy for living with it" that Smallwood suggests, then it's not a very good one.

Raunch is about individual choices. It is a juggernaut that is created by what individual people wear when they get up in the morning, what they do with each other in relationships, what they consume and what they excuse. It is in the intimate realms of life that raunch must primarily be contronted.

Levy has done the good work of documenting raunch culture. What next?

Having offered no hint a substantive solution, and after hinted spuriously at fatal flaws in Levy's analysis, Smallwood is basically saying that self-objectification is an intractible part of modern womanhood.

So what is next? The patent destructiveness of women’s self-objectification and seeking power equity via raunch behavior and the destructiveness of men who participate in raunch will only end with this: when men and women are transformed by a God into the image of Christ who is higher than their sin. While it is possible for certain lone secular thinkers to grasp the problem of raunch, at bottom, there is not other "strategy" for dealing with it other than the individual transformation of people's hearts and minds to an image of spiritual health and wholesome-ness that lies outside of the human predicament of bondage to sin. This is the only strategy that will confront raunch in the intimate realms of life where it is flourishing.

If Smallwood were to consider this suggestion an intrusion of “conservatism” that would erode feminism “hard won gains”, then, for Smallwood, nothing is “next”, and people will continue to be titillated and excited and then demoralized and exhausted by an addiction to raunch that is, and always will be, out of control.

To her credit, Smallwood is at least willing to admit that there is a destructive aspect to raunch feminism. Read some the passionate letters in response to her "Girls gone wild" review, and you'll see the full-throated denial of any dark side to the raunch culture.

Letters in response to "Girls gone wild"

Examining a dirty word -- Censorship

2007-07-22T23:40:00.000-07:00

Back in May, a book review by Richard Schickel was featured in the Los Angeles Times about book Freedom to Offend: How New York Remade Movie Culture by Raymond J. Haberski Jr. on the era just after the movie censoring of the ‘50’s. I’ll admit I haven’t read the book. However, as with most book reviews that use the book topic as a springboard for the book reviewer’s opining, I don’t need to have read the book confront Schickel’s point of view. Here is the link to Schickel’s book review below.

Read the article

Now that you’ve had a chance to read it, here is a statement that he made that I want to unpack in the context of other thing that he says in his article.

…The real issue was the widespread belief that movies, as a mass art, required closer censorship than other arts. The censors argued, ludicrously, that they were protecting a completely mythical creature, the innocent child who might someday wander into a theater and, in effect, see Mommy and Daddy doing it. Might have, I suppose. But so what? Children see and hear all sorts of things we'd prefer they didn't…

Now my goal is not necessarily to defend the movie censors, their methods or their rhetoric. That is a topic for another post. I will say in regard to this book review that I have a bias: I sympathize with the essential idea that there is an innocence that children possess that adults have an obligation to protect by setting boundaries.

Countering this idea is Schickel who is in the same ilk as Bill Maher when Maher says, “children aren't innocent” (Maher also says that Jesus wasn’t Republican, which is true, but that’s another issue). Here’s what at stake in denying the existence of innocence in children. If there is any idea that there may be a special innocence to the lives of children then it opens the door to arguing that some sort of boundary somewhere is appropriate is appropriate and that some censorship of some kind must take place to enforce the boundary.

While often claiming that parents should confine their jurisdiction of values to the “home”, Schickel and those who share his belief, use a rhetorical sword that thoroughly dismisses the ontological possibility that children have any special innocence. It is this sword that, taken to its logical conclusion, cuts into the very jurisdiction of the home. If the innocent child is a completely “mythical creature” and therefore is as non-existent as the tooth fairy, why should any parent ever raise a finger, a voice or an eyebrow to ever demarcate boundaries to protect a child’s innocence.

Likewise, there is the equal and opposite rhetorical sword; the one that says that there is a special innocence to children. It is a sword that is wielded by those who favor the imposition of boundaries that cuts into a realm beyond the jurisdiction of home and cuts into society at large, and even into the realm of the movies. In response to this threat, Schickel and those who share his belief are willing to use an opposing rhetorical sword that is able to cut into more than they are willing to admit.

What is happening in the paragraph cited above is Schickel in the process of A) creating the rhetorical sword to cut at the idea of children’s innocence, and then B) trying to hold back the sword from cutting along the full arc that his blade is designed to cut. He does this by first declaring that the innocent child who might wander into a theater is a purely “mythical creature” but then admits that "Children see and hear all sorts of things we'd prefer they didn't…".

It is almost an offhand remark, "Children see and hear all sorts of things we'd prefer they didn't". There is more importance and meaning in that statement than Schickel lets on, or is even able to admit to himself, which is why I want to camp out on it. Who is “we’? If we assume for the sake of convenience that “we” is adult society, is this adult society completely and utterly wrongheaded in its preference? Is the preference completely and utterly baseless and devoid of any claim to truth or reality? Here is the problem. The preference that “we” have would need to be completely and utterly baseless in order for the innocent child to be a “completely mythical creature”. “Completely” doesn’t leave a lot of room for ambiguity or nuance.

Perhaps Schickel would try to explain his position by saying, as many would, that A) the reality of kids seeing adult content and B) the desire that we would have for a child to not see it is the difference between what is "real" and an "ideal" in the world. Here, our “preference” is that which is ideal, while the reality of kids being exposed to adult content is that which is “real”. If Schickel took this line of thinking, he would be saying that the “ideal” is something that is purely mythic, and that what is “ideal” in human affairs does not have nearly the claim to being real when compared to that which actually occurs in day-to-day human affairs.

This is a common belief but inaccurate belief. In truth, that which tangibly occurs in the realm human affairs is merely an existential realm of reality. An ideal is not completely mythic in the sense that Schickel intends the word "mythic" to mean, as something as fanciful as the tooth fairy and that can be totally dismissed from serious discussion. Ideals are an intangible part of reality that are as real as our existential and tangible reality, even as our existential and tangible reality falls short of the ideals most of the time. Nevertheless, ideals shape, and should shape, our existential reality profoundly. Human affairs exist in the tension between what is ideal and what is real, and we would quickly think our way into savage behavior if we completely abandoned ideals.

As an example of this, we all know what junk food is even though we eat it. If a Martian were sent to Earth to conduct a superficial survey of what it is that people, in fact, eat, the Martian would discover that lots of people eat a lot of junk food. The practice of eating a purely nutritious diet is “mythic” in the sense that it is an Olympian task that the vast majority of people fail at. However, the need that people have for nutrition is not mythic at all. It may be impractical to prevent people from eating junk food. It may even be that people in a free society need to be free to have junk food. Whatever the case may be, there is an intellectual canyon that is crossed by telling ourselves that it isn't, in fact, junk food or by saying something tantamount to it, i.e. that junk food is completely harmless.

Of course, the nutritional value of junk food can be verified in a laboratory. The innocence of children can’t. The epistemology of tangible scientific empiricism is not always suited to the realm of grasping at ideals any more than it is suited to explaining the mystery of beauty and art. As with many issues, one person’s studies with one agenda can be pitted against another person’s studies and statistics with another agenda.

But maybe, just maybe, the innocence of children exists in some plane of reality, where it is a real thing, and kids are, in some way, better and healthier for having a sense of innocence protected. If this is true, then violations of their innocence are a spiritual and emotional junk food of a different kind. It is my assertion that it is this ephemeral reality that the antennae of collective adult preference is pointing us to, and our intuition, though not provable with scientific precision, may not be completely wrong.

I think that Schickel knows this on some level, which is why he includes his reference to our “preference" in stating his opinion, even as he has crafted his opinion as a “take no prisoners” rhetorical sword. He doesn't want to be too dismissive of the remote possibility that kids have an innocence that needs to be protected and nurtured. However, Schickel doesn't want the faint possibility of this to in any way get in the way of the way that movies are presented to the world.

Schickel criticizes the idea that the “mass art” required some “closer censorship” by brushing aside any concern about the possibility that a few kids made it into the theaters. So Schickel doesn't seem to be bothered by a few kids going in. But that is an easy target of his blasé. The real question is whether he bothered by a vast swath of them going in? It would be more intellectually honest for Schickel to say flat out that he wouldn’t mind in the least if most, if not all, children made it in to see movies with adult content. But then again, his “preference” would get in the way of making such a bold statement.

In regard to movie boundaries, more and more allow more and more sex and gore has been allowed in movies under the R and PG-13 rating over the years. In relation to what was censored in the ‘50’s, more and more kids have been "brought in" to the theatre to more sex and gore. For all intents and purposes, the 1950's boundary that Schickel dismissed has now been significantly breached. Now what?

Later in his book review, Schickel bemoans that "American film is almost universally pitched to teenage dimwits and the nation's addiction to pornography is chronic and more alarming… ”. So what does this have to do with adult content in movies? Movies are part of the larger media infrastructure that has increasingly brought raunch, and gore into the mainstream. And movies for “dimwits” and “porn” are both appeals to our base nature and the lowest common denominator for and easy buck.

What Schickel is actually bemoaning is the taste for raunch and gore and has run amok, that has become so dominant in our society that it imposes its own unique form of tyranny. As our society demands some form of “closer censorship” in the form of a ratings system, so too does our present society demand raunchy spectacle in movies, and it is this demand that has financial clout and with it, the creative clout to crowd out better movies. While certain aspects of some movies may be “self censoring”, the market is not.

Schickel plainly loves the "heady days" of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s and hates prissiness and dismay of the guardians of moral purity and the contempt of the high culture that came before and the drivel and raunch that has come after. Here is a scary possibility for Schickel. It is possible that there was a value to the force of censorship, even as the rhetoric of it was grating. The force of ‘50’s era censorship probably kept a lot of dimwit stuff and raunch in check by making movies work harder on different levels to be appealing without having easy access to sex and gore.

It is also possible that the first generation to be free from '50's censorship had the creative spark that was extruded though their being part of a culture that still had a more of a value for the sacred. I think that this enabled the first generation of movie makers who were free from censorship to be able to deal with sex in more aesthetically sophisticated ways than was accomplished in either their past or in their future because it was suppressed for decades in our culture. Their creative ability came out through the pressure of the culture like the force soda after it has been shaken, only to become warm, sticky suds on the ground later. It is possible that sex for lowest common denominator of raunch and gore has become the sticky “suds” of American cinema and media oozing out of spent creative and intellectual fire of the past.

Schickel knows, on some level, that the proliferation of raunchy garbage and the associated costs to our society is the price that he is willing to pay for the artistic freedom that he wants, the price for having enjoyed the “heady” days of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. The problem is that in the cognitive dissonance of completely denying the existence of the innocence of children, but not completely, he has not risen completely to the task of admitting the true extent of the cost of the artistic freedom he wants.

In regard to children's innocence, for Schickel to say that children's innocence is there and is violated would be honest. For him to say that we have allowed it to be violated and that we've all become cynical and blasé to sex and violence would be honest. For him to say that our society values the freedom of movie art and movie economics more than the innocence of children would be honest. For him to say that he and many others are willing to accept the trade-off of allowing raunchy and dimwitted movies to proliferate and help dumb many people down and injure the innocence of many kids in order to allow for greater artistic freedom would be honest.

However, for him to say that the innocence of children is not there to begin with; that it is simply a fairy tale myth with not claim to reality, is not honest. It is simply less painful to his conscience than admitting that the possibility that innocence of children has been injured.

Unsolicited Advice -- Examining Matthew 7:3

2007-07-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

Matthew 7:3 Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

Many people read this passage to mean that one person, whom I will refer to as the “confronter”, should not confront another person, whom I will refer to as the “confronted”, on a small fault when the confronter has not dealt with his large violation of that same fault. This interpretation of the passage is based the most obvious and clearest form of hypocrisy. If I am criticizing another person for a small infraction, when I am committing that same infraction on a larger scale, I am obviously guilty of hypocrisy. Others may interpret this passage in the broadest possible sense to mean that anyone with a large fault in any realm of his life cannot confront another person on a small fault, even if the large fault of the confronter is completely unrelated the small fault of the confronted.

The problem with the former interpretation is that it is too narrow and does not call many confronters to enter the full X-ray of self-examination. The problem with the latter interpretation is that it is too broad and makes the standard for confrontation too high – who is not guilty of any large faults in any aspect of his life?

The passage is best interpreted to mean that there is something about the large fault of the confronter that it is affecting the confronter’s ability to operate with love and integrity as he approaches his brother in confrontation. Here, Jesus is saying that that one must remove any obstacle to operating with love and integrity as one begins to operate in the process of confrontation.

If the “speck” that belongs to the confronted is a genuine fault, then an unsolicited confrontation may be necessary on the part of the confronter. However, in order to proceed, the confronter must make sure that is not guilty of committing that same fault. That is the first test of integrity. Then, the confronter must make sure that he has repented of any insecurities or latent issues that are in any way keeping him from operating carefully with love, care and precision as he attempts to confront his brother. This is the second test of integrity, and it solves another potential problem. It is possible that the “speck” belonging to the confronted is not a genuine fault at all but only appears to be that way in the eyes of the confronter. It is also possible that the “speck” is a tiny fault that appears to the confronter to be much larger and more urgent that it really is.

It is the confronter’s failure to operate out of peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control that will render him unable to see clearly to approach his brother. For the confronter to operate without hypocrisy in all of the ways that hypocrisy can affect the confrontation, he must first take his emotions captive and surrender his emotions to the ministry of God’s Spirit. He must also apply his mind to discern the true severity of the fault that he is about to confront another on, according to Biblical standards of what constitutes a severe fault. The quality of the confronter’s emotion processing and Biblical/intellectual discernment will determine the quality of the confrontation.

The second test of integrity, of taking insecurities captive to the truth of Scripture and the ministry of God’s Spirit, solves yet another problem. A confronter who is being driven by insecurities to act impulsively is not assessing the true gravity involved in confronting another person. When we are confronting another person, we are drawing from a certain “negativity bank” in our relationship; there is a certain, limited degree to which we are prepared to hear things that are necessary but negative from another person with whom we are in relationship with. Any confrontation, no matter how small, even if it is only to dispense advice, is never “no big deal”, and must always be done with care and forethought so that we do not draw from the “negativity bank” carelessly. To treat any advice and criticism that one offers another as “no big deal” is to be flippant in regard to what is real about relationships. Anyone who is being intellectually honest will admit that this is true for anyone, including him.

It is the teaching of Jesus for us to be slow to confront another over what, according to Biblical standards, is a small matter, and to put our hearts and minds through several tests before proceeding in a confrontation. The wisdom of this passage can be summed up, by saying, “do unto others, as you would have them do unto you” by confronting others with the care and precision that you would like to have applied when you are confronted. A confronter’s failure to confront another with the precision and care that he/she would like to be confronted with is the subtlest and most common form of hypocrisy that Jesus is addressing. The inability to confront a brother in love and precision is the most common form of “plank” as it superficially presents itself. It is taking the hard, necessary step to examining the sin and insecurities that are causing this inability that we are able to understand the specific nature of the “plank” that needs to be removed as it is lodged deep in our hearts

One of the most common ways that the teaching is this passage is violated is when people give impulsively give advice/criticism to others. It will invariably be grating and will be interpreted as unloving criticism by the person receiving it. The insecurities that can fuel the impulsive giving of unsolicited advice/criticism are many. Someone who is giving advice/criticism impulsively may have the fear he/she is not effective in influencing the world and is trying to soothe that fear by trying too hard to seem wise and effective in the company of others. This form of insecurity is the result of a fallen, misapplication of a God-given need that we all have to affect the stage of history.

Someone who is giving unsolicited advice/criticism can have an even deeper an uglier problem; the need to find comfort in conforming to the standards of the world and the impulse to act out of discomfort to “fix” another person to conform to worldly standards. There is a demonic torpidity that lurks in the hearts of those who affect the stage of history in order to make themselves more comfortable according to worldly standards of comfort. This sin is compounded by intellectual dishonesty when those who act out of their desire for comfort excuse and justify the unsolicited advice/criticism by saying that it is “no big deal” or that they were “just” trying to “help” the other person. It is in this case the giving unsolicited advice/criticism can be the manifestation of a deep idolatry on the part of the person giving it.

These are only a couple of the insecurities that can fuel hypocritical and impulsive criticism and advice giving. It is A) impulse to give hasty, unsolicited advice and B) the empty justifications for giving it that Jesus calls us to crucify in the application of his teaching in Matthew 7:3 on how to proceed to properly confront another.

Dealing with Wounded Energy

2007-07-09T19:54:00.000-07:00

We have each been hurt. We have each been punched in the gut by some form of injustice, whether committed by group or an individual, whether intentionally or un-intentionally.

I know that there are Christians who say that we must immediately invoke the gratitude of Jesus' death on the cross as the antidote to our wound. I find that this advice vexing. It is empty advice even as it contains some aspects of truth. It is in the family of “forgive and forget” advice that does not honor the difficult and thorny process of dealing with hurt. At least I can say that that sort of advice has never cut it for me.

Dealing with gratitude and the cross in the context of ministry to ourselves and others is a big topic. Suffice to say for this post that my idea of Jesus is one who is active and living and who meets us in our hurts. It is this supernatural, pan-global availability of Jesus via the Holy Spirit was a primary reason for the cross (John 16:7 But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you). It is in the ministry of the here and now that the power of the cross time and space into the present moment. It is in the clear and present availability of Jesus in the here and now that my discussion of forgiveness and anger relinquishment begins.

Dennis Prager, a Jewish commentator, makes the observation that Jesus calls us not to be angry at our brother but only calls us to actually forgive those who have directly asked for it from us. There are some passages that speak of forgiveness as something we offer to one who asks us, and there are other passages that speak of forgiveness as something we offer to anywone ("...as we forgive those who trespass against us..."). Is there any difference between the relinquishment of anger/forgiveness that we are called to for anyone's offense against us and the act of offering forgiveness to the one who has specifically asked for forgiveness from us? That is an interesting question for another post. What can be said is that the common denominator in forgiveness and anger relinquishment is that we are called to is a journey of emotion processing that requires giving up our anger that must not depend on whether the offending party has repented.

The common denominator for any serious hurt from another that requires a serious act of forgiveness/anger relinquishment is that there will often be a long intellectual, emotional and spiritual journey to reckon fully and completely with the offence. There will be a long, staggered process to properly understand and put into words what happened to know with precision what exactly is being forgiven, so that the offense is understood in all of its dimensions. The hurt will be contained in our psyche in several pockets at different levels of depth. The exposure of these pain pockets will occur as we are continually ministered to by God’s Spirit and as we are placed under various stresses and pains. It is when these various pockets of hurt see the light of day that they can explode in our consciousness like un-detonated grenade that has been exposed in a mine-clearing operation.

Dealing with this hurt, as it is continually brought to the surface, is a long journey of managing wounded energy. There are bad forms of wounded energy, which include rage and other forms of malicious thought and behavior. There are good forms of wounded energy, which include compassion, passion, understanding and even a righteous form of anger. The nut-meat of deep forgiveness and anger relinquishment is the long process of letting go of the bad forms of wounded energy and the redemptive directing of the positive forms of wounded energy.

Wounded energy and the call to justice

While we are accountable to care about injustice even if we have not been directly hurt by it, being directly hurt by an injustice is an important way that God calls us to attention to care about injustice in the context of "faith, justice and mercy". To illustrate this in the context of urban ministry, John Perkins of the Voice of Calvary Ministry in Jackson Mississippi discussed the “felt need concept” of urban ministry. In John Perkin's ministry people with resources choose to enter a poor, distressed neighborhood, ie. the ‘hood, to become neighbors to those who are stuck there. As those who have chosen to live in the 'hood experience the injustices first hand, they are compelled to pursue justice for the inner city in their own enlightened self interest. The “felt need concept" is also about making the Gospel real and tangible by dealing with the needs that have been brought to the fore of people’s attention.

As humans, we live in the ‘hood of planet earth and the injustices therein. We are called to live on planet earth like those who have chosen to move into the ‘hood, as Jesus himself chose to enter the ‘hood when he became flesh. It is by “picking up our cross daily” that we continually own and re-own this choice. Like the wealthy neighbors who choose to live among the poor, as Christians, we are called to bring the wealth of the resources of knowing God intimately into the situation of our hurt. It is as we are hurt directly by injustice that we are able to feel the “felt needs” of planet earth in regard to the need for justice. This is enlightened self-interest for the benefit of ourselves and those around us to confront injustice that we pray with force for God’s Kingdom to come.

It is when we experience injustice that we are able to know evil on earth first hand and to have a depth of conviction to confront it and the compassion for others being afflicted by it. It is in this context that we can begin to give shape to the long process of managing our wounded energy so that God is able to heal us and guide our wounded energy for a redemptive purpose. It is via the experience of injustice that God heightens our need to fulfill our purpose and fulfill the calling of bearing His image. It is the act of trusting God that we enter into this calling, trusting that God will bless and harness all of the wounded energy that we have acquired for a good and blessed purpose.

It is in the face of being hurt, we have two-fold responsibility, each complimenting the other. The first aspect of responsibility to manage our wounded energy is directly tied to the moment of the hurt. We must immediately enter into a gear of operating in trust in God and giving up our rage and anger to God and to His direction and timing. We are to not return injustice with injustice. The second aspect of responsibility that we have is across the span of time. We are responsible to the bigger picture, and we are to allow God to use our wounded energy to be the engine of our conviction to confront the injustice under God's direction.

These two forms of responsibility operate symbiotically with each other. We are to trust "from the get-go" that vengeance and total judgment belong to the Lord. It is in the successful ministry of God’s grace and direction to our wounded energy that we are able to exercise the lesser forms of judgment that we are called to. As we operate in God's grace and timing in managing our wounded energy, we are able to operate in Godly wisdom and direction in the management of our heart and mind and our affairs with others and (see my post on judging).

Rage is crisis in the exercise of proper judgment in of the all realms in which we are called to exercise right judgment. Rage is a crisis in our sense of being able to protect ourselves from the slings and arrows that would subvert our joy and our fulfillment. In rage, the human self lashes out apart from God’s peace and direction, operating out of fear. It is in the impulse of rage that we have the impulse to exercise the sort of total judgment on another person that God reserves for Himself.

The beginning of being able to deal with rage is to recognize it as a form of fear. If we take it captive properly and early, we can present it to God while it is still in its “fear” form before it has mutated into something larger and darker in our psyche. If the fear has become rage, we must allow God to unravel it so that it is revealed as fear in our hearts, so that we can present it God as our fear and receive the ministry of God’s peace.

The point of God’s peace that passes understanding is not tranquil, blissful equanimity. Rather, the point of God's peace that passes understanding is that the peace is an essential part of our trans-rational ballast as we embark on God’s path to redeem our wounded energy. The peace is a "pre-articulate" part of journey with God, penultimate to the exercise of fierce precision that God would lead us to confront evil. It is in recognizing this that we can submit to God’s peace not as an act of “blowing out” in a Zen Buddhist sense, but as the beginning of a journey with God who wants to use us as instruments to confront injustice in the world.

I discussed forgiveness and anger relinquishment once with a non-Christian Japanese friend of mine who was still learning English. I was trying to explain a big concept in very simple terms. I explained that being hurt by someone is like being shocked by the electricity coming from a bare wire that one has stepped on. I explained that the generator for that electricity is coming from somewhere far and beyond that person. The process of forgiveness/anger relinquishment involves correctly identifying the spiritual source and putting the person who is the conduit for that spiritual source into perspective.

Forgiveness/anger relinquishment is the act of putting a conflict with another person into its correct spiritual and philosophical plane, transferring the battle away from its incorrect target and following the direction of God to enter the battle correctly. As we relinquish our rage and surrender our wounded energy to God, we are able to operate in God’s direction and timing confront the injustice as a larger philosophical and spiritual battle and let go it is as a "tit for tat" with another person. While "forgive and forget" is often bad advice, it is valuable in the limited sense that we are called to have the image of the “monster” as it has taken the form of a particular person vanish into irrelevance, as the image is juxtaposed against the truth, joy and wisdom of the Lord.

As we are able to walk with God to channel our wounded energy toward a correct and fruitful confrontation of evil, we are able to we are able to pray effective for the advancement of God’s Kingdom that will end the foolishness that we were subjected to. It is via God’s healing in us that we are able to glimpse how His Kingdom is being brought “on earth as it is in heaven”, and it is by God’s grace that we are able see how the Kingdom is advancing into earth. These moments of holy clarity usher the triumph of joy over rage and are landmarks on the road to the redemption of our wounded energy.

As this vision matures, God allows us to see how His kingdom is advancing into the lives of those who were the conduits of evil that we are experienced. It is then that we are able to “pray for our enemies” as an act of correctly applied spiritual battle, confronting evil in prayer with the force of passion, joy and clarity.

As the battle is a spiritual one, it is also a philosophical one. We are called to confront the intellectual anatomy of the foolishness of the ideas that caused or facilitated the evil that we experienced. As we walk on the intellectual journey of reckoning with the hurt, we are able to articulate the justice that we were not able to articulate at the time. As we do so for the defenseless self that we once were, we are able to do so for others who are in a position of defenselessness.

It is as we are confronting successfully on the spiritual plane and the philosophical plane of reality that we are able to be more effective confronting in the human to human plane. We are able to live out Jesus’ commands to call our brother’s attention (Matthew 18:15-17) to an offence without being in a state of sin that would cause harm.

The Pleasure Principle

2007-06-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

I was watching David Letterman once when he had Jerry Seinfeld as a guest. Seinfeld then riffed on a little comedy routine, talking about deferred payment plans that say “buy now, pay in June”. He said that it was like a person was treating their self today and their self in June as two different people, as “Today guy” and “June guy”, and saying, “I’m Today guy and I’m going to enjoy this purchase. As for paying for it, that’s June guy’s problem”. Seinfeld was making a funny commentary on a serious issue in a society wherein many people have allowed themselves to be fleeced of the idea that there is any continuity of their selves through time, and thereby give themselves permission to act on impulses without regard to the future. It is the consequence of people who do not have a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives that is constructed enough to give shape to their sense of self as it moves through time.

Daniel Robinson is a philosophy teacher featured on the Teaching Series on the great Ideas in Philosophy” was discussing the goals of philosophy to find the “good life” and offered up a metaphor that was clearly not the “good life”. Robinson described a person who allowed their brain to be removed from their body and placed in a vat with electrodes hooked up to it so that the brain could receive constant streams of stimulated pleasure.

While the "brain in the vat" has been used as a thought experiment for various philosophical ends to examine the question of real and perceived knowledge, I want to examine is the visceral reason why the “brain in the vat” is a ghastly image. For one to choose to place one's brain in a vat is to choose after a series of experiences that not contextualized into a whole. Choosing to place one’s brain in a vat can offer one no joy in how one has affected the stage of history. It can offer no joy in the thread of continuity in life experiences that one can discover via one’s conscious effort to explore one’s nature and develop one’s character.

In the context of a discussion of pleasure, putting one’s “brain in the vat” is a metaphor for those who seek continual pleasure highs in the moment but who reject any effort to contextualize their pleasure and hold it accountable to a larger purpose. Jerry Seinfeld's “Today guy” and “June Guy” dichotomy is a consequence of “brain in the vat” living. For one who wants to divorce "Today Guy" from "June Guy", having one's brain in a vat would actually be a way for one to save oneself the consequences of living in the real world The only alternative to attempting to put one's “brain in the vat”, and therefore living properly in the real world, is to realize that there is a self inside of us that is being continually made better or worse toward an end that is larger than ourselves.

In The Picture of Dorian Grey, Dorian Grey is a man who was given the opportunity to live forever and appear young and beautiful as long as he did not look at the painting of himself in the attic of his house. As Dorian Grey did good deeds, his picture was made beautiful and as he did bad deeds, his picture was made scarred and ugly. In the context of our purpose for being, the self is like a Dorian Grey painting that is either becoming increasingly beautiful or increasingly ugly, and that will presented to us, to God and to the stage of history for all to see.

Our purpose is to elevate the world, to give the world a new experience of moral beauty through the unique contours of our own individual personhoods. It is our conscience that holds us accountable to this end. It is our conscience, as the Dorian Grey painting, that reflects the self that we are developing back to our self-consciousness according to whether the self is being developed according to our purpose. In is in the rejection of our conscience and the rejection of looking at our true selves and in the rejection of seeking our purpose that we place our "brain in the vat" and live as Dorian Grey did, who chose cruel pleasures until he was compelled to look at his ugly, scarred picture.

Our conscience is the membrane between our self-consciousness and our soul’s inner knowing of the larger purpose that each of us are endowed with. Our conscience informs our self-consciousness of whether we are rising to that purpose, and our conscience gives us joy or misery. It is with this understanding that Meaning is that form of knowledge and truth that reveals the contours of ourselves inside and out in the context of our purpose and elaborates on our purpose. It is meaning that takes other forms of truth and makes it beautiful within our lives.

It is in this context of a soul’s journey to achieve its meaning and purpose that one can begin to deal with each experience in life as an opportunity to discover Meaning. It is on a “journey of meaning” that one discovers the landscape of one’s soul and the purpose for which it was created, and is able to better lead others to find their purpose. With this understanding of purpose, life is both a construction and a journey leading somewhere, and the journey is not merely the destination.

It is from the vantage point of our purpose and our conscience that there is a hierarchy of pleasures within a moral order. There are pleasure pursuits that are connected to truth and to our purpose. It is these pleasures that are consistent with our purpose and that are validated by our conscience that constitute Joy, which is the union of truth and pleasure.

And then there are pleasures are not Joy, which replace, or even subvert our purpose. There are pleasures that can be wedded to our purpose in the right context and pleasures that are perverse and are inherently destructive. There are pleasures of beautiful accomplishments, the pleasures of blessing another person, which are joyful pleasures. There is the pleasure of winning the chess game, the pursuit of which can either be a joyful experience or an escape from the pursuit of higher pleasures. And there is the pleasure of crack cocaine, which demands everything of body and mind and gives nothing in return except for ruined health and addiction. There are pleasures that are virtues; the feelings of peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control. And that are pleasures that are vices; the feelings of lust, greed and the satiating of envy and revenge.

It is in the context of a moral hierarchy of pleasure that pleasure has gravitas, that pleasure is the power of gravity to lead us to blessings or to curses. Not all pleasure “rushes” are created equal, and each pleasure must be taken captive to purpose. All pleasures must be taken captive to the journey, and that meaning must be extracted from it, and every experience is taken captive to the whole endeavor of ones development. This is why Christian teaching holds us accountable for being aware of the moral and spiritual value of the things that please us.

In regard to the "brain in the vat" and the cruel pleasures of Dorian Grey, seeking mediocre and ephemeral pleasures is not unrelated to seeking destructive and cruel pleasures. When we seek momentary and banal comfort, we abandon the search for Meaning and leave the deep and heaving needs that we possess in a state of restlessness. It is these needs that will warp us, leading us down destructive paths, if they are not brought in line with our purpose. (As I wrote about in my discussion on vapidity, it is a consequence of being vapid that peoples' need for a sense of purpose is warped into a need to be the "fashion police" who hold themselves and others accountable to being excellent within the realm of banal pleasures)

In the context of pleasure and the moral order of pleasure that runs from vices to virtues, Character is the stoic ability of the self to persevere in the absence of lesser pleasures in order to secure a greater pleasure. It is our responsibility to exercise our Character to harness the power of pleasure so that it leads us to the joy and truth. It is when we experience pleasure that we are transformed, and are bonded to the source of our pleasure and become better or worse, becoming more or less in line with our purpose for being.

In regard to the question of pleasure, it is Christianity that that asserts that there is a moral order and spiritual order to the realm of pleasure, based on whether the pleasure is connected to our purpose for being; that the pleasure of virtues, peace patience kindness goodness and self-control are morally superior to the pleasures of vices. It is our purpose defined by Christianity that we are to enjoy God, to glorify God and to advance His Kingdom. It is this purpose gives us the shape and context for our journeys of meaning, and gives us benchmarks for how we are doing on that journey. It is Christianity that empowers us for the journey, wherein the Holy Spirit interacts with our conscience, empowering us to discover the contours of our created being and succeed in operate according to God’s purpose for us so that we can find joy in the virtues and grow out of the vices. And it is all of the benefits and consequences of God's promises for now and for eternity that call us to have the Character to keep life in perspective as the cord that saves us from being bonded to lesser pleasures.

Social Justice and the Mexican Border

2007-05-27T15:42:00.000-07:00

Intro

I have pondered the issue of illegal immigration, and I have come around over the years very slowly and reluctantly to the position that I now hold, even as I am always open to hearing other points of view that are well articulated. Unfortunately, I've found many arguments on both sides of the issue wanting. Many of those who favor un-mitigated immigration across our borders discuss the topic in the context of promoting social justice, as understood as confronting the injuries that rich have promulgated against the poor.

Simply put, justice is the calculation of fairness, the exercise of fairness and the prosecution of fairness. From that essential starting point, there are many forms of justice, including jurisprudence, that deal with different jurisdictions of life wherein questions of fairness are tested. In Scripture, the prophet Amos specifically discusses social justice, and Jesus calls us to "faith justice and mercy". Mercy is clearly a value that we are called to practice on an interpersonal level, but how much should mercy be exercised by the government in relation to the application of the justice and jurisprudence? This post is the beginning of an ongoing attempt to begin to explore the complexities of justice when justice and mercy are complicated.

I have written a speech wherein I imagine myself giving a speech as if I were President of the United States. Writing this imaginary speech has been an exercise in trying to begin deal with the complexities of justice and mercy in regard to the current issue of illegal immigration. This "speech" also contains a redaction of many points that have already been made before on the issue.

"My fellow Americans,

"While it is possible to be racist and anti-Latino as a reason to care about border security and immigration, racism and bigotry are in no way inherent in having an interest in protecting our borders and the integrity of our legal system. While it is true that the northern border needs to be made more secure, and that our coasts need to be made more secure, it is our southern border where the vastly greatest number of illegal immigrants comes from. Our energy on border issues needs to be proportional to the scope of our problem, and it is our southern border that needs special attention.

I have known and liked many illegal Latino immigrants who are sweet, quiet hard working people, and the thought of doing something that would disrupt their lives is a painful prospect. Our current situation that allows many sweet, quiet hardworking people to cross our borders also allows many people who are a threat, including gangs, criminals and terrorists. It is an unfortunate reality, one that adults must face in dealing with this issue: we cannot confront the problem of border security in a way that deals with the bad people without also impacting the ability of good people to make it across.

One could argue that we should merely interdict the bad people who enter after they've crossed the border and leave the good ones alone. While we must, of course, interdict bad people who've crossed onto our soil as an unavoidable part of law enforcement, it does not make for a good foundation for our immigration policy to do this at the expense of tightening the border. Interdicting bad people who are here in the US after they have crossed the border means that these bad people will be first crossing the border and inflicting harm on US soil before they are caught. Our immigration policy must be based on a more serious and concerted effort to control who enters our country so that bad people enter as infrequently as possible.

Allowing many sweet, quiet, hardworking people to cross our borders illegally is beneficial to many parties. Illegal immigrants benefit, the families and homelands of many illegal immigrants benefit from remittances, and many US business interests benefit. Nevertheless, despite the ways that illegal immigration is benefiting many parties, it is eroding the integrity of our legal system and the integrity of many other key institutions that are necessary for our society. This erosion is not happening because the majority of individual illegal immigrants are especially evil or flawed people: most of them are decent people acting rationally in their own personal interests to try to better their lives. The erosion of the integrity of our legal system and institutions is happening because our society is only able to assimilate a certain number of people at a time.

While determining that number is an arbitrary and inexact science, it is necessary for us to arrive at a number and respect the number that we have arrived at. This is the very essence of a value for the rule of law. The alternative is that we find no such number, and allow our system to be overwhelmed. The integrity of many other institutions and interests in our society, including – but not limited to— our budgets, hospitals, schools, social security system is at stake. Being able to predict and manage the flow of new people into our country allows us to plan and budget accordingly. It also allows us to better culturally integrate people into the E Pluribus Unum that makes our country strong and great. It is in the advancement of this interest that managing the flow of people into our nation is the right and the responsibility that comes with being a nation.

One could try to make a counter-argument to this by saying that our country has benefited from immigrants. Of course our country has benefited from immigrants. However, this is a non sequitor as a response to the current problem of mass illegal immigration from the southern border. The current southern border illegal immigration issue is not the same issue as the immigrants who crossed the Atlantic at the turn of the 20th century. Those immigrants arrived at our invitation and put an ocean in between the Old Country and their new home in America. In fits and starts, they assimilated into the new, American way and came to recognize George Washington as the father of their country as much as any other American. We are at a time in our history when we do not need the mass influx of people in quite the same way that we did in the last century. The mass influx that we are facing now is overwhelming our institutions, and we need to have it slow down so that those who are coming in to be citizens can be assimilated.

Many of the illegal immigrants of today are more geographically and culturally connected to their homeland than the immigrants of the past, and often consider the US to be an extension of their rightful homeland. Many of them still wave the flags of their homeland and vote in their homeland's elections, and demand that the language of their homeland be institutionalized alongside the English language in every manner of document. While Spanish is a beautiful language, there is a potent symbolism in making it co-equal to English in America in every public space and on every public legal document. Having two languages side by side is as potent a symbol of dual allegiance as having two flags. This phenomenon on the current grand scale has no precedent in any of waves of immigrants who arrived in this country at the turn of the 20th century.

This is not to say that the heritage the Spanish language, of Mexico or of any other south of the border country is bad and must be rejected. It means that a dual allegiance that increases in scope will make it increasingly harder to assimilate people and their children into the American heritage. Our country must have both the Unum and the Pluribus to be strong, and the current illegal immigration problem on its current course is leading us away from E Pluribus Unum.

Immigrants must make a meaningful and symbolic break with their allegiance to their homeland of origin so that they may fully bond to our nation as citizens. While this is true for all current immigrants from any part of the world, this is especially true for those who are geographically close to us. It is our prerogative as a nation to decide how many immigrants we can accept. It is our prerogative as a nation to make the laws that an immigrant must follow to become a citizen.

This is not to diminish the personal sacrifice and hard work that many illegal immigrants have made to get where they are. While this is usually a great sacrifice of personal effort to find personal gain for one's family, it is not the same sacrifice of one's identity and allegiance as one who has followed all of the rules to become a US citizen. The sacrifice that bonds a person to our nation and to all of the ideals of our nation as a fellow citizen must be that unique form of sacrifice that holds the law of our land in highest regard. It is in following those laws -- that we as a nation have decided – and in valuing the wisdom that lies behind those laws that an immigrant makes the meaningful symbolic break with the allegiance to his homeland of origin and crosses the threshold to become a US citizen. An illegal immigrant who wants to change the U.S. laws ex post facto to fit his behavior is not properly bonding himself to our nation.

And likewise, U.S. corporation or politician that wants to change the immigrations laws to accommodate the current situation is not operating in the best interest of our nation in the long run. All too often, they are serving their more immediate interests to please their constituents or to maintain their current business situation than they are interested in the long term interests of our nation. While wanting to "help the economy" is a valid goal, there is an interest of our collective citizenship of the E Pluribus Unum that is even higher than the economy. We are citizens of a nation first and foremost before we are members of an economy. When the interests of the economy are the first source of our allegiance over and above the well-being of our nation, we are doomed to be corrupted and subverted.

Some have proposed making changes to our immigration laws to allow for temporary workers. The problem with this is that we will not be able to enforce new immigration laws if we cannot enforce the ones we already have. We will no more be able to control the flow of those individuals across the border to get their temporary jobs under this proposal than we are now able to control the flow under our current immigration regime. Under this proposal, we will no more be able to enforce the "temporariness" of those workers under new laws than we are able to enforce the status quo under the current laws. Without the will to enforce the laws that we now have, any proposal to change our laws to confront the problem of illegal immigration is an empty proposal and will not fix our broken system.

Simply allowing an illegal immigrant who is already established here to pay a fine to begin the process of becoming a legal citizen will not solve the problem we now face. This is because this proposal would allow illegal immigrants to work their way out of the act of having broken the immigration laws that made them illegal in the first place. As others have stated, it would unwittingly establish the act of breaking our laws as the basis for one to begin the path to citizenship. And for every other illegal immigrant who did not want to pay the fine, the system would continue to operate in the broken way that it has been operating.

While disrupting the lives of many nice and hardworking people is a painful thing to do, it will be an unavoidable aspect of restoring integrity to our legal system. In the face of the flesh and blood people who will be uprooted, the idea of preserving the integrity of our legal system might seem as cold, remote and abstract interest. However, it is in our best interest in the long run to preserve the integrity of our legal system. Doing so means that we maintain the value for the rule of law, which means that we preserve a value for all of the long term interests that laws are created to protect even when they are sometimes inconvenient in the short term.

It is true that the Bible speaks of justice as it relates to helping the poor and correcting the historical injuries that have been done to the poor. There are historical injuries that the U.S committed against poor Mexicans – as have the Aztecs, and then Spanish and then Mexican oligarchy and the Central American drug lords and sundry leftist rebels. This does not excuse the U.S. of its responsibility to face its past. In a separate discussion, we can debate whether reparations should be made to Mexico for the Mexican American war or for "Greaser laws" of the turn of the 20th century. We can balance out the things that the US took and the ways that the US has benefited Mexico over the years see where the balance lies. What we cannot do is use the broken state of the current immigration laws as the de facto and undeclared "reparations" to Mexicans for any and all sins of the US against Mexico and/or poor Mexican citizens. In the context of the current immigration debate, any appeal to "justice" to help the poor illegal immigrant that frames the issue as exclusively the U.S. vs. the poor Mexicans is simplistic and injurious to the truth. An idea of justice that comes at the expense of facing the more abstract and long term considerations of what is in the best long term interests of the US and US institutions is a narrow and incomplete idea of justice. It is an attempt to correct a series of injuries with yet another injury.

Some will argue that we cannot take such drastic measures on account of the pragmatic concerns for our national security. They say that while our current immigration situation presents some degree of threat to our security, having an unstable situation south of our border would also be a threat to our national security in a different way. This is a valid concern. In our current situation, the US absorption of illegal immigrants has functioned to mitigate against that potential economic and political instability south of our border. As we in the US move toward seriously enforcing the laws that we currently have, we also need to be open to ways that we can help avert the disruption that would occur south of the border as a result of enforcing those laws.

I don't have the complete answer to this problem, though micro-lending NGO's in Central America may play a role. The governments of countries in Central America also need to find ways to better support entrepeneurship, confront corruption and become places where people don't feel the need to emigrate from. Confronting this potential problem will be complex, and it is an uncertain future that we must face. What we cannot do is work backward from the corruption and dis-function of other countries as a reason to diminish the integrity of our own laws.

It is true that certain parts of our country have deep historical and cultural ties to Mexico. These parts of the country have an American culture that has absorbed many aspects of Mexican culture. I personally enjoy this as I walk down the street where I live in Southern California. While it is valuable for these parts of the country to recognize and celebrate their heritage and the blend of cultures that has occurred, these parts of the US need to be recognized as belonging to the US and operating under the dominion of US laws.

It is tempting for those who value a globally inter-connected world to conclude that maintaining the integrity of our borders or the integrity of our national identity is an enemy to this interconnectedness. It is easy to believe that borders only promote a sense of bigoted and narrow identity among those who identify with one side of the border or the other, and that truly enlightened people don't need borders. While the existence of borders may help enforce the bigotry of some people, the belief that borders are useless is a belief that seems enlightened but is actually sloppy, dangerous and inaccurate. In truth, our borders and immigration laws are a necessary membrane between countries that have a relationship culturally, economically, geopolitically and in many other ways. It is in the interest of what is best for that membrane that we need to face the problems of our broken immigration system.

The answer to this issue of illegal immigration must be one that has the ultimate best long term interests of all parties. Our current practice of having under-enforced immigration laws seems on the surface to be helpful to the most parties, but it is actually shortsighted and will not be in our best interest in the long run. What will be in everyone's best long term interest is an immigration system that is consistent, transparent, properly enforced and sustainable long into the future.

The idea of mass deportations seem scary and unpleasant, but it is part of the bitter pill that must be swallowed to get there. The argument that this is impractical is an empty argument, since it only means that it will be difficult, messy and expensive. Any course of action we take will be difficult, messy and expensive including the course of taking no action or of taking "path of least resistance" action. In the long run, it is in doing what is in our best long term interest that will be most practical."