Most of the time

by happy_moron Posted on March 27, 2013

I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.

So very often I wake up and I think, “How did I ever get to be grown up without feeling the least bit good at it?”

At some point I supposedly turned into an adult, but I just haven’t got the foggiest idea at which point that was. The year is 2013 but I feel like I’m stuck in 1993 somewhere.

But the year is 2013, and it seems that things choose to happen whether I’m ready for them or not. Apparently this is their choice and not mine…

Whenever I feel like this, I find myself gravitating towards the language offered by Jordan B. Peterson to describe the feeling. He suggests that the reason I feel this way is because I am very small and the world is very big:

“The nature of human being is such that it consists of a confrontation with the bounded finite with the unbounded infinite… those are the bare facts of the matter. The facts are that the world of experience as it presents itself to us is literally, and not metaphorically, complex beyond our capacity to understand.”

But he goes further – experience with the infinite, for him, means suffering…

“The finite is always overwhelmed by the infinite – it has to be – because it can’t encapsulate it. And so what that means is that suffering is essential to the nature of human existence. And suffering exists as a consequence of the consequences of our limitations.”

 

Very often I feel like I live in this world of Jordan B. Peterson’s, where I am tiny in a big chaotic world. Not coincidentally, this is the world of ancient Mesopotamian myth.[myth]

It’s worth commenting that these ancients tended to be polytheistic. The ancients had many gods because they needed many gods. A given god might be, at any point, asleep… or indifferent… or downright vindictive… It cost relatively little to add another deity to one’s list, but the consequence of not doing so was existential horror. You had to be protected from the chaos. You were a tiny dot in a world of powerful, unfriendly, chaotic forces, subject to being rubbed out at any point…

YHWH, the god described in the Hebrew Bible, is quite different. He shows no interest in being distant, uncaring or inscrutable! YHWH introduces himself as a God who is intimately involved in what happens on the earth; he is a God who does things.[does]

YHWH is a God who is known relationally, by a shared series of ‘relatings’ – things he has done and said (and continues to do and say) among humanity… In fact, the primary way that the Hebrews used of describing his character was to tell stories of things he had done. They knew who he was by his great and mighty doings. The God who heals – the God who delivers – the God who provides…

God has a history with men, and his character is revealed in his acts. For a Hebrew, then, YHWH is not an existential bogey man but someone who has done things before, will do things again, and must be paid attention to!

Now, if you listen to the Peterson clip, you’ll hear him saying something which I didn’t quote earlier. Peterson believes that the reason religion is endemic to humanity is not because people really believe it, but simply because people need to respond somehow to the collision of the finite with the infinite.

Because we’re scared of the dark, all light is make-believe… how does this follow?

Peterson discounts the possibility (for a Hebrew, ignores the fact) that Hebrew belief in God is built on historical action. The Hebrews acknowledged YHWH because he did stuff that they saw. He appeared in flame on a mountain. He drowned the Egyptian army. He gave them a code of laws. He made promises to their patriarchs. They didn’t write their scriptures out of Existential Angst; they wrote them because they had encountered YHWH and they knew who he was because he had done things among them.[ex]


Fast forward some three thousand years, and not too much has changed. Much like the ancients, I am still small, and the world is still big. Most often I don’t feel ready for what the world has in store. This is, even if it is rooted in my own personal insecurity, still something like their ancient fear.

The question is, is there still a God who acts in history? If there isn’t, then yeah, I’d better be terrified and live a tragic[tragic] life. If there is, what I’m afraid of probably isn’t that important…

If there is a God who is actually doing stuff, then what I should be afraid of is not paying attention, not being aware of what he is doing around me.

If there is a God, and he does stuff in the real world, he’s got to be focus #1, no?[focus]

Maybe there are two truths at play here.

There is a little truth – that I am little.
And there is a big truth – that God is big.

If I tell myself that I want to be a person who honours and seeks the truth, must I not spend a little time thinking on the little truth, and a big time, thinking on the big truth?

Maybe I’m not competent.
And maybe I don’t have to be.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. Jordan B. Peterson has steeped himself in this world; it seems he has studied it for long enough that he has (consciously or unconsciously) adopted its frame of reference. ↵
  2. The very first thing he did, for example, was to create and order everything!↵
  3. In the beginning of Exodus,  God makes it clear that he is doing things (laying down plagues ‘n stuff) for the purpose of being known. (And not just by the Hebrews, but by everyone.) The story pushes into our face the terrible irony that YHWH, the Creator of all that is, is not known by us – and, in fact, is working to get our attention. If you fast forward to the Christian gospels, John lays out (in very Jewish fashion) the same truth! God was still trying to be known (through Jesus) and those who paid attention have see his glory… (The other time his glory was seen, of course, was on the mountain when he revealed himself to the Jews in Exodus…)↵
  4. If you watch on in the clip, you’ll hear Peterson talk about how the encounter of finitude with the infinite is essentially tragic (and can be nothing else except tragic). Of course, for him the infinite has no character or goodness, and does not change the condition of the finite in any way except to terrorize it. Which is pretty tragic.↵
  5. The followup question is, “Why is it so hard for me to focus on him for any length of time at all?”↵
Posted in thehumancondition, theology | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Bits and Atoms

by happy_moron Posted on February 20, 2013

I love reading the webcomic xkcd.

I often disagree with the comic’s conclusions about things, but I am grateful for the clarity with which xkcd sees and presents the world. It is a comic that strives to honour truth and honesty.

One of the reasons I often disagree with the comic’s conclusions is that xkcd comes from a different culture and worldview than I do. Why do I say this? Well, xkcd is the heartbeat of a particular subculture made up of geeks, hackers and scientists. This culture is resolutely secular. It’s primary idol[idol] is Science and its primary virtue is being smart. This culture doesn’t much like[fond] other religions.[religion]

A pillar of this culture’s worldview is that it loves to think of things as bits and atoms. This kind of abstract, analytical observation is extremely helpful to science… but it has a hidden danger. The danger is believing that because there are bits and atoms, things are only bits and atoms. This kind of reductionism seemingly enables Science, but it is dry and unsatisfying. “We humans are sacks of chemicals…”

Another way of saying this is that because we can see how things work in such astonishing detail (yay Science!), we trick ourselves into believing that the level of precision and detail we have answers the question of why things work as they do. In fact, the question of why things work has nothing to do with bits and atoms. It’s a question of causality that is answered philosophically.[final]

No depth of detail in bits and atoms can make a person conclude that one thing causes another. We can see the correlation and identify that certain things happen together (or one after another, or one before another, etc) with seemingly perfect consistency[perfect]… but just because two things happen together does not mean that one causes another.[bib]

The question of what really causes things to happen (or, reframed,  the question of why things are the way they are) is a much deeper, much more human question. To put this in the language of xkcd, correlation does not imply causation. At least, not at the level of raw data – only at the level of human belief.

Ancients took the question of why seriously. In modern times, we’ve stumbled a bit. We still want to know why but our searching has been hobbled, largely because of a modern deceit that bundled scientific observation of How with ad-hoc philosophy, labelled the whole worldview as ”Science”, and trumpeted the religious dimension of this worldview as better than any others.

This robs people, because they think the why questions have been answered by bits and atoms, when bits and atoms actually have nothing whatsoever to say on the question. And the philosophy introduced tends to be a reductionism that is dry and lifeless and which no-one seriously believes in day-to-day life because it just. doesn’t. work.

Making matters worse is the fact that this reductionism has become conflated with Science and with Being Smart and is defended with religious zeal by religious followers – when in fact reductionism has precious little to with scientific observation.[obs]

A reductionist worldview has remarkably few tools to say why people shouldn’t take steroids when riding their bikes. For that matter, why ride your bike in the first place? This is actually a really easy question (most kids answer it without even asking it!), but it becomes a difficult question when the starting point, the very first thing to be said about people, is that we are sacks of chemicals and that our other aspects are strictly by-products of the chemical-sack-cocktail…

We need to be careful when we find that our beliefs are taking simple questions and turning them into difficult or impossible things. This is true of Christian theology as much as anything else. It’s a warning sign, a hint of an inability to deal with reality.

Because of the disconnect with reality, there is a great fight within this geek culture – a fight between the need to be smart and the need to acknowledge greater meaning beyond bits and atoms. Xkcd portrays this fight starkly…

“Being smart” delights in destroying meaning and butchering the ‘sacred cows’ of the ignorant. Don’t they know that everything is only bits and atoms?

 At the same time, the bounds of human frailty and finitude are borders no amount of ‘smart’ can reach beyond.

Accepting the creativity of God is not ‘smart’, but even scientists aren’t immune from smarter people showing them up…

The worldview claim being made is that Science has conquered the question of why and it has found that there is no why, there is only the how, which is the same thing as the why. You can ask “Why is the sky blue?” and get a very detailed answer about how the sky appears as blue… In this worldview we are meat sacks and chemical sacks and every question we ask can get swept under a giant handwaving carpet of – “Things are the way they are because they evolved that way.”[ev]

Perhaps the greatest point to be made in the whole discussion is that  a reductionist worldview destroys itself. After all, why should there be any confidence that a mere sack of chemicals should understand itself at all, much less judge its own motivations for riding a bike?

Absolutely it is a problem! There is mystery to a human that bits and atoms cannot tell.

As I said, I love xkcd. It says all that I  have just said, and it says it succinctly, clearly and with poignance. But it’s trapped in a worldview which preaches that, because things have bits and atoms, there is no meaning beyond the bits and atoms. Which simply isn’t true, and consequently simply isn’t smart.

But more on that in another post…

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. I use idol in the particular sense of “Idols are those things apart from the one true God which we believe will save us from the horror and chaos of the surrounding world,” which is what idols have always been. We trust Science to give us victory in war and to save us from disease and death and stuff. On occasion it produces the goods, but it’s never been very good at the saving from death thing. It postpones it, sometimes…↵
  2. The comic below is a good indicator of what I mean. Our expositor “begrudges nobody their sources of solace”, but is not above making veiled antagonistic suggestions that other sources of solace are impotent…

    You’ll notice I called Science an idol just previously, which is the exact same kind of veiled jab. Idols are pretty worthless things. I don’t think veiled jabs are bad things necessarily, because there are some things we oughtn’t to be fond of…↵

  3. Do you see what I did there? I implicitly called it a religion… ;-) If you don’t like that term, you could use the term worldview. I use the term ‘religion’ because every worldview has a religious dimension – everyone thinks something about religion, after all – and I’m particularly interested in highlighting this religious aspect of worldview right now.↵
  4. Way back at the time of Aristotle people understood this distinction. We’ve regressed. Mostly I blame shiny things like iPads for this. Aristotle even had a name for the purpose of things (what they were really for). He called it their final cause.↵
  5. In order to say “perfect” you would have to test two things happening together at every single moment in time ever in every place in the universe everywhere under every variation of conditions possible which, fortunately, is something that we can’t do. So, seemingly perfect.↵
  6. Christian Scripture has its own perspective on causation which is built on an ancient Hebrew way of looking at the world.

    “…you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” — Ps 139

    It is a mistake to read a statement like this as a mechanical description, rather than a proclamation of divine causality…

    “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” — Heb 1:1-3 (ESV)

    Regardless of how things work, the reason why things continue to be the way they are is because God continues (through the person of Jesus Christ his son) to make them so.↵

  7. I think there’s another post lurking to make this point↵
  8. Substitute, if you like, “It’s a survival mechanism,” “You’re culturally conditioned to do so,” or “That’s what you were taught growing up.” All are similarly secular answers to the same questions of why.↵
Posted in thehumancondition, theology | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Working for God

by happy_moron Posted on February 12, 2013

Recently I was reminded of how little we do for God.

Part of it came through some Genesis reading I’m doing. The first few chapters of Genesis are remarkable, because they put humanity in a position of receiving from God that is completely opposite to many other ways of thinking.

It is, for instance, opposite to the way other cultures of the Ancient Near East thought about gods and people. They believed that gods made humanity as slaves. People were slaves of the gods and could expect a life to match that reality. These gods were nasty, violent, lustful and generally of poor moral character. They were poor masters; the sort of god who says, “I’m above working, I’ll make a slave” is not the sort of god you’d particularly like to be a slave to.

People were slaves to their idols. They had to wake the idol up in the morning, bathe it, clothe it, lay out food for it, worship it religiously, placate it, sing to it, put it to bed… If they wanted to ask it for something they might have to cut themselves with knives, or have sex with a prostitute,  or sacrifice a child… they were chained to their idols because they were terrified – terrified of a big dark world of chaos in which they were very small.

They didn’t live in civilization or in modern comfort; their idols promised to give them a bit of order in the ancient world of terror… if they didn’t anger the idol. This is a picture the Bible was written to expose and destroy.[pagan]

The Biblical portrait of receiving also clashes to a lot of thinking you might find in modern Christian churches… not a specific doctrine, per se, but more a mindset.

It’s the kind of mindset that frames our relationship with God as one where we need to do things for him. ”We need to worship him.”  ”We need to read our Bibles.” “We need to glorify him.” “Our lives need to be dedicated to religious devotion…”

Now, Adam and Eve had jobs to do and a garden to tend and an earth to fill and subdue: they had work that God had given them. But Genesis presents this as a blessing: ”Go forth and multiply”. It’s a gift, not a burden. Mostly what Adam and Eve were responsible for doing was to recieve the goodness that God was lavishly pouring out on them. Religiously speaking, they were doing nothing.

If you want to appreciate how much nothing they were doing, just contrast it with any pagan religion, where the gods must be fastidiously cared for and worshipped in specific, ritualistic ways.[payoff]

Or you could, dare I say it, look at some instances of Christian devotion and ‘slot machine religion’. Anyone who loses the picture that their role is to receive well from God is in danger of demeaning God.

When we are unable to receive well from God, of course, we become nasty very quickly.Why? Because there’s a response cycle that takes place when we receive well. It goes something like this:

I receive :-D :-D :-D

I learn what God is like (he’s good!) :-O :-O :-O

I worship :-D :-D :-D

When we don’t receive well from God, we don’t learn what he is like. Holding a skewed perspective of God is a dangerous thing. We were made to live in conjunction with a God who is good and who fills life with good things… once we are out of harmony with this, it gives us room for bitterness and vindictiveness and contempt for creation, out of which all sorts of nasty stuff comes forth. We start to live in a way that was never intended; a way we weren’t made to live.[Rom1]

Of course, it’s a challenging thought that we really can’t do anything for God. It shifts the emphasis in our daydreaming, because we stop becoming the central characters; we’re not the ones doing things! We stop being the hero – God becomes the hero.

We respond to God as a result of our experience.

God wants to shape a good world – we experience it and respond to it with thanksgiving.

God wants to establish a good kingdom and invites us – we discover this and join him in his purpose

God wants to overcome the barriers that make us nasty people – we receive his grace and allow him to transform us.

Devotion comes as a result of experiencing and receiving. If you think about how we become devoted to anything – a puppy, the game of golf, the pursuit of knowledge – it follows this dynamic. We find out that we love something. If we think that we can give God a gift of anything, a great gift to give is to learn how to move away from our skewed perspective of him that leads us to all sorts of nastiness.

After all, if we think that God is mean – or distant – or evil – or uncontrollably angry and violent – or fickle – or vindictive – or whatever… what hope do we have for our own character?

One of the results of this way of thinking about things was that I began to reconsider my morning devotions. Are they something that I think I am doing for God? Or are they primarily a time that I finally stop and give God an opportunity to do something that he wants to do?

It’s a massive thought – that God wants to meet me in devotions for my sake and not for his; that he doesn’t need anything from my devotions, that he’s not lesser if I don’t have them. It’s kind of dissatisfying, in a way, because I can’t pretend, then, that I am adding anything to God. I’m the one who needs saving, after all. He wants to do something for me.

It’s also a massive thought that this – this receiving – is the pathway to true and proper worship. Only by receiving from God can I really know him, to worship him.[receive]

But I don’t see the Bible putting it any other way.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. It’s worth pointing out that Christianity has been remarkably well received by pagan cultures. It effectively wiped out pagan thought across Europe and has made progress worldwide. Nasty gods are something very much to be rescued from; especially when they made you as a slave.↵
  2. The payoff to ritual is that if you do it right, often it has a slot-machine effect, where results are guaranteed. This is right at the heart of ‘magic’. If you get the formula right, it works every time.↵
  3. This is my paraphrase of what Romans Chapter 1 describes.↵
  4. For some of us (me) receiving feels… icky. But I can’t help it… not unless I want to stop breathing, anyway. We are in a position of receiving everything from God. We are 100% dependent, and there’s no way to change that.↵
Posted in thehumancondition, theology | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Men and Porn

by happy_moron Posted on February 5, 2013

Just a few scattered thoughts on where the culture is and how we got here…

Ran across a hard-hitting article on the effects of a pornographic culture on young children…

It’s disturbing, but it’s not necessarily surprising if you’ve spent any length of time on the internet browsing Reddit (or, for that matter, if you’ve turned on your television recently.) There’s a running cultural joke that teenage boys are defined by uncontrollable lusting, masturbation and a desire for sex. Google “man’s brain” if you don’t believe it :-( .

The belief that porn is part of being a man and therefore acceptable is a worldview belief, one fairly widely held in North America. The logic isn’t complicated: men are animals with natural desires ==> natural is good ==> indulging lust (through porn/whatever) is necessary and good.

The thinking at play is the direct result of a secular mindset, one that replaces the idea of absolute morality with a morality that is purely defined by pragmatism.[not] The question of whether or not porn is bad become, in this culture,  sociological and not moral; the only concern is whether or not it harms society.[harm]

Which, incidentally, it does.

Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas, has some interesting comments on the effect of porn:

His basic idea, that women are learning to behave pornographically – conforming to male expectations – is an disturbing one, not least because it makes sense…

Significant problems are seen when something ugly in an adult world filters down into a childhood one. But it does filter down, because children learn from their elders. It’s gonna happen; who else are they going to learn from? In this case, there’s an ugly idea that unbridled lusting is natural (and therefore good) and that, as part of the identity of a man, any talk of removing/suppressing it is naive, bigoted and outdated. Additionally, once you separate sexual desire/fulfillment from a marriage relationship and validate it as part of biologically being a man, there’s no logical reason to deny it from a pubescent boy.

But once such an idea is actually seen in the culture of small children, the ugliness of it just pops out. It was always inappropriate, but it is now starkly more so…

There is also the interesting technological wrinkle that our children have more powerful communication tools, and can text nude photos and publicly shame/blackmail/coerce one another. These are not really causal problems, but they undeniably exacerbate the underlying worldview problems. Kids are way better equipped to exert peer pressure these days… but peer pressure can work in many directions, not just perverse ones. Why is it being exerted in such perverse directions, here and now?

This is a fight that involves a worldview clash. Fighting it effectively involves swimming full against the prevailing stream of the culture. The fight starts by presenting a world in which the word ‘perverse’ has real meaning. If pornography can’t be called perverse, how can it be controlled?

In a secular worldview, however, the word “perverse” has no proper meaning. The closest thing it can be defined as is perhaps “deviant” or “socially harmful”, and pornography is not, in this culture, deviant. It is harmful, but treating the problem nature of pornography as one of social harm implies the right solution is one of technological or sociological manipulation. To put it another way, if we are hurting one another, an answer is that prevents us from doing so is good enough.

Unfortunately, this bypasses the real problem – the need to form moral character. How does one grow up boys who refuse to pressure girls for sex, and, even further, smack down and exact retribution against any boy who does? That’s the interesting question.

Forming moral character is something that a secular postmodern worldview is inadequately shaped to handle. A secular framework doesn’t do well with absolute language of “good” and “bad”. The notions of good and bad, however, just so happen to be the basic tools used in forming moral character.

The Christian bedrock of moral character is God. More specifically, the fear of the LORD is called out as a primary means of guarding character. It’s the beginning of wisdom! Perversion and prostitution feed on fools…

So if you ask me what will keep thirteen year old girls from plunging off balconies, it is preaching the good news of Jesus Christ. Not a popular answer, but probably a necessary one.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. It’s not, although it pretends to be. Part of the problem of Keepin’ it Real is that it’s possible to claim the role when you’re actually only Keepin’ it Aligned With How I Think Things Are. ‘Pragmatism’ can be thought of as Yet Another Ideology…↵
  2. This is a sneaky word game, because “What is harmful?” is just the question of “What is good or bad?” using a synonym. Using ‘harm’ language allows us to pretend that we’re having a pragmatic, unbiased, secular discussion when in fact we’re having a dogmatic, passionate and religious discussion. But it will lead us to have it badly, because we think that we’re talking about practical things when what we’re really arguing about is what (dogmatically) constitutes harm.↵
Posted in inthenews, theology | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Unresolved tension or how to write good

by happy_moron Posted on January 24, 2013

Just a little half thought today; a snippet.

This past December was the first month since I started the Happy Moron that I failed to post anything; I figured I’d better throw *something* up even if it’s not much of anything…

The other night, I was sitting in a class on preaching. I had to; I was taking the class… Anyway, our course discussion meandered onto the difference between telling stories and presenting the sermon as a structured argument. There was  a big fight. Words were thrown.

Interestingly, there’s not a vast gap between the two sides. They might seem different… but they’re not so different, really. The connection lies in the idea of unresolved tension.

In a story, interest is generated by the unresolved tension of it – the conflict. How will it end? Comedy, tragedy, drama… all good stories leave the listeners hanging in a state of curiosity, wondering how the unfinished business of the story will be dealt with… in joy or in disaster. Every single piece of the story has to move towards the resolution of the tension. This is what we call the plot; the dramatic march towards the ending…

Hey, this is exactly what a good academic paper tries to do! Academic papers all start the same boring way:

“Few questions in the area of blah blah blah bear such epistemological and teleological significance as the question of….”

As boring as this is, it’s trying to make a case for why the question is unsolved and why the question is important. Really, it’s the old marketing scam, all dressed up in a robe and gown:

“You have BO. Buy our deodorant!”

“Are your teeth white enough? I have a dental strip for you!”

“Are your friends laughing at you? We have living room furniture for this…”

If you can create a problem for people to worry about, they’ll stick around for your promised solution. Marketing, pure and simple…

Writing also manufactures a problem, but it’s given the nice name of conflict. It’s unresolved tension. (Usually Hopefully in academic writing, there’s no body odour issue, but instead a question that needs answering.) Cognitive dissonance is nasty stuff, and the promise of fixing a seeming conflict or answering a difficult question is what makes an interesting paper.

All the argument that follows in the paper follows slowly resolves the introduced tension, point by excruciatingly detailed point, until the tension is happily resolved, the question is answered, and we can sleep at night.

(Arguably, if your reader can sleep at night, you haven’t written your introduction very well. Or you’ve written on the wrong question. There are enough important questions that make us sleepless; why should we write on lesser ones?[1])

The structured argument has the same hooks as a story or as a deodorant ad. You expose the audience’s latent discomfort (which is pretty easy) and then, once you have them in distress, resolve the distress. (If you don’t have anything that will resolve someone’s distress, by the way, you shouldn’t preach. It will just end bad.)

Ultimately I’m not sure that it matters which form is used, just so long as it talks about something that really, really, bothers people.

On that note, you might be interested in my next post:

YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.

Cheers.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. I like to start all my papers, “YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.”↵
Posted in metablogging, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

What if I told the story of my life

by happy_moron Posted on November 27, 2012

But I wasn’t the hero?

What if God was the hero?

How would I even tell that story? What role would I play if I was the secondary character? Would I be the villain? Sidekick? Comic relief?

What if God was the hero and he was building the entire story of my life towards one moment of climax, a moment that actually wasn’t about me at all? What if I am Pharaoh and Moses is out there somewhere and I have a role in a story that is really about him?

If I’m not the hero of the story, how do I cast myself?

I sure hope I’m not the Pharaoh, but still… maybe the story of my life isn’t about me, after all.

Maybe it’s about my church.

Maybe it’s about someone who is supposed to hear the gospel from me.

Maybe it’s about a family I’m supposed to have.

Maybe it’s just about God, plain and simple.

If I try and tell the story differently, does it change how I act?

Posted in story | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

So wrong, so important

by happy_moron Posted on November 25, 2012

All sorts of wrongness going on in this story.

Ok; let’s make a list of the wrongness.

A student is suing her Texas school.

Why? Because the school puts RFID tracking devices on students.

Why? Part of the motive is to prove that the kids are at the school (even if they’re not in class) to get state funding that is linked to attendance.

The claim in the suit is on religious grounds. What grounds? That the tracking (has a barcode) resembles the mark of the beast. (You could make a case for religious disagreement but it would probably be better based on the worth and dignity of the human person – as we bear the image of God.)

School administration offers to send her to another school that hasn’t put the tracking in yet. (Yeah, that’s not avoiding the issue)

Don’t get me wrong – this is an important issue – but there’s just so much wrongness going on. It’s painful.

Posted in inthenews | 2 Comments

Hollywood beauty

by happy_moron Posted on November 10, 2012

This isn’t about anything. It’s just a random thought I wanted to type up. I think it was triggered by the fact that I tried to watch television after a long time away from it – and I found it hard. Too many beautiful people cluttering up the screen.

A few years ago, someone introduced me to a very interesting concept: “Hollywood Ugly”.

Hollywood Ugly is the attractiveness of That Guy: the platonic, somewhat moronic Friend seen in a sitcom or a film, cast to look like a normal ugly person yet still conventionally good looking, because even the ugly people in Hollywood aren’t ugly. To be ugly in Hollywood is to still look better than the rest of us.

In Hollywood, everyone is beautiful. Everyone must be beautiful. Hollywood is selling something – selling a promise – but no matter how much we spend, for all the botox and the scalpels and the anxious mirrors, we never seem to grasp it. When Hollywood puts on beauty, and lays it on thick, it is a lie to mask an emptiness and it always seems just a little plastic.

But as I dabble in story, I begin to see that in story the woman must be beautiful and the man must be handsome and bold. The girl is a princess and the boy a prince… and for all the lies of Hollywood there is an urgency to this that no amount of false glamour can hide.

A story must bear truth, and there is a truth, born in a garden long ago, that every woman is beautiful and every man is handsome.

We ask our stories, “What is the image of a woman? Of a man?” and they must answer. They must do so without losing personhood beneath a flood of silicone… but also without losing the beauty that rests in the eyes of God.

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Life Has Rules — Rule #57

by happy_moron Posted on November 7, 2012

Rule #57

If you had to rush out of the house one morning to catch your bus and didn’t have time to eat your oatmeal, if you shoved the bowl in the fridge… if you come back to it two days later at suppertime when you are too lazy to cook and say”I dunno, it’s a milk product, but it was in the fridge so that’s okay, right?”… and you take a bite and it tastes funny…

Do not say,

“That’s all right, I won’t be able to taste it after the first few mouthfuls.”

Just sayin’. Rule #57. Keep it handy. (For your friends.)

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International Textbooks

by happy_moron Posted on October 30, 2012

Were I not a paragon of virtue, I might have something of a personal curiosity in this case.

Obviously I would never do such a gross thing as go onto the internet and buy overseas textbooks that were never intended to be sold in North America.

If I were to, I might expect them to be paperback textbooks with non-glossy, cheap paper and slightly blurred ink. They might have on the cover something that generally went along the rough lines of, “Special edition for sale in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar only and not for export therefrom.”

Not that I would know, personally, of course :-D

The thing is, you can’t sell a textbook for $100-150 in any of those places. If you want to sell a textbook, it has to be for about $10-15USD , which means a cheaply printed textbook.

But… if you’re a mercenary North American Student who wants to buy a textbook for $30-60, and doesn’t really care so much about the course, and is happy with a book that is adequate to the task at hand… the thought of a sweet deal on a text might just convince you that it’s not wrong to buy a used textbook, even if it was originally bought overseas. Afterall, does printing “Not for export” on a cover make it necessarily so?

At the heart of this, there is a globalization problem that makes things difficult for publishers, who would dearly like for people to NOT buy books at cut-rate prices and sell them overseas.

Ultimately the problem lies with the reality that there is a rich-poor gap, and, as the world becomes more connected, it becomes harder to pretend that we don’t live on the same planet. But we can try and litigate our way to that pretense :-)

Mind you, this is one of those fuzzy areas (read: every area) where the perceived purity of law shatters and things get messy. Because publishers don’t care if you take a couple books in your carry-on for a friend, but they care very much indeed if you set up any sort of business at scale.

But it’s a problem to distinguish between these two. If you try and argue (as the publishers in this case are arguing) that copyright protection means you can’t resell goods from outside the country, you have a whole kettle of fish that smells really, really bad.

How do you craft the same copyright law to apply to 100 books but not to two? One is “okay” the other is not.

Oh, and how do you crack down on used textbook sales without affecting used vehicle sales? Used paint? Could this case be the death of garage sales?

Lets hope the Supreme Court of the United States gets this one right, if only because where the Americans go, Canadians are sure to follow – ;-)

What really attracts me about this article is depth of wisdom that the SCOTUS has to exercise. They can’t paint themselves into a corner. The publisher’s lawyer is free to say, “This interpretation of the law won’t kill garage sales and libraries, of course not! Nobody wants to kill garage sales and libraries, least of all us!” But the Court understands that if you rule that something is a viable consequence of the law, eventually someone will ask for it, even if it’s banning garage sales. There are a lot of jerks out there.

The judgement of the SCOTUS extends far beyond the wishes of what this lawyer is asking for, right now. They have to force themselves to see the bigger picture. It’s a wisdom thing; they might loathe the defendant in the case, but their duty is to the law and to the truth. They don’t have the luxury of pretending.

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