The word indicates some sort of advancement toward a goal or improvement. In the sense of improvement, a particular goal isn't necessarily implied, but without one, it's difficult to make an objective judgment of the degree or utility of progress. It doesn't always have to be an overarching goal by which we can evaluate the whole of some human endeavor; we can look to science and slap an "understand how the universe works" sticker on it, but for the most part we can only look at how well we're answering specific questions along the way. We may be near the end or the beginning of scientific exploration, but which it is, is more a matter of speculation or philosophy than of empirical research and mathematical modeling.
What about non-scientific progress? I think we have the same problem, but there's no external yardstick or phenomenon to measure "progress" against. We end up taking some values we hold, or inventing some, and plotting a course to follow them, sometimes with little concern for other values, which other people who might have a stake in the matter might hold or which get subordinated to their crusade for inadequately explored reasons.
Let's look at social progress for a few moments.
What do we have? At the forefront is the idea of personal equality and freedom, that a person should be able to do more or less whatever he wants, regardless of circumstances that don't immediately ask for a tempered agenda, like the conflicting rights or desires of another person. Now, equality and freedom are fine things, things we should often err on the side of, but they can also be somewhat empty. Freedom isn't just a matter of "from," but one of "to" as well, and equality unchecked can smear some distinctions that are legitimate.
What we see a lot of in our society is a pattern of identifying social injustices, agitating to eliminate them, and then looking for new injustices. We're at a point now where activists look at the patterns of the past and try to map them onto the future, perhaps more out of a sense of Progress than out of a sense of certain things being just and certain things being unjust. It's a lot more complicated, but Progress itself as we've seen it in our civilization has become the value we use to judge things by, instead of a label for pursuing real virtues. Freeing real or artificial demographics from oppressive (by which I mean "distasteful to some") traditions becomes the primary means for keeping score of our society's virtue, so while achieving legally approved gay marriage and consequence-free sex for children everywhere are themselves lauded, the only price counted is the disappointment of the White Male Oppressors (and a little angsty uncertainty, which is categorized as a healthy disdain for undoubted (not unquestioned--if it'd really been questioned, then some answers might have been considered--authority), and Progress moves on to find the next social power struggle, since it seems to see nothing except demographic conflicts.
I think the problem is right there. For individuals, it boils down to "nobody should be prevented from doing whatever they feel like doing," and at higher societal levels, there's really...nothing. You get the occasional visionary like Marx or the fictional architects behind Orwell's Big Brother, but for them Progress is just a tool to achieve an equality and freedom that are the poorest imaginable.
Progress becomes, not an achievement of justice, but a speedometer by which we measure the rate of adoption of ideas no one remembers trying before.
At that point it's easy to get off track. It's not hard to imagine someone forgetting what the fullness of marriage is, especially when duty was emphasized at the expense of the joys of an intimate relationship and raising children, and be in favor of opening it to everyone who wants it since it can be such a source of joy. It's a little harder to imagine right now that pets should be afforded the franchise, but once they are bestowed with enough human rights? In California, pets are no longer owned by their keepers, so don't think no one's testing the waters. Maybe the slope isn't very slippery, but there are people out there advocating any crazy notion you can think of, so don't be too surprised.
"Progress" toward no real goal, or toward one that isn't particularly (or obviously) good, isn't progress. It's just change. Change can be good, sometimes even for its own sake to break up the monotony, but when someone asks "why not?" we should also ask "why?"
"Why not?" is not an answer that justifies change. It is the question.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
What's the Church got to prove to you?
What makes the Catholic Church the Bride of Christ? What evidence does she--do we--have? Truth claims? An argument from history? Evidence of holy activity in the world? Proof that it's the only ecclesial body that makes sound claims of what defines or identifies the Church and meets those criteria?
Fr. Kimel has some words for the devil's advocates:
I added the emphasis. Funny how even with sola fide in your corner, without having a didactic anchor, "knowing them by their fruits" ends up becoming a back door to Pelagianism.
If one sees fit to judge the Church this narrowly, why not more narrowly? Indeed, some do. Some make employment of women outside the home their litmus test, or the willingness to bless already-sexual homosexual partnerings, and every other concern is secondary, or disconsidered out of hand.
If you are looking at such a small piece of an ecclesial body's doctrine or practice, it's not really a church you're interested in. You want a social institution, of great or small caliber, to make you feel good with a grand gesture.
If you're looking to judge an ecclesial body on how it performs in these other areas--recruitment, training, social service, whatever--then you're also not interested in a church. You want a charitable organization, or a business.
Go ahead. See if you can rate the Catholic Church next to Welfare and Social Security, or against Kaplan and the public school system. See if any evaluation would even make sense and then get back to me.
As for simple skeptics:
Go ahead. Take G.K. Chesterton's advice, and consider judging the Church on how good it has been, as well as on how badly it has failed in its mission. Condemning the Church because over history it has let a million poor people suffer in squalor and die alone in ditches and alleys is premature, to say the least, if you don't even know if the number of people the Church has succeeded in helping is on the order of dozens or of billions.
I wouldn't be satisfied with a statistical rationale if I were making that argument, but if I were bold enough to berate the Church for not living up to a higher standard than I hold anyone else to, I'd still be obliged to determine how well it performed against this new standard.
Fr. Kimel has some words for the devil's advocates:
Yes, the Catholic Church should do better at making Christians, it should do better at evangelizing, it should do better at catechizing, it should do better at preaching the gospel, it should do better at worshipping God, it should do better in serving the poor and the oppressed, it should do better in every aspect of its life and ministry.
However, if the Church was doing better in all of these areas, or even just the one you have mentioned, would you be persuaded that the Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ, as she claims to be? Of course not! Because performance neither proves nor disproves the claims of the Catholic Church. Ironically, your objection to the Catholic Church—viz., her poor, even sinful performance—is grounded in a works-righteousness understanding of the gospel. You are demanding that the Catholic Church justify herself as the Body of Christ by her works! But the Catholic Church is the Body of Christ only by grace and election!
Are you willing to apply the same criterion of performance to individual believers, to yourself? Are you willing to prove your regeneration in the Spirit by your works, by how well you are living the Christian faith, by how effectively you are proclaiming the gospel in word and deed? Jim, are you not in fact judging the Catholic Church by a standard you would never apply to yourself? What would you say to the nonbeliever who declares that Christianity cannot be true because there are so many bad Christians?
But your criterion of performance also fails for other reasons. For one thing, you are judging the Catholic Church on the basis of her performance in one geographical area in one period of time. But she has no doubt performed better (whether it be at catechesis or evangelism or whatever) in other places and in other times. Why not judge the Catholic Church at her best? Why not judge the Catholic Church by her saints?
I added the emphasis. Funny how even with sola fide in your corner, without having a didactic anchor, "knowing them by their fruits" ends up becoming a back door to Pelagianism.
If one sees fit to judge the Church this narrowly, why not more narrowly? Indeed, some do. Some make employment of women outside the home their litmus test, or the willingness to bless already-sexual homosexual partnerings, and every other concern is secondary, or disconsidered out of hand.
If you are looking at such a small piece of an ecclesial body's doctrine or practice, it's not really a church you're interested in. You want a social institution, of great or small caliber, to make you feel good with a grand gesture.
If you're looking to judge an ecclesial body on how it performs in these other areas--recruitment, training, social service, whatever--then you're also not interested in a church. You want a charitable organization, or a business.
Go ahead. See if you can rate the Catholic Church next to Welfare and Social Security, or against Kaplan and the public school system. See if any evaluation would even make sense and then get back to me.
As for simple skeptics:
[F]or 2,000 years the Catholic Church has been proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and making disciples. How many saints must the Catholic Church produce to convince you? How many martyrs must lay down their lives? How many nations must she evangelize? How many churches must she build? How many baptisms must she administer? How many penitents must she absolve? How many Masses must she celebrate? How many religious orders must she establish? How many hospitals and schools must she found? How many hungry persons must she feed? How many homeless must she house? How many kings and despots must she confront in the name of Christ? And who stands today, pray tell me, more firmly and courageously against the culture of death, abortion, and sexual immorality than the Catholic Church?
If you insist on judging the Catholic Church by her works, then by all means do so, but do so across all categories of mission and ministry. Do not judge her just by your parish church in the year A.D. 2007 but judge her by her remarkable and glorious history that reaches back to the Apostles of Christ.
Yet are you truly in a position to judge her sanctity and sins, good works and failures? Why do you see only her weaknesses and not her strengths, her defeats and not her victories?
Go ahead. Take G.K. Chesterton's advice, and consider judging the Church on how good it has been, as well as on how badly it has failed in its mission. Condemning the Church because over history it has let a million poor people suffer in squalor and die alone in ditches and alleys is premature, to say the least, if you don't even know if the number of people the Church has succeeded in helping is on the order of dozens or of billions.
I wouldn't be satisfied with a statistical rationale if I were making that argument, but if I were bold enough to berate the Church for not living up to a higher standard than I hold anyone else to, I'd still be obliged to determine how well it performed against this new standard.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Abuse of liturgical abuse
The American Papist put together a video making fun of some of the sillier liturgical abuses that have been committed against the Novus Ordo:
For now I'm not going to comment on the grotesqueries of clown masses, but rather the relatively mundane liturgical dance, whose inappropriateness in formal liturgy is not always self-evident. Most of the arguments I've seen against it fall into one of three categories: it's not a natural part of our liturgical culture (i.e. simply grafting it into the rubrics tends to be disruptive on multiple levels), it tends to draw attention to itself and away from God (which confounds the purpose of the mass), and it's often just badly done (which I don't have to explain, do I?).
If someone managed to convince me that dance could be properly integrated into the mass, and then somehow compelled me to reconstruct the liturgy accordingly, I'm sure what I'd do is have the dancers direct the preponderance of their effort and attention toward the altar or tabernacle. Most of the (thankfully little) I've seen seems to have put a premium on engaging the congregation and showing them what the performers are doing, and hardly in the "Hey you, remember that this is all about praising the Eucharist/Incarnation/trendy theological meme" sense.
If it points to us, even in aesthetically inspiring ways, it is not worship. Maybe if it praised God for the great things He has done in and for and through us, but performing art like what we see here is frivolous decoration at best, and turning the liturgy into self-celebration at worst.
I don't mind art for art's sake, but worship is for the glory of God. We can (and should) see God's greatness in all human activity, but the liturgy isn't simply human activity, and any aesthetic element to the liturgy should expressly draw us toward the Eucharist and upward to heaven. With the stuff like what the American Papist is satirizing, the claim that it's well-ordered worship sounds a lot like a storefront church claiming to be rooted deep in history because its unschooled pastor is teaching himself Hebrew to read the Torah.
For now I'm not going to comment on the grotesqueries of clown masses, but rather the relatively mundane liturgical dance, whose inappropriateness in formal liturgy is not always self-evident. Most of the arguments I've seen against it fall into one of three categories: it's not a natural part of our liturgical culture (i.e. simply grafting it into the rubrics tends to be disruptive on multiple levels), it tends to draw attention to itself and away from God (which confounds the purpose of the mass), and it's often just badly done (which I don't have to explain, do I?).
If someone managed to convince me that dance could be properly integrated into the mass, and then somehow compelled me to reconstruct the liturgy accordingly, I'm sure what I'd do is have the dancers direct the preponderance of their effort and attention toward the altar or tabernacle. Most of the (thankfully little) I've seen seems to have put a premium on engaging the congregation and showing them what the performers are doing, and hardly in the "Hey you, remember that this is all about praising the Eucharist/Incarnation/trendy theological meme" sense.
If it points to us, even in aesthetically inspiring ways, it is not worship. Maybe if it praised God for the great things He has done in and for and through us, but performing art like what we see here is frivolous decoration at best, and turning the liturgy into self-celebration at worst.
I don't mind art for art's sake, but worship is for the glory of God. We can (and should) see God's greatness in all human activity, but the liturgy isn't simply human activity, and any aesthetic element to the liturgy should expressly draw us toward the Eucharist and upward to heaven. With the stuff like what the American Papist is satirizing, the claim that it's well-ordered worship sounds a lot like a storefront church claiming to be rooted deep in history because its unschooled pastor is teaching himself Hebrew to read the Torah.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Hungering for Eucharistic adoration?
I keep hearing about parishes that don't have Eucharistic adoration at all. My first exposure to it was at a church that had a perpetual adoration chapel, so when I read about a parishoners here and there who want it, I'm surprised and disappointed that something as simple as exposing a consecrated host for even one hour a month isn't getting done.
There are all kinds of excuses, some understandable, some lame, all insufficient to justify curbing worship.
"The priest is too busy with other ministries/projects/social outreach"
Aside from expressly priestly duties--I mean in particular sacramental duties, although I don't want to draw the circle too small around things that require an ordained minister--most parish activities should be handled by a parishoner. It's what we're for; it's not like the priest is the only professional Christian and we just go in once a week the way we go to see the doctor once a year and expect the professional to do his thing for us. In fact, if we omit the benediction that traditionally comes at the end of adoration, a priest doesn't need to be there at all.
"The parish should focus on serving the community outside of mass; taking extra time for worship isn't a good use of time."
The first great commandment is to love God. The second is to love your neighbor. Doing the second is one way of doing the first, but it is not the only way, and if it were the primary way, then even the Sunday obligation couldn't withstand the logic. It's not like a Holy week service, where there is some expectation of large numbers of people showing up outside Sunday morning; people can come and go as they please. It's more like confession, only the priest doesn't have to be there.
"We're just not a parish that's big on devotionals."
Really? You really think that if you set a monstrance out at some publicized time and day, no one at all would show up because they just lack the interest or time or charism for extraliturgical worship? Do they pray at home by themselves, or teach their children to pray before going to bed? What else is the sanctuary being used for on a weekday evening or a Saturday morning, that would be preventing the few people who might want to spend some time with Jesus in person from doing so? I've already explained how it can't be that the priest is too busy, so even if exposition only lasted for an hour, and only one person stopped by for five or ten minutes between errands, it couldn't be that great a waste of time even if we set aside the fact that it would be time spent in the Presence and thus of inestimable value.
Even if no one showed up the first time, I think there's something welcoming about the Eucharist being displayed, about Jesus waiting for someone to come and sit with Him for a little while.
Here's my thought: if you want adoration and the people who could enable it are dragging their heels, show up anyway. If the church is locked tight 167 hours a week, then stay late after mass and explain that you just want to stay and pray a little while before they lock the doors. Come alone or come with other people who want it. You can get by without having the Sacrament exposed. You could even do the Litany of Divine Praises if you want to add some structure. God will bless the people who are faithful to Him. I would not be surprised if, by the grace of God, you could show the priest that there was enough interest in praying before the Eucharist exposed, then he would soon be moved to allow you to do so.
There are all kinds of excuses, some understandable, some lame, all insufficient to justify curbing worship.
"The priest is too busy with other ministries/projects/social outreach"
Aside from expressly priestly duties--I mean in particular sacramental duties, although I don't want to draw the circle too small around things that require an ordained minister--most parish activities should be handled by a parishoner. It's what we're for; it's not like the priest is the only professional Christian and we just go in once a week the way we go to see the doctor once a year and expect the professional to do his thing for us. In fact, if we omit the benediction that traditionally comes at the end of adoration, a priest doesn't need to be there at all.
"The parish should focus on serving the community outside of mass; taking extra time for worship isn't a good use of time."
The first great commandment is to love God. The second is to love your neighbor. Doing the second is one way of doing the first, but it is not the only way, and if it were the primary way, then even the Sunday obligation couldn't withstand the logic. It's not like a Holy week service, where there is some expectation of large numbers of people showing up outside Sunday morning; people can come and go as they please. It's more like confession, only the priest doesn't have to be there.
"We're just not a parish that's big on devotionals."
Really? You really think that if you set a monstrance out at some publicized time and day, no one at all would show up because they just lack the interest or time or charism for extraliturgical worship? Do they pray at home by themselves, or teach their children to pray before going to bed? What else is the sanctuary being used for on a weekday evening or a Saturday morning, that would be preventing the few people who might want to spend some time with Jesus in person from doing so? I've already explained how it can't be that the priest is too busy, so even if exposition only lasted for an hour, and only one person stopped by for five or ten minutes between errands, it couldn't be that great a waste of time even if we set aside the fact that it would be time spent in the Presence and thus of inestimable value.
Even if no one showed up the first time, I think there's something welcoming about the Eucharist being displayed, about Jesus waiting for someone to come and sit with Him for a little while.
Here's my thought: if you want adoration and the people who could enable it are dragging their heels, show up anyway. If the church is locked tight 167 hours a week, then stay late after mass and explain that you just want to stay and pray a little while before they lock the doors. Come alone or come with other people who want it. You can get by without having the Sacrament exposed. You could even do the Litany of Divine Praises if you want to add some structure. God will bless the people who are faithful to Him. I would not be surprised if, by the grace of God, you could show the priest that there was enough interest in praying before the Eucharist exposed, then he would soon be moved to allow you to do so.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Is man-machine marriage on the horizon?
Maybe so.
I find the idea ridiculous, but David Levy's argument from inevitability is persuasive.
I certainly expect that such a silly notion will not be long-lived (although it could enjoy a renaissance once AIs become convincing), but I also suspect there's enough momentum behind the Culture of Death's ambiguization of marriage that someone will be getting a marriage certificate signed before all's said and done.
Said Levy:
Of course it matters--an android (or gynoid, I suppose) isn't going to fake love any better than an otherwise well-adjusted real human can fake it--but if you can fool yourself into thinking you're happy, into distracting yourself from genuine pain with playing house by yourself, and with all the things commensurate with house-playing, then I would be surprised if no one tried it. Marriage with animals has been tried--or aped, rather, if you'll pardon the incongruent pun--at least once. Robots are already being made to perform certain household functions, and in some parts of the world, lifelike and life-sized dolls are already treated as surrogate girlfriends. Having one that can cook dinner and scrub toilets is still a ways off--though Levy only predicts that we'll see it happening by the middle of the century--but having a conversation with a false person that you've programmed, instead of imagining the conversation, will seem pretty appealing to affluent and very lonely people.
Levy naturally assumes that people want to marry just for happiness, but when a robotic "marriage" goes south, it will probably seem as natural as any other human marriage that has failed. It will be interesting to see how many people with failed robotic spouses treat it like with all the aplomb of a cell phone upgrade and how many show the same potentially disturbing overattachment of a guy getting wistful over trading in his first car.
Levy continues:
I wonder: does "remarkable" necessarily equal "good?" No, never mind; I know the answer already.
Dr. Fisher has a point, but the human drive to love doesn't mean that a three-element reductionism is proper to a well-integrated human. That people will attempt to have real relationships with fancy but stupid machines is--well, people anthropomorphize objects all the time, so it's precedented, first of all--not so indicative of the success of the robo-spouse industry as of the level of dysfunction that can be found in humanity.
It's cute when a child is attached to a doll or invents an imaginary friend. For a child, it's also not unhealthy; the young person becomes accustomed to taking care of a doll and hopefully, by imitating the real mother, will carry some foundation of parenting forward into adulthood; the child with an invisible playmate exercises the imagination, which is a faculty that requires exercise like any muscle and does not cease to be at the onset of adulthood.
When an adult becomes attached to a doll, even a mobile, speaking one, it is somewhat disturbing. Adult skills are learned and practiced in youth so that they will be used in earnest in adulthood. As the youth matures, the exercise becomes more sophisticated and realistic, and playing at adult behavior for the sake of playing should diminish as the lessons to be learned by simulating real social activity dwindle, and real adult behavior can be engaged more and more.
An artist will tell you that you have to emphasize the basics in rehearsal, but rehearsal without performance is empty. It's contraceptive, masturbatory.
People who would strive for a relationship with a lump of metal and latex will be expressing a genuine need for love, but machines aren't a solution. Whether the reason is fear, habit, or lack of thought about what marriage is really about, these people wouldn't be ready for a real relationship, and the solution is to get them ready, not give them a pressure release valve that spares them the risks of living.
If living and loving are like muscles to be exercised, and ones that are atrophied from decades of neglect, should they not be trained as they would have been in childhood? I will not deny the value of some coaching here. Older siblings and friends and therapists can all provide some tools for learning to deal with other, real people. Can androids be used to this end? Maybe, but they'd need to do more than convincingly simulate humanity in order to really do people some good, and it would be a lot more cost effective--if you want to be utilitarian about it--to simply employ actual humans. If someone isn't to the point where he can deal normally with real people even under limited conditions, then he's got more fundamental problems than being shy around girls or comfortable around abstracted personalities on a computer screen, and giving him the means to nurse his pathology is not going to make it better. It just saves him the trouble of doing so.
As long as he's desperately pretending to live the American Dream, though, who are we to judge, though, right?
I find the idea ridiculous, but David Levy's argument from inevitability is persuasive.
I certainly expect that such a silly notion will not be long-lived (although it could enjoy a renaissance once AIs become convincing), but I also suspect there's enough momentum behind the Culture of Death's ambiguization of marriage that someone will be getting a marriage certificate signed before all's said and done.
Said Levy:
"If the alternative is that you are lonely and sad and miserable, is it not better to find a robot that claims to love you and acts like it loves you? Does it really matter, if you’re a happier person?"
Of course it matters--an android (or gynoid, I suppose) isn't going to fake love any better than an otherwise well-adjusted real human can fake it--but if you can fool yourself into thinking you're happy, into distracting yourself from genuine pain with playing house by yourself, and with all the things commensurate with house-playing, then I would be surprised if no one tried it. Marriage with animals has been tried--or aped, rather, if you'll pardon the incongruent pun--at least once. Robots are already being made to perform certain household functions, and in some parts of the world, lifelike and life-sized dolls are already treated as surrogate girlfriends. Having one that can cook dinner and scrub toilets is still a ways off--though Levy only predicts that we'll see it happening by the middle of the century--but having a conversation with a false person that you've programmed, instead of imagining the conversation, will seem pretty appealing to affluent and very lonely people.
Levy naturally assumes that people want to marry just for happiness, but when a robotic "marriage" goes south, it will probably seem as natural as any other human marriage that has failed. It will be interesting to see how many people with failed robotic spouses treat it like with all the aplomb of a cell phone upgrade and how many show the same potentially disturbing overattachment of a guy getting wistful over trading in his first car.
Levy continues:
"It’s not that people will fall in love with an algorithm but that people will fall in love with a convincing simulation of a human being, and convincing simulations can have a remarkable effect on people"
I wonder: does "remarkable" necessarily equal "good?" No, never mind; I know the answer already.
Rutgers University biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, renowned for her studies on romantic love, suggests that love seems dependent on three key components: sex, romance and deep attachments. These components, she remarks, “can be triggered by all kinds of things. One can trigger the sex drive just by reading a book or seeing a movie—it doesn’t have to be triggered by a human being. You can feel a deep attachment to your land, your house, an idea, a desk, alcohol or whatever, so it seems logical that you can feel deeply attached to a robot. And when it comes to romantic love, you can fall madly in love with someone who doesn’t know you exist. It shows how much we want to love.”
Dr. Fisher has a point, but the human drive to love doesn't mean that a three-element reductionism is proper to a well-integrated human. That people will attempt to have real relationships with fancy but stupid machines is--well, people anthropomorphize objects all the time, so it's precedented, first of all--not so indicative of the success of the robo-spouse industry as of the level of dysfunction that can be found in humanity.
It's cute when a child is attached to a doll or invents an imaginary friend. For a child, it's also not unhealthy; the young person becomes accustomed to taking care of a doll and hopefully, by imitating the real mother, will carry some foundation of parenting forward into adulthood; the child with an invisible playmate exercises the imagination, which is a faculty that requires exercise like any muscle and does not cease to be at the onset of adulthood.
When an adult becomes attached to a doll, even a mobile, speaking one, it is somewhat disturbing. Adult skills are learned and practiced in youth so that they will be used in earnest in adulthood. As the youth matures, the exercise becomes more sophisticated and realistic, and playing at adult behavior for the sake of playing should diminish as the lessons to be learned by simulating real social activity dwindle, and real adult behavior can be engaged more and more.
An artist will tell you that you have to emphasize the basics in rehearsal, but rehearsal without performance is empty. It's contraceptive, masturbatory.
People who would strive for a relationship with a lump of metal and latex will be expressing a genuine need for love, but machines aren't a solution. Whether the reason is fear, habit, or lack of thought about what marriage is really about, these people wouldn't be ready for a real relationship, and the solution is to get them ready, not give them a pressure release valve that spares them the risks of living.
If living and loving are like muscles to be exercised, and ones that are atrophied from decades of neglect, should they not be trained as they would have been in childhood? I will not deny the value of some coaching here. Older siblings and friends and therapists can all provide some tools for learning to deal with other, real people. Can androids be used to this end? Maybe, but they'd need to do more than convincingly simulate humanity in order to really do people some good, and it would be a lot more cost effective--if you want to be utilitarian about it--to simply employ actual humans. If someone isn't to the point where he can deal normally with real people even under limited conditions, then he's got more fundamental problems than being shy around girls or comfortable around abstracted personalities on a computer screen, and giving him the means to nurse his pathology is not going to make it better. It just saves him the trouble of doing so.
As long as he's desperately pretending to live the American Dream, though, who are we to judge, though, right?
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Silliness in recent years
Below are responses to half-baked presumptions that have been in the news and on the Internet not-so-lately (would've posted it sooner, but I forgot I had left it in draft status for two years). I try to call out opposing sides on a couple things, although I'm probably not very fair. Maybe next time.
"God sent hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans!"
God sends rain on both the just and the unjust. Was He not also punishing all the other cities that get hit by hurricanes? If New Orleans deserves punishment, would not also San Francisco? When was the last time they had a catastrophic earthquake? Maybe Boston's not getting hit hard, except for the occasional blizzard, because God doesn't condemn whatever's going on there. Does it seem likely in this context? Not to me. It's easy to map Biblical patterns onto current events; it's harder to know what's actually on the mind of God.
Christ wouldn't condemn [insert social misfit of your choice]! He'd probably go have dinner with him!"
Yes, He wouldn't necessarily condemn anyone, just as He didn't condemn the adulterous woman brought before Him by a mob, or the woman at the well who had married several times. He does, however, admonish sinners to sin no more. It's hard to invite sinners to a life of holiness when you distance yourself from them. It's a far cry from "I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more," to "Don't ever change." We should be comforted by the fact that Jesus loves us despite our failings, by His mercy, but we should also be motivated by His justice, not so much out of fear but out of love for Him. Even if God's mercy were greater than His justice, it wouldn't mean that we now get to keep doing whatever it is we wanted to do all along, only now there's nothing bad about it. It's not living under Christ's mercy, it's abusing it.
Late in 2005, in Israel, a British tourist named Sharon Tendler "married" a dolphin she had been visiting for fifteen years. Although assuring friends she'd end up with the dolphin instead of some boyfriend, she concedes she might "marry" a man someday, and hopes the dolphin, Cindy, finds another dolphin with whom to have lots of calves.
I'm not going to say "This fiasco is all the fault of the homosexual lobby!" but one more prediction about the fallout from the de-definition of marriage has come true. In fact, perhaps three have: is Cindy really the name of a male dolphin, and is Tendler going to divorce "him" when she meets the right human, or since she bases her love for Cindy primarily on how comforted she feels by Cindy's presence, and isn't expecting any fidelity (if consummation were even possible between them in the first place--I don't want to know) anyway, then what the heck kind of relationship is it? People can (but shouldn't) get married for whatever reason they want to, yet generally they recognize what marriage is supposed to be, at least in some stunted and partial sense; here, it's not even clear how Cindy could have said, in any way, shape, or form, "I do," how Cindy could have been capable of consenting to such an arrangement, personally if not legally.
"If a woman can't abort a pregnancy that is the result of rape, whenever she looks at her child, she's going to see the rapist."
I certainly sympathize with the victims of rape, but these words strike me as the kind that would only be spoken by someone who has never been or refuses to be a mother. I can hardly imagine how rape victims might react, but how cold and alienated do you have to be to look a person in the face, and not only not see that person, but hardly see a person at all? The solution, it seems to me, would be to put the child up for adoption. I know, continuing a pregnancy that's the result of rape would be a heavy cross to bear for anyone, and that pressure plus the abstractness in which abortion is often painted makes it easier to consider, but if a woman can come face to face with another person and say "I should have killed you," her problem is bigger than lacking the cab fare to Planned Parenthood.
"I could not bear to go through life knowing that my son or daughter, who resulted from a rape, was out there somewhere, being raised by adoptive parents. It would be less cruel to abort."
Less cruel to you than having to know someone else is trying to make good out of a bad situation? Maybe you're right, in a way--maybe people with attitudes like this one and the previous really are unfit to be parents. I know I wouldn't be happy living under the thumbs of people who really had to weigh the inconvenience of tearing my limbs off and crushing my skull against the inconvenience of having me around.
At least one protester's sign at a West Coast Walk for Life (caution: tasteless and vulgar content) read "Free abortion on demand."
I guess this one would go along with HMOs being a basic human right, along with liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Okay, flu shots are free, at least if you're a student or a senior citizen, but why should a major voluntary surgical procedure be free? I'm not talking about bankrupt people who need emergency medical care--they're already tax writeoffs for hospitals, if you're more worried about money than reluctant doctors--and I don't think the protester was, either. Why not demand free surgery for any sort of body modification you can think of? We have the right to self expression, after all.
Read another: Why not outlaw heterosexuality instead! [sic] Strike at the source!" Yet another: "Stop breeding."
Okay, even if you buy the notion that if the population increases by only one person, the global ecological system will completely collapse, what good would come of completely ceasing breeding? A hundred years from now, we'd be extinct. Do we really want to become extinct? I don't, even if it means that when our population reaches six billion and one, a "few" surviving people will find themselves thrown back to the stone age. Imagine instead what would the world would be like in fifty years if childbirth stopped tomorrow: everyone nearly old enough to retire, no one young enough to keep things going for them. I didn't see the people carrying those signs coming in from the woods trying to survive on their own, with as little impact on the environment as possible, and only trying to raise awareness. In fact, I don't see many of them wearing canvas instead of leather and eating tofu instead of beef, although it would be a start.
Things that make pseudoscientists and paranormal researchers look bad:
When Cassini's Huygens probe landed on Titan, a guest on Coast to Coast AM described the conditions on Saturn's moon as a "alternate reality." In my mind, describing anything, no matter how strange, that still follows the physical laws we already know, as "alternate reality" strikes me as distastefully hyperbolic.
On a different episode, George Noory was talking with someone about how medieval stained glass makers were able to create different colors by changing the fineness of the particles used to color the glass, rather than their composition; apparently, some of the particles were so finely ground that they functioned as quantum dots, with significantly different optical properties (like, you know, color) from particles with a more classical size. George commented that if skilled laborers could create quantum devices back then, maybe they were capable of time travel or something equally preposterous. Having a basis in regular science would really help in your study of its fringes.
Even an undergraduate level--skip the advanced stuff so you don't risk getting indoctrinated too much in scientism while you get extra practice at empirical research. I just wish liberal arts majors had to study more science to graduate. If people had more than a passing familiarity with the undisputed aspects of how the world works, it would really save us a lot of trouble all around.
Things that make actual scientists and wannabes look bad:
Examples of hearing second hand about an unexplained phenomenon, proposing a half-formulated rationale, and presuming its absolute veracity despite mitigating details:
Extended Marian apparitions, despite being obvious images of a woman who speaks with some of the people present, are dismissed as vaguely humanoid groups of birds and an unbridled imagination of schizophrenic magnitude in an otherwise and previously perfectly lucid witness. This kind of naysaying is quite common.
When informed that stalks of wheat from a crop circle appear to carry less of an electrical charge than stalks from elsewhere, a statistician on the National Geographic Channel (why they felt he'd be qualified to judge physical anomalies was not revealed) blithely described, without personal observation, the standing stalks as miniature lightning rods, which should hold a charge while stalks lying flat had their charges naturally dissipate, even though the flattened stalks had been on the ground for only a few hours before both groups of stalks were cut, which took place hours before the test; yet after the cutting of the dried stalks, there is no charge dissipation. Come on; you claim to be a scientist, even a plain mathematician, and a rational thinker, and some handwaving about differential capacitance in allegedly normal and uniform samples is all you can come up with, yet you brand your hypothesis as fact? Why is it so hard to accept that there are legitimately strange natural phenomena we simply haven't characterized yet? Another factoid from the NGC show: anomalous magnetic fields in agroglyphs (i.e. crop circles--I like the fancy word more, don't you?) are sometimes attributed to magnetized ferritic globules, but agroglyph hoaxers are believed when they claim it's all because they scattered iron filings around the glyphs, even though (1) the globules do not resemble commercially available filings (2) the globules stick to the plants, rather than to each other, as unconstrained magnets are wont to do.
Agroglyphs puzzle me. People so often seem to crave a paranormal dimension in their lives, at least to have room to believe there is one even if they don't experience it--up to and including faith in science as an omnipotent tool of understanding that we are simply unable to currently wield at its full potential. Something like bizarre patterns of flattened grains show up, and the first people to provide a superficially plausible demonstration are believed at their word with zero concern for the few lingering anomalies. I get better science from Mythbusters.
Materialists probably think they're following the maxim of Sherlock Holmes: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." The problem is that the line of thinking usually runs this way: "I refuse to believe that anything supernatural is real. Some logical, empirical explanation must be able to account for this strange phenomenon. I'm too clever to think otherwise, so whatever I think of off the top of my head is most likely exactly what really happened." After a few implausible assumptions get made, the probability of the half-baked naturalistic explanation starts seeming as low as an actual miracle to objective observers, but admitting that better explanations require more knowledge than is currently possessed often seems too difficult.
"God sent hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans!"
God sends rain on both the just and the unjust. Was He not also punishing all the other cities that get hit by hurricanes? If New Orleans deserves punishment, would not also San Francisco? When was the last time they had a catastrophic earthquake? Maybe Boston's not getting hit hard, except for the occasional blizzard, because God doesn't condemn whatever's going on there. Does it seem likely in this context? Not to me. It's easy to map Biblical patterns onto current events; it's harder to know what's actually on the mind of God.
Christ wouldn't condemn [insert social misfit of your choice]! He'd probably go have dinner with him!"
Yes, He wouldn't necessarily condemn anyone, just as He didn't condemn the adulterous woman brought before Him by a mob, or the woman at the well who had married several times. He does, however, admonish sinners to sin no more. It's hard to invite sinners to a life of holiness when you distance yourself from them. It's a far cry from "I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more," to "Don't ever change." We should be comforted by the fact that Jesus loves us despite our failings, by His mercy, but we should also be motivated by His justice, not so much out of fear but out of love for Him. Even if God's mercy were greater than His justice, it wouldn't mean that we now get to keep doing whatever it is we wanted to do all along, only now there's nothing bad about it. It's not living under Christ's mercy, it's abusing it.
Late in 2005, in Israel, a British tourist named Sharon Tendler "married" a dolphin she had been visiting for fifteen years. Although assuring friends she'd end up with the dolphin instead of some boyfriend, she concedes she might "marry" a man someday, and hopes the dolphin, Cindy, finds another dolphin with whom to have lots of calves.
I'm not going to say "This fiasco is all the fault of the homosexual lobby!" but one more prediction about the fallout from the de-definition of marriage has come true. In fact, perhaps three have: is Cindy really the name of a male dolphin, and is Tendler going to divorce "him" when she meets the right human, or since she bases her love for Cindy primarily on how comforted she feels by Cindy's presence, and isn't expecting any fidelity (if consummation were even possible between them in the first place--I don't want to know) anyway, then what the heck kind of relationship is it? People can (but shouldn't) get married for whatever reason they want to, yet generally they recognize what marriage is supposed to be, at least in some stunted and partial sense; here, it's not even clear how Cindy could have said, in any way, shape, or form, "I do," how Cindy could have been capable of consenting to such an arrangement, personally if not legally.
"If a woman can't abort a pregnancy that is the result of rape, whenever she looks at her child, she's going to see the rapist."
I certainly sympathize with the victims of rape, but these words strike me as the kind that would only be spoken by someone who has never been or refuses to be a mother. I can hardly imagine how rape victims might react, but how cold and alienated do you have to be to look a person in the face, and not only not see that person, but hardly see a person at all? The solution, it seems to me, would be to put the child up for adoption. I know, continuing a pregnancy that's the result of rape would be a heavy cross to bear for anyone, and that pressure plus the abstractness in which abortion is often painted makes it easier to consider, but if a woman can come face to face with another person and say "I should have killed you," her problem is bigger than lacking the cab fare to Planned Parenthood.
"I could not bear to go through life knowing that my son or daughter, who resulted from a rape, was out there somewhere, being raised by adoptive parents. It would be less cruel to abort."
Less cruel to you than having to know someone else is trying to make good out of a bad situation? Maybe you're right, in a way--maybe people with attitudes like this one and the previous really are unfit to be parents. I know I wouldn't be happy living under the thumbs of people who really had to weigh the inconvenience of tearing my limbs off and crushing my skull against the inconvenience of having me around.
At least one protester's sign at a West Coast Walk for Life (caution: tasteless and vulgar content) read "Free abortion on demand."
I guess this one would go along with HMOs being a basic human right, along with liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Okay, flu shots are free, at least if you're a student or a senior citizen, but why should a major voluntary surgical procedure be free? I'm not talking about bankrupt people who need emergency medical care--they're already tax writeoffs for hospitals, if you're more worried about money than reluctant doctors--and I don't think the protester was, either. Why not demand free surgery for any sort of body modification you can think of? We have the right to self expression, after all.
Read another: Why not outlaw heterosexuality instead! [sic] Strike at the source!" Yet another: "Stop breeding."
Okay, even if you buy the notion that if the population increases by only one person, the global ecological system will completely collapse, what good would come of completely ceasing breeding? A hundred years from now, we'd be extinct. Do we really want to become extinct? I don't, even if it means that when our population reaches six billion and one, a "few" surviving people will find themselves thrown back to the stone age. Imagine instead what would the world would be like in fifty years if childbirth stopped tomorrow: everyone nearly old enough to retire, no one young enough to keep things going for them. I didn't see the people carrying those signs coming in from the woods trying to survive on their own, with as little impact on the environment as possible, and only trying to raise awareness. In fact, I don't see many of them wearing canvas instead of leather and eating tofu instead of beef, although it would be a start.
Things that make pseudoscientists and paranormal researchers look bad:
When Cassini's Huygens probe landed on Titan, a guest on Coast to Coast AM described the conditions on Saturn's moon as a "alternate reality." In my mind, describing anything, no matter how strange, that still follows the physical laws we already know, as "alternate reality" strikes me as distastefully hyperbolic.
On a different episode, George Noory was talking with someone about how medieval stained glass makers were able to create different colors by changing the fineness of the particles used to color the glass, rather than their composition; apparently, some of the particles were so finely ground that they functioned as quantum dots, with significantly different optical properties (like, you know, color) from particles with a more classical size. George commented that if skilled laborers could create quantum devices back then, maybe they were capable of time travel or something equally preposterous. Having a basis in regular science would really help in your study of its fringes.
Even an undergraduate level--skip the advanced stuff so you don't risk getting indoctrinated too much in scientism while you get extra practice at empirical research. I just wish liberal arts majors had to study more science to graduate. If people had more than a passing familiarity with the undisputed aspects of how the world works, it would really save us a lot of trouble all around.
Things that make actual scientists and wannabes look bad:
Examples of hearing second hand about an unexplained phenomenon, proposing a half-formulated rationale, and presuming its absolute veracity despite mitigating details:
Extended Marian apparitions, despite being obvious images of a woman who speaks with some of the people present, are dismissed as vaguely humanoid groups of birds and an unbridled imagination of schizophrenic magnitude in an otherwise and previously perfectly lucid witness. This kind of naysaying is quite common.
When informed that stalks of wheat from a crop circle appear to carry less of an electrical charge than stalks from elsewhere, a statistician on the National Geographic Channel (why they felt he'd be qualified to judge physical anomalies was not revealed) blithely described, without personal observation, the standing stalks as miniature lightning rods, which should hold a charge while stalks lying flat had their charges naturally dissipate, even though the flattened stalks had been on the ground for only a few hours before both groups of stalks were cut, which took place hours before the test; yet after the cutting of the dried stalks, there is no charge dissipation. Come on; you claim to be a scientist, even a plain mathematician, and a rational thinker, and some handwaving about differential capacitance in allegedly normal and uniform samples is all you can come up with, yet you brand your hypothesis as fact? Why is it so hard to accept that there are legitimately strange natural phenomena we simply haven't characterized yet? Another factoid from the NGC show: anomalous magnetic fields in agroglyphs (i.e. crop circles--I like the fancy word more, don't you?) are sometimes attributed to magnetized ferritic globules, but agroglyph hoaxers are believed when they claim it's all because they scattered iron filings around the glyphs, even though (1) the globules do not resemble commercially available filings (2) the globules stick to the plants, rather than to each other, as unconstrained magnets are wont to do.
Agroglyphs puzzle me. People so often seem to crave a paranormal dimension in their lives, at least to have room to believe there is one even if they don't experience it--up to and including faith in science as an omnipotent tool of understanding that we are simply unable to currently wield at its full potential. Something like bizarre patterns of flattened grains show up, and the first people to provide a superficially plausible demonstration are believed at their word with zero concern for the few lingering anomalies. I get better science from Mythbusters.
Materialists probably think they're following the maxim of Sherlock Holmes: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." The problem is that the line of thinking usually runs this way: "I refuse to believe that anything supernatural is real. Some logical, empirical explanation must be able to account for this strange phenomenon. I'm too clever to think otherwise, so whatever I think of off the top of my head is most likely exactly what really happened." After a few implausible assumptions get made, the probability of the half-baked naturalistic explanation starts seeming as low as an actual miracle to objective observers, but admitting that better explanations require more knowledge than is currently possessed often seems too difficult.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Apologetic for a Random Reader (IV)
Today: the Real Presence
Obviously I'm not going to go into all of it. I just wanted to address one or two points that often come up when discussing the Eucharist with Protestants and other non-Catholics who have some familiarity with the Bible.
I do find it curious that the people most inclined to speak of the literal truth of the Bible tend to be the quickest to ascribe John 6 and related passages to symbolism. Certainly, the Eucharist contains symbolic elements, but Christ made an awful effort to emphasize the importance of the Bread of Life.
First, He uses very graphic language, words with connotations closer to "chew" and "gnaw" than to "assimilate for edification." When His listeners said "This is a hard saying. Who can accept it?" it should seem odd that Jesus would say "I can satisfy all your spiritual needs" and people would take issue with it, but not accuse Him of blasphemy, as happened elsewhere. At other times when people misinterpreted His parables and analogies, He corrected them; this time, He did not, which suggests that the more scandalous interpretation was the correct one after all. If I'm losing you at this point, ask yourself which seems more disturbing: a metaphor for God as the source of all goodness, or a command to commit something like ritual cannibalism.
Second, He spoke quite a bit about being the Bread of Life. More than any other analogy He made. Maybe more than all His other analogies put together. I haven't counted verses, but I'd put money on Eucharistic material outweighing other symbolism not counting Good Shepherd stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if it did even including the Good Shepherd. If it were just a metaphor, why say things like "My flesh/blood is food/drink indeed?"
Sometimes, other parallels are made with more apparent symbolic language. "Jesus said He was a door," goes one common criticism, "but we know better than to look for a doorknob in His side, don't we?" "He said He is the vine, but we shouldn't be looking for a leaf-covered man at the Second Coming, should we?" Since I believe in the Real Presence, I sometimes wonder if these other metaphors also contain dimensions of truth that extend beyond the meaning we can apprehend (or can expect to lie beyond our apprehension), but true enough, Christ is not a door or a vine quite in the sense that we understand mundane portals and foliage to be.
When someone reminds us not to expect the doorknob, so to speak, though, they're missing a rather critical detail. We knew "I am the door" is a metaphor because there was no doorway to be shown to the disciples. We knew "I am the vine" is a metaphor because we never saw Apostles growing out of Him. How is "I am manna come down from heaven" different?
He did not only refer to Himself as food. He referred to food as Him. At the Last Supper, there was bread present, and there was wine present; and His words were "this is My Body...this is My Blood." Where we lacked signs of gateage or vinery in the other metaphors, so we could know that the language was only symbolic, here we have the consummation of the whole discourse on the Bread of Life, ratified with an unleavened loaf and a fermented drink squeezed from grapes. Here we have bread that is not just miraculously multiplied, but bread that Jesus names as Himself.
It strikes me as odd that John 6 should be so much harder to understand in this sense of identity than "the Father and I are one" is to be understood as a statement of identity. Then again, some people struggle with the Trinity, as well, so maybe at least I shouldn't be surprised.
Obviously I'm not going to go into all of it. I just wanted to address one or two points that often come up when discussing the Eucharist with Protestants and other non-Catholics who have some familiarity with the Bible.
I do find it curious that the people most inclined to speak of the literal truth of the Bible tend to be the quickest to ascribe John 6 and related passages to symbolism. Certainly, the Eucharist contains symbolic elements, but Christ made an awful effort to emphasize the importance of the Bread of Life.
First, He uses very graphic language, words with connotations closer to "chew" and "gnaw" than to "assimilate for edification." When His listeners said "This is a hard saying. Who can accept it?" it should seem odd that Jesus would say "I can satisfy all your spiritual needs" and people would take issue with it, but not accuse Him of blasphemy, as happened elsewhere. At other times when people misinterpreted His parables and analogies, He corrected them; this time, He did not, which suggests that the more scandalous interpretation was the correct one after all. If I'm losing you at this point, ask yourself which seems more disturbing: a metaphor for God as the source of all goodness, or a command to commit something like ritual cannibalism.
Second, He spoke quite a bit about being the Bread of Life. More than any other analogy He made. Maybe more than all His other analogies put together. I haven't counted verses, but I'd put money on Eucharistic material outweighing other symbolism not counting Good Shepherd stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if it did even including the Good Shepherd. If it were just a metaphor, why say things like "My flesh/blood is food/drink indeed?"
Sometimes, other parallels are made with more apparent symbolic language. "Jesus said He was a door," goes one common criticism, "but we know better than to look for a doorknob in His side, don't we?" "He said He is the vine, but we shouldn't be looking for a leaf-covered man at the Second Coming, should we?" Since I believe in the Real Presence, I sometimes wonder if these other metaphors also contain dimensions of truth that extend beyond the meaning we can apprehend (or can expect to lie beyond our apprehension), but true enough, Christ is not a door or a vine quite in the sense that we understand mundane portals and foliage to be.
When someone reminds us not to expect the doorknob, so to speak, though, they're missing a rather critical detail. We knew "I am the door" is a metaphor because there was no doorway to be shown to the disciples. We knew "I am the vine" is a metaphor because we never saw Apostles growing out of Him. How is "I am manna come down from heaven" different?
He did not only refer to Himself as food. He referred to food as Him. At the Last Supper, there was bread present, and there was wine present; and His words were "this is My Body...this is My Blood." Where we lacked signs of gateage or vinery in the other metaphors, so we could know that the language was only symbolic, here we have the consummation of the whole discourse on the Bread of Life, ratified with an unleavened loaf and a fermented drink squeezed from grapes. Here we have bread that is not just miraculously multiplied, but bread that Jesus names as Himself.
It strikes me as odd that John 6 should be so much harder to understand in this sense of identity than "the Father and I are one" is to be understood as a statement of identity. Then again, some people struggle with the Trinity, as well, so maybe at least I shouldn't be surprised.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
I used to go to a nearby ag school to get meat on the cheap.
Because of their animal and meat sciences curricula, I could get decent selections of what I presume were semester projects at reasonable prices. Sometimes I could even get eggs.
A buddy of mine is still in grad school at said college, so I asked him one time before I went to visit to pick me up a number of things. One of the items he got was an eight pound slab of bacon. I wanted to be able to slice it up myself, or do other things with it that don't require thin strips of cured pork. It's extra work, but for the price and the novel culinary opportunities, I thought it'd be worth it.
I'd gotten a smaller one in the past, and I discovered that these slabs sometimes come with a nigh-inedible rind that should be removed before consuming. I neglected to remove the rind from that first slab, hoping it would cook down, but what I ended up doing was making a series of BLTs with extra-crisp meat that I could just break the rind off of, since I'd done so much slicing through that annoyingly tough stuff (yeah, I know, what was I thinking?) that doing a second round of dissecting just seemed an unbearable chore.
I asked my buddy to try to get one of the slabs that didn't have the rind, but no such luck. When I picked it up, there it was. Oh well. At least now I knew not to try to eat it.
What I still didn't know, though, was what the rind was. I figured it was just some subdermal layer of connective tissue, some intramuscular tendonlike membrane or something. Turns out I was wrong.
It was skin. You know what made it obvious to this non-biologist, non-farmer?
Nipples.
In retrospect I'm surprised I wasn't more revolted, but after ten or fifteen minutes with a hand cheese slicer, the skin was gone, and I now had mostly innocuous-looking one pound bricks of bacon.
Mostly.
A buddy of mine is still in grad school at said college, so I asked him one time before I went to visit to pick me up a number of things. One of the items he got was an eight pound slab of bacon. I wanted to be able to slice it up myself, or do other things with it that don't require thin strips of cured pork. It's extra work, but for the price and the novel culinary opportunities, I thought it'd be worth it.
I'd gotten a smaller one in the past, and I discovered that these slabs sometimes come with a nigh-inedible rind that should be removed before consuming. I neglected to remove the rind from that first slab, hoping it would cook down, but what I ended up doing was making a series of BLTs with extra-crisp meat that I could just break the rind off of, since I'd done so much slicing through that annoyingly tough stuff (yeah, I know, what was I thinking?) that doing a second round of dissecting just seemed an unbearable chore.
I asked my buddy to try to get one of the slabs that didn't have the rind, but no such luck. When I picked it up, there it was. Oh well. At least now I knew not to try to eat it.
What I still didn't know, though, was what the rind was. I figured it was just some subdermal layer of connective tissue, some intramuscular tendonlike membrane or something. Turns out I was wrong.
It was skin. You know what made it obvious to this non-biologist, non-farmer?
Nipples.
In retrospect I'm surprised I wasn't more revolted, but after ten or fifteen minutes with a hand cheese slicer, the skin was gone, and I now had mostly innocuous-looking one pound bricks of bacon.
Mostly.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The Lord called my dad home a month ago, after a long battle with cancer.
I don't want simply to eulogize, but it might help a little to talk about some of my experiences. I should be back to more regular posting soon. If I have any regular readers left, you'll probably be willing to slog through this post; if not, check back next week.
While he started to seem better--his colon probably finally healing from the surgery--around Thanksgiving, he began feeling significant levels of pain and his strength started to drop shortly thereafter, and he spent most of the last month in the hospital. For the last few days the focus was on pain management, and he slipped away during the night. The rest of the details don't matter.
Indeed, for days--probably longer--he'd lost so much strength that he had to stop and rest in the middle of a meal, not only because it was so hard to eat with his abdomen swollen as it was, but because the act of eating took so much effort. At Thanksgiving, though, he ate normally--enthusiastically--without stopping, with hardly even slowing down the way I have to with my second serving of turkey or mashed potatoes. Maybe his colon had finally gotten back to normal, but I wonder now if Thanksgiving was an apropos gift.
Whenever my sister and I would come home from school for vacation or a few days, he always made sure that our last meal together was a nice one. He called it "our Last Supper." Maybe Thanksgiving was supposed to be his "Last Supper" with us, and the return of his appetite was just the gift of one last normal family event.
For now, we're largely being carried by relief that he's no longer suffering, and by keeping busy with our respective jobs and taking care of post-mortem administrativa. My sister made the observation that it will be easier to miss him than to watch him continue to suffer. Despite the bureaucracy my mom's had to deal with every day since then, it's been true for all of us.
While we always held out hope--living the last few years without hope really would have been much worse, and it would have been ghoulish to say our goodbyes and make our peace with him and then simply wait four years for him to die--it was difficult to see one part of his life after another taken away. I don't know how frustrating it must have been to retire and finally have the time to do what he wanted, and to start on medication that robbed him of all sensitivity in his extremities, so he could no longer play music, or carve wood, or even enjoy food like he used to; to be too ill to renew his airman's medical certification so he could start flying again; to be too weak to go hiking anymore, or anything outdoors more than a simple walk around the block once or twice a day.
During all this, he never complained, and endured everything with patience and dignity. I know I complain about my work situation a lot--not here, so much, but there are a few things I'm trying to remember to look at as opportunities for growth--but if I'm ever given such a heavy cross to bear, I hope I can be even just half the lamb my dad was.
The funeral was the weekend before Christmas, and I was dreading sitting through that and the viewing the afternoon before, but both were much better than I expected. My dad was someone who always enjoyed life, so we all agreed it would be appropriate to have a joyful funeral mass. As I said last time, things of this nature are bittersweet, but in my mom's words, there's been enough sadness. It also helped that the priest had come to know my dad quite well since the diagnosis, and so could offer a homiletic eulogy that wasn't just a reminder to the rest of us of fire and brimstone or a skein of vague, saccharine platitudes. A friend of the family reminded us about the opportunity for spiritual growth we had, and while we all did take comfort in our faith, it was hard to see anything happening other than enduring more than any of us thought we would have to, or could.
The one other thing I noticed was that, both before and after, the most hopeless and emotionally raw moments were the ones when it was easiest to pray. Sometimes it was just throwing emotions up to heaven, sometimes it was the simple rhythm of formal prayers, but I felt a comfort in prayer that reminded me of my mom's comfort when I was young and getting my shots--she sympathized but knew that my brief suffering was necessary. There's probably a whole library of books that could be or have been written on the theology that can be unpacked from that, but at least right now going any deeper is beyond me.
Two things really made the weekend bearable. One was remembering that everyone else who came to share their respects were also grieving, in their own way, and for the most part it was much more sudden for them than for us, so it helped me to be more empathetic. The other was having the opportunity to see the impact Dad had on other people as a man. I've gotten glimpses in the past, but his being my father tended to overshadow everything. I realize that people tend to say nice things about the deceased to comfort the deceased's loved ones, but just looking at the people who came, I could see how torn up they were about it.
I've come to know some of Dad's peers to be exemplary men, men I even now look up to for their integrity and faith and personability. What I didn't understand before, what I was honored to realize, is that these very men looked at my dad the same way.
I would liked to have known him more in that mode, but I probably would have had to distance myself as his son a little bit to see around the relationship we already had, which I'm not sure would be a net gain for me. What I can do instead is see Dad as the man reflected in everyone around him.
As a fourth degree Knight of Columbus, he was entitled to an honor guard during the vigil at the end of the viewing the night before the funeral, and a color guard during the funeral itself. My sister observed that, while the pomp was really quite respectful and not gaudy like she expected, it was in the carriage of the few Knights who had known him since before he joined (including some of my role models) whose respect for the man really showed through; yet, when the casket was taken from the church and the ceremony was over, every single Knight personally reiterated his condolences to me and gave me a hug. These men are not the modern, overly sensitive type, and that kind of gesture is not consistent with a man simply doing his duty.
Okay, I don't really have a good way to end this post. I tried saying "Things have gotten back to normal, except..." but nothing sounded appropriate. We're getting along, life keeps on keepin' on, blah blah blah. There's catharsis in grief, but I don't know how to write about it yet.
I don't want simply to eulogize, but it might help a little to talk about some of my experiences. I should be back to more regular posting soon. If I have any regular readers left, you'll probably be willing to slog through this post; if not, check back next week.
While he started to seem better--his colon probably finally healing from the surgery--around Thanksgiving, he began feeling significant levels of pain and his strength started to drop shortly thereafter, and he spent most of the last month in the hospital. For the last few days the focus was on pain management, and he slipped away during the night. The rest of the details don't matter.
Indeed, for days--probably longer--he'd lost so much strength that he had to stop and rest in the middle of a meal, not only because it was so hard to eat with his abdomen swollen as it was, but because the act of eating took so much effort. At Thanksgiving, though, he ate normally--enthusiastically--without stopping, with hardly even slowing down the way I have to with my second serving of turkey or mashed potatoes. Maybe his colon had finally gotten back to normal, but I wonder now if Thanksgiving was an apropos gift.
Whenever my sister and I would come home from school for vacation or a few days, he always made sure that our last meal together was a nice one. He called it "our Last Supper." Maybe Thanksgiving was supposed to be his "Last Supper" with us, and the return of his appetite was just the gift of one last normal family event.
For now, we're largely being carried by relief that he's no longer suffering, and by keeping busy with our respective jobs and taking care of post-mortem administrativa. My sister made the observation that it will be easier to miss him than to watch him continue to suffer. Despite the bureaucracy my mom's had to deal with every day since then, it's been true for all of us.
While we always held out hope--living the last few years without hope really would have been much worse, and it would have been ghoulish to say our goodbyes and make our peace with him and then simply wait four years for him to die--it was difficult to see one part of his life after another taken away. I don't know how frustrating it must have been to retire and finally have the time to do what he wanted, and to start on medication that robbed him of all sensitivity in his extremities, so he could no longer play music, or carve wood, or even enjoy food like he used to; to be too ill to renew his airman's medical certification so he could start flying again; to be too weak to go hiking anymore, or anything outdoors more than a simple walk around the block once or twice a day.
During all this, he never complained, and endured everything with patience and dignity. I know I complain about my work situation a lot--not here, so much, but there are a few things I'm trying to remember to look at as opportunities for growth--but if I'm ever given such a heavy cross to bear, I hope I can be even just half the lamb my dad was.
The funeral was the weekend before Christmas, and I was dreading sitting through that and the viewing the afternoon before, but both were much better than I expected. My dad was someone who always enjoyed life, so we all agreed it would be appropriate to have a joyful funeral mass. As I said last time, things of this nature are bittersweet, but in my mom's words, there's been enough sadness. It also helped that the priest had come to know my dad quite well since the diagnosis, and so could offer a homiletic eulogy that wasn't just a reminder to the rest of us of fire and brimstone or a skein of vague, saccharine platitudes. A friend of the family reminded us about the opportunity for spiritual growth we had, and while we all did take comfort in our faith, it was hard to see anything happening other than enduring more than any of us thought we would have to, or could.
The one other thing I noticed was that, both before and after, the most hopeless and emotionally raw moments were the ones when it was easiest to pray. Sometimes it was just throwing emotions up to heaven, sometimes it was the simple rhythm of formal prayers, but I felt a comfort in prayer that reminded me of my mom's comfort when I was young and getting my shots--she sympathized but knew that my brief suffering was necessary. There's probably a whole library of books that could be or have been written on the theology that can be unpacked from that, but at least right now going any deeper is beyond me.
Two things really made the weekend bearable. One was remembering that everyone else who came to share their respects were also grieving, in their own way, and for the most part it was much more sudden for them than for us, so it helped me to be more empathetic. The other was having the opportunity to see the impact Dad had on other people as a man. I've gotten glimpses in the past, but his being my father tended to overshadow everything. I realize that people tend to say nice things about the deceased to comfort the deceased's loved ones, but just looking at the people who came, I could see how torn up they were about it.
I've come to know some of Dad's peers to be exemplary men, men I even now look up to for their integrity and faith and personability. What I didn't understand before, what I was honored to realize, is that these very men looked at my dad the same way.
I would liked to have known him more in that mode, but I probably would have had to distance myself as his son a little bit to see around the relationship we already had, which I'm not sure would be a net gain for me. What I can do instead is see Dad as the man reflected in everyone around him.
As a fourth degree Knight of Columbus, he was entitled to an honor guard during the vigil at the end of the viewing the night before the funeral, and a color guard during the funeral itself. My sister observed that, while the pomp was really quite respectful and not gaudy like she expected, it was in the carriage of the few Knights who had known him since before he joined (including some of my role models) whose respect for the man really showed through; yet, when the casket was taken from the church and the ceremony was over, every single Knight personally reiterated his condolences to me and gave me a hug. These men are not the modern, overly sensitive type, and that kind of gesture is not consistent with a man simply doing his duty.
Okay, I don't really have a good way to end this post. I tried saying "Things have gotten back to normal, except..." but nothing sounded appropriate. We're getting along, life keeps on keepin' on, blah blah blah. There's catharsis in grief, but I don't know how to write about it yet.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
"This is your Calvary," the priest told my dad.
(skim halfway down if you're not interested in medical details; skim all the way down if you're not interested in me getting personal)
I speculated later to my mom that maybe that makes her and my sister and I Dad's Mary, Mary, and John.
My mom called me late Saturday morning to let me know that Dad was, in the doctor's words, on a downward spiral, and that he asked to see his kids. I tossed a change of clothes in a bag and drove up right away (I just got back a little while ago); my sister's coming in Wednesday.
I'm glad in some ways I've been spared the emotional roller coaster of proximity to the situation, but I do wish I'd been closer so I could offer Mom a little more support, and maybe help her maintain a more balanced perspective, instead of extrapolating certain miserable death or probable complete cure every time a doctor comes in with dramatically bad or good news and tries to give a "big picture" analysis without, apparently, keeping the rest of the data in clear enough perspective for us laymen. She generally keeps me updated on major things, but when he's staying in the hospital or just visiting to get a battery of tests done, the news can cycle between bad and good by the hour. Since I can't be there all the time I usually end up with a pretty condensed summary of what's been going on.
After having been by Dad's side through the years since his diagnosis, though, Mom's gained a strength she didn't know she had (or, a grace she didn't expect to get). She's at the end of her rope, too, but for all my talk about wanting to be able to support her, I think she helped hold me together more than I did for her.
I guess that's just part of being a parent. The children can console the surviving parent, but the surviving parent is still Mom or Dad. Even Dad continues to look out for us; Mom's gotten pretty good at reading the euphemisms he uses to keep her from worrying, but he was the first to encourage me to get back on the road this afternoon so I could stay ahead of the bad weather.
It's still strange to us. We know that cancer is complicated and the human body, even more so, but we just can't read the signs for an illness this profound. He looks thin, but his color's very good. His vital signs are strong--better than mine, even--but his electrolytes are lower than some of the doctors have ever seen. His physical strength isn't bad, but his lack of stamina and balance make it hard for him to get around (indeed, during the weekend of Thanksgiving, there were a few times he had to stop in the middle of a meal and rest, but maybe it was simply because his sleep aid prescription was too strong--I just don't know).
His sodium level is where the big balancing act in treatment right now is taking place. He needs a certain amount to be able to function coherently; when his sodium levels drop, it gets hard for him to concentrate, and if they drop too much he risks heart arrhythmia and cardiac arrest. If his sodium levels get higher, fluid collects in his abdomen (causing discomfort and making it hard to eat enough at mealtime) and, now, his pleura (causing shortness of breath). Saturday morning was bad, but by the time I got there things had leveled out a bit, and by the time I left this afternoon, although he wasn't particularly hopeful, he was less skeptical about making it to Christmas, when I'll be coming home again.
We don't expect a miracle, but we still have hope for one, because all natural options are closed to us at this point, and because living without hope--even if we do have to talk to hospice managers and funeral directors in the meantime--is no way to live. I may write in the near future about the reasons for hope we had, which I alluded to a couple months ago, but right now I'm tired and I might just wait to see how the story ends before I go off confusing myself over disappointing speculation that hasn't been verified or rendered moot yet.
My parents' pastor showed up shortly after I arrived Saturday evening, and his comment put the whole weekend into a different perspective for me.
Dad's been suffering a lot, and while he told the nurse this morning that he wasn't in pain, you can still tell a lot's been taken out of him. How humbling it must be, to have your person stripped so bare that sitting up in a chair will make you lightheaded. Even now, though, these mortifications come with small mercies. Since the doctors are out of curative options, they can change their treatment philosophy a bit to maximize his comfort and functionality in the short run. They still have hope too, of course, despite being unable to do anything beyond the palliative; if there's any hope to be had for a return to a level of health where proactive treatment would be feasible, getting his electrolytes under control would be the place to start.
So on the one hand it's sad because I know they're giving him a little more leeway in his diet because getting a burrito from the place down the street instead of something designed by the staff nutritionist can't do any more harm. On the other hand, I'm glad that something as simple as rubbing his feet and giving him a sip of my Coke, after nothing but water and milk and foul-tasting nourishing drinks, can give him all the comfort that he can find right now. It's not much, but it's something I can do.
I think having a family is partly God's way of making sure we all have naked people to clothe and hungry people to feed.
Rubbing the cramp out of his leg and trying to get some of the swelling out of one ankle while Mom worked on the other one, I thought about the Last Supper, when Christ washed His apostles' feet, and the time Mary washed and annointed His feet as well. I had no oil (Mom usually has skin lotion within reach when they're at home), and my hair wasn't long enough to wipe his feet with, but I wondered how Dad felt to be in a place where the only comfort he could get was the physical administrations of his wife and son (and in a few days, his daughter). I thanked God that, while what I was doing was not much more useful than sitting at home and wishing I could help, He at least let me participate in bringing Dad as much relief and peace as he's been able to get.
He didn't express to me (he did mention it to Mom, who assured him it's not how it would be for us; even now, it doesn't crowd everything else out) any concern about our last memories of him being a once-vibrant, now frail man fading away in a hospital bed, but if he did, I would have told him that I'd always cherish this weekend, just being near him, making sure we said all the things people regret not saying when a loved one is taken suddenly, being able to care for him and each other in the small ways that are all we can do now. Even blinking away tears and stopping to blow my nose Saturday night, I was astounded at the beauty of an act that seemed so small, of massaging Dad's feet in a hospital room that for all the noise just outside seemed so quiet, that had that substantial stillness I usually only experience standing before the Sacrament.
Christian deaths are always bittersweet because we're gaining a saint while we're losing a big chunk of the only life we know, but while the smallness of our ministrations was sad on top of everything else, being there and being able to do them added so much on top of being able to say "I spent time with him at the end and got the chance to say 'I love you' one more time."
Barring a miraculous recovery and a comfortable death years from now (I wonder how I'll feel about making those caveats in the future, if he lives or dies), Dad's last days being this way will end up being a big part of my mental picture for a while because the memory will have been the last thing of his I would get to hold on to; I won't deny it. In this world it's natural for children to bury their parents, though, and whether it's sooner or later, his end won't be the end of me and eventually I'll be able to integrate it properly into the big tapestry called Dad that's hanging on the wall of my life.
I speculated later to my mom that maybe that makes her and my sister and I Dad's Mary, Mary, and John.
My mom called me late Saturday morning to let me know that Dad was, in the doctor's words, on a downward spiral, and that he asked to see his kids. I tossed a change of clothes in a bag and drove up right away (I just got back a little while ago); my sister's coming in Wednesday.
I'm glad in some ways I've been spared the emotional roller coaster of proximity to the situation, but I do wish I'd been closer so I could offer Mom a little more support, and maybe help her maintain a more balanced perspective, instead of extrapolating certain miserable death or probable complete cure every time a doctor comes in with dramatically bad or good news and tries to give a "big picture" analysis without, apparently, keeping the rest of the data in clear enough perspective for us laymen. She generally keeps me updated on major things, but when he's staying in the hospital or just visiting to get a battery of tests done, the news can cycle between bad and good by the hour. Since I can't be there all the time I usually end up with a pretty condensed summary of what's been going on.
After having been by Dad's side through the years since his diagnosis, though, Mom's gained a strength she didn't know she had (or, a grace she didn't expect to get). She's at the end of her rope, too, but for all my talk about wanting to be able to support her, I think she helped hold me together more than I did for her.
I guess that's just part of being a parent. The children can console the surviving parent, but the surviving parent is still Mom or Dad. Even Dad continues to look out for us; Mom's gotten pretty good at reading the euphemisms he uses to keep her from worrying, but he was the first to encourage me to get back on the road this afternoon so I could stay ahead of the bad weather.
It's still strange to us. We know that cancer is complicated and the human body, even more so, but we just can't read the signs for an illness this profound. He looks thin, but his color's very good. His vital signs are strong--better than mine, even--but his electrolytes are lower than some of the doctors have ever seen. His physical strength isn't bad, but his lack of stamina and balance make it hard for him to get around (indeed, during the weekend of Thanksgiving, there were a few times he had to stop in the middle of a meal and rest, but maybe it was simply because his sleep aid prescription was too strong--I just don't know).
His sodium level is where the big balancing act in treatment right now is taking place. He needs a certain amount to be able to function coherently; when his sodium levels drop, it gets hard for him to concentrate, and if they drop too much he risks heart arrhythmia and cardiac arrest. If his sodium levels get higher, fluid collects in his abdomen (causing discomfort and making it hard to eat enough at mealtime) and, now, his pleura (causing shortness of breath). Saturday morning was bad, but by the time I got there things had leveled out a bit, and by the time I left this afternoon, although he wasn't particularly hopeful, he was less skeptical about making it to Christmas, when I'll be coming home again.
We don't expect a miracle, but we still have hope for one, because all natural options are closed to us at this point, and because living without hope--even if we do have to talk to hospice managers and funeral directors in the meantime--is no way to live. I may write in the near future about the reasons for hope we had, which I alluded to a couple months ago, but right now I'm tired and I might just wait to see how the story ends before I go off confusing myself over disappointing speculation that hasn't been verified or rendered moot yet.
My parents' pastor showed up shortly after I arrived Saturday evening, and his comment put the whole weekend into a different perspective for me.
Dad's been suffering a lot, and while he told the nurse this morning that he wasn't in pain, you can still tell a lot's been taken out of him. How humbling it must be, to have your person stripped so bare that sitting up in a chair will make you lightheaded. Even now, though, these mortifications come with small mercies. Since the doctors are out of curative options, they can change their treatment philosophy a bit to maximize his comfort and functionality in the short run. They still have hope too, of course, despite being unable to do anything beyond the palliative; if there's any hope to be had for a return to a level of health where proactive treatment would be feasible, getting his electrolytes under control would be the place to start.
So on the one hand it's sad because I know they're giving him a little more leeway in his diet because getting a burrito from the place down the street instead of something designed by the staff nutritionist can't do any more harm. On the other hand, I'm glad that something as simple as rubbing his feet and giving him a sip of my Coke, after nothing but water and milk and foul-tasting nourishing drinks, can give him all the comfort that he can find right now. It's not much, but it's something I can do.
I think having a family is partly God's way of making sure we all have naked people to clothe and hungry people to feed.
Rubbing the cramp out of his leg and trying to get some of the swelling out of one ankle while Mom worked on the other one, I thought about the Last Supper, when Christ washed His apostles' feet, and the time Mary washed and annointed His feet as well. I had no oil (Mom usually has skin lotion within reach when they're at home), and my hair wasn't long enough to wipe his feet with, but I wondered how Dad felt to be in a place where the only comfort he could get was the physical administrations of his wife and son (and in a few days, his daughter). I thanked God that, while what I was doing was not much more useful than sitting at home and wishing I could help, He at least let me participate in bringing Dad as much relief and peace as he's been able to get.
He didn't express to me (he did mention it to Mom, who assured him it's not how it would be for us; even now, it doesn't crowd everything else out) any concern about our last memories of him being a once-vibrant, now frail man fading away in a hospital bed, but if he did, I would have told him that I'd always cherish this weekend, just being near him, making sure we said all the things people regret not saying when a loved one is taken suddenly, being able to care for him and each other in the small ways that are all we can do now. Even blinking away tears and stopping to blow my nose Saturday night, I was astounded at the beauty of an act that seemed so small, of massaging Dad's feet in a hospital room that for all the noise just outside seemed so quiet, that had that substantial stillness I usually only experience standing before the Sacrament.
Christian deaths are always bittersweet because we're gaining a saint while we're losing a big chunk of the only life we know, but while the smallness of our ministrations was sad on top of everything else, being there and being able to do them added so much on top of being able to say "I spent time with him at the end and got the chance to say 'I love you' one more time."
Barring a miraculous recovery and a comfortable death years from now (I wonder how I'll feel about making those caveats in the future, if he lives or dies), Dad's last days being this way will end up being a big part of my mental picture for a while because the memory will have been the last thing of his I would get to hold on to; I won't deny it. In this world it's natural for children to bury their parents, though, and whether it's sooner or later, his end won't be the end of me and eventually I'll be able to integrate it properly into the big tapestry called Dad that's hanging on the wall of my life.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Wow, 106 weeks
I just realized I've been at this more than two years now. Not much to commemorate the occasion with, but it's been a month since I last posted (been writing a couple drafts but haven't finished any in the meantime), and I thought I should let both my readers know I'm still playing at this business.
So yeah. Happy birthday to me. So to speak.
So yeah. Happy birthday to me. So to speak.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Your prayers once again requested...
My dad informed me today that he's going to be moving out of the hospital--he's been in for several days to contend with pneumonia and an apparent abdominal infection--and into hospice care at home. He had abdominal surgery to remove some malignant tumors in the spring and has had fluid building up ever since. Right now all the readable signs are pointing to the infection actually being a recurrance of his cancer.
I haven't had a chance to talk with him in detail about what's transpired yet; he's supposed to call tonight. One or two medical cards may still be waiting to be played, but I think my parents have made a decision to scale back the treatments to less heroic levels. I'm sure I'm not the only one hoping for a non-mundane miracle, but after receiving several messages pointing to Dad being some kind of witness to God's grace and mercy, my folks are trying to prepare for the eventuality that he's not going to be doing so by going around and giving uplifting talks to groups of people.
A spontaneous recovery after all means known to medical science have been eliminated would be more glorious, I suppose, but we all know it doesn't always work in ways that make sense this side of the veil.
If you would send your prayers our way, especially strength for my mom and comfort for my dad and hope for both of them, I would be grateful. I'll also be praying for my readers, so if any of you have anything to ask for, feel free to mention it (or not, if you're confidentially minded) in the combox.
I haven't had a chance to talk with him in detail about what's transpired yet; he's supposed to call tonight. One or two medical cards may still be waiting to be played, but I think my parents have made a decision to scale back the treatments to less heroic levels. I'm sure I'm not the only one hoping for a non-mundane miracle, but after receiving several messages pointing to Dad being some kind of witness to God's grace and mercy, my folks are trying to prepare for the eventuality that he's not going to be doing so by going around and giving uplifting talks to groups of people.
A spontaneous recovery after all means known to medical science have been eliminated would be more glorious, I suppose, but we all know it doesn't always work in ways that make sense this side of the veil.
If you would send your prayers our way, especially strength for my mom and comfort for my dad and hope for both of them, I would be grateful. I'll also be praying for my readers, so if any of you have anything to ask for, feel free to mention it (or not, if you're confidentially minded) in the combox.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Rootless, de facto ecumenism?
I don't know.
The area where I live and work seems to have a high number of churches. A lot of them are fairly small, so maybe there's not much to be said about the local demographics. One in particular I pass on my workday commute is a Church of God. They recently put up a sign advertizing something that I think is supposed to become a regular event, a Friday night fish fry.
Fish fry? Did they get a Knights of Columbus chapter recently?
Sorry, I don't mean to make light of it. It just seemed a peculiarly Catholic thing to be doing. On the bigger blogs you can read about how in various places in Protestantism, the groups that have rejected the various sacraments eventually come around to replacing them with pale imitations of sacraments. You could probably even make that argument for the end-of-October "harvest festivals" that replace Halloween, which categorize all the macabre and supernatural stuff as demonic and opt for a merely pagan celebration, are trying to get back to the idea that material creation itself is good, after having flirted at times (and in some cases more) with such things as puritanism.
So, some protestant circles are looking back to some of the older practices that are definitely Catholic, but perhaps predate some of the troubles that led to the Reformation, or at least have some antique historical continuity and were neglected by those outside of the institutional Church.
Even with the vaguest hand-waving explanations, though, I can't see how a Friday night fish fry really fits. Is it just one of those things that has worked its way into our culture that they're trying to make a special event out of, the way the KoC does as a fundraiser/service for all the Catholics in town who would be eating fish at home anyway? I'm having trouble buying the idea that it's just a nice thing the Catholics do that they want to adopt, the way some are starting to adopt the rosary or the Stations of the Cross. Sure, we eat fish on Fridays because we abstain from other meats as a penance, fine, but you can fast or abstain whenever you want, and even though Good Friday is an obvious good model to follow, how do you get from there to communal fish cooking events?
No idea. I'm not criticizing, mind you; I have a feeling that I'm going to come off as a little incredulous, but I don't mean it that way. It's just puzzled me these otherwise fairly dull few weeks, so here I am, mentally masturbating over it.
Actually, speaking of dull, something that isn't is the near-death of my main computer. I hope to replace the hard drive, which I've managed more or less to back up, but it's well past its prime so I mean to relegate it to travel use only. I hope to get a new one maybe this weekend; we'll see how things hold out. So...posting might be even more sparse than usual for a while yet.
The area where I live and work seems to have a high number of churches. A lot of them are fairly small, so maybe there's not much to be said about the local demographics. One in particular I pass on my workday commute is a Church of God. They recently put up a sign advertizing something that I think is supposed to become a regular event, a Friday night fish fry.
Fish fry? Did they get a Knights of Columbus chapter recently?
Sorry, I don't mean to make light of it. It just seemed a peculiarly Catholic thing to be doing. On the bigger blogs you can read about how in various places in Protestantism, the groups that have rejected the various sacraments eventually come around to replacing them with pale imitations of sacraments. You could probably even make that argument for the end-of-October "harvest festivals" that replace Halloween, which categorize all the macabre and supernatural stuff as demonic and opt for a merely pagan celebration, are trying to get back to the idea that material creation itself is good, after having flirted at times (and in some cases more) with such things as puritanism.
So, some protestant circles are looking back to some of the older practices that are definitely Catholic, but perhaps predate some of the troubles that led to the Reformation, or at least have some antique historical continuity and were neglected by those outside of the institutional Church.
Even with the vaguest hand-waving explanations, though, I can't see how a Friday night fish fry really fits. Is it just one of those things that has worked its way into our culture that they're trying to make a special event out of, the way the KoC does as a fundraiser/service for all the Catholics in town who would be eating fish at home anyway? I'm having trouble buying the idea that it's just a nice thing the Catholics do that they want to adopt, the way some are starting to adopt the rosary or the Stations of the Cross. Sure, we eat fish on Fridays because we abstain from other meats as a penance, fine, but you can fast or abstain whenever you want, and even though Good Friday is an obvious good model to follow, how do you get from there to communal fish cooking events?
No idea. I'm not criticizing, mind you; I have a feeling that I'm going to come off as a little incredulous, but I don't mean it that way. It's just puzzled me these otherwise fairly dull few weeks, so here I am, mentally masturbating over it.
Actually, speaking of dull, something that isn't is the near-death of my main computer. I hope to replace the hard drive, which I've managed more or less to back up, but it's well past its prime so I mean to relegate it to travel use only. I hope to get a new one maybe this weekend; we'll see how things hold out. So...posting might be even more sparse than usual for a while yet.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
The Subway Hero
On January second of this year, Wesley Autrey jumped onto the tracks of a New York subway to save a man who had collapsed and fallen from the platform. Autrey, for his part, was rather modest about the whole thing; writing off any assertions that he did something remarkable, he visited the man in the hospital and went back to work.
Charles Colson's article at CERC makes a point I want to elaborate on a little:
There's nothing wrong with recognizing that your actions might be considered objectively heroic because you put yourself at risk to accomplish something. In a way it's doubly heroic to do so under the assumption that saving lives is just what you're supposed to do, "I'm just doing my job, ma'am" cliches aside. When I first read the article, I was thinking it was kind of sad if we're so jaded that a small act of heroism can really inspire millions of people, if only briefly. Not that saving a man's life is small--Autrey's actions just made me speculate in that direction. Then I thought, while it might be sad in some ways that an isolated act of heroism by an ordinary person is newsworthy for seeming unusual, it's also great that we can inspire people at all with the most basic gestures of human charity, how natural it is for us to make some effort to help someone who really needs it and to make us all feel a little less lost, how easy it is to be made a little more willing to do something good for others in the future, even if it's just for a little while.
How often do we become disheartened because we look at the heroic actions of others and think "I could never do as much good as they do?" We never should. Most of us won't ever have an opportunity to make a single grand gesture of heroism, to save one life and inspire a million others in one fell swoop. It doesn't mean, though, that we can't make a difference. Most of us have our heroic moment smeared out into a million tiny events throughout our lives where we make a difference in the lives of a handful of people at a time. We may not get to take the mantle of inspiration and wear it in front of more people than we've directly helped (if even them), to serve as an example to everyone, but we can still help people around us, and still be a good example to them.
Charles Colson's article at CERC makes a point I want to elaborate on a little:
While Autrey didn’t think that his actions were spectacular, other people did. At a time when most of the news is disheartening, Autrey’s actions inspired millions of people. Americans have become jaundiced and skeptical. We need heroes every now and then, a role model — and that’s what Autrey has become.
There's nothing wrong with recognizing that your actions might be considered objectively heroic because you put yourself at risk to accomplish something. In a way it's doubly heroic to do so under the assumption that saving lives is just what you're supposed to do, "I'm just doing my job, ma'am" cliches aside. When I first read the article, I was thinking it was kind of sad if we're so jaded that a small act of heroism can really inspire millions of people, if only briefly. Not that saving a man's life is small--Autrey's actions just made me speculate in that direction. Then I thought, while it might be sad in some ways that an isolated act of heroism by an ordinary person is newsworthy for seeming unusual, it's also great that we can inspire people at all with the most basic gestures of human charity, how natural it is for us to make some effort to help someone who really needs it and to make us all feel a little less lost, how easy it is to be made a little more willing to do something good for others in the future, even if it's just for a little while.
How often do we become disheartened because we look at the heroic actions of others and think "I could never do as much good as they do?" We never should. Most of us won't ever have an opportunity to make a single grand gesture of heroism, to save one life and inspire a million others in one fell swoop. It doesn't mean, though, that we can't make a difference. Most of us have our heroic moment smeared out into a million tiny events throughout our lives where we make a difference in the lives of a handful of people at a time. We may not get to take the mantle of inspiration and wear it in front of more people than we've directly helped (if even them), to serve as an example to everyone, but we can still help people around us, and still be a good example to them.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Is religion dumb and dangerous?
I'll save dumb for later, aside from observing that today's active atheists often seem to be interested in reaping the gloating and other perquisites of being a freethinker, without all that tedious mucking about in actual thought, instead quoting catch phrases like so much duckspeak.
Maybe more people have been killed for religion than for anything atheistic; after all, atheism didn't gain ascendency until the 20th century, whereas people have fought over religion--but also other things perpendicular to religion, like territory or other resources--for millennia before then. Well, howsabout we tally up the deaths under regimes and philosophies that are post- or anti-religious, or anti-Christian, at least?
I'm not trying to make excuses for or take attention away from the things nominally God-fearing people have done wrong. Most of the crusades after the first were ill-executed, if not ill-conceived. We sin doubly when we claim there exists and we abide by an objective and absolute moral standard, and fail to hold ourselves to it. The fact that I'm mostly picking on communist/fascist historical events is also not meant as a relativistic exoneration of injustices enabled under capitalism; capitalism isn't theistic or atheistic, but in proportion to how Marxist they are (theism under economic communism being hypothetically possible as well), socialist or fascist systems are specifically atheistic or otherwise opposed to organized religion (organized government by definition not deigning to suffer competition for institutional loyalty).
Most of these deaths are executions. Many, however, are from starvation and neglect, such as Mao's five year plans failing to take reality, in the form of lack of industrial expertise and infrastructure and noncompliant weather for farming, into account; or Stalin shipping off trainloads of actual or potential troublemakers to Siberia where they could hardly sustain themselves. While not all the non-execution deaths were malicious, they still indicate a failure of a post-theistic system to be of any benefit to large numbers of people. Some sources put Stalin's and Mao's death tolls at twice the upper limits I have listed.
Papa Doc: 30-60k. Small potatoes--I include only because even the lower range outstrips the total deaths under the Inquisition, even the harsh--and meticulously documented, if you'd care to see for yourself--Spanish Inquisition.
Pol Pot: ≤ three million
Sukarno: half a million, not counting ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (this regime was somewhat theistic, but otherwise was pretty faithfully Marxist)
Khmer Rouge: 1.5-3 million
Mao's cultural revolution: 30 million
Stalin: 10-30 million
Hitler: Hitler was fascist, but anti-communist, and he was no Christian, despite any early political rhetoric that might still be on record (claiming there was no bull of excommunication shows you don't understand how the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith works); in addition to the six million Jews that were killed, three million Christians in Poland alone were also slaughtered, with Christians elsewhere and members of other suspect groups adding up to another million or two. Let's say 10 million--it's nice and round.
See Mass deaths and atrocities of the twentieth century at Wikipedia for more details. You can look up the data somewhere else if you don't trust the numbers there; they cite plenty of other resources for you to compare, so it's at least a worthwhile starting point even for Wiki snobs.
What's our total? 55-76.5 million, just counting the top six causes (that I could think of) during the twentieth century--not even taking up the whole century. That death toll is as many as the black plague worldwide in the middle ages. Do you still want to argue that the Crusades--a million or so over the course of two full centuries--can hold a candle to these figures? Even adding in deaths at the hands of the Saracens (religious in their own right) during the same time period, it's just a drop in the bucket.
Have there been more religious deaths all throughout history than atheistic ones? Maybe so, but the irreligious sure made up for lost time in the 20th century. Sure, we also have more people nowadays, so the proportions are different, and most religions are more laid back than they were a thousand years ago, but these caveats don't exonerate the modern era's mass murders.
The world population--never mind Europe--during the middle ages was around a quarter billion. It grew over the centuries, but a quarter billion's a convenient average. The Crusades and the Inquisition don't account for two million people, 0.8% of the total population, over a few centuries.
In the first half of the 20th century, it was around two billion people. Contra-religious deaths are as low at 55 million, as high as 100 million if you include abortion, but let's stick with 55 million: 2.75% of the world population, over a few decades. Making up for lost time, indeed.
Never mind that in our enlightened modern era, we're all supposed to be above such horrors as genocide, but apparently only the Church learned anything from the scandals of the Crusades.
"Freethought" indeed. I know of a respectable number of theological skeptics who aren't afraid to cogitate on the hard questions, but most of the time the only response to "What about Mao and Stalin?" is "Uh, Hitler had to be a Catholic in good standing, and besides, their governments weren't atheistic; they were just political entities rather than religious," as if being expressly anti-theistic was really no different from mere silence on the issue.
More like "Thought-free."
Maybe more people have been killed for religion than for anything atheistic; after all, atheism didn't gain ascendency until the 20th century, whereas people have fought over religion--but also other things perpendicular to religion, like territory or other resources--for millennia before then. Well, howsabout we tally up the deaths under regimes and philosophies that are post- or anti-religious, or anti-Christian, at least?
I'm not trying to make excuses for or take attention away from the things nominally God-fearing people have done wrong. Most of the crusades after the first were ill-executed, if not ill-conceived. We sin doubly when we claim there exists and we abide by an objective and absolute moral standard, and fail to hold ourselves to it. The fact that I'm mostly picking on communist/fascist historical events is also not meant as a relativistic exoneration of injustices enabled under capitalism; capitalism isn't theistic or atheistic, but in proportion to how Marxist they are (theism under economic communism being hypothetically possible as well), socialist or fascist systems are specifically atheistic or otherwise opposed to organized religion (organized government by definition not deigning to suffer competition for institutional loyalty).
Most of these deaths are executions. Many, however, are from starvation and neglect, such as Mao's five year plans failing to take reality, in the form of lack of industrial expertise and infrastructure and noncompliant weather for farming, into account; or Stalin shipping off trainloads of actual or potential troublemakers to Siberia where they could hardly sustain themselves. While not all the non-execution deaths were malicious, they still indicate a failure of a post-theistic system to be of any benefit to large numbers of people. Some sources put Stalin's and Mao's death tolls at twice the upper limits I have listed.
Papa Doc: 30-60k. Small potatoes--I include only because even the lower range outstrips the total deaths under the Inquisition, even the harsh--and meticulously documented, if you'd care to see for yourself--Spanish Inquisition.
Pol Pot: ≤ three million
Sukarno: half a million, not counting ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (this regime was somewhat theistic, but otherwise was pretty faithfully Marxist)
Khmer Rouge: 1.5-3 million
Mao's cultural revolution: 30 million
Stalin: 10-30 million
Hitler: Hitler was fascist, but anti-communist, and he was no Christian, despite any early political rhetoric that might still be on record (claiming there was no bull of excommunication shows you don't understand how the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith works); in addition to the six million Jews that were killed, three million Christians in Poland alone were also slaughtered, with Christians elsewhere and members of other suspect groups adding up to another million or two. Let's say 10 million--it's nice and round.
See Mass deaths and atrocities of the twentieth century at Wikipedia for more details. You can look up the data somewhere else if you don't trust the numbers there; they cite plenty of other resources for you to compare, so it's at least a worthwhile starting point even for Wiki snobs.
What's our total? 55-76.5 million, just counting the top six causes (that I could think of) during the twentieth century--not even taking up the whole century. That death toll is as many as the black plague worldwide in the middle ages. Do you still want to argue that the Crusades--a million or so over the course of two full centuries--can hold a candle to these figures? Even adding in deaths at the hands of the Saracens (religious in their own right) during the same time period, it's just a drop in the bucket.
Have there been more religious deaths all throughout history than atheistic ones? Maybe so, but the irreligious sure made up for lost time in the 20th century. Sure, we also have more people nowadays, so the proportions are different, and most religions are more laid back than they were a thousand years ago, but these caveats don't exonerate the modern era's mass murders.
The world population--never mind Europe--during the middle ages was around a quarter billion. It grew over the centuries, but a quarter billion's a convenient average. The Crusades and the Inquisition don't account for two million people, 0.8% of the total population, over a few centuries.
In the first half of the 20th century, it was around two billion people. Contra-religious deaths are as low at 55 million, as high as 100 million if you include abortion, but let's stick with 55 million: 2.75% of the world population, over a few decades. Making up for lost time, indeed.
Never mind that in our enlightened modern era, we're all supposed to be above such horrors as genocide, but apparently only the Church learned anything from the scandals of the Crusades.
"Freethought" indeed. I know of a respectable number of theological skeptics who aren't afraid to cogitate on the hard questions, but most of the time the only response to "What about Mao and Stalin?" is "Uh, Hitler had to be a Catholic in good standing, and besides, their governments weren't atheistic; they were just political entities rather than religious," as if being expressly anti-theistic was really no different from mere silence on the issue.
More like "Thought-free."
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
A little while ago I was reading an article Mark Shea had written for a local newspaper. The article was mainly a clarification of the CDF's clarification of the pope's recent document about the Catholic understanding of what a church is. As is often the case, the readers' comments were as interesting as the article itself, if not in a terribly worthy sense.
My personal favorite was where one person said 'Yes, you politely point out that the pope is just clarifying how Catholicism understands Christianity differently from Protestants, but I have to disagree that there's nothing to be upset about; really it was just just a diplomatic covering for the pope's actual words, that other churches are defective.'
If I'd read the article and comments early enough that I thought the person who left that comment might still be around to read the followup, I would have pointed out that his so-called disagreement was still agreeing with the principle. Mark spelled out the differences between groups as "adding to or subtracting from" the deposit of faith. If subtracting truth or adding something artificial doesn't constitute a defect, I don't know what does, and if he's going to come out in public and criticize someone for making a public and concrete criticism of groups that criticize Rome for being defective, as well, then I'm not sure what his understanding of debate or dialog really is.
A few others took some cheap shots at priestly celibacy, not cheap in the sense of underhanded or unfair so much as cheap in the sense of "religion is almost beneath my contempt but I'll attack it anyway as long as I can use pithy sound bites from other contratheists as a crutch." To wit: "the Marian doctrines of the immaculate conception and the virgin birth are based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew word almah, which means "young girl," for the Greek work parthenos, which means "virgin" as we currently understand that term. From this comes two millennia of sermons about sexual continence, which has caused unbelievable amounts of human suffering."
Parthenos fits under the umbrella of almah, may have even been its defining criterion, so the orthodox interpretation would hardly be implausible, even if the Apostles who knew Jesus and Mary--who would have spoken Greek and Aramaic and at least been literate in Hebrew--hadn't been around to clarify this point for the communities that had only the words spoken by the Apostles and disciples and the earliest written sources to rely on. Still, "unbelievable amounts of human suffering" stemming from advocacy for not having libertine sex? Really? As a microcosm, are we really suffering less in these past 30 years than we did before the sexual revolution? Sure doesn't look like it to me; I'd probably take "sadder but wiser" over "ignorance is bliss," too, but then you can't say "well, they just covered it up and oppressed people more before the sixties," and I wouldn't really say we're wiser for our sadness, just less hopeful. Trading naivete for despair isn't exactly a sage's choice.
I'll wrap up with just a few unrelated points that arose from discussion of Mark's article, since writing overly long and broad posts rather than pithy and self-contained ones seems to be more my thing.
Eh, I won't go over any of the rest. They're lame comments dripping with ignorance of history like "Rome would tortue you for being a heliocentrist if it could" and American provincialism like "Never mind Pol Pot and Stalin, it's Torquemada and Law who really brought war and suffering to the world whilst trying to hide behind the First Amendment." Yes, I know I'm splicing some thoughts together; they're not really any smarter in their original and less compact forms.
My personal favorite was where one person said 'Yes, you politely point out that the pope is just clarifying how Catholicism understands Christianity differently from Protestants, but I have to disagree that there's nothing to be upset about; really it was just just a diplomatic covering for the pope's actual words, that other churches are defective.'
If I'd read the article and comments early enough that I thought the person who left that comment might still be around to read the followup, I would have pointed out that his so-called disagreement was still agreeing with the principle. Mark spelled out the differences between groups as "adding to or subtracting from" the deposit of faith. If subtracting truth or adding something artificial doesn't constitute a defect, I don't know what does, and if he's going to come out in public and criticize someone for making a public and concrete criticism of groups that criticize Rome for being defective, as well, then I'm not sure what his understanding of debate or dialog really is.
A few others took some cheap shots at priestly celibacy, not cheap in the sense of underhanded or unfair so much as cheap in the sense of "religion is almost beneath my contempt but I'll attack it anyway as long as I can use pithy sound bites from other contratheists as a crutch." To wit: "the Marian doctrines of the immaculate conception and the virgin birth are based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew word almah, which means "young girl," for the Greek work parthenos, which means "virgin" as we currently understand that term. From this comes two millennia of sermons about sexual continence, which has caused unbelievable amounts of human suffering."
Parthenos fits under the umbrella of almah, may have even been its defining criterion, so the orthodox interpretation would hardly be implausible, even if the Apostles who knew Jesus and Mary--who would have spoken Greek and Aramaic and at least been literate in Hebrew--hadn't been around to clarify this point for the communities that had only the words spoken by the Apostles and disciples and the earliest written sources to rely on. Still, "unbelievable amounts of human suffering" stemming from advocacy for not having libertine sex? Really? As a microcosm, are we really suffering less in these past 30 years than we did before the sexual revolution? Sure doesn't look like it to me; I'd probably take "sadder but wiser" over "ignorance is bliss," too, but then you can't say "well, they just covered it up and oppressed people more before the sixties," and I wouldn't really say we're wiser for our sadness, just less hopeful. Trading naivete for despair isn't exactly a sage's choice.
I'll wrap up with just a few unrelated points that arose from discussion of Mark's article, since writing overly long and broad posts rather than pithy and self-contained ones seems to be more my thing.
- Adulthood nowadays seems to be defined as the point where a person becomes capable of making informed decisions. Maybe not with fully developed faculties, but I suppose that since adults make mistakes we shouldn't prevent children from making mistakes, and only enable them to make informed mistakes. Once upon a time, adulthood was defined by the ability to restrain one's impulses. Did anyone ever try to justify "Never mind the disciplines you were taught; if it feels good, just go for it," or did we just slide into it because it was easier?
- It does seem a little sad that theists argue that without a Lawgiver they would be violent heathens, to which most atheists object; yet it is usually these same atheists who argue for an arbitrary or natural law that pretty closely coincides with the mores of western civilization. The Catholic will recognize this as the Natural Law that it is; no atheist I've met so far has bothered to explain how the values he holds that coincide with Christendom's but do not seem to have been well-recognized in other societies are merely coincidental.
- "The god of the OT is a genocidal, misogynistic monster."
I'll grant you that YHWH was stern, even harsh with the Israelites. To write Him off as a monster, though, requires that you skip over all the passages where people try to dialog with Him; not simply the places where He says "leave none of them alive, lest one of your men comes to worship their idols," which perhaps only makes sense to a theist in the first place, but the places where he relents from the strictest punishment they knowingly incurred, as soon as they asked for mercy. Doesn't exactly sound like something you'd expect from Baal or Pazuzu, is it? Wiping out pagan peoples wasn't common in the Old Testament, even between Egypt and the Promised Land, and it was always prophylactic; when punishments did come, they were always slow in being delivered and were never without warning. If the best criticism you can levy is "genocidal, misogynistic monster," then you really lack the perspective necessary to judge how a god-figure, Abrahamic or pagan, figures into human society.
Eh, I won't go over any of the rest. They're lame comments dripping with ignorance of history like "Rome would tortue you for being a heliocentrist if it could" and American provincialism like "Never mind Pol Pot and Stalin, it's Torquemada and Law who really brought war and suffering to the world whilst trying to hide behind the First Amendment." Yes, I know I'm splicing some thoughts together; they're not really any smarter in their original and less compact forms.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Pagan (etc*) divorced mother denied custody of children
*Most of the stink being raised orbits the fact that the woman in question is some flavor of neo-pagan, most expressions of which involve libertine ritual (sometimes symbolic, sometimes actual) sex.
The level of discourse I've observed has for the most part been higher--at least a little--than what one normally expects from the Internet, especially on such topics as religion, morality, and politics. Still, for the most part, the discussion seems to glide over the most damning factor in the court's custody decision. From Volokh's excerpt of the decision:
Now, the mother has the right to raise her child as she sees fit, short of exposing the daughter to disproportionate harm by doing so (however the magnitude and type might be defined by legal minds), including raising her as a neo-pagan. One of the commenters at Volokh even points out that any number of legally permissible things can be considered in a custody hearing that push a judgment to disfavor one party or the other, since the question isn't about legality, or just about what's good for the child as what's best for the child within the court's purview.
So the mom has weird sex with a guy she hasn't quite married yet, and worships some sort of abstracted natural forces, and spends a lot of time online, probably writing about these activities.
However, they're all dodging--and perhaps it's because the decision doesn't emphasize it more, but the judge did write that it appears unlikely the mother and her fiance (not the father) will be able to adequately protect the daughter from her practices (like sadomasochism in the bedroom) that are, shall we say, difficult to explain to children. I think blogging is the slightest hazard of these three, but maybe the fear was that the mother spent too much time on the Internet relative to her working and parenting responsibilities, and that the daughter might find out about her mother's activities from exploring her mother's online activities.
Why is the judge fearful of these likely turns of events, and not just of the mother's fringe interests themselves?
For one thing, the mother also "has used illicit drugs on a semi-regular basis." Remember that bit from the ruling?
Stop the presses, people. I don't care what religion or orientation you are or what fetish you indulge or refrain from indulging. If you're a drug user, a big black mark goes into your "not fit for custody" column. You can pretend you're a victim of Christian heteronormative narrow-mindedness, but don't think for a second that your propensity to flout the law and use chemicals that are demonstrably harmful to users, people close to them, and society in general is merely the repressive work of some "sex-negative" people who can hardly help but violate your First Amendment rights with glee. No; first you have to step back and explain why lighting or shooting up or whatever is your reasonably harmless entitlement. Then we'll discuss if it's really a medieval/fundamentalist judge that has the chip on his shoulder.
The level of discourse I've observed has for the most part been higher--at least a little--than what one normally expects from the Internet, especially on such topics as religion, morality, and politics. Still, for the most part, the discussion seems to glide over the most damning factor in the court's custody decision. From Volokh's excerpt of the decision:
[Mother] has undertaken to engage in a lifestyle that is extreme by normal social standards and [mother] testified that she is a devotee of sado-masochism; that she is bisexual; that she engages in paganism; that she has used illicit drugs on a semi-regular basis; and that she spends a great deal of time online where she has two to four websites of so-called "blogs."
Now, the mother has the right to raise her child as she sees fit, short of exposing the daughter to disproportionate harm by doing so (however the magnitude and type might be defined by legal minds), including raising her as a neo-pagan. One of the commenters at Volokh even points out that any number of legally permissible things can be considered in a custody hearing that push a judgment to disfavor one party or the other, since the question isn't about legality, or just about what's good for the child as what's best for the child within the court's purview.
So the mom has weird sex with a guy she hasn't quite married yet, and worships some sort of abstracted natural forces, and spends a lot of time online, probably writing about these activities.
However, they're all dodging--and perhaps it's because the decision doesn't emphasize it more, but the judge did write that it appears unlikely the mother and her fiance (not the father) will be able to adequately protect the daughter from her practices (like sadomasochism in the bedroom) that are, shall we say, difficult to explain to children. I think blogging is the slightest hazard of these three, but maybe the fear was that the mother spent too much time on the Internet relative to her working and parenting responsibilities, and that the daughter might find out about her mother's activities from exploring her mother's online activities.
Why is the judge fearful of these likely turns of events, and not just of the mother's fringe interests themselves?
For one thing, the mother also "has used illicit drugs on a semi-regular basis." Remember that bit from the ruling?
Stop the presses, people. I don't care what religion or orientation you are or what fetish you indulge or refrain from indulging. If you're a drug user, a big black mark goes into your "not fit for custody" column. You can pretend you're a victim of Christian heteronormative narrow-mindedness, but don't think for a second that your propensity to flout the law and use chemicals that are demonstrably harmful to users, people close to them, and society in general is merely the repressive work of some "sex-negative" people who can hardly help but violate your First Amendment rights with glee. No; first you have to step back and explain why lighting or shooting up or whatever is your reasonably harmless entitlement. Then we'll discuss if it's really a medieval/fundamentalist judge that has the chip on his shoulder.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Violent crime has been dropping in recent decades. Some attribute it to the relaxing of gun laws--law-abiding citizens becoming more able to protect themselves, and potential criminals either being stopped by them or deterred by this knowledge. Others attribute it to a corellary of the Roe Effect: more potential criminals are getting aborted, so they never grow up to cause trouble and put more stress on troubled homes to drive even more people into crimes of desperation.
I know the former is at least partly responsible. In states where personal defense is or has become more legally feasible, crime has dropped or been consistently lower than other places where the government spends a lot of time intimidating non-criminals into being docile, such as California.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think that the Roe Effect might have some a beneficial effect on crime in the short run. Bear with me for a moment.
Roe is an artifact of a sterile cultural philosophy. After abortion became legal, it started getting more difficult to make political hay out of the issue. In 1973, decades of propaganda had culminated in enough support and wooly-headedness to get SCOTUS to conjure up some quasi-Constitutional right to abortion and use flimsy reasoning to base it on an otherwise-sensible inferral of a right to privacy. Since then, though, the people who were in favor of abortion tended to have, advocate, and finance them. Pro-life people had children and taught them to value life; pro-abortion people didn't have the human resources to keep up and had only propaganda to fall back on for trying to convert pro-lifers and fence-sitters who see more and more historical evidence that abortion isn't really a solution to a problem.
God is life. God loves life. It's no accident that sterile and actively life-hating philosophies tend to be self-limiting in the long run. Why might abortion seem to yield a drop in crime?
On the one hand, well, the moral scales don't tip; we're just exchanging drugs and armed robbery for prenatal infanticide. On the other hand, yes, there are fewer potential criminals growing up in troubled homes. On an absolute scale, crime might be dropping, but the overall population is not rising when children aren't born. So, what about per capita crimes? Do pro-abortionists have an out there, at least?
Without having to look at statistics, I can say "yes, but no."
It's the 21st century. People are living longer. There are more people at greater ages than before--population rises due to a reduction in mortality, not an increase in fertility. In the short run, the former can overtake the latter, especially if most crimes are committed by people who are younger than the average career-holding, family-starting person. Take them away, and sure, crime will drop. It'll just be a few years before we see employment (and unemployment) drop, school enrollment drop, before we see population seriously drop. Unless you look at Europe, at least; they're a little ways ahead of us.
Abortion can reduce crime? Abortion reduces everything. Don't let one lesser evil amongst many distract you.
I know the former is at least partly responsible. In states where personal defense is or has become more legally feasible, crime has dropped or been consistently lower than other places where the government spends a lot of time intimidating non-criminals into being docile, such as California.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think that the Roe Effect might have some a beneficial effect on crime in the short run. Bear with me for a moment.
Roe is an artifact of a sterile cultural philosophy. After abortion became legal, it started getting more difficult to make political hay out of the issue. In 1973, decades of propaganda had culminated in enough support and wooly-headedness to get SCOTUS to conjure up some quasi-Constitutional right to abortion and use flimsy reasoning to base it on an otherwise-sensible inferral of a right to privacy. Since then, though, the people who were in favor of abortion tended to have, advocate, and finance them. Pro-life people had children and taught them to value life; pro-abortion people didn't have the human resources to keep up and had only propaganda to fall back on for trying to convert pro-lifers and fence-sitters who see more and more historical evidence that abortion isn't really a solution to a problem.
God is life. God loves life. It's no accident that sterile and actively life-hating philosophies tend to be self-limiting in the long run. Why might abortion seem to yield a drop in crime?
On the one hand, well, the moral scales don't tip; we're just exchanging drugs and armed robbery for prenatal infanticide. On the other hand, yes, there are fewer potential criminals growing up in troubled homes. On an absolute scale, crime might be dropping, but the overall population is not rising when children aren't born. So, what about per capita crimes? Do pro-abortionists have an out there, at least?
Without having to look at statistics, I can say "yes, but no."
It's the 21st century. People are living longer. There are more people at greater ages than before--population rises due to a reduction in mortality, not an increase in fertility. In the short run, the former can overtake the latter, especially if most crimes are committed by people who are younger than the average career-holding, family-starting person. Take them away, and sure, crime will drop. It'll just be a few years before we see employment (and unemployment) drop, school enrollment drop, before we see population seriously drop. Unless you look at Europe, at least; they're a little ways ahead of us.
Abortion can reduce crime? Abortion reduces everything. Don't let one lesser evil amongst many distract you.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
S.B. 351: stop federal funding of Planned Parenthood
I received in the mail today a survey from Fidelis about the propriety of PP receiving public funds for promoting abortion. Despite charging an average of $300 per abortion, taking private donations, and offering annuities to their supporters, someone apparently thinks PP needs more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year in order to defray the costs of the "sex education" (such as their teenwire.com site that provides at least as much information on--let's not equivocate--how to have more sex and try to constrain the hazards of heightened promiscuity, as it does to provide basic anatomical and epidemiological information).
Well, the survey's short, at seven questions. I just want to raise a couple points the survey brought up, or I thought were worth discussing just a little more explicitly.
PP apparently claims that the $272 million they get from the feds doesn't go to abortion, but rather goes to the aformentioned "education," contraceptives (read: free condoms for walk-ins), and 'other family planning purposes,' whatever they might be. It strikes me as a basic economic truth that if you give someone money to do something, they will be able to spend more money they already have on other things. I'm not going to sift through the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices and see how well they fit the $272 million implementation of Title X of the Public Health Services Act vis-a-vis PP, but morally, I don't think we can pretend that helping PP a little doesn't help it overall, even if they sent a wish list to the government and let Washington buy all the materials and such itself.
Precedents in other industries aside, I don't see any sense in divorcing the commission of abortion from the advocacy of it. Oh, they don't just promote abortion? Well, their medical clinics aren't only used to perform them, either, although anecdotal evidence doesn't suggest they like doing sonograms. Oh well.
PP isn't just the Pueblo, Colorado of sex; they're its Wal*Mart, and so their "education" isn't so much a public service as it is advertising...hmm; maybe a better comparison would be the Dairy Board or American Cattlemen's Association, or those informercials on late-night TV that provide only enough information about their subject matter to get people to buy the wares they really want to peddle. As such, I see no reason why it would be appropriate for the federal government to step in. Who else gets the government to pay their advertising? The military--not really a parallel situation. Everyone else is expected to be more or less self-sufficient and autonomous, except PP, which apparently provides some sort of medical service that is so important nobody else wants to do it.
Is it even appropriate for PP to target minors with this information? On the one hand, while parents have the right to instruct their children as they see fit, sometimes they don't teach the bare minimum, don't even teach them the truth, let alone the whole truth; the same is true for general education, which is why we have public schools and require all students to attend them or have their parents provide evidence of other, equivalent arrangements. On the other hand, like I said before, PP doesn't just educate; they like to run way across the line into advocacy and roll around there a while. Now, do legal minors with strange feelings need support and information they can't get at home? Sometimes, yes; however, there's a big difference between helping someone who's homosexual or observes a discrepancy between their anatomical and mental genders to understand what's going on and to come to terms with it, and to say "Hey, whatever you want to do is fine, go for it!" to legal minors in the first place.
"Do what you want" isn't parenting, or a substitute for it; indulgence is contrary to what parenthood needs to teach; PP should hardly be claiming to fill a parenting (let alone information) gap if they're confounding the function of forming healthy adults this way.
According to their 2002-2003 annual report, then-president Gloria Feldt was reimbursed to the tune of $379,788, all things factored in; further, seven other big cheeses pulled down more than $180,000. One of the questions in the survey was "Do you believe that, for an organization that receives taxpayer funding, this level of compensation is __too high __about right __undecided (?)"
I couldn't resist; I wrote in the margin "Not to mention, an organization that solicits private donations!" I understand that large organizations, even nominally volunteer ones, sometimes need full-time people managing things at the highest levels, and that it's not always expedient to have those positions filled by people who can afford to give away 40 hours a week, so they may need to put someone on a payroll.
Now, civilians get paid by the government all the time, not just as employees but through federal grants. I do think, though, that it's a serious misdirection of priorities for an outfit claiming to be desperately trying to help people have educated sex and no children. Maybe more of that $1.5+ million going to the top brass should be directed to, I don't know, hiring more doctors, or giving away better condoms, or hiring better animators for their cartoons or IT people for their web site; if their cause is so great, how hard could it be to find a crackerjack CEO-type who needs a job but is willing to make a contribution in the form of a modest salary?
I know if I found out that a group I gave money to, whether or not they got grants from elsewhere (private or public), I'd sure be feeling like my money was wasted if I found out the head honchoes were making six figures. No wonder you're in such need for a perpetual bailout; if money's getting blown on executives at a place that sells itself as a nonprofit service organization, how many other cuts has their financial philosophy made that they're bleeding from? Getting a quarter billion from the government and then throwing so much at just a handful of administrators says to me "Our cause is really important! We need federal assistance in addition to our revenue! Oh, but $272 million is enough to get the job done, so we'll give a lot to the pencil pushers at the top; oh, we'll still take donations too." Do they need help, or not, and if so, how much do they really think they need?
So they want to know if I'm willing, if I think it's even proper, to support an organization that not only does something immoral, but wants me to believe that it offers other services I shouldn't object to, and does so very badly? No thanks.
I don't know if an agency that performs evil efficiently is worse or better than one that does so inefficiently but also manages to retard good in the process, but I'd really want to have nothing to do with either.
Well, the survey's short, at seven questions. I just want to raise a couple points the survey brought up, or I thought were worth discussing just a little more explicitly.
PP apparently claims that the $272 million they get from the feds doesn't go to abortion, but rather goes to the aformentioned "education," contraceptives (read: free condoms for walk-ins), and 'other family planning purposes,' whatever they might be. It strikes me as a basic economic truth that if you give someone money to do something, they will be able to spend more money they already have on other things. I'm not going to sift through the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices and see how well they fit the $272 million implementation of Title X of the Public Health Services Act vis-a-vis PP, but morally, I don't think we can pretend that helping PP a little doesn't help it overall, even if they sent a wish list to the government and let Washington buy all the materials and such itself.
Precedents in other industries aside, I don't see any sense in divorcing the commission of abortion from the advocacy of it. Oh, they don't just promote abortion? Well, their medical clinics aren't only used to perform them, either, although anecdotal evidence doesn't suggest they like doing sonograms. Oh well.
PP isn't just the Pueblo, Colorado of sex; they're its Wal*Mart, and so their "education" isn't so much a public service as it is advertising...hmm; maybe a better comparison would be the Dairy Board or American Cattlemen's Association, or those informercials on late-night TV that provide only enough information about their subject matter to get people to buy the wares they really want to peddle. As such, I see no reason why it would be appropriate for the federal government to step in. Who else gets the government to pay their advertising? The military--not really a parallel situation. Everyone else is expected to be more or less self-sufficient and autonomous, except PP, which apparently provides some sort of medical service that is so important nobody else wants to do it.
Is it even appropriate for PP to target minors with this information? On the one hand, while parents have the right to instruct their children as they see fit, sometimes they don't teach the bare minimum, don't even teach them the truth, let alone the whole truth; the same is true for general education, which is why we have public schools and require all students to attend them or have their parents provide evidence of other, equivalent arrangements. On the other hand, like I said before, PP doesn't just educate; they like to run way across the line into advocacy and roll around there a while. Now, do legal minors with strange feelings need support and information they can't get at home? Sometimes, yes; however, there's a big difference between helping someone who's homosexual or observes a discrepancy between their anatomical and mental genders to understand what's going on and to come to terms with it, and to say "Hey, whatever you want to do is fine, go for it!" to legal minors in the first place.
"Do what you want" isn't parenting, or a substitute for it; indulgence is contrary to what parenthood needs to teach; PP should hardly be claiming to fill a parenting (let alone information) gap if they're confounding the function of forming healthy adults this way.
According to their 2002-2003 annual report, then-president Gloria Feldt was reimbursed to the tune of $379,788, all things factored in; further, seven other big cheeses pulled down more than $180,000. One of the questions in the survey was "Do you believe that, for an organization that receives taxpayer funding, this level of compensation is __too high __about right __undecided (?)"
I couldn't resist; I wrote in the margin "Not to mention, an organization that solicits private donations!" I understand that large organizations, even nominally volunteer ones, sometimes need full-time people managing things at the highest levels, and that it's not always expedient to have those positions filled by people who can afford to give away 40 hours a week, so they may need to put someone on a payroll.
Now, civilians get paid by the government all the time, not just as employees but through federal grants. I do think, though, that it's a serious misdirection of priorities for an outfit claiming to be desperately trying to help people have educated sex and no children. Maybe more of that $1.5+ million going to the top brass should be directed to, I don't know, hiring more doctors, or giving away better condoms, or hiring better animators for their cartoons or IT people for their web site; if their cause is so great, how hard could it be to find a crackerjack CEO-type who needs a job but is willing to make a contribution in the form of a modest salary?
I know if I found out that a group I gave money to, whether or not they got grants from elsewhere (private or public), I'd sure be feeling like my money was wasted if I found out the head honchoes were making six figures. No wonder you're in such need for a perpetual bailout; if money's getting blown on executives at a place that sells itself as a nonprofit service organization, how many other cuts has their financial philosophy made that they're bleeding from? Getting a quarter billion from the government and then throwing so much at just a handful of administrators says to me "Our cause is really important! We need federal assistance in addition to our revenue! Oh, but $272 million is enough to get the job done, so we'll give a lot to the pencil pushers at the top; oh, we'll still take donations too." Do they need help, or not, and if so, how much do they really think they need?
So they want to know if I'm willing, if I think it's even proper, to support an organization that not only does something immoral, but wants me to believe that it offers other services I shouldn't object to, and does so very badly? No thanks.
I don't know if an agency that performs evil efficiently is worse or better than one that does so inefficiently but also manages to retard good in the process, but I'd really want to have nothing to do with either.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Our disposable economy
I was at the municipal airport some time ago and heard one of the employees--maybe the terminal manager, for all I know--talking with the local flight instructor. He just happened to be complimenting the instructor on the decent new chairs he got for his office. The last thing I heard him say on the subject was about how they were only $15 so if they broke, replacing them would be no great task.
Naturally a year or two later--not so long that I couldn't remember overhearing that conversation well enough to think it would be funny if my life were a movie--I broke one of them, and it made me think of all the other things I own, or even just see around, that aren't meant to be repaired but simply discarded or maybe recycled. I've been told in the past that it's tantamount to a conspiracy among manufacturers to produce things that are prone to breaking and designed to be unrepairable by the average (or even the average mechanically inclined) person, so that they may be sure of selling more of the same things in the years to come.
There's probably some subscription to that philosphy, but I don't think we have to worry about the Shoe Event Horizon anytime soon.
First of all, it's not entirely true. Some of the more durable goods do tend to be pricier and harder to find than the cheaper ones, and they all may even be harder to repair when something does go wrong, but there are still things that work more reliably than their predecessors. Some of the Total Quality Management initiatives even rise above their own bureaucracies and enable an improvement in product quality by demanding better documentation of manufacturing processes and by documentation and standardization of methodologies, which make systemic problems easier to recognize--and recognized problems are vastly easier to solve than invisible ones.
Automobiles may be the quintessential example. I was going to say personal computers, but I think that fully integrated, non-user-serviceable configurations will become more popular, especially since the available computing power in more conventional tower designs, which are more suited to low-level tinkering, is really starting to get beyond what most users will need. Automobiles have become much more sophisticated, in some ways being more difficult to work on, but as long as there are gasoline engines and gearboxes and other powered moving parts in a motor vehicle, some home maintenance may always be possible. Since so much of the car is electronically managed, there are many things that just aren't up to a professional or amateur mechanic, but diagnostic computers can make the job easier when there is something for a human to do. Further, cars are lasting much longer; it's now expected for a car to operate beyond a hundred thousand miles, to the point where some manufacturers even have six-figure milage warranties, and some have been recorded as running several hundred thousand. Fifty years ago, when people could easily find TV repairmen and cobblers in their home towns, they could also find mechanics, but few or none who could work the magic it would take for a typical car of that time to last until the odometer rolled over.
Cars aren't simply better built, they're more complex, with much more going on under the hood and behind the dash than there was even when I was a child. It's barely adequate for a modern mechanic to rely on the wrench in his hand and the knowledge in his head. It's just more sophisticated work than it used to be, even with computer assistance. I think what's true with mechanics is also true, or at least thematically consistent, with my main point.
Most manufacturing today is automated to some degree. You'll need a few engineers and technicians to baby-sit a plant, and some trained but possibly unskilled people to operate the equipment, but compared with fifty years ago, you need more gearheads and fewer laborers. There's a net cost saving in manufacturing because the payroll got short enough to offset the education of the engineers, but what about repair and maintenance?
Well, that kind of work is still labor intensive, and whether or not a toaster or a radio is made to last, if you can get it open, it takes a lot more than a screwdriver and persistence to get it working again. Computer repair might be more of a cottage industry than traditional repair services, but even then, what usually happens is a component is replaced and then thrown out or recycled for materials. Circuit boards and such are so touchy that trying to manually replace diodes or capacitors, if the malfunctioning ones can even be identified by your average soldering gun wielding citizen, is most likely to multiply the problems.
The result is that labor, on average, is more expensive than it used to be, in fact is by and large too expensive to spend on small appliances, even if they were designed to be accessible to curious gearheads. Even if they still used the older and more durable designs, it'd really be less expensive to replace something than to hire someone (not just buy a replacement part, unless you are willing and able to do it all yourself from home) to take it apart, diagnosis it and install the parts.
I do occasionally see a durable good designed for recycling--choice of easily reused or compostable materials, ease of dismantling and sorting into material types--but that still seems to be the exception. Or maybe the recycling outfits hired by cities haven't caught up yet with green cradle-to-grave product engineering yet.
Naturally a year or two later--not so long that I couldn't remember overhearing that conversation well enough to think it would be funny if my life were a movie--I broke one of them, and it made me think of all the other things I own, or even just see around, that aren't meant to be repaired but simply discarded or maybe recycled. I've been told in the past that it's tantamount to a conspiracy among manufacturers to produce things that are prone to breaking and designed to be unrepairable by the average (or even the average mechanically inclined) person, so that they may be sure of selling more of the same things in the years to come.
There's probably some subscription to that philosphy, but I don't think we have to worry about the Shoe Event Horizon anytime soon.
First of all, it's not entirely true. Some of the more durable goods do tend to be pricier and harder to find than the cheaper ones, and they all may even be harder to repair when something does go wrong, but there are still things that work more reliably than their predecessors. Some of the Total Quality Management initiatives even rise above their own bureaucracies and enable an improvement in product quality by demanding better documentation of manufacturing processes and by documentation and standardization of methodologies, which make systemic problems easier to recognize--and recognized problems are vastly easier to solve than invisible ones.
Automobiles may be the quintessential example. I was going to say personal computers, but I think that fully integrated, non-user-serviceable configurations will become more popular, especially since the available computing power in more conventional tower designs, which are more suited to low-level tinkering, is really starting to get beyond what most users will need. Automobiles have become much more sophisticated, in some ways being more difficult to work on, but as long as there are gasoline engines and gearboxes and other powered moving parts in a motor vehicle, some home maintenance may always be possible. Since so much of the car is electronically managed, there are many things that just aren't up to a professional or amateur mechanic, but diagnostic computers can make the job easier when there is something for a human to do. Further, cars are lasting much longer; it's now expected for a car to operate beyond a hundred thousand miles, to the point where some manufacturers even have six-figure milage warranties, and some have been recorded as running several hundred thousand. Fifty years ago, when people could easily find TV repairmen and cobblers in their home towns, they could also find mechanics, but few or none who could work the magic it would take for a typical car of that time to last until the odometer rolled over.
Cars aren't simply better built, they're more complex, with much more going on under the hood and behind the dash than there was even when I was a child. It's barely adequate for a modern mechanic to rely on the wrench in his hand and the knowledge in his head. It's just more sophisticated work than it used to be, even with computer assistance. I think what's true with mechanics is also true, or at least thematically consistent, with my main point.
Most manufacturing today is automated to some degree. You'll need a few engineers and technicians to baby-sit a plant, and some trained but possibly unskilled people to operate the equipment, but compared with fifty years ago, you need more gearheads and fewer laborers. There's a net cost saving in manufacturing because the payroll got short enough to offset the education of the engineers, but what about repair and maintenance?
Well, that kind of work is still labor intensive, and whether or not a toaster or a radio is made to last, if you can get it open, it takes a lot more than a screwdriver and persistence to get it working again. Computer repair might be more of a cottage industry than traditional repair services, but even then, what usually happens is a component is replaced and then thrown out or recycled for materials. Circuit boards and such are so touchy that trying to manually replace diodes or capacitors, if the malfunctioning ones can even be identified by your average soldering gun wielding citizen, is most likely to multiply the problems.
The result is that labor, on average, is more expensive than it used to be, in fact is by and large too expensive to spend on small appliances, even if they were designed to be accessible to curious gearheads. Even if they still used the older and more durable designs, it'd really be less expensive to replace something than to hire someone (not just buy a replacement part, unless you are willing and able to do it all yourself from home) to take it apart, diagnosis it and install the parts.
I do occasionally see a durable good designed for recycling--choice of easily reused or compostable materials, ease of dismantling and sorting into material types--but that still seems to be the exception. Or maybe the recycling outfits hired by cities haven't caught up yet with green cradle-to-grave product engineering yet.
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