If you really want to, you can

Sometimes Caleb (my son) still struggles with the concept of sleeping, and more specifically with sleeping at the same time his parents are sleeping. Therefore, I somewhat often find myself bouncing on an exercise ball with him dozing in my arms and watching whatever happens to be on TV, for lack of anything else to occupy my mind at the time. I was doing this the other night and caught the Tonight Show. Jay was doing his monologue. He did a bit about the lead paint from China (I don't remember what the punch line was, but I'm sure it was full of wit) and as the audience was finishing up their laughter, the guitar guy (Kevin?) remarks that we should just make this stuff here in America. This elicited a big round of applause from the crowd. Strangely though, it was definitely the kind of applause that signals agreement, but resignation to the fact that that which is being agreed upon as good will never be...like when people applaud a speech about how money shouldn't decide an election, or how nice it would be for everyone in the world to have enough to eat every day.

This struck me as odd. In no other place do we, as individual consumers in a capitalist economy have more influence than in the marketplace. If you, as a consumer would like more goods to be made in the U.S., stop buying goods made elsewhere. In fact, I'd be willing to wager that if everyone who saw that show and agreed with Kevin's statement were to stop buying things manufactured in China and sold in Wal-Mart, and were to buy only American good from the same store, you could get a fair amount of manufacturing moved back to the U.S. in a few years. Here's the catch though (and there's always a catch), you're going to have to pay a lot more for your stuff, and you might even have to go to a few different stores to get everything you need. You might also have to sacrifice some things like movies and eating out.

I suppose this is the point though, that it's a lot easier to agree with a notion in principal, and even to applaud it as worthy of support, but then to quickly point out to yourself that it's completely impractical for you personally to actually execute such a principal in your own life. It does make one feel good to agree with something that is right, but it's somewhat frustrating to find people who are doing only that when they could with a small amount of effort actually contribute to the change of direction they claim to desire.

Caleb at four months

I think it's probably time for an update to the son's pic on here. Caleb at about four months.

That's a big gorilla

It takes Microsoft two weeks to exceed Apple's quarterly earnings? Check it out.

http://software.seekingalpha.com/article/33932

Raising controversy

I recently had unfettered access to satellite television for several days in a row, and consequently spent a little too much time watching tv. I know that if I watch too much tv, especially some local news broadcasts, I'm going to eventually see something upon which I will have to comment. This time it came later in the trip, but I was not disappointed. I was presented with a story about a town in Oregon which has recently added some concrete posts designed to serve as barriers between pedestrians and motorists. As the article indicates, the town has raised some controversy as to whether or not the posts look like the male reproductive organ.

I think we as a society are going to at some point need to start telling people that some of the things they are worried and offended over are not in fact legitimate, and that they won't be getting their way . Is no one else in this town concerned that their citizens immediately think of a penis when they see a post with a rounded top, and then that they project their offense onto the rest of the town? Perhaps it might be time for those people to re-evaluate their thought life, their priorities, their sense of self importance, their sense of humor, and then move on to something more worthy of their time and energy.

Constitutional authority

I like to think I'm not a blind patriot; that I'm not oblivious to America's faults and weaknesses when I say it is truly a great and marvelous country. I will however maintain that America is a wonder. The most recent example I've been presented with is the court ruling regarding a U.S. resident held at Guantanamo (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10947948). I am continually amazed by America's passion to fight vigorously for the rights of her would be enemies. That America would have the structure and the process and the right to police herself to the point of ordering her president to release a suspected terrorist is, when looked at objectively, quite incredible. Further, I find it striking that the terrorists would like to abolish the very system which is continually working to defend their rights as humans, and that that system is forced to defend them none the less, as it would be useless to all if it failed to apply to some. This is good and correct, but remarkable from what we know of the human tendencies toward tyranny and selfishness.

Caleb Benjamin Scott

I think he looks like his mom, thank goodness.

But...it's nonsense

As I'm sure everyone has heard by now, the Discovery Channel will be airing a documentary on the fourth of March called "The Lost Tomb of Jesus". The makers of the documentary claim a tomb uncovered in 1980 is the tomb of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, complete with the bones of Jesus and his son. I am not here going to enumerate the details of this claim, or the reasons given for or against, as that is already being taken care of in great earnest by many other parties. I will however include a small quote from Professor Amos Kloner, who was responsible for the excavation of the tomb in 1980.

"It makes a great story for TV, but ... it's nonsense. There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb. They were a Galilee family with no Jerusalem ties. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the 1st century CE [Christian Era]."

However, this talk of the tomb of Jesus got me thinking. Hypothetically speaking, if researchers were to all agree that this tomb is in fact the tomb of Jesus' family, and somehow they also all agreed the bones were in fact the bones of Jesus of Nazareth (I don't know how they would do this, but we're pretending, so the how is unimportant right now), would this fundamentally change my beliefs about the world?

I like to think I'm a fairly rational person. I like to think I have somewhat well thought out reasons for the things I believe, and even rationale for things which must by necessity fall into the category of "faith" (a category which every person must have, for we do not at this time have indisputable answers to all questions), which brings me to this hypothetical proposition regarding the supposed bones of Jesus.

I believe though that in answer to the question, it would not change my beliefs to a great degree. Some would say this is an intellectual cop out, that to deny such obvious evidence would be proof that religious belief is blind to the facts. I would of course disagree, and my disagreement stems from my understanding that our current wisdom is not necessarily any greater for being current. In other words, I don't think we as a collective human race are by default wiser than the people who came before us simply because we happen to be the most recent. For example, our current level of understanding regarding the workings of the human body is more advanced than at any known time in human history, but it's debatable whether we are any better at healing disease than the ancient Chinese were. What we currently consider advanced thinking in a great many areas will undoubtedly be labeled as foolish in the future, and this is simply the human condition.

In this particular case, were I to take the eye witness accounts in the New Testament, couple those with the fact that the same eye witnesses later died for their testimonies, and weigh that against expert testimony two thousand years later, I believe I would find the New Testament account more compelling.

Now I can sleep, knowing I've answered a question which was never asked.

My contribution

I really enjoy Weekend Update, and will sometimes watch SNL just for that portion of it. This week though I was somewhat saddened by one of its segments. It wasn't really their fault, they were just doing their job, molding satire like master craftsmen and craftswomen. The subject of the segment was Ted Haggard's "rehabilitation", and the sadness came when I realized SNL had every right to comment on it. I'm aware that every Christian in America, and possibly the world (including me) is tired of hearing and talking about Ted Haggard, but after seeing the material his rehab is providing for writers, how can they stop talking about it? Here's a little excerpt with reference to Mr. Haggard, and mind you this is after three weeks of counseling:

"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph [Rev. Tim] said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

He's heterosexual except for the times over the last three years when he had sex with a man? This man has lied, deceived, adulterated, and engaged in immoral conduct for years, all while leading a church and an evangelical organization and after three weeks in counseling the statement is that at least he isn't homosexual?

I could go on here, but it would turn into a rant, and that's only mildly useful, and then mostly to myself. The point of sadness came for me when I realized why SNL (and several other programs) were having such a field day with the announcement that Haggard is "completely heterosexual" after three weeks of counseling. They find it so humorous because they recognize the complexity of people and life, and are amused that Christians apparently do not. I can almost see these people sitting around chuckling at another example of Christian naivety. "Oh, you've got a serious behavioral problem in your life? Here's a pamphlet with some bullet points; that should fix you up."

Clearly, this one statement from this one situation does not define all of Christendom, but I do believe it illustrates a tendency Christians have toward the clean and simple for fear of the involved and messy.

I realize of course that in many cases pamphlets with bullet points do immeasurable good, but we've got a big, rich, complex book called the Bible because in the final analysis life and death are not described with bullet points. Christians are supposed to know that people are all broken and messed up, and that even a belief in the saving power of Jesus does not necessarily free them from their past, from their bad habits, from their heritage. It is time we Christians stopped thinking and acting like a child and started treating people both in and out of the church not as projects but as invaluable individuals who need love, patience, kindness, forgiveness, and most certainly the grace of God.

Enemies

As we toured through the detention facility where Pol Pot's regime had imprisoned, tortured, and eventually killed thousands of people who were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong profession, or the wrong family, or the wrong place, I got to thinking about evil. To be honest it was difficult to think of much else in that place. It was as if its entirety had been saturated with evil and though most of it had gone, a pure residue remained on the ground, on the walls of the cells, and in the air. To stand in that old high school and breathe was to feel the other end of the human spectrum, the one opposite of child feeding programs, AIDS workers, good soldiers, blood drives, and free clinics; it was to feel the true breadth of human capabilities.

When I left the museum I believe I was literally in shock. It took me several weeks to recover to the point of considering what I had seen. As I began to consider it though, a somewhat odd reference came to me. In Paul's letter to the Ephesians he states that the Christian struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world. That is, those who are for good in this world are not fighting against bad people, but against purely bad spiritual authorities. I take this to mean that Pol Pot himself was not evil, but rather influenced so heavily by the entities which are evil that he was capable of the horrors we see in Cambodian history. This makes a certain amount of sense. If one takes a look back at some of the worst atrocities in human history, the people generally held responsible for those things are recorded as honestly believing they were taking good actions. Now, obviously these peoples' definition of good was mutated beyond sanity and recognition, but in their own minds they still considered their behavior and that of those under them to be somehow correct. This means they deserve our love and pity, not our hate; easy to say, nearly impossible to live. I suspect though that Jesus was in tune with the idea that there are no evil people, only people influenced to varying degrees by evil. Here's what he had to say about it:

"You're familiar with the old written law, 'Love your friend,' and its unwritten companion, 'Hate your enemy.' I'm challenging that. I'm telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty...Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you."

In addition to holding some lambs, having good hair, being nice, and claiming he was God, Jesus was a decent philosopher too.

Leaving God at the farm

The Old Testament portion of the Bible has some accounts (or stories, depending on your particular outlook on such things) which can only be described as shockingly incredible. I have a few of these which always make my list of most likely to have caused personal revelation.

There's the prophetic version of "When Animals Attack" in which Elisha is strolling along on his way to somewhere, when for no recorded reason an apparently large crowd of "youths" begins to mock him with the name "bald-head". While not especially witty, the name apparently agitates Elisha, so he calls down a curse on these youths...and two bears come out of the woods and maul forty-two members of the crowd! This may be one reason we don't see wide use of the insult "bald-head" today. A few years earlier when the Israelites were on their way into Canaan, there was a fellow by the name of Balaam living there already. The details of the account are a bit long, but at one point this man is riding his donkey along a road. For various reasons God is not happy with what Balaam is doing, so he sends an angel to block the road. His donkey can see the angel, and so leaves the road to avoid running into it. Balaam beats the donkey to get her back on the road. This happens a couple of more times with the angel, the donkey avoiding it, and the beating. So then the angel allows the donkey to speak, and the donkeys says to Balaam "What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?" Then, Balaam was either accustomed to talking animals or more of a man than I because he didn't miss a beat and responded, "You have made a fool of me!" They actually go on to have a little conversation about the happenings of that afternoon, and this was way before the invention of any synthetic narcotics.

There is one of these accounts though which I come back to with some frequency. It comes during the time of David. The Israelites were forever fighting with a particular group of people known as the Philistines. They were sort of like high school rivals in a way, only with wars and burning cities instead of football games and pranks. At one point the Philistines have the ark of the covenant, which was essentially an elaborate wooden chest which housed the holy things of Israel, including the tablets on which God had carved the ten commandments. The ark was extremely important to Israel. I'm sure you've seen the Indiana Jones movie. The Israelites went to get it back, and it wasn't hard because the Philistines had already decided to send it away. On the way back to Jerusalem, the oxen pulling the cart carrying the ark stumbled, so a man by the name of Uzzah reached out and steadied it. He was immediately struck dead. It was the law that no one except men of a certain tribe could touch the ark or any of the holy things, but David still got angry with God for killing Uzzah. He no longer wanted to take the ark to Jerusalem, so he left it at someone's house and went home. Three months later David went back to get the ark, and took it to Jerusalem with him.

Sometimes I relate to the way David felt when he left God on someone's farm. I have no way of physically leaving God anywhere, but I think maybe I would do it at times if I could. I probably wouldn't even go all the way out to a farm, I'd just leave him in the church parking lot, or maybe down at the neighborhood park. I'm sure any place I left him would be better for his being there, but at the time I might be too angry or confused to want to talk to him. I'm also quite sure I would go back and get him later and we'd be alright, but that time of separation would be necessary.

Even though I can't physically leave God anywhere, I am sometimes frustrated, confused, and angered by his actions (or lack of actions), just as David was. Mind you this is not an ongoing occurrence (as my pride might have it), but there are those moments when God's decisions become very personal. At these times I believe honesty to be more important than attempting to manufacture an attitude perceived as appropriate and correct, but which is in reality false, and I may emotionally remove myself from God for a season. But I believe this to be appropriate on occasion.

Without honesty I do not believe we can experience spiritual or emotional growth. In fact, I would suggest that believing there is a "correct" way to relate to God, which does not include a little raw emotion has only succeeded in the past to stagnate and embitter people. I tend to think of God as being rather understanding of the whole thing. After all, he did set the system up in the first place, and while it's clearly not exactly what he had in mind, I really expect that he still relates quite well to what's happening. He must know we can't possibly comprehend all of his ways (that's why he's called "God Almighty"), and that there will be times when our humanity gets the best of us, and we'll question him. He would know we're questioning him, and to express something other than this would be lying, which he has gone on record as disliking. No, I think God will understand if we sometimes leave him at Joe's Cafe for awhile...just as long as we come back sooner rather than later.

Gravy

I have a friend who is very kind and intelligent, and luckily also very resourceful because the automobile he owns can just barely be classified as such. The tires are bald, the paint is oxidized, the driver side wing window is shattered and patched by duct tape, and the rear window is completely missing (I understand it just popped out on the highway one day and was completely atomized). Actually, several months after the window mishap I noticed he had replaced it with a shower curtain, cut to size and taped in place. The curtain lasted for perhaps six months, and was as I recall actually slashed by some unidentified rascals in the end. No further effort was made to repair the window. He describes the car by saying, "It's not just an eye sore, it's also a health hazard." I told him five years ago he needed to get a new ride because there was no way that one was making it through the winter. When I see he has managed to actually drive it somewhere yet again, I remind him that each successful start is just gravy.

I received an email today from another friend of mine. Her dad had just gotten out of a seven hour surgery to remove his colon and the cancer which had overtaken it. She is staying with him for a few days because he can now do nothing for himself and is in extreme pain most of the time.

I'm not sure why my friend's email reminded me of my other friend's car, but it did. Perhaps it's because I know, though I am not always conscious of it, that each day this world and I exist together is really just gravy. Maybe I'd actually like someone to remind me each time I get out of bed (though probably not in person because that'd be more creepy than anything else) how no one is promised tomorrow, but in this particular case it was graciously given to me in all its weight and beauty.

"But life," one might say "day in and day out is not weighty and beautiful, it's ugly and meaningless." I don't agree with that conclusion and I think it's based on some misunderstandings, but that discussion is too large for this space, and is better had in person anyway. Suffice it to say Jesus loves changing things (as evidenced by the names of Peter and Paul), and given a chance I'm sure he would love to change this perspective on life as well.

I realize of course the vast number of times and ways in which this idea has been expressed. I'm even aware of how cliche most of those expressions have become. However, I do not believe the concept to be less worthy for its frequent repetition, and even though I know it is unrealistic and perhaps even unproductive to think one can constantly carry such an idea in the forefront of their consciousness, I still can't help but believe that even an occasional recollection of something as grand as the preciousness of another sunrise refreshes the natural nobility and honor of a person's soul. It is such a soul that can truly carpe diem.

The Reel world

We went to see "Stranger Than Fiction" the other night. It's playing at the Reel (also known as the Dx3 (dollar times three) Theatre, or sometimes just Ghetto), though it was only released a couple of months ago. This means people were no longer paying full price to see it, so it was re-heated and served again at a discount. As a frequenter of the Reel I've become somewhat familiar with the pattern. If a movie stays in the regular theatres for a long time, it's probably worth the few bucks to go see it on the big screen, and it will be what is expected. However, if a movie moves quickly from the full price theatre to the one where sound and picture together on the first try is a happy surprise, that movie is a bit of a gamble. On the one hand the simple fact that the majority of Americans did not find it appealing arouses some curiosity, but on the other hand a movie that not even Americans were bored enough to watch raises some suspicions. In this case though the movie does indeed feature Mr. Will Farrell, so I figured we had the odds on our side.

I'm not going to review the film because next to another Christian self-help book, another movie review is the last thing anyone needs. But, I will say it's better than average and probably worth seeing.

I think the theme of the movie is something like "our lives are wonderful and beautiful because of the simple things around us, like a smile from someone you love, or a tree, or a cookie, or a watch." This is a worthy enough thought, made better only by answering the question of why this is so, but there is also a sub-theme along the lines of "doing what you've always wanted to do, and not doing what you don't want to do leads to a more fulfilling and complete life." This I think goes along with a more general theme running through much of American entertainment which makes the claim that doing what you want to do is more noble and admirable than doing what you don't want to do, which I think just dovetails nicely into the human propensity for selfishness.

I am all for an excellent life, lived fully and well. But I don't agree with the notion that a life well lived must necessarily include all manner of activities thought to be desirable at the time, or that it must preclude anything felt to be dreary or unappealing. Certainly life consists of a mix of these things (sometimes in a greater degree one way or the other), and the mindset that "carpe diem" means avoiding or abandoning undesirable activity in favor of something deemed to be more glorious can lead only to discontentment or irresponsibility, or both. Attempting to gain complete satisfaction and fulfillment from any object, including an event or an occupation or a lifestyle is, in the words of a wise man, just "chasing after the wind".

In the end we find that almost no work is more inherently noble or glorious than another, once we remove mankind's perceptions from the equation and see only the heart with which the work is undertaken. Put another way, it is not the work which makes a person noble, honorable, or glorious, but rather a person who has always the ability to make nearly any work noble, honorable, and glorious. There are obviously occupations which are exceptions to this, but I believe they are few and rare. I would also submit that persons have a much greater chance of shaping things in this manner should they have a personal acquaintance with the essence of glory, honor, and nobility; which just makes Jesus's invitation to friendship all the more appealing.