once more with feeling

Too wonderful for words.

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Filed under: Video, culture & value, offsite, political-economy

You would never hear me attack Obama or Clintons because Chelsea or some other daugher got pregnant. I would attack them for advocating bad or evil policy. I would scream bloody murder if it came out they promoted abortion in such a case.

I’m operating under strict equality before the law here at this blog.

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Filed under: political-economy

I had a short story idea this morning. Though it gripped me more than just that.

I’m thinking some magicians/scientists experiment with a guy and throw him back in time to the early nineties. So he suddenly gets to deal with all the things he did wrong in his life. The main thing he does is work really hard making money and making connections. It helps that he has a vague idea to invest in AOL and Amazon and Google and oil and when to pull out. But the main issue is that he really keeps his eye on getting ahead. Rather than writing for “religious right” publications as much, he really leveraged everything he had to write for businesses.

So he really gets ahead with his wife, since he was thrown back to about the time he got married. Things seem very ideal to him. He moves to Nashville, right on schedule, but is able to actually buy a house, something that had never happened the first time around. His wife seem a lot less stressed than he remembered. Everything is working out.

And then his wife gets pregnant. How did that happen? Before, it took them two years to conceive, and they did so after leaving Nashville. So who is this child going to be? And it turns out to be a girl, whereas before his firstborn was a boy. His wife and he discuss names and all the ones he always wanted for a daughter, ones she expected him to use, he refuses. He knows a girl who will be born who should get those names and then another after for the third favorite candidate.

Or will she? Suddenly it becomes obvious that his ideal life is not one he can share with the actual children he knew and loved and was hoping to do better for. They are gone, annihilated, never existed. They never will. He gets new children now. Wonderful happy and much better supported children. And he has trouble looking at them some times. He wants the four he had before.

And something else starts to break apart. His wife starts complaining because he’s not the man she married. She married an idealist and, once his weird explanations for his sudden change in pursuits wear out, she feels like he is someone else. He doesn’t handle this well at all. He tells her she doesn’t know what she wants or how miserable she would be. Of course, he is the one that is miserable now.

What would I call this story? “Same Stream Twice” has a ring to it. “Wishing I Could be Stupid Again” might work. “Preferring Potterville” might work if “It’s a wonderful life” is still remembered. Some reference to Zuzu’s petals should be included.

My sons talk to me about how great the world would be if Adam never sinned. But I point out to them that they would never see it. That other timeline would have other people in it.

And it even works to an extent in an individual’s autobiography. You can’t help but have regrets. But ultimately it is impossible to hate your life decisions without hating yourself and the person you have become.  A different life would mean different relationships and ultimately a different self. And there is no point in hating yourself. That never works. Wanting to improve yourself and avoid repeating past mistakes presupposes just the opposite.

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Filed under: I have no idea how to categorize this

It seems to me that lots of people advocate the legalization of all drugs–not just marijuana but cocaine and heroine and every other drug–without feeling at all compelled to defend those drugs as harmless.  They don’t argue that injecting heroine is completely safe, let alone healthy.  They simply defend the right of people to make their own decisions and enhance or degrade their lives as they see fit.  Doctors who report on the adverse health consequences of smoking crack are not often mocked as politically-motivated hacks, even when they are attempting to defend the current policy of prohibition (the one exception to all this might be marijuana, where there are arguments about the claims which led it to be listed as a controlled substance).

But when it comes to porn, everything is different.  Even people who favor legalized porn get angrily attacked simply for not liking the effects that they argue have followed from its widespread use.  Anyone who claims that porn is addictive is ridiculed as a psuedoscientist.  All links between continual consumption of porn and other wrong behaviors are all assumed to be based on delusions.

It seems like the libertarian position on porn doesn’t even exist in the population.  Either porn is harmless and even healthy or else you must believe in destroying the First Amendment which our forefathers wisely crafted to protect the rights of teenagers to download hardcore movies over P2P networks.  You would think that someone somewhere would figure out that this stance is actually going to produce more opposition to legalized porn.

If the only alternative to drug criminalization was to teach that cocaine is good for everyone, then I would expect fewer people to favor legalization.

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Filed under: political-economy

I had no idea how to describe it, but I like what Felicia Day wrote recently:

I’ve decided to turn the phrase “stressed beyond belief” to “coping with a wealth of opportunities”.

So pray that I cope and that the wealth becomes something more tangible. Like yesterday.  And that I have patience.

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Filed under: What's going on

I was ordained in 1998. I was in seminary from 1995 to 1998. I was in the PCA as a member from 1989 onward.

I loved the PCA. I was so excited about the Reformed Faith and about the PCA as a place for it that I recommended it to friends and family. I was happy when a former college roommate joined a PCA church. I was thrilled when my fiancee told me that my brother had told her that he had become a TULIP calvinist and that “It wasn’t because of him.” True younger brother spirit, that; but I knew that the borg was winning and it made me happy. He has since become a ruling elder and is raising his children in the PCA. My parents also joined and became members of the PCA as the result of my evangelism.

By the way, it was also in the PCA that I was introduced to G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc and enjoyed them without fear or recrimination. In fact, literarily and theologically I used to find the PCA a place of faithful Reformed commitment coupled with a liberality of mind and generosity of spirit. In fact, the first time that impression was ever seriously challenged was with the introduction of the internet. In all too many ways I now see I fit all to well into that different environment. I was young and loved to argue and hadn’t yet realized that email lists were merely foreplay to ecclesiastical lynchings. The Bible warns what happens when evil words spread, but foolishly expected them to be contained to cyberspace (including my own).

[Addendum sidenote: Another difference was that it was commonly understood that different eschatological views were all allowed. No one had invented the internet/conference word “transformationalist” to represent post-millennialists as beyond the pale in the Evangelical Reformed world.]

But more broadly, before the specific lessons I began to learn in seminary with my first email membership, I also knew that the PCA, being human, was a place where horrible things could happen. This again precedes the FV hysteria and is unrelated to it. I’ve never gone into details and I won’t begin to do so now. But not everything can be proven in a church court. Strangely, it never occurred to me that all my accusations should be posted in an anonymous attack blog.

When I look at the way the CREC and Doug Wilson are treated, and every story from every malcontent is repeated seriously by pastors and elders with pretentions of godliness, if makes me ill. I cannot believe this toilet bowl of gossip and tale-bearing is regularly siphoned as if it were confirmed news (a recent example). And it never ends.

Nor does such a breach of ethics stay confined to the purposes of the original pioneers. That kind of behavior will do far more damage to the “established” Reformed churches than it will to the original victims. God is not mocked.

And in the meantime, it is obvious that the “established” denominations are already under judgment. “And children shall lead them.” This blogging behavior is just another form of arrested development in the church.

link

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