Monday, December 1, 2008

First Week of Advent: Hope

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him,
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might,
the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide disputes by what his ears hear,
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,
and faithfulness the belt of his loins.
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den.
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:1-9 ESV)

I think there is a tendency, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, to see Jesus' birth as something inevitable. We tend to expect the people living at that time to know exactly what was going to happen, and how, and why, because we know the story so well that, well, everybody must know it, right?

Wrong. For most of human history, people only had hope to go on. From the first promise that Eve's offspring would crush the head of the serpent, to the most detailed prophecies in Isaiah, all those people had to go on was hope. They looked forward to the time when God would send his anointed to right the wrongs, bring misery to an end, and (for much of the history of Israel) free His people from domination by the pagan nations which surrounded them, conquered them, and oppressed them.

I have long thought that it would be better if we could hold back our frenzy of Christmas carols, at least in the first part of Advent, and limit ourselves to those songs (like "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" which look forward to the event in hope, rather than celebrating it as an accomplished fact. I'm not sure that we can really grasp the sheer joy that the word of Jesus' coming brought to the hearts of those who first heard the news unless we can project our imaginations into a world and a time when people didn't know the story, didn't know what was going to happen, and certainly had no assurance that it would happen within their own lifetimes, since so many generations had lived and died in hope, without seeing the fulfillment of that hope.

And it is appropriate for us to learn to identify with that hope, because we have to live with hope of our own. Jesus came, and He changed the world, and we know that we are set free, but that is all on the inside. The outside still hasn't been fixed up. While we know that Jesus will be the victor in the end, the final battle over the fate of the human soul still has to be fought. We live in a time of tension between what Jesus has already done, and what He is still to do. So, like the people in the time of His first coming, we too live in hope. We, too, don't know the story of what will be, what is going happen, or whether it will happen within our own lifetimes.

So, before we celebrate the event, let's celebrate the hope that preceded it. Let us embrace that hope, for it isn't all that different from the hope we live by.

O come, o come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.

Sing it, pray it, mean it. For yourself, or for those in parts of the world where taking the name of Christ means risking persecution, imprisonment, or even death. For the Jews, too, faced persecution, imprisonment, and death for the sake of the truth not all that long before Jesus was born. For them, the birth of the Messiah was not an interesting theological concept, but a desperate hope when all seemed darkest. Feel that darkness, if you can, so that you can appreciate the light all the more.

  Saturday, November 29, 2008

E-mail 2.0

1. I've have a pretty close relationship with myself. We're on a first name basis, and I can talk to myself any time I like, instead of bowing down and knocking my forehead on the ground three times first, as might otherwise be the case.
2. Generally, I enjoy talking to myself, but sometimes, there can be this whole competitive thing going on, whether neither one of us is willing to admit that the other has a valid point. When it gets really ugly, sometimes I can go for weeks without speaking to myself. After a particularly nasty argument, I might even cross the street to avoid running into myself. But we always make up eventually.

  Monday, November 24, 2008

As Far From Fairy Tale Romance As I Can Get

  Saturday, November 22, 2008

It's What's Inside That Counts

Posting my comments about Shrek seems to have gotten me thinking about the whys and wherefores of human attraction. For the most part, I'm liable to rail against what I call "fairy tale romances", because to me, they perpetuate some very harmful myths, the most dangerous of which is the notion that you can judge a person's character by how good-looking they are. 

When I was very young, I saw a TV musical version of Cinderella, [Amazon.com/Amazon.ca] with a score by Rodgers & Hammerstein. For the most part, it was pretty standard, fairy tale romance stuff. (In other words, icky¹.) but in amidst all the ick, one thing stood out: although the prince (of course) fell in love the moment he laid eyes on Cinderella, and (of course) burst into song at that very moment, the words he sang have stuck in my brain to this day: "Do I love you because you're beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?" I've always interpreted that as an admission that our opinion of the physical attractiveness of another person is coloured by, and maybe even determined by, our opinion of them as a person.

Certainly, I have found that to be true in my own life. During those periods when I have had a "girlfriend", it always seemed obvious to me that she was the most beautiful woman on the planet. (I could never understand why everybody else didn't agree with my assessment.) In the same way, there have been many times when I've heard other guys raving about this or that female celebrity, and have had to restrain myself from saying something like, "How can you possibly find that woman even remotely attractive when she's so [insert appropriate negative character trait here]?"

No doubt the kind of guy who insists on polling every other guy in the immediate area on the attractiveness of every female who walks by finds it a little frustrating when the response they get out of me is, "How should I know? I don't know anything about her." It's not like I have no opinion whatsoever, but I learned a long time ago that I'm just not interested in rating women on the basis of numbers (whether those numbers represent the distance around her body, or the thickness of her eyebrows.) Instead, I find myself attracted to women who have faces which suggest a sweet, wholesome, kind personality. (Give me Mary-Anne over Ginger any day.)

In other words, what I'm really trying to do is figure out what's on the inside, based on what's on the outside. Except that (as I have been trying to say) you can't do that. The visual cues which incline me to believe that a woman is a nice person (and therefore beautiful) are just as external, just as malleable, and potentially just as misleading as the numbers which lead the shallowest "ladies man" around by the eyeballs. I once read that 97% of people consider themselves to be "above average" judges of character, which means that at least 47% of people are seriously overestimating their ability. Of course, that doesn't put the other 50% in the clear: you can be "above average" at something, and still not very good at it, if the average ability of the population is low. And, judging by the state of the world these days, the average ability is pretty low at this sort of thing.

But that should come as no surprise to us. The Bible says:

But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." (I Samuel 16:7, NIV)

So, in the end, we come back to where I started, with Shrek. At one point in the movie, he complains, "They judge me before they even get to know me." His complaint is not unjustified: even people who are trying to see past external appearances to other people's character, still have only external appearance to go on. And as long as we stick to the fairy tale model, and go by appearances, we will be misled. And, just as in a fairy tale, when we make a foolish decision, we get what we deserve.

1. Given the nature of the story, it was inevitable that the show would have a whole bunch of romantic stuff, which I found really icky at the time. (Oddly enough, although the intervening years have brought me to change my mind about girls being icky, I have yet to experience a similar change of opinion about romance as a genre. Of course, that could be because my experience has not given me any evidence that romance stories are any less unrealistic than they seemed to me as a kid.)

  Thursday, November 20, 2008

Character Counts

  Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Oldies But Goodies

  Monday, November 17, 2008

Big Boys (and Girls) DO Cry

I was riding the bus home from work, and there was a little girl with her mother on board. The girl kept asking her mother to do something which her mother refused to do, saying, "Not now, there are people here." The little girl was in tears of frustration and need. What was the request that the mother refused? What outrageous demand was this child making, regardless of her mother's discomfort and embarrassment? I can hear the words now, even in my sleep: "Hold on to me!"

Granted, we live in a fairly hands-off culture. We are brought up to "stand on our own two feet." We are taught not to cry, not to touch, not to need. I'm sure the mother was trying to bring up her daughter properly, to teach her to deal with the cold, harsh world on her own. But it is all a lie. We can't deal with this world alone! To pretend that we can endure the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune without flinching is to lie to others, and ultimately, to ourselves. We can pretend to the world that we are all little Spocks, immune to pain and need. Most times we can even fool others. If we are determined, and unfortunate, we can even fool ourselves. But in doing so, we become less human, less redeemable, less like the image into which God works to renew us. Instead, we begin to be conformed to the image of machines.

We live in a world that needs a hug. A world of lonely souls, desperate, yet afraid, to cry out, "Hold on to me!" Part of our task, first with each other, and then with the larger community, is to risk needing again, to risk loving again, to risk holding on to each other.

  Friday, November 14, 2008

How Not To Do It, in one very specific circumstance

  Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Greg's Political Rant: Day 5: Better Than Nothing

One of the other things which really peeves me about politics these days is negative advertising. Because Canada uses a "first past the post" voting system, and the U.S. has a de facto two-party system, it is to candidates' advantage to smear their opponents. It doesn't matter if you convince people to vote for you, as long as you can discourage them from voting for your opponent. In fact, you could run a successful campaign without ever once saying anything positive about what you stand for, as long as you can successfully demonise your opponent.

And, at least as far as a politician is concerned, you can be successful without having to bother with niggling little details like telling the truth. Thus, in the last Canadian federal election, the spin doctors for the candidate who eventually became my MP successfully torpedoed the chances of his biggest opponent by painting her as a red-necked fundamentalist because she attended a particular church. This was slanderous for a number of reasons, among them being that the church concerned (the Christian & Missionary Alliance), while evangelical in theology, is not exactly noted for taking a public stance on political issues of any sort. But more importantly, it was disingenuous, because the candidate who ended up winning, in part by slandering his opponent's church, attends the very same church that his spin doctors were painting as a hotbed of fundamentalist lunacy.

The same kind of fear-mongering has been happening on both sides of the border this year. Depending on who you listen to, voting for the wrong party means that either Christians or gays will be rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Or, if you vote for the wrong party, the environment will be devastated in the name of saving the economy. (Or possibly the other way around.) Or if you vote for the wrong party, our wonderful country (whichever one you're in) will be completely overrun by terrorists. (Either that, or we'll be sending troops to Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, and maybe Liechtenstein if they don't clean up their act.)

Even the most rabid supporter of this or that party has to know, on some level, that they're spouting utter rubbish when they make such dire predictions. (At least, I hope so. It would be sad to think that there's anybody in the world who's really that stupid, let alone the huge numbers of people who have been making these kinds of arguments.) But the system imposes no limits on this kind of trash talking, because nowadays, it's no longer about proving that you're actually going to be any good, as long as you can convince people that you are at least not quite as bad as the alternative.

I think we need an alternative. I think we should demand that our politicians prove that they can be better, or at least better than nothing. What? Yes, better than nothing.

Let me explain: every time there's an election, at least in Canada, the losers all complain that the number of seats they won was not a fair reflection of their share of the popular vote. Sometimes, when the disparity is wide enough, people start calling for some form of proportional representation. I find it fairly easy to resist getting on that bandwagon, because all I have to do is look at places like Italy, Israel, and Japan to see the pitfalls of PR: the parties gain power at the expense of the voters, governments tend to be short-lived and ineffectual, and small, lunatic fringe parties can hold the balance of power in parliament and sway policies out of all proportion to their size.

Now in some systems, like the one used in France, a winner must get at least 50% of the votes in order to win, and if no candidate wins in the first round, they hold run-off elections. In a system like that, even if you can't have your first choice, in the end, nobody can win who isn't at least acceptable to a simple majority of voters. That would be better than the system in Canada, where you can have one candidate win a seat with only 25% of the vote, as long as their next-closest competitor gets even one less vote than they do.

But to make things really satisfying, I'd like to see a system like they use to select the winners of the Hugo Awards, which are presented at each year's world science fiction convention. The Hugo Awards use a system which Wikipedia calls preferential voting. Each ballot is marked with a voter's preferences: first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on. One of the options is "No Award." If no candidate wins an outright majority in the first round, then those ballots cast for the candidate with the lowest number of votes are counted again, this time according to the second choice. (This is like the run-off elections in the French system, except that people only have to vote once.) If necessary, the second-lowest candidate's votes are similarly recounted, and the process continues until a candidate does gain a majority of votes. But the real twist in this system is that there is always the possibility that the votes for "No Award" will end up being more numerous than the votes for any candidate, in which case there is no Hugo Award in that category that year.

I really like the thought of having a "None of the Above" choice for elections, because too often, I'm faced with a choice between a candidate I actually like, who's running for a party that I loathe, versus a candidate I can't stand, who's running for a party I would normally like. So the thought of being able to vote for "None of the Above", and force all the parties to nominate different candidates than they tried the first time has a real appeal for me.

But even without a "None of the Above" option, the Hugo voting system has the appeal of punishing candidates who use negative advertising. After all, when you have multiple candidates in the same riding, there will be many cases where no candidate can win in the first round, and will need to be the second choice for enough voters to push them over the 50% threshold. If you go around demonising another candidate or their party, you are going to make it much less likely that anybody supporting that candidate or party will make you their second choice. Thus, instead of trashing your opponents, the way to victory is through presenting yourself as the best alternative. Instead of painting your opponent as being even worse than you, instead you'd have to paint yourself as being even better than your opponent. That, in turn, would require admitting that your opponent does occasionally have a valid point to make, even if they're not always quite as brilliant as you are. (And, if you add the "None of the Above" option to the equation, then you really put the pressure on, because candidates would then have to prove that, not only are they better than their opponents, but they're also better, quite literally, than nothing.)

Working out the implications that making such a change in the voting system would have for the tenor of political debate is left as an exercise for your imagination. Here endeth the ranting.

  Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Greg's Political Rant: Day 4: We Have Met The Enemy, And They Are Us

Many Christians are upset by the results of the American elections, seeing the Democratic victory as a rejection of Christian morals in favour of policies which are opposed to Christian teaching. In the same way, many Christians in Canada were disappointed that the Conservatives failed to gain an outright majority. (The hope, which was never terribly realistic, I'm afraid, was that a majority Conservative government would overturn Liberal innovations such as the legalisation of same-sex marriage.)

If it's true that North America is moving away from Christian morality, then we have only ourselves to blame. Moral issues cannot be settled by legislation. You can't push measures through on the basis of razor-thin electoral margins of victory, and expect the population as a whole to have any respect for them. If we want to win people's hearts, then that is where we must campaign: not on the political battlefield, but in people's hearts.

Now, as a Christian, my moral stance develops out of my theology. I believe that God is both loving and all-knowing, and that His commands stem from His love and His omniscience. In other words, when He forbids us to do something, He does so because doing that would do us harm. In the same way, if He commands us to do something, then doing that is for our good. In short, Christian morality is not a matter of pleasing a cosmic spoilsport, but rather obeying a loving God who has our best interests at heart. I sometimes talk about the Bible as "the owner's manual for the human race": if anybody knows how to keep the system running smoothly, it's the original manufacturer.

If that's true, and I believe it is, then Christian efforts to shape government policy in more moral directions would be more effective if we spent a lot less time telling unbelievers that they had better obey the commands of a God they don't believe in, or else, and a lot more time pointing out how this or that action or policy is harmful to the people involved, and to society as a whole. I doubt that we would ever manage to convince everybody on every issue, but there are potential co-belligerents, if not allies, on any number of issues. In opposing pornography, we would be in agreement with women's rights campaigners, who have also recognised the links between pornography and sexual abuse. In opposing gambling, we would be in agreement with those who have to deal with the social fallout of gambling, and opposing those politicians who see gambling as an easy way to raise money without (visibly) increasing taxes.

Some issues, like the sacredness of human life, are going to be a harder sell. Apparently, advocates of capital punishment are unmoved by the knowledge that the rate of executions in the U.S. places it among some very unsavoury company, or that there seems to be racism in a system where black defendants are far more likely to be executed than white defendants accused of the same crime, or that many people have been proven innocent after being convicted (in Canada, sometimes after they have spent years in jail, and in the U.S., sadly, sometimes after they have been executed.) Therefore, perhaps we should address the issues that those people do care about, and point out that the cost of repeated appeals actually makes it more expensive to execute a prisoner than to imprison them for life.

In the same way, pro-choice advocates have been very successful at portraying abortion as a means of liberating women, and the pro-life movement as caring more about the baby than the mother. Since they seem to be immune to arguments about the humanity of the unborn, and since we should (and, I trust, do) care just as much about the mother as about the baby, we should probably be addressing the evidence that abortion does not, as has been asserted, empower women, but perpetuates the oppression of women. The pro-choice movement is certainly not going to admit how many women have been killed, maimed, or inadvertently sterilised during "safe" legal abortions. The pro-choice movement is not going to admit how abortion is used as a method of sex-selection in countries like China, so that the live birth rate for females has plummeted in those places. The pro-choice movement isn't going to talk about post abortion stress. Yet they have arrogated to themselves the role of being the protectors and liberators of women. If we don't challenge that, then we can hardly be surprised that they are winning the "election" of public opinion.

But whatever the issue, we have to be willing to put in the time to research the issue properly, identify the harm caused by the behaviour which the Bible forbids, and then explain that to the world. There's no point in relying on an authority that the world doesn't recognise. We have to make each argument on its own merits. If that process ends up getting us to take moral issues more seriously ourselves, so much the better.

After all, economists have argued for years that the world runs best when people are governed by enlightened self-interest. Self-interest, we have in abundance. Enlightenment is somewhat more rare. Therefore, it's high time for us to inject more light and less heat into the discussion of moral issues. Until we are prepared to do that, we have only ourselves to blame if the world refuses to listen to us.

  Friday, November 7, 2008

Greg's Political Rant: Day 3: A Pox On Both Your Houses

Another thing which irks me about political debate is that people's thinking is so blinkered. People always want to pigeonhole political choices into "left" or "right", or at least some kind of spectrum spreading from one to the other. If you're on the "left", then you're in favour of women's rights, minority rights, social programs, world peace, and the environment, and your opponents are a bunch of baby seal clubbing, war-mongering, heartless, racist, chauvinistic, neo-fascists. If you're on the "right", then you're in favour of limiting the powers of government, stimulating the economy, law and order, encouraging people to advance on the basis of their ability, and encouraging trade, and your opponents are a bunch of protectionist, crony advancing, criminal-coddling, tax-and-spend, totalitarian, crypto-commies. (Even the "what's your sign?" pigeonholing in night clubs in the 70s, as shallow as it was, gave people more than two options to choose between.)

As it happens, British Columbia¹ has lurched between the extremes of left and right for years. The saying, when I was younger, was, "vote Social Credit² until you're born, and after that, vote NDP³." Social Credit was the last party to oppose abortion on demand, but developed a reputation of being mean-spirited, slashing spending on social programs, health care, education, and public transit, which made people wonder why the party valued the unborn, when it seemed to care so little for those who managed to be born alive. Social Credit also developed a truly disgusting appetite for corruption, which led to the eventual destruction of the party.

As a Christian, I could not endorse either party. The SoCreds may have been pro-life, but the Bible talks a great deal about having compassion on the poor and needy, and that was a trait in which the SoCreds were notably lacking. On the other hand, while the NDP originally started out life as a social gospel movement, and has been an advocate of many good causes, such as workers' rights, human rights, environmental protection, and health care, the party has also endorsed causes hostile to Christian morality (and, I would argue, harmful to society as a whole.) So, depending on the issue, I might agree with the SoCreds on some things, and the NDP on others. (And, on some issues, I disagreed with both of them.)

Whatever the jurisdiction, and whatever the names of the parties, there's a tendency to want to fit people into pre-defined boxes which don't match reality. Just one one issue, the sanctity of human life, that holds true. In Canada, the "left" are in favour of abortion and opposed to the death penalty, while the "right" (or at least some of them) are opposed to abortion and in favour of the death penalty. As a Christian, I'm opposed to both, yet the existing parties tell me that I have to choose the lesser of two evils. To which my response is, "a pox on both your houses." I refuse to wink at one evil in order to avoid another. I oppose both. The situation is the same on a whole range of issues: each wing opposes some evils and promotes others. Even with all the parties in Canada to choose from, there isn't a single one that I can vote for without holding my nose. Of course, the situation is even worse for Americans, who only have two parties to choose from, both of them evil and corrupt. The only thing I can say is, "be grateful that you don't get all the government you pay for."

1. BC Politics are pretty whacked at the best of times. Remember that this is the province which once had a premier who had legally changed his name from William Smith to "Amor de Cosmos" even before entering politics. Yet even though he was clearly not right in the head (he was eventually declared insane), he was repeatedly elected, first to the colonial legislature, and then to parliament. When I try to explain BC politics to outsiders, I generally resort to saying, "God picked up North America by the East Coast and shook it, and all the loose nuts rolled down to the West Coast." Sadly, our more recent politicians, while not quite so colourfully named, haven't been much, if any, of an improvement.
2. Social Credit started out as one of the less economically sound parties born in reaction to the Great Depression, and, on the way to dominating BC politics for more than 30 years, shed its original party doctrine (and, indeed, any doctrine other than keeping the NDP out of power at all costs.)
3. The NDP, or New Democratic Party, had exactly the same roots. In fact, it's amazing how similar the SoCreds and the NDP are in their roots. Both were started by men named Douglas, both had party leaders who were Baptist preachers, and in the 1940 election, the SoCreds ran under the name "New Democracy." Nevertheless, the SoCreds ended up on the extreme right wing, while the NDP ended up on the left. And, for most of my lifetime, BC's government has lurched from one extreme to the other.

  Thursday, November 6, 2008

Greg's Political Rant: Day 2: The Limits Of Politics

Put aside all the hyperbole, stupidity, and naked ambition, and you may be able to see one glaring omission from the political debate: nobody, and especially no politician, has been willing to come clean and admit that there are problems (and big problems) which simply do not have a political solution. The biggest non-political issue in the news this season is the stock market crash. A stock market crash is a classic case of an asset price bubble, and such things have happened before, in stocks, real estate, and even (believe it or not) tulip bulbs. In any asset price bubble, people buy something which they can't afford, and which they know is already overpriced, on the assumption that the price will rise higher still, and they'll be able to sell off their overpriced asset once it's become even more overpriced, and so turn a nice profit. Eventually, of course, the price rises so high that nobody can afford to bid any higher, the people who have beggared themselves to get onto the bandwagon end up having to sell at a loss or risk losing everything, and the price crashes. Inevitably, there is a cry that "they" have been manipulating the market, and profiting from other people's misfortune. But what is really going on is that people thought they could make easy money with no effort, and let their greed and stupidity blind them to all the signs of the impending collapse.

The politicians can pass all the laws they like, but they're never going to prevent this sort of thing, because it's impossible to legislate greed and stupidity out of existence. (And yet, we still see people blaming the government for the state of the stock market, as if the government forced, or even encouraged, people to by overpriced stock.) We're human, and therefore we're flawed. Any politician who tells you that they can "fix" humanity is either deluded or lying. (Most likely the latter, since we all know how to tell when politicians are lying: their lips move.)

But no politician will ever admit that there's any problem that doesn't have a political solution. Partly, that's because, in the words of Abraham H. Maslow, "To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail." Politicians can only conceive of political solutions, because politics are all they understand. Charles Colson, once the hatchet man for the "leader of the free world" only came to understand the limits of political power after he lost it:

Wars reach no permanent solutions; there is no such thing as a lasting peace or, as Americans so fondly believed, "a war to end all wars." Terrorists stalk the globe, and governments can do little to stop them.

Wars proliferate; political solutions fail; frustrations rise. Yet we continue to look to governments to resolve problems beyond their capability. The illusion persists. (God & Government, chapter 24)

Just try to imagine Colson talking about the limits of politics while he was still involved in politics. How much support would any politician gain by saying of certain problems, "You know, on this issue, it doesn't matter how you vote, because this is something that the government just can't fix"? It would be true, of course, but no politician would ever be able to admit it in public, partly because politics, as currently conducted, is the art of promising the world, and delivering just enough to win re-election, but mostly because we, as voters, want politicians to lie to us. When we feel nervous, we are willing victims, even collaborators, of any slick talker who will come along and promise us, "I will solve all your problems if you will vote for me." To that extent, when thing go wrong, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. If we demanded honesty and humility from our politicians, we might actually get it for a change.