Month: April 2007

“It’s wrong to vote on rights”

As you may know, Valerie and I live in the only state in the USA in which a party of seven, by a majority of one, has elected to modify the human condition by changing the definition of a single word. Massachusetts has, for several years now, by court edict, granted to homosexual couples the right to “marry.” It doesn’t bother them at all that this is ontologically impossible, on the level of granting fish the right to breathe by changing the definition of the word “lung.” A homosexual union cannot be a marriage because marriage entails a commitment to become a family by raising together the children that come from the union. Nevertheless, Massachusetts now hands out marriage certificates to couples of the same sex and has been forced to remove the words “father” and “mother” from birth certificates, replacing them with the words “Parent A” and “Parent B.”

How long this kind of nonsense will continue is a anyone’s guess. But organizations like VoteOnMarriage.org have been steadily working on the only legal recourse available: to change the Massachusetts constitution to make explicit what was originally assumed: that a marriage can only exist between a man and a woman. The effort has been surprisingly difficult. The amendment process in Massachusetts is particularly complicated – it requires a referendum and two separate votes in congress. In addition, many people in the MA congress are unwilling to even consider putting the issue on the ballot, and are willing to violate their own constitutional procedures to avoid it.

In addition, I’m finding, there are a large number of people who are very interested in insulting both their creator and human intelligence with a single word. So there has begun a campaign to bring the amendment process to a halt. One such organization is MassEquality, which I’ve just discovered. Apparently they believe the best arguments should be self-contradictory. Continue reading ““It’s wrong to vote on rights””

Ten Complaints about Feminism

Todd Seavey is a writer of apparently some standing in New York City. He calls himself a libertarian, which is a philosophical tradition I can only moderately agree with, but he has written a critique of Feminism (as opposed to something like “traditional conservatism”) that I think is well worth reading. An excerpt:

far from feminism being the opposite of chivalry, it should by this late juncture in history be obvious that both chivalry and feminism are just systems for getting men to treat women more gently than they treat other men. The difference is that under chivalry, both sexes admitted this was the arrangement and under feminism, we are supposed to pretend women are being held to the same standard even when they aren’t.

A caution though: he makes some arguments based on sexuality which, though apparently accurate, are pretty unseemly.

democracy fails because it does what voters want.

Greg Mankiw points us toward a new book now available on amazon.com: The Myth of the Rational Voter. There is also an excerpt available at the Princeton University Press.

The book is a critique of democracy on the basis that people are fallen and sinful. Of course, being written by economists for a secular audience, it doesn’t quite put it in those terms, but it makes essentially the same point:

Across-the-board irrationality is not a strike against democracy alone, but all human institutions. A critical premise of this book is that irrationality, like ignorance, is selective. We habitually tune out unwanted information on subjects we don’t care about. In the same vein, I claim that we turn off our rational faculties on subjects where we don’t care about the truth. Economists have long argued that voter ignorance is a predictable response to the fact that one vote doesn’t matter. Why study the issues if you can’t change the outcome? I generalize this insight: Why control your knee-jerk emotional and ideological reactions if you can’t change the outcome?

Of course, being a book by economists written for a secular audience, they go on to look into ways of forming a government that can compensate for fallen human nature. After all, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” I think this is consistent with a Christian understanding of government, regardless of the form it takes. One of those purposes is to at least put a cap on human evil until such time as the Governor comes who can eliminate all sinfulness.

I’m afraid I haven’t time to read the book myself, but it looks a very worthwhile read. I’d love to hear from anybody else who gets a chance to look at it.

Only Catholics Should Speak in Tongues?

Mark Barnes believes that Speaking in Tongues is a practice that should only be practiced by Roman Catholics:

Most Charismatics believe that “speaking in tongues is prayer or praise spoken in syllables not understood by the speaker”. Tongues, in other words, are understandable only with interpretation. Frankly, this turns the clock back on the reformation. Charismatics who practice tongues-speaking in public worship have given up the hard-won victory that the word of God should be in the language of the hearer.

I may have some thoughts later to share in response, but for now, I’d like to hear *your* thoughts.
However, I will add that his arguments in this post aren’t nearly as interesting as his earlier post that Charismatics Are Not New Testament Christians

Wired

Kyle informs me that I must put up a blog about what happened this morning.

We were eating breakfast and Kyle decided to use his coffee press to make some coffee. Now let me preface this with the fact that we actually don’t drink much coffee in our house, mostly tea. So Kyle made a couple of cups of coffee and I decided to drink a bit with milk and sugar in it (have to mask that bitter taste right?)

I poured in my milk and added four lumps of sugar to the concotion and began to drink. Everything tasted great. I polished off the dregs and put my dishes in the kitchen.

A few minutes later, Kyle asked, “so how’d you like the coffee?”

“Great! It was perfect once I put my milk and sugar in it.”

“Um. Didn’t you know that I had put sugar in the pot?”

“Oh no! How much?”

“Well, I figured that there was about two cups there so I put in eight cubes….maybe ten.”

By this point I was hiding my head and laughing. No wonder I couldn’t taste the coffee, I pretty much drank sugared milk with a bit of coffee flavor. Good thing I don’t drink it very often; better luck next time I guess.

To Have Authority

###Curious bits of 1 Timothy###

The other thing that’s been bothering me lately is less of a hot topic, and at the same time a little more complex. It has to do with the second half of the sentence “I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man,” in 1 Timothy 2:12. What does this phrase “to have authority over a man mean?” Once again, it sounds obvious and deeply offensive to the modern mind: Paul is a misogynist and wants to hold women down. More charitably, he’s establishing God’s order for church, possibly reaffirming a hierarchy that has been intrinsic to humankind from the beginning: that the men should be the leaders of the community.

That may be so, and if it is, it comes with a bundle of questions about how we are to implement such a hierarchy in our society, and how that might affect our worldview. But the thing that has my attention is the idea of hierarchy itself. As I mentioned earlier, as an American, I have this gut-level *need* to make everybody basically equal. I’m very content with the idea of meritocracy. I have no problem with admitting that there must be some kind of structure, some kind of decision and command process, and awarding positions of power to those who desire them and prove their capability to fill the role. That is, I’m an instinctive egalitarian, though I recognize that there are fundamental differences in temperament between men and women which may lead to different roles.

1 Timothy seems to fly in the face of my egalitarianism. Continue reading “To Have Authority”

Let a woman Learn

###Curious bits of 1 Timothy###

Last semester, I embarked on an ambitious effort to do some analysis of 1 Timothy 8-15, one of the infamous biblical texts on whether women should have positions of authority. It was a little too ambitious, and I never quite completed it, but ever since, it’s been hanging in my mind, and I keep coming back to it with different results. Since I’ve been dwelling on it again, I thought I’d share a few of my quandaries.

First is the issue of learning and teaching. A cursory reading seems to show that Paul believes women should be allowed to learn, but not to teach. Furthermore, there is a peculiar way that a woman should learn: quietly, and submissively. “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; rather she is to remain quiet.”

Beyond the general offensiveness of this idea to modern Western minds, there have been any number of sound biblical objections to this simple interpretation, which I’m not going to bother to address. The one that has been holding my attention for a while has been that there seems to be an inherent contradiction just within those two verses: “Let a woman learn… I do not permit a woman to teach.” This is curious. Why would someone conjure a person to learn, only to abjure them to teach? I know this is ignoring the religious frame of the text, but the old one-room school house would fall apart under these orders: Imagine not allowing those who have just learned to immediately go and teach! Does knowledge rot in the mind, depending on whose mind it is encased? Continue reading “Let a woman Learn”

Physical

Jeff stared: Surrounded by the usual crusty slop of a school nurse’s office was a fish tank, populated with 3-inch poodles, their gray-green hair wafting in the water. The nurse laughed.

“Soto’s poodles. Gotta love ’em. Those Bolivians did some crazy things before the war, didn’t they?” She leaned in conspiratorially. “He bred these at the beginning, before they got really good at it. They say he drowned 10,000 poodles before he found one that could breathe water.”

“But… That’s not how you do…”

“Oh lay off. It’s a legend. It doesn’t have to be true. Now let’s have a look at you. Have a seat. Unbutton your shirt”

Jeff sighed. Fifty years ago, the medical profession was a highly respected industry, like telepathy, or blacksmiths in ancient times. Now, who knew where this bimbo got her certification? Anybody could do this stuff.

As the nurse stared at his various parts and waved her wand over him, Jeff looked around. In the three years he’d been in college, he’d never actually come in for his physical. He wasn’t sure exactly how he’d managed to avoid it. The place was a mess, covered in dirt and old food wrappers, half-eaten meals, all evidence of the anti-microbial field in effect. Worst machine ever invented: it sterilized without cleaning. He sniffed. An engineer would never work in such clutter.

“Now let’s have a look at those reflexes,” the nurse said. She pulled out a small metal hammer and tapped his knee.

Instantly, his kneecap shot up six inches from his knee, the skin ripping away in searing pain. At the same time, an electric twinge went up his spine as he fell back in a spasm. Reflexively, he tried to straighten his legs, but the malfunctioning knee refused to let him, grinding against the femur.

“Whoa! Kinda twitchy, aren’t we? Let’s see what we’ve got going on here.” chuckled the nurse. She pressed a hypo to his thigh, and the pain stopped. As he sat up, she gripped the tattered skin on the underside of his knee and ripped, pulling it down his leg to reveal a complex piece of metal. The skin sagged around his ankle like a sock.

Jeff wanted to vomit. “When did I get that?”

“Few years ago. Freak accident. You said you didn’t want to remember. There we are! I thought that was getting a little flaky last year.” She tweaked something, then shoved the kneecap back into place, rolled the skin back up the leg, and waved her wand over the wound. The skin healed over. “All done!”

Gingerly, Jeff stepped off the mat. Everything felt… normal. Slowly he walked to the door.

“Here. Have one on me.” The nurse tossed a packet to him. The label said, Forget me shots: instant amnesia. Jeff suddenly realized why he couldn’t remember his other physicals.

“You know,” said the voice behind him. “You really shouldn’t take those. You miss all the best parts. Last year after looking you over, we had a great time, right in this room…”

He ran out, slamming the door to muffle her cackling.

Jane Galt on Socialization

“Socialization” impedes socialization:

Certainly, it is not evolutionarily normal for children to spend the majority of their time immersed in a peer group composed of people within a year of their own age. Nor is it probably healthy. Children act rather like animals when they’re in groups together. Not only the immaturity of adolescence, but the barbaric cruelty of much of it, may be due to the fact that herding children into a series of age-segregated activities profoundly retards the process of socialisation. If Judith Harris is right, and peer group effects dominate parental influence, we are in effect letting large groups of children raise each other.

Find Judith Harris. Buy me her book.