I had another dream, I had another life
This morning’s post for Times and Seasons was about: When to Disobey. Short version? Being willing to say “no” to religious leaders isn’t fundamentally a question about the quantity of obedience. It’s about the quality of obedience. Being open to saying “no” transforms blind, automatic obedience to willing, mindful obedience. Long version? Read the post. (The comment thread is pretty active, too.)
Once again, I have let all three readers of my blog The Slow Hunch down. Instead of providing links here on Difficult Run to new blog posts each time I write one, I’ve let them build up over the past couple months. To add a little salt to the wound, letting them pile up has made realize that I still don’t post all that much despite my supposedly new commitment to do so.
But I digress. Here is yet another recap of my past few posts at The Slow Hunch:
Stop on by.
I’ve blogged before about the benefits of immigration reform and (more) open borders. I also think our path to citizenship is a mess. So, my initial reaction to the President’s announcement regarding immigration was mixed. Peter Suderman at Reason has a pretty balanced take on why my reactions were mixed. In response to the claims that President Obama’s actions are “unprecedented and illegal,” Suderman notes the following:
1. Probably legal: “As Reason’s Shikha Dalmia and Case Western Reserve University Law Professor Jonathan Adler have noted, the president has a great deal of authority to set enforcement priorities and exercise discretion when it comes to immigration law. Even some of the loudest critics of Obama’s action have come around to the idea that, at least technically, it would not exceed the president’s discretionary power, even if it would constitute an unusual and strained use of it.”
2. It is unprecedented: “The administration and some of its supporters are arguing that various presidents, including Republicans, have taken comparable steps before, limiting deportations through executive order, and that makes this well within political norms. This argument leaves out crucial details about congressional involvement and support for those previous presidential orders.” These crucial details have been well-documented by David Frum at The Atlantic.
3. It is a further expansion of executive power and the norms around using it: “Just because an executive action is technically legal does not mean that it falls within legal norms, and executive power can be expanded not only through explicit assertions of previously off-limits authority, but by making use of powers that existed but were never used, or never used to such an extent…Anyone who worries about executive overreach, even those supportive of expanded immigration, ought to be wary of the precedent this move, and the thin line of reasoning behind it, could set.” Expanding the power of one man should be troubling.
4. Executive action may be preferable to reform bill: “If you favor making immigration easier and more straightforward, and think that draconian enforcement efforts are both wasteful and counterproductive, then there are real upsides to executive action when compared to a big congressional overhaul.” Increased border control funding and an “incredibly invasive form of workplace nannying which would create huge hassles for workers and employers, as well as large numbers of false positives—making hiring, and finding employment, an even harder process than it already is.”
5. Executive action could poison broader, more stable reform: “There’s no question that the immediate political consequence would be to further outrage Republicans, and turn a party that has long had a mix of views about the virtues of expanding immigration into one dominated by opposition…But the backlash might not just be the immediate consequence, and it might not just be limited to the congressional GOP and its core supporters; unilateral action might result in a deepened long-term opposition to greater immigration as well.” I highly doubt this has anything to do with the morality of immigration. It is likely nothing more than a political move meant “to provoke Republicans into a frothing rage, in hopes that they will do something politically stupid as a result. (They might oblige.)”
Suderman concludes with caution:
This is not to simply condemn Obama’s plan, but instead to warn enthusiastic supporters that the choice to act at this time, in this way, without legislative backing or public support, might be satisfying in the moment, but also stands a real chance of closing off opportunities for a better, more lasting solution at some point in the future. Consensus is hard, and sometimes it seems impossible, but in politics, it’s also important.
President Henry B. Eyring–LDS apostle and First Counselor in the First Presidency–participated in The Complementarity of Man and Woman: An International Interreligious Colloquium at Vatican City on Nov. 18, 2014. His presentation was entitled “To Become as One.” The video is below.
Julie Smith at Times & Seasons had an excellent insight about the following quote from President Eyring:
Her capacity to nurture others grew in me as we became one. My capacity to plan, direct, and lead in our family grew in her as we became united in marriage. I realize now that we grew together into one—slowly lifting and shaping each other, year by year. As we absorbed strength from each other, it did not diminish our personal gifts.
Smith notes,
What I hear him saying is that men and women come to marriage with a different set of roles/characteristics,[ref]For a social scientific view of these different set of characteristics, see Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2002) and Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives, ed. W. Bradford Wilcox, Kathleen Kovner Kline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).[/ref] but one goal of marriage is for them to teach each other and to adopt each other’s roles. I sometimes hear in LDS venues a rather opposite idea–one I find theologically problematic inasmuch as it suggests that men and women should maintain separate characteristics, something I find incompatible with both the idea of the perfection of Christ and his ability to serve as an example for all both men and women, as well as the idea of men and women striving to themselves become perfected. His thinking here can be a great bridge from older teachings about gender difference to a newer vision where those differences can still be acknowledged but won’t be seen as limiting. I especially like his idea that, as he took on nurturing and his wife took on leading, it didn’t diminish either of them. (Contra language we sometimes hear bemoaning the loss of femininity and masculinity.)[ref]A fairly popular post by evangelical blogger Rachel Held Evans makes similar observations.[/ref]
Smith’s observation reminds me of a point made by Texas A&M professor and fellow Latter-day Saint Valerie M. Hudson regarding the telos (“end,” “purpose,” “goal”) of marriage:
What we [Mormons] understand from our doctrine is that the telos of marriage is to ground every human family in real, lived, embodied gender equality. And then, as a consequence, all reproduction would occur only within that context of gender equality. If the ideal were lived, then every son and daughter of God would be born into a family that lived gender equality, and thus each would learn how to form such a relationship when they themselves came of age. Reproduction is the fruit, not the root, of what God intended in establishing marriage.
That is why it doesn’t matter who’s fertile, and whether a marriage of infertile people is a marriage is beside the point. The test of whether you have a marriage or not is whether it is gender-equal monogamy.
For Hudson, companionate heterosexual monogamous marriage is a matter of gender equality and human peace incarnate.[ref]See her Sex & World Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).[/ref] I think President Eyring’s talk could lead to exciting new ways of discussing gender in the LDS Church.
Note: Obnoxious amounts of Christianity ahead. You’ve been warned!
I’ve been contemplating Jesus’ cleansing of the temple for a few weeks now. I like Saint John’s account the most:
13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers at their business. 15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16 And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; you shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for thy house will consume me.” 18 The Jews then said to him, “What sign have you to show us for doing this?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he spoke of the temple of his body.
I believe the passage has literal meaning. Jesus literally drove people out of the temple because they had turned God’s house into a house of trade. We should avoid the same temptation to have our focus at church become socialization or business rather than love of God. Similarly, we should have zeal for upholding God’s truth in the universal Christian community where immoral teaching and heresy often appear.
Yet more and more the spiritual meaning of the passage has been speaking to me. I think we often look to the external temple (the church) with zeal for rightness, but how often do we look to our inner temple? I look in myself, and I see pride, greed, fear, jealousy, unfaithfulness, falsity, and every manner of unrighteous emotion. I recall the words of Matthew:
13 [Jesus] said to them, “It is written,
‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’;
but you are making it a den of robbers.”
I then ask myself how a man who wants to have zeal for the external house of the Lord can do anything while his internal house remains in disarray. It is not possible. At best, it will Pharisaical pride at stamping out exterior wrongs all while ignoring blatant interior wrongs. Jesus had no patience for exactly one group, and that group was the Pharisees. So let’s not be them.
Rather, we must ask Jesus to cleanse our inner temple. Perhaps something like, “Jesus, bind up a whip of cords, overturn my unrighteousness, make this temple into a house of God.” I’m under no impression I will be liberated from the brokenness of human nature. But I want to ask God to help me. Like Joan of Arc answered during her trial:
[Joan is asked : Do you know if you are in the grace of God?]
“If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me.”
Only from this relationship with God should we even start thinking about external concerns of church doctrine or moral issues. Only then can truth flow from love of God and neighbor rather than the desire to see others in the wrong or doctrinal obsession. I still feel those temptations pull at my heart, goading me to put others in the wrong so that I may feel right. Even when we know these feelings are wrong, we are tempted next to meet them half-heartedly because we view experiencing these emotions as inevitable. No! Bind up a whip of cords, drive them from the temple of the Lord. They have no place here.
Which brings me to my last idea. A natural stage in Christian life is restraining yourself from something you want because you know it’s wrong or unhelpful. However, we cannot persist here. If we do, we will spend our whole lives feeling like we’ve simply been holding ourselves back to serve the Lord. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s good. “Take up your cross and follow me.” However, this is not the fullness of life that Jesus intends. He wants us to rejoice in our life with Him, going forth with joy. So, let us pray to Jesus, saying, “Lord, make my heart like your heart, my desires as your desires, my mission into your mission.” In this way we may grow closer to the Lord, rejoicing in goodness and love rather than feeling like we’re just holding back evil day by day.
As a final note, don’t by any means construe my ideas as anything more than the thoughts of a single Christian. I am not a priest, I am not a trained theologian, and I’m not even 30. If these internal reflections are helpful, I’m glad. If they aren’t, ignore them freely.
A brand new study from the American Enterprise Institute (authored by sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and economist Robert Lerman) looks at the impact of family structure. Its key findings:
These findings (among others) led Larry Kudlow to write elsewhere, “While restoring economic growth may be the great challenge of our time, this goal will never be realized until we restore marriage. In short, marriage is pro-growth. We can’t do without it.”
Check it out.
Bloomberg has a long piece on Rich Weinstein, whom you probably have not heard of. He’s the guy who unearthed the footage of Jonathan Gruber (one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act[ref]AKA ObamaCare[/ref] bragging about how the American people had to be misled in order to pass the bill because they are too stupid to k now what is good for them. You can find lots of videos on YouTube now, but I’ll give you just one as an example of the category:
Weinstein, for his part, is not a journalist, blogger, or political activist of any kind. From Bloomberg:
“When Obama said ‘If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period’—frankly, I believed him,” says Weinstein. “He very often speaks with qualifiers. When he said ‘period,’ there were no qualifiers. You can understand that when I lost my own plan, and the replacement cost twice as much, I wasn’t happy. So I’m watching the news, and at that time I was thinking: Hey, the administration was not telling people the truth, and the media was doing nothing!”
He did his own research, found a bunch of guys who called themselves architects of the law (Jonathan Gruber was one of them), and then started fanatically looking for everything that any of them had ever said about the law. Eventually, he found the clip above. The University of Pennsylvania yanked the video once it started making the rounds, leading to a classic case of the Streisand Effect, and the rest was history. Three thoughts.
1. I agree with Weinstein that it’s disturbing no one else found these videos. As he put it: “It’s terrifying that the guy in his mom’s basement is finding his stuff, and nobody else is.”
2. To be totally honest, I have a lot of sympathy for Jonathan Gruber. As much as the Fox News crowd might jump all over him for calling the American people stupid, he’s got a point. It might be unkind, but it is–when you’re talking about economic concepts–completely accurate. I’m just as exasperated as he is with American ignorance of basic economics, which leads to such wonderfully silly policies as the minimum wage and corporate taxation continuing to be wildly popular. I empathize with both his frustration and with his glee in successfully pulling an end-run around the electorate and accomplishing something that (in his view) is beneficial for everyone. He’s not a mustache-twirling villain. He’s a guy who was trying to do the right thing, and was willing to be sneaky to get results.
3. As a lawyer friend of mine pointed out, if you get someone’s consent through deceit, you don’t actually have their consent. And for us Americans, the principle of consent of the governed is one of the bedrocks of our entire system of government. If the people are willfully misled–and Jonathan Gruber makes clear the law was intentionally written to do just that–than this is an attack on American democracy.
Sometimes the partisan angle is actually accurate, and this is one of those cases. Conservatives have long warned of the arrogance of liberalism, centralized planning, and a do-gooder technocracy that knows better than you do what’s good for you. Trying to provide healthcare for more Americans is one of the most noble imaginable motivations, but if the process is fundamentally anti-democratic that’s just not good enough.
In recent years there has been no shortage of interest in the intersection of video games and economics, but usually the research focuses on MMORPGs which often include extensive in-game economies and also involve virtual property that can have substantial real-world value. CCP Games (the guys behind EVE Online) even have a full-time in-house economist.
That’s not what this article is about. Nope, I want to talk about an amazing little paragraph I came across in an early preview of Halo 5. Here it is:
Halo 5 also includes an unexpectedly awesome addition: in-game audio cues for enemy locations and weapon spawns. It’s subtle and not immediately noticeable, but it’s a brilliant mechanic that I didn’t even know I wanted. If your teammate gets sniped, in-game audio from his Spartan will announce where the bullet came from using classic callouts like “Red Street” and “Mid.” It will take time to learn these cues, but I think they’ll make playing solo a much more enjoyable experience. It reminds me of audio I’d hear watching a Major League Gaming match, which makes sense considering 343 recently hired a few very accomplished Halo professionals to work on Halo 5.
I agree that it’s brilliant, but I think it’s even more brilliant than the author realizes.
Here’s the problem: one of the things that makes team-based games fun is teamwork. But teamwork requires coordination. In particular–since communication in FPS games is strictly voice-based–it requires a common vocabulary. If you see a bunch of bad guys running towards one spot on the map, you might want to tell your team. In an incredibly fast-paced game, how do you do that? What do you call the particular area they are running towards? What do you call the particular area they are running from? No one has time to bring up their map and read off grid coordinates, so you need to have a commonly accepted set of place names. There’s a name for this problem. It’s called the coordination game, and it’s one of the classical scenarios in game theory.
Coordination games are games where everybody wins by cooperating, but there’s no reason or effective method to pick one particular solution. The classic example: which side of the road should you drive on? Joking aside, it really doesn’t matter if you drive on the right (America) or the left (the UK). Either one works perfectly fine, as long as everyone agrees on the same thing.
So what might be the most important aspect of this gameplay innovation is that it will solve the coordination problem by teaching all the players a single, accepted set of place names to describe the map. These place names tend to evolve on their own over time, by the way, but that process can be really long (since it takes time for various, vague alternatives like “the red house,” vs “the farm house,” vs. “grandm’a house”[ref]Not made up, by the way.[/ref] to compete with each other for universal acceptance.
Of course there are lots of unrelated problems with voice chat in video games, but I’m excited to see if this approach leads to a measurable increase in strangers coordinating with one another to try and win games, as opposed to just slinging racist and homophobic insults. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be an in-house analyst for a big video game publisher…
The Brookings Institution has an essay series on character and opportunity. As the site describes it,
This essay collection contains contributions from leading scholars in the fields of economics, psychology, social science, and philosophy. It provides a kaleidoscope of views on the issues raised by a policy focus on the formation of character, and its relationship to questions of opportunity. Can ‘performance’ character be separated from ‘moral’ character? Should we seek to promote character strengths? If so, how?
Definitely worth checking out.
I’m not going to answer how they can co-exist. Sorry to disappoint.
Actually, my answer is that I cannot completely know why suffering and evil exist. There’s plenty of good answers that I believe cover areas of evil, such as how evil can result from human moral freedom, suffering can bring about greater good, etc. but sooner or later we reach what we would call pointless suffering–suffering that seems to serve no purpose.
But today it dawned on me that labeling suffering as pointless is presuming knowledge a human being cannot possibly possess if God does indeed exist. I just finished reading the book of Job, and the deeper I grow in faith, the more God’s answer seems completely justified:
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
2 “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
3 Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
7 when the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Truly, who can fathom why God made the world the way he did? Can we see all ends and declare with utmost certainty that we know suffering is pointless, that God had no point in allowing evil? Logic is a powerful human engine, but even logic has its limitations. Can any one human being presume to see all ends and render judgment on whether suffering has a purpose or not?
What’s more, if we presume God exists, I would argue instead that no suffering can be pointless by definition. Any suffering we endure can be offered to the glory of God. I still don’t why suffering exists, but I now know what I can do with any and all suffering that comes my way. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said:
My personal trials have also taught me the value of unmerited suffering. As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.
It’s not an easy philosophy to carry out by any means. But I don’t think rejecting God makes the situation any better. In fact, I’d argue it makes it worse. Saying God doesn’t exist in response to the problem of evil doesn’t solve the riddle to why we suffer. It simply removes any right or basis we could possibly have for questioning why we suffer. Nature certainly doesn’t care one way or the other if we suffer and die.
The above may seem like an argument from ignorance. I don’t know, so I give up. Actually, I think it strikes a middle way: I don’t know, so I won’t presume to know in order to answer why we suffer. I think there’s much value in knowing what you cannot know, and if God exists, I definitely do not have the knowledge, either empirical or theoretical, to see all ends and explain why all suffering has ever happened and will continue to happen. But that ignorance doesn’t really bother me. As an atheist I said we shouldn’t invent answers where we simply don’t know, and I will continue to assert the same as a Christian. Better to say I don’t know than invent a false answer that presumes knowledge beyond my capacity.
As a final thought, I remember talking to a deacon who had given funerals for children. Parents often ask why their child died, and the deacon always answers, “I don’t know.” He said it’s the best answer because, truly, he doesn’t know, and trying to discern or invent an answer to a child’s death will do nothing but hurt already bereaved parents. I think that’s a good approach. There’s a real temptation for Christians to have an answer for all suffering because God is so often called to account. We should resist that temptation. Instead, let us weep with those who weep and remember that even the very wise, as Gandalf famously said, cannot see all ends.