Not Logical

Before I even knew what science fiction was, I was a fan of Mr. Spock.  Before I was obsessed with Jedi, Time Lords and Hobbits, I saw this man with pointy ears and I thought that he was hands down the star of the Star Trek.  That other, stockier guy in the yellow shirt, who was always over-acting had not yet caught my imagination the way the pointy-eared alien called a Vulcan did.  It wasn't just his look either, it was that he seemed so... well... alien, without really looking that much different.  Sure there were the ears and the general pointy-ness and that severe hairline, but what really grabbed me was the other-ness of a being who valued logic above all else.
There was something prophetic about the contrast of Spock and Kirk, Kirk was really the center of attention to be sure, but Spock somehow stole the show, by pointing out the basic flaws in Kirk's all too human emotional responses and decisions.  Even as a kid, when I still had very little idea what the word illogical meant, there was something about that basic drama and contrast.  In large part that was made more powerful by the personal gravitas of Leonard Nimoy, who has now left us and our illogical human world.
Nimoy was not your traditional leading man, he was sort of long and dour looking and had this sort of authoritative tone that made you feel like you were being lectured to by the Principal, but yet, for Spock, for a Vulcan (technically a half Vulcan), he was absolutely perfect.  You see how he defined an entire imaginary species in the fact that every actor who has played a Vulcan in the rather expansive Star Trek universe has essentially mimicked his manner and demeanor, right down to the raising of a pointy eyebrow.
Defining an entire imaginary species is no small feat for an actor, especially since the original series was all too short-lived.  If it wasn't for the peculiar survival of Star Trek most of us would probably only know Nimoy as a narrator and a voice on commercials. His voice was really his talent, not so much his looks, and that, in and of itself, in a world of show business that needs people to be pretty, is also a triumph for Nimoy.
It would be illogical for us to mourn a man who lived to the prosperous old age of 83, but somehow I know our terrestrial existence is going to be a little bit less sensible without him in it.

Peace be upon you Leonard.

God's Preference

Richard Rohr strikes again.  Maybe I should just start doing running commentary about the daily meditation, because a lot of days, when I read that thing first thing in the morning it just sort of "ruins" my whole day.  I have been wrestling for years with the idea that somehow, some way God doesn't seem particularly interested in winning.  It tickles around the edges of things when I hear athletes thank God for helping them win a game.  I think, "Wait a minute, God was with the losers too."  It gets a little more uncomfortable when I hear blood thirsty attitudes and unchecked vengeful hatred pouring out of people who claim to follow Jesus.  It gets downright gut wrenching when we actually go to war against some of the poorest people in the world, and churches are pretty much all on board.  I understand that pacifism is probably not a totally feasible option for everyone, but maybe we could support our country and the people who serve it better by not being cheerleaders for the warmongers.
At the heart of all these levels of discontent is the desire that I have to follow what Jesus taught and what Jesus did.  I understand that his example is not something that can be followed by an actual earthly nation, that's why the Kingdom of Heaven is described in the way that it is by all of his parables and teachings.  But it can be followed by actual people, and I think people that are going to worship him and call him Lord, ought to at least make a stab at being those people.
The discouragement of it all for me is the fact that we have stopped trying.  G.K. Chesterton said that the reason why Christendom fails is not because Christianity was tried and found lacking but because it was found difficult and never tried.  You can't run a secular nation based on what Jesus taught, it would be an insane and probably doomed place.  We would have to forgive our enemies, and not resist the evildoer, we would be overrun with criminals and the first time some hostile force attacked we would all just willingly die, while praying to God to forgive them.  Until God deals with the evil and the violence of human nature that is amok in the world, we simply aren't going to be able to live the way Jesus did.
Except that, here in America, we can, because we have freedom of religion, and we have a culture, a really rather wonderful culture that allows us to follow Christ as fully as any people who have ever sought to live out a Christian existence in the middle of an empire.  We have luxuries and privilege, we have the opportunity to speak a prophetic word and call our nation to be better.  I guess that's what I think we should be doing. I pray that we will.

Absence Makes the Nose Grow Longer

I have been thinking a lot about absence lately.  I find myself, as we come up on a decade of life without my brother, reflecting on all the things that are now missing from our family life.  I am also preparing to be absent from my normal life and routines for forty days on the Camino de Santiago.  Michele is getting pretty tired of being reminded by just about everyone, how hard that is going to be, even if they mean well and are trying to be supportive.  I am beginning to believe that my walking is going to be the easier part of this equation.
It is an anxious thing to think of all the things that won't happen if you're not there.  On the other hand, it's humbling to know that life is somehow going to manage to go on without you, which creates a kind of anxiety all it's own, especially when you consider your "professional" sphere of life.  No one wants to feel like they're easily replaced.  I keep trying to look at this pilgrimage with the widest angle that I can; thinking about it as a growing experience, where I will learn things about myself and my place in the various arenas of life through temporarily disappearing from them.
The voyage of self discovery angle is old and worn enough that it can easily be overdone though.  The vision quest, the walkabout, the various solitary pilgrimages made by real people and characters in books don't really deal much with the absences created by the departure of the hero.
I'm feeling a little bit more anxious about my absence than I am about journey.  I'm worried about how Michele and the kids are going to get along without me, though I know that they will.  I have though about stupid things like mowing the lawn and walking the dog.  And let's not even get into the church stuff.  I've got preachers lined up, and I trust in the ability of the leaders of this church, but man, there's a lot of stuff that could happen and I can't just swoop back from the Camino to save the day.  It's my issue really, I know it, it's all my ego and the part of me that wants to feel unique and irreplaceable.  That's what I have to grow through before I ever get on that plane.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus returns from his adventures to find that there are suitors infesting his house and courting his wife, interlopers trying to take advantage of his supposed demise.  Penelope has managed to hold them at bay, but they're still eating up the resources of the house.  I always kind of wondered why it was that he didn't just stroll through the door and tell them all to beat feet, but I am seeing that perhaps they are the first and last anxiety that needs to be conquered on a journey, they are the fears of absence, they are all the things that might go wrong.  And they need to be resisted and slain every bit as much as the sirens or the cyclops.
I think that's why so many epic journeys are made out of necessity, because of all the things that want to keep you from leaving your front door in the first place.  After all, Tolkien's Hobbits would not be half as sympathetic characters if it wasn't for the constant longing they have just to be back home.  If it wasn't for the sense of sacrifice of the journey, they would just be gluttonous little mercenaries who are really more trouble than they're worth.  It is the wrestling with absence that is the pathos of the story.
But what of absence that is permanent?  What of the heroes that never again cross the threshold of their homes?  Then as well, absence is the thing, the negative space of what perhaps should have been but was not.  What do we do with that?
What do we do when we must live through a tragedy instead of an epic adventure?
We spend our time poking about the edges of what might have been.  We must give that absence it's space, because to deny it is only to make it that much stronger.
My faith tradition assures me that the experience of the one who departs is rather more pleasant than the experience of the ones left behind.  As time goes by, I'm not sure I find that entirely comforting, especially as it relates to my absence from home while I'm doing this Camino.
If I 'm going to put the ones I care about through such grief, however temporary it may be, I'm going to have to do what I can to make it worthwhile.  And I suppose this is where it starts, acknowledging that all is not a brave adventure, admitting that I know about the vacancy that I will leave in my family, acknowledging that I am not as important as I may think I am, but I'm still important enough that I will be missed.  I need to remember that faithful waiting is as strong a thing as boldly walking, and appreciate all that I leave behind, not just because I love them, but because they love me, and thus there will be the presence of an absence when I am gone.

The Edge of the Inside

I might have mentioned that we got some snow, and I also might have mentioned that Southern Maryland tends to paralyze when snow like this happens.  So Ash Wednesday service was cancelled, which is a little bit of a bummer because I was going to talk about prophets, and prophets are interesting characters.  Richard Rohr has also been talking about Prophets, and has some interesting things to say, and particularly the thing about where a Prophet has to exist: on the inside of the system, but not in its shining, gooey center.
Intuitively, I know this is true, and rather difficult, because to be a Prophet means you're probably going to offend some people, but the offense is actually necessary, because the word is "from the Lord" whatever that means in your particular system.  I have a couple or three examples milling around in my head.  The first example is the blogosphere, you know where I'm writing and you're reading, and where occasionally people take a stab at saying Prophetic things. I'm thinking specifically about Christian bloggers writing about the Church.  Because of the interweb, our religious ghettos are dissolving in a big hurry.  As a Presbyterian Teaching Elder, I regularly read things by Richard Rohr (Roman Catholic, Franciscan), Brian McClaren (Emergent, post evangelical), Shane Claiborne (Radical Hippie Christian), Rob Bell (whatever the heck Rob is these days), N.T. Wright (Conservativ-ish Anglican), Martin Marty (Liberal-ish Mainline Protestant), Eugene Peterson (Patron Saint of modern Presbyterians), Rachel Held Evans (Millennial mouthpiece and target of a whole lotta hating), and a whole bunch of other churchy writers and bloggers who have a lot to say about who/what/how we are the church or what we should be as the church.  I find that I am able to hear prophetic things from all of these people in some moments, and not in others, it depends on whether or not I feel they're in my system, or whether they're shouting at my system from the outside.
Eugene Peterson is pretty much always in my system, he is a Presbyterian Pastor who served a church in suburban Maryland, when Eugene says something, I pretty much have to listen, even if it makes me want to tuck my tail between my legs and wander off in shame.  The other ones, I have a pretty finely tuned filter (though Rohr is getting through a lot more than I would have expected an RC type would).  I can see the places where they're talking about "our" church, as in something we are both a part of and both fully invested in, and both concerned for the overall welfare and sanctity of.  I can also see the places where they're pointing the finger at me from the outside, telling me all the ways that my way of being the church is just wrong and they have figured it out.  If that seems like a fine line, don't worry, I'm about to get more radical up in here.
Earlier this week, a couple of friends of mine, secular humanist types, or as they say, "heathen."  Noticed that Pope Francis made a comment about people who chose not to have children being "selfish."  I heard in the tone and some of the comments that defensiveness of people who have been prophet-ed without being a part of the prophet's system.  I made a joke about cats, which is a popular thing on the facebook, and I got a bunch of likes, which is a good feeling, and in digital world means you are "in."  I then mildly defended Francis, and made a comment that pointed out that Francis (I called him Frank for the sake of maintaining my "like"ability) is actually bringing the RC church along in a rather stellar, progressive fashion, but that you can't expect him to all of the sudden just stop being Catholic.
I have really appreciated Francis for his stand on economic justice and our need to develop global empathy, and to get back to loving our neighbors, but I know he's not going to come out and support birth control, or women priests, or gay marriage, it's a bridge too far, and it would lead to his prophetic voice being silenced and cast out of the community of the Roman Catholic Church.  You want to talk about ugly? See what happens when the Church has to forcibly get rid of a Pope, since it can't actually excommunicate him, pretty much the only option is murder, which has happened, both in reality and suspicion rather more than one might think.  Which is, of course a major danger for prophet types in general, if you get to be too much of a pest, speaking for God and all, they just off you, because they can't kill God.  And when people get mad enough about anything, they seem to just have to kill someone.
Which leads me to the most irritating bit of prophetic troubling: ISIS, which honestly, I hate with a righteous hatred, on several levels.  I hate that they are just brutal and barbaric, I hate that they claim to be serving god with their abhorrent violence, and I also hate that they are a mirror of so much of what has gone wrong with religion over the centuries.  Add to this the fact that we are so resistant to seeing the indictment of our own history, and I can't help but be nervous about even talking about this.
It comes back to the fact that Jesus told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  Don't get me wrong, when they lined up those Christians and beheaded them, I didn't even need to watch the video, it gave me a howling fit of rage and hate.  And that is the ultimate victory of evil, to get people who are trying to follow Jesus to forget all about what he said and did, and hate others and fear others, and eventually kill others. There have been many times where I let the hate win, where I just thought: "this is too much, those barbarians gots to be got, send in the bombs, let's go all shock and awe and see how they like that!"
I'm tempted to see violence as an answer.  Maybe it is, but it's not the Jesus way.  This doesn't mean I'm pointing the finger at everyone who wants to go in with guns blazing, I'm talking to the people in my system, the ones who are really trying to love God and love our neighbors.  We can't change ISIS, they won't even listen to other Muslims, they certainly won't listen to us.  We can't change the secular world, war is probably coming.  What we can do is "Rend our hearts, not our garments," as the Prophet Joel says.  Let your heart break for the brokenness of the world, but don't let it make you bitter, do not let it impoverish your ability to feel empathy, do not let the anger run you.
Listen to the voices of the prophets, the ones that tell us where cycles of violence will get us.  Look there for a solution that will not just lead to another generation of angry disenfranchised Muslims willing to fight to get back to the seventh century, "when things were better."  We can learn a lot from the darkness and evil of ISIS, we can see so many things that were festering in the secret cells of Al Quaeda and Hezbollah, now out in the bright light of day.  If you don't like it, let's try and turn and do something else, let's not just do the same things we've always done and expect different results.

A Gracious Sabbath

We just got our first "real" snow storm since we moved to Maryland.  Last year we got a few taps of maybe 4 or 5 inches, which caused the kids to miss a bunch of school, and me to realize that this area generally doesn't deal with snow quite like Western Pennsylvania.  Here snowstorms like the one that just dumped about 10 inches or so on Southern Maryland are rare enough that folks don't really plan for them, like you have to in colder climes.  But when they do happen, everything just shuts down.  Including Presidents day on Monday the kids have not seen the inside of a school in five days.  Shrove Tuesday Pancakes: cancelled, Ash Wednesday Service: cancelled.  We just had a discussion about having to get someone to plow the parking lot for the first time since 2009 (that's right, you can make it six years here without having to plow the lot).
The big slow down is kind of nice though, especially for us pastor types who are normally frantically trying to get a whole bunch of Lent stuff accomplished.  God has given us a break.  Do you ever think that perhaps there's something to the whole pattern of nature that's supposed to always keep us humble?  There's something about a good snowstorm that is a gentle reminder of our limitations.  Hurricanes and tornadoes and wildfires, may be a little less gentle reminders, but they should also give us a moment to reckon with our boundaries.
Boundaries are not always comfortable, but they are necessary.  Hebrew Scriptures build boundaries into the patterns of daily life, Sabbath, Jubilee, limits on how and how much one can acquire, rules that reigned in our own industrious thirst for more, they were probably some of the primary reasons why so many of God's people strayed off into idols, idols don't make limits, they want more every bit as much as we do, they're basically just our lust, greed, pride and maybe even malice, writ large and supernatural.
I am often struck by some of the things Jesus didn't do, as much as I am by the things he did.  He didn't press the advantage when he had the crowds (literally) eating out of his hand.  He didn't set up shop and build a temple or a synagogue of his own, he didn't start an Essene-like community where he could really train up some "good" followers.  He didn't defend himself against the eventual plot that led to his crucifixion, even though he knew it was coming, and had some resources at his disposal.
Limits create margins, and margins make ecological, social and spiritual sense.  If your life is booked solid, when do you connect with your kids or your spouse?  When do you pray?  If we are all about maximizing efficiency and productivity we reap to the edges of our fields and there is nothing left over to feed the widows and orphans (Bible stuff again).  Also, not leaving adequate hedgerows and natural vegetation along streams called riparian zones, leads to erosion which in the long run destroys the productive capacity of the soil and also degrades the water quality and even leads to large "dead zones" in the Chesapeake Bay, which messes with the blue crab fishery and means that a bushel sells for upwards of $200 and that's a crime (sorry, went on a bit a rant there).  It all starts with margins, or lack there of.
We have demonstrated that we can both intentionally and unintentionally effect the ecosystems of our planet, and a lot of the dire consequences are simply a result of our poor attention to margins.  But we also sin in this regard, we create a world where some have too much and others do not have enough.  I have read several articles lately that point out the rather plain mathematical reality that it would be cheaper to build free shelters for the homeless population and allow them to live there in warmth and safety than it is for us to just ignore them and leave them on the street.
But we don't do it, because, well, it's just not fair.
That logic is hard to get around with kids and adults alike, because "fairness" and justice are often not even living in the same neighborhood, and kindness appears to have taken a long vacation.
We are stuck in a dualistic nightmare of scarcity, where the idea of enough for all, even though it is, right now, a technological possibility, is something we're just not willing to engage, because some insist it's not fair, or it's a naive pipe dream.
But what it if it's not?
Yesterday afternoon and evening, after we had dug ourselves out of the driveway, we went to town for a few things, and burgers.  There was no one about, relatively speaking.  The normal hustle and bustle of this area had calmed; there was no traffic, no crowds, the roads were clear and dry.  Nature had imposed a limit and people had pulled back voluntarily, and I suspect for most fairly comfortably.  We had some shoveling to do, and a frozen pipe that luckily didn't burst, it hasn't been without a hassle or two, but there has also been blessing, and that's the thing about margins, they give you room to experience life.  They don't make it all sunshine and flowers, but they help us be better humans when we learn to live within them.

Now Where Do I Get My News?

Jon Stewart is leaving the Daily Show...  let there be a day of mourning, the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, because one of the few voices of truth is leaving his post!
Actually, no, it's okay, I'm going to miss him, but he has done something rather wonderful over the past 17 years, and I think it's okay for him to go and do something else now.  But Jon has caught lightning in a bottle.  He was the right guy, at the right time, in the right place, to invent something new: fake news that ended up being more honest than the "real" news.
In the beginning, the DS was about deliberately taking statements far out of context, taking absurd pictures or videos and inventing fake stories about them, it was funny, but it wasn't groundbreaking.  At some point, Stewart and his crew realized that they didn't actually have to make things up, the truth was absolutely as worthy of a good laugh as anything they could possibly make up.  They were pretty honest about this surprising reality.  In recent years, Stewart would often just look at the camera and say something like, "We used to have to make stuff up," after some politician, or more often a Fox News pundit said something so outlandishly false or hypocritical that all you really have to do is sort of roll your eyes and it's an instant joke.
Stewart is clever and likable and generally really seems to be puzzled by the ideological blindness of both the left and the right.  In opening our eyes to what is worthy of ridicule about the world, he also opens our eyes to the truth.  I don't think it was ever really an intentional move though.  I think they were just comedians looking for a laugh, and it turned out that there was more ammo out there in the regular old news than they had expected.
What the Daily Show did so very well was what Toto did in the Wizard of Oz.  Because of their sense of smell, they knew there was something fishy about how we were being told about the world.  We were too trusting of news anchors whose primary qualification was good hair, and we listened too guilelessly to pundits who were really trying to sell us something (sometimes the only thing to sell is fear).  The DS pulled back the curtain to show us the sad old man working the media machine.
Stewart's tone, and the tone of the show was always: "Look you guys, you can see how ridiculous this really is right?  You're not stupid, you can think for yourselves.  You know there's something wrong about how they're telling you this story."
In the process of doing this, in assuming that we can actually appreciate the humor in how ridiculous things have gotten, he showed that people could trust him.  I felt like I could trust him, because I knew where he was coming from, what his agenda was: to be funny.  I cannot say the same thing about straight news, any of it.  I feel like I have to parse out Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer, and I'm not even going to get started on the Fox crowd.  I either don't know what their angle is or I just plain don't like the angle they're taking.
The DS gives us an alternative to the Walter Cronkite, voice of God, presentation of the news.  We need that because the news media has proven to be untrustworthy (not evil, just unreliable) in their quest for the truth.  Jon was not questing for the truth, he was questing for a joke, he found the truth rather accidentally, or some might say organically.
The reason that I think it's all going to be okay, now that the little guy is leaving, is that the form never really relied that much on him.  He was/is not really the cult of personality type.  Nothing about him screams: authority figure, mostly it screams: funny guy.  The form for finding the truth while looking for laugh is out there now, the curtain is pulled back, it's just a matter of finding someone who can sit at the Daily Show desk, and the truth can continue to smirk at us.
It was Stewart's gift to be able to laugh at just about anything, especially himself.  For 17 years he has helped all of us do the same thing, and it has gotten us through some really tough times.
Thank you Jon.

A Series of Unusual Connections

Two things happened in the past week that drew attention some attention.  One was serious and terrible, the other was not important to the point of making me wonder why anyone was even paying attention.
Let's start with the stupid thing: Kanye West made a face and refused to shake Beck's hand when Beck's album won a Grammy for album of the year.  Kanye West is narcissistic to such an extent that his whole persona becomes a sort satirical, maybe even prophetic, statement about our own self importance.  Kanye is angry and petulant and never misses a chance to make everything about him.  Some say he's a genius, others say he's a boil on the posterior of society, and perhaps they're both correct in some form.  I don't really know, my involvement with hip hop and rap pretty much died when Ice Cube, Mr. Straight Outta Compton, started acting in kids movies.  I just don't know any more.  That said, I do know something about Beck, Beck is about my age, his career is now approaching venerable status.  His first really significant hit was a song called "Loser," and he has spent his career impressing music critics, if not necessarily mass audiences.  Beck is a total nerd, seriously, check this out:

That's Beck.  That's the 40 something father and dorky musician type that Kanye chose to snub.  I'm pretty sure Beck is used to being ignored and insulted by guys like Kanye, I'm pretty sure he's not crying over his Grammy right now because Kanye left him hanging.  The point is that Kanye looked like a complete tool for trying to go all hard on a person like Beck, whose career has contained enough self deprecating humor to make Kanye want to look up what self deprecating means.  If you're going to try and humiliate someone whose first major hit proclaimed that he was a Loser (in two languages no less), you're probably scowling up the wrong tree.

The general reaction to Kanye seems to be that he's becoming irrelevant, which is actually one thing that an artist like Kanye absolutely cannot afford to be.  If his antics become so predictable that the public just yawns and chuckles, he's absolutely becoming a man without a country.  If we're not shocked and offended, and we just think he's being a prig, he's lost all his edge and he's really good for nothing except being married to a Kardashian (and we know how that usually goes right?)

Now for the serious business: ISIS.  They burned a Jordanian pilot to death and put out a video of it.  Add it to a long list of atrocities that those clowns have committed since they first showed up.  It's really no worse than beheading journalists and committing mass torture and rape and generally being about as nasty as their imaginations will allow and then pretending like they're doing it all for Allah.  They're absolute scum, we have known that for a while.  The interesting thing is that in picking a Jordanian for their latest atrocity, they may have actually done the same thing that Kanye did; which is make people who might otherwise give him the benefit of the doubt (i.e. anti-western Arab Muslims) think that they're a bunch of jerks.  See Jordan is an Arab nation, a Muslim nation, but in the world of the middle east they're also one of the very few good guys.  Jordan is governed by a stable and generally benevolent monarch, King Abdullah II, here he is with the Queen of Jordan (who is rather well known for her humanitarian work):

Notice that they look pretty Western, and they are pretty well respected in the international community.  Jordan is generally a country that shelters refugees from Iraq and Syria and even Israel at times.  They are known for being moderate and helping out where they can.  In other words, especially in the screwy world of the Middle East, they're good people.  But they're not patsies, and they're probably not going to just sit there for the outrage, but they've got skin in the game, and they're the people who need to confront the situation, they're exactly the ones who can really work towards an end to this mess.

ISIS picking a fight with Jordan is like Kanye picking on Beck, it just seems wrong to pretty much anyone who isn't a complete psychopath.  But I have come to suspect that this is actually the way that the war against extremism is going to be won: we have to let them hang themselves.  We can't play the policeman of the world for very much longer, in fact, we probably should have stopped a while ago.  And this isn't one of my pleas for non-violence, because if anyone ever deserved a violent end, it's ISIS and Boko Haram, it's just that I think the reaction has to come from the collective outrage of humanity, not just from anything that can be explained away by the haters as American self interest.

This is just the sort of thing that will turn the tide.  As long as we play the role they expect us to play, extremists will win, they will be martyrs, and they will draw others to their cause.

Let's make them irrelevant instead.

Logical Connections

One of the things that seems absolutely rampant in the world today is a rather poor grasp of logic and rhetoric.  These are things that used to be an integral part of what was termed a liberal education.  It's rather ironic that, in an age where we are rapidly advancing our technical ability, we are losing the very skills that we need to remain in control of that technology.  We have this illusion of science as an exercise in numbers, data, experiments and analysis.  But one thing I learned rather clearly in my college physics class: writing up the lab report well is actually just as important, grade-wise, as coming to the "correct" conclusion.
But we tend to jump to conclusions.  We rather assume that conclusions are, well, conclusive, and often they are not at all.  Science needs to make headlines just like everything else these days, and headlines don't like things like standard deviations and margins of error.  They like even less going back and examining the premises on which a researcher establishes a chain of causation, and so, pretty much on a daily basis, you have some mind-blowing conclusion that is actually debunked by good old rhetorical analysis, not even further research, just a re-examination and re-framing of the data already collected.
The problem is that the general public doesn't always have the skill to conduct this debunking, because things are so technical.  I can tell you about all the data that 99 percent of climate scientists tell us points to a man-made climate change, but I don't actually sit around looking at that data myself (I'm terrible at statistics for one thing), but I can look at the statements and the summaries made by those scientists and put that together with the sort of conceptual scientific understanding that I do have, i.e. atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased over the period of time we have been paying attention to such things, average global temperature has also been increasing during the same time, there is a possible causal link between the two phenomenon.  Depending on whether I believe this is going to have catastrophic environmental consequences is a more complicated discussion, but the link is increasingly strong, and the consensus of the scientific community supports that.  Ten to fifteen years ago, there was less certainty, and it took time for more research to be done and more certainty to build, but there are still people who heard alternate explanations a decade ago holding on to those outdated ideas, and this insistent and deliberate ignorance becomes increasingly insane.
Speaking of insanity, the opposite of this phenomenon is found in the anti-vaccine movement.  Someone noticed that, all of the sudden, there were larger and larger numbers of children being diagnosed with autism.  This seemed to roughly coincide with an era where children were being vaccinated as infants against a variety of illnesses.  Someone came up with the idea that there was a causal link between autism and being vaccinated.  Since autism is a pretty unfortunate thing to have happen to a kid, a bunch of parents decided not to get their kids vaccinated.  Viola, welcome back measles.  As it turns out there was absolutely no evidence of the causal connection between vaccines and autism, but again people like to hold on to stuff they believed a while back.  As it turns out, a more likely scenario is that cases of autism have been fairly common in the human population going back a ways, but people with milder expressions of autism were just seen as shy, or anti-social, or just a little off, while people with more severe expressions were often institutionalized and the disorder was called something else.
We buy or don't buy these explanations largely based on our worldview (i.e. is it well accepted by people I agree with or not), for instance anti-vaxxers tend to be soccer mom types in affluent suburban type places, climate change deniers tend to be people invested in the oil industry and their Fox news mouthpieces, and Donald Trump (I make it a personal moral priority to disagree with anything Donald Trump says).  Those are stereotypes, yes, but they illustrate that, in many instances, acceptance or non-acceptance of scientific data is a largely social decision.
If your social circle is into large, off-road pickup trucks that get about 12 MPG, you're going to be a little less receptive to someone who tells you to get a Prius to save the polar bears (even if you think polar bears are way cool).  You're just not going to accept the rather complicated relationships between more C02 in the atmosphere, caused by your gas guzzler and the melting of the polar ice caps.
Likewise, if you're one of those parents who only feeds your kids organic yogurt and bean sprouts, you might be pre-disposed to be a little suspicious of a doctor shooting all sorts of vaccines into your little pink baby, you might take more convincing.  But the flaw is not in the data, the flaw is in the way it's presented.  The reality of the world we live in is that everything needs a good PR campaign.  It's not good enough just to do the science, you have to be able to sell the results.

Benchmarks

Weather and schedule have not been conducive to my training regimen.  I have been getting out at most three times a week, sometimes as few as once, for a walk that is pleasant and moderately challenging, but far from long enough.  I have been carrying the pack for about three weeks, but yesterday and today, I left the pack home.  Yesterday, it was brisk and in the low 30's, today it was near 70 degrees (take that meteorologists).  Today I was walking with a ticked off eleven year old, and we were setting a good pace, I could tell by the fact that we kept passing people (because the park was more crowded than it generally is in February) and because I was really getting winded, sans extra weight.  I've clearly got some work to do over the next two months.  I'm going to have to get serious about my diet again, I'm going to have to stop making so many excuses for not walking. I'm going to have to stop a lot of the self-delusion that led me down the primrose path to diabetes mellitus.
I've got a really long walk to get ready for.  I've got most of the gear, I've got plane tickets, but today I found out that I've definitely gone downhill fitness-wise since last summer.
In a related vein, I was talking this morning at church with someone about the spiraling nature of the spiritual journey, how your general sense of well being and connectedness to God can kind of ebb and flow, and how it's important to try and grow through it, that maybe you take a couple steps forward and sometimes a couple steps back, and how you generally have to retrace some ground you have maybe already covered, or so you thought.
You can compare it to exercise for sure.  It's not much of a stretch, but what it rather crucial to note in both cases is that your self discipline is ultimately going to fail.  It's not being defeatist, it's being realistic to admit that if your diet, your exercise regimen, or your prayer life is based solely on your own ability to buckle down, you're going to fail, and you're probably making yourself miserable in the process.
Here's a crooked spiral for you: I know I'm going to spend almost 40 days walking, I know I've got to prepare for that, meaning that I need to shed a few pounds and get my body in shape and my boots broken in.  At the same time, I know I'm going to spend almost 40 days walking, and that absolutely is going to get me in shape, I'm going to probably drop at least 10, if not 15 pounds, by the simple virtue of the fact that I will be burning nearly 8000 calories a day, and most likely, while I will be eating well, I will probably not be consuming 8000 calories a day.  It's the most basic of math, but that math is used by yours truly to justify not getting a jump on that whole getting in shape thing, which is absolutely going to bite me in the rear end, if I don't knock it off.
See, I know that the first three or four days on the camino are going to be unpleasant.  I am in no way looking forward to the 10 km ascent of the Pyrenees, which happens on the very first day out of St. Jean.  I am not looking forward to the sheer exhaustion that comes as my body learns to process everything more efficiently and without so much waste.  I know all of this is going to happen, and no amount of preparation is really going to stop it.
So, the logic goes, why bother, why delude yourself into thinking that you can just work your way through that nonsense in advance? You can't, the Camino is going to hurt you in the beginning, and then your body will adjust, or so that's the story.  What I'm trying to do is not avoid the pain, it's to avoid the breakdown.  I'm going to have to fight dehydration, which I recognize has happened to on both of my recent backpacking trips, I'm going to have to really stretch out my walks, double, triple, maybe even quadruple the length, by the ides of March.  It needs to happen so my body doesn't flat out let me down.  I'm not as bad as I was four years ago, but I'm not as good as I was two years ago.  I have lost my Pennsylvania hill climbing lungs, and I've picked up some "we eat out too much" baggage around the middle.
This is the benchmark at two months until departure: I've got some work to do.

Fifty Shades of Wrong

I will not be going to see Fifty Shades of Gray, but not for the reason you probably think.  I don't have any problem with consenting adults doing "things."  I don't really mind people making movies about consenting adults doing "things," even if those "things" are a little outside what might be considered healthy sexuality.  I think our general attitude towards having people do naked things in movies is a little ridiculous and hypocritical.  Case in point: a PG-13 rated romance where two people are obviously having sex (extramarital sex at that), but because of well placed arms and shadows, no nipples or other pudenda are visible, it avoids an R rating (and let's not get started on the amount of violence that can avoid being "adult content.") See also erectile dysfunction medication advertisements that are on during almost any type of programming imaginable and have led to some uncomfortable questions about why your heart needs to be healthy enough for sex from my kids.
I'm not a big proponent of pornography, but for reasons that have very little to do with sex and more to do with the destructive cycles of addiction it produces.
I have watched and found merit in movies like Basic Instinct, Henry and June, Shame, even Last Tango in Paris (definitely not recommending that one) and others that flirt with or receive an NC-17 rating.  I'm not a prude when it comes to movies.  But I'm not a big fan of Fifty Shades of Gray.
A couple of years ago, when several of the women in my life were reading Fifty Shades, I was at least curious enough to sort of skim through it.  One of the skills I learned in seminary was how to read and assess things really quickly, deciding on merit and highlights what "needed" to be learned.  I can "process" many works of non-fiction in the span of about an hour, which I will often do and then decide to go back and actually sink myself into reading it.  I did this with Harry Potter, and realized that Hogwarts was a story and a world that I definitely wanted to get into, likewise with the The Hunger Games.  However, Twilight and Fifty Shades, not so much.  The decision, with fiction, is largely aesthetic, how do the snippets of the story make me feel, does it seem worth the investment of time and emotion that it takes to actually enter the story, and is the story a place I want to enter?  Is it a safe story (like Harry Potter or Narnia)?  If there are dangers, will those dangers make my life appreciably better for having risked them?  Will they challenge my assumptions in a way that allows me to grow, or are they simply going for the iconoclasm of shock value?
My opinion of Fifty Shades of Gray was that E.L. James was just enough of a writer to be dangerous, and not a good enough writer to be trusted.  Her narrative was flawed, her characters were ridiculous at best and psychotic at worst.  The so called romance at the core of the books was far too abusive to be considered healthy, and even the much ballyhooed sex scenes were actually not all that sexy.
Fundamental problem number one: Christian Gray is a nightmare waiting to happen.  Seriously, I want to tell every woman that I care about even a little, if you meet a person like Christian Gray do not even give him your phone number.  If for no other reason than the simple fact that he has so much wealth and power that you will never ever, contracts be damned, be able to tilt the power dynamic to neutral, which is where it really should be in a genuine loving relationship.  In addition to being inexplicably rich, the man is a sociopath with a history of being sexually abused and manipulated, which he apparently has not managed to properly process.  The fact that he can only be aroused by inflicting pain on another person, is absolutely not okay, it is not just a peculiar sexual peccadillo, it is a sign of serious dysfunction.
Fundamental problem number two: Anastasia is a prototype for the type of woman that abusers go after: young, shy, naive, unsure of herself, and yet also attractive.  Her methods of dealing with Mr. Gray are also fairly prototypical victim-type rationalizations: he really loves me deep down, I really love him deep down, he's really just a wounded bird that needs me. Oh yeah, and she really likes all that his money can buy, and he's really attractive... and a host of other really bad reasons to stay with a creep.  She is not a strong female character who knows what she wants, she is a young girl who is seduced by a wealthy, attractive and older man, who basically forces her into signing a paper that says he's allowed to tie her up and rape her, you know, under certain conditions.
Fundamental problem number three: This story can only possibly have a "happy" ending in a very poorly rendered narrative.  For actual love to emerge from the primordial stew of abuse, is not just a stretch that requires a bit of imagination and suspension of disbelief, it is a positively toxic story in a world where rape and violence towards women is absolutely an epidemic. Framing this is a story as a unconventional, but ultimately romantic relationship is a task that has no place in a world where one of the biggest stories of the year was an NFL player punching his fiancee in an elevator, and where a girl has to literally carry a mattress around her college campus to get the community to acknowledge that she was raped and it's not freaking okay.  I'm not even going to go into what happens to women and girls in other parts of the world, because my blood pressure is already high enough.
The core issue is not telling the story of a dysfunctional, abusive relationship in graphic detail.  I can see the need for that sort of cathartic process, the problem is that it's being presented as a romance, with a "happy" ending.
Yes, there is lots of kinky stuff out there, and no, it's not always bad, but a lot of times it is, a lot of times it's broken and painful and a lot of times it absolutely eats people alive.
Saying that love can happen in that sort of a mess is not acknowledging the "gray areas" in human relationships, it is presenting a delusional version of a very deep truth: love conquers all.  Love does conquer all, but domination and power are antithetical to love.  Yes, antithetical, a destructive opposite force, which means that if you think this sort of thing is going to lead, in the end to a healthy relationship you are delusional.
I have heard the apologists for the BSDM world say that this stuff is perfectly healthy, but what I know about the human soul tells me otherwise.  Dominance and submission are ways that people sometimes express their sexuality, however there is a twisting and a disconnection, these are ways to gratify an impulse that has little to do with true intimacy, people wear masks and assume a different personality. They want to be something other than what they are, and they indulge in a fantasy, but that fantasy allows them to get away from themselves. For instance: a powerful politician takes the submissive role and a prostitute dominates him, in truth he still has all the power, and he can stop the role playing anytime he wants. If that's the case, I suppose you're welcome to have your kinks. But be aware that the falseness of the form is indeed pornographic, it's no more real than the absurd scenes involving buxom and bored women who answer the door in lingerie and seduce the pizza delivery guy.
But what worries me about the major publicity the book received and now the movie is getting, is that it tends to trivialize and smooth over behavior that is often not voluntary or consensual.  In the real world people who are dominated, abused and perhaps even enslaved cannot just walk away or change their minds.  This sort of relationship rarely has all the carefully placed safeguards that James has used to make her story less abjectly terrifying. The dark side of what probably would occur in reality between Anastasia and Mr. Gray makes me more than a little uneasy.  Just because you can tell a story where perversion and abusive behavior turns out okay, doesn't mean we ought to think it will regularly turn out that way, any more than the fact that some people survive cancer means that everyone should want to get it.

Lists, Lists, Lists

The interweb loves it some lists.  Every day I read at least several lists of what parents should do or not do, what churches should do or not do, what our government should do or not do, what people who want to get in shape should do or not do.  I admit it, I have gotten to the point where I will "fast forward" through all of the plain text and just read the bold printed or bullet points.  Assuming that I at least have some interest in the subject dealt with by the list, and that I am reasonably curious about, oh say, "five reasons why Amish albinos are finding a home in post-evangelical coffee house churches,"  I'm probably just interested in the five reasons, because you should be able to tell from the bold print whether the writer is wearing a tin foil hat.
I like quadrilateral diagrams even better than lists so here's one that roughly describes the impact of most of the lists I read:

You'll notice that there is only one quadrant that is like to produce actual change (bottom right), and that is only a big maybe.  There are of course, sweet spots in the matrix, places where you can overcome the overall quality of the quadrant, but these are going to be very site specific, and most likely nowhere near the specific experience that generated the list in the first place.

Case in point, on a list of things that pastors need to do to maintain their personal well being, is the observation that many pastors do not have friends outside the church and this contributes to being enmeshed in whatever dysfunction is going on in the church at any given moment.  True enough, but it presents different problems for everyone.  For me personally it is rooted in the fact that I have never had that many friends, and the friends I do have tend to be based on context.  I'm just not a big "reach out and touch someone" sort of person, and apparently neither are the people who I make friends with, so unless we have some sort of good excuse, we aren't just calling each other up to chat.  This means that my friendships tend to be episodic.  I can get together with someone I haven't seen in years and have a good time and remember why it was that we were friends, and even really enjoy catching up on all that has happened in the intervening years, but everyone, including me, is always moving around, and it just doesn't hold, and I have absolutely no idea what to do about it.  Black Francis, the lead singer of one of my favorite bands (The Pixies), was being interviewed for a documentary that was made around the band's reunion after a long separation.  Rumors had it that they were mad at each other or that there was some trauma that lead to them not talking to each other for a long time, he said something like, "No, that's kind of just who we are." Meaning that they were fine, and didn't actually hate each other, they just weren't all that enmeshed with each other, and they each had their own thing going and they were fairly okay with just kind of drifting.  I can totally identify with that.

Some of the list ideas for winning friends and influencing people: spiritual directors/counselors (great, a "friend" that you pay to listen to you), people outside the church (I'm an introvert, did I mention that I don't make friends that easily? And that I generally need some context, like, I don't know, a church).  Things that work for others in my situation probably will not work for me, and thus the list suggesting that I fundamentally alter a long standing facet of my personality is not going to help me out very much.

I don't mean to whine or get defensive, just trying to be realistic and honest about the prognosis. Fortunately, I have been me for pretty much my whole life, and I have learned how to deal with that unfortunate reality.  So I will still read these lists, and I might chew on any wisdom that I find therein, but I'm not going to swallow it all.

Lists can be informative, and sometimes wise, maybe even helpful, but they tend to over simplify or get way too nit-picky.  It is a fundamental existential problem that we never know exactly what shoes another person is standing in, it's kind of sad, but it is also one of the reasons why the world is a wonderful and strange place, where we constantly encounter others who show us new things, just maybe they could slow down with the lists.

Blinded by Science

The idea that science is going to save us from all of our troubles is a flat out myth, and perhaps a dangerous one at that.  There is a point where knowledge ceases to avail and technology will not always come riding to the rescue.
But that doesn't mean we should just give up on the pursuit of knowledge or just stall our advancing technology for fear that we might cross some invisible boundary.  As of right now, there are not only very smart people at work in laboratories and workshops thinking up new ideas and advancing old ones, there are also equally intelligent sorts thinking about the ethical implications of those developments.
We perhaps have believed the lie of certain movies and other fictions that really groundbreaking science is always impeded by ethical considerations. The idea that the technical ability of humankind might somehow go too far is a major theme of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was originally published in 1818.  So, yeah, not exactly a new idea.  Oppenheimer famously had some second thoughts when the Manhattan Project finally made the bomb, and that has been, I think the rather dramatic test case for humans doing science-type things they probably would have been better off not doing.  It is unfortunate that so many of our greatest advancements in knowledge come in the pursuit of killing people.  The ability to split the atom was a major jump forward in many areas of scientific exploration, most of which had nothing to do with vaporizing cities.
We just had to go back and do a little reverse engineering ethics-wise.
Now you find ethics considerations on the front lines of scientific exploration, sometimes even ahead of them.  Cloning, stem cell research, genetic engineering, things we're not entirely proficient in actually doing yet, all have had the ethical brakes applied at some point or another, and this is not a problem for science, rather it is an important discipline in order for science to do it's best work.
The problem is that large numbers of people do not understand ethics any better than they understand science, and people tend to fear that which they do not understand (A+ again Mary Shelley).
So we have anti-vaccine people, who have imbibed a cocktail of pseudo-science and fear, and have allowed the measles to be a thing we have to worry about again.  All things considered, I am fairly grateful to have grown up in a world where smallpox and polio are no longer things that happen to kids, and I'm a little offended as a human being that people have chosen to open the door for those things to make a comeback.  I heard yesterday that they have started clinical trials on an Ebola vaccine in Liberia, it's a live virus vaccine, where they take a weakened and inert strain of the virus and inject it into a person and it teaches their immune system how to fight it.  It sounds really dangerous right?  Injecting a deadly virus into yourself?  But it's not, one of the doctors said there was zero chance that the vaccinated individuals would contract Ebola (from the vaccine, they still live in the middle of an active outbreak).
The long term prognosis of vaccination programs is total eradication of certain diseases.  In other words a world where zero people die of Ebola, or Smallpox, or encephalitis caused by the Measles.  Unless people are too afraid to get vaccinated.
In the UK today they are voting on a technique that will allow people with a family history of mitochondrial diseases to use a form of in-vitro fertilization that will weed out the genetic defect.  Mitochondrial diseases are passed from mother to child, and can afflict carrier families with all sorts of things from diabetes to MS, cause deafness, blindness, early death, reproductive failure, and a long list of other rather unpleasant things. And there is a way that these inter-generational afflictions can be removed from the gene pool.  It's a little more complicated than just getting a shot, to be sure, and it involves messing around with human embryos and basically "creating" for lack of a better word, people with genetic material from three parents.
There are a few arguments against such monkey business, however, as someone who has to live with borderline diabetes, if I could not worry about that because of just a smidgen of some genetic material from another mother, I would be in favor of it.  I am inspired by people who make the most of disabilities, who live with MS or other such incurable diseases, who get around despite being blind or deaf, that's great, but you know what else would be great?  If they didn't have to deal with that stuff in the first place.
The neat thing about this is that it doesn't involve selecting out "undesirable" embryos, it involves making the embryos healthier.  It's not aborting a baby with a genetic defect, it is creating babies without that one particular defect, and once you break the genetic chain you don't have to keep doing it generation after generation.
Other objections seem to sound like the rather strange question of whether a clone has a soul, which is not really a scientific problem, but a pseudo-religious question.  I say pseudo-religious because it's not something I really have many worries about.  I guess the God I believe in doesn't have a shortage of unique souls to give to living creatures, even if they were made in a test tube.
But see that is where this line between ethical considerations and aesthetic and superstitious considerations gets a little blurry.  If someone considers a clone, or a baby with three genetic parents an abomination against God's will, well I suppose they're going to prefer the possibility of someone and their children and their children's children living with MS, though I suspect if it was in their family the abomination line would move considerably.
And that's the real spiritual sickness, it's called "not my problem" syndrome, and the only vaccine for it is called empathy, which is something we seem to lack in the modern world, and it is something that science really can't give us.

The Real Deflate-Gate

It's the day after.  The "Big Game" is all over and done with.  The Seattle Seahawks managed to have victory snatched away by a player that no one had ever heard of before yesterday.  I can't say I really cared one way or the other about the game.  There wasn't really an underdog to root for, the Seahawks were the defending champions (front runners), the Patriots are, well, the Patriots (cheaters, evil empire).  It was Tom Brady (too pretty for a man) and Bill Belichick (Mr. grumpy-pants) against Russell Wilson (likeable but clueless guy) and Pete Carrol (not very likeable but clueless guy), Richard Sherman (really good corner who talks too much) against Darrelle Revis (really good corner who doesn't talk hardly at all), the line on the game was a push, even Vegas (who always pays attention) couldn't figure out which team was better... it's a good thing that they wear uniforms (especially Vince Wilfork), or else you couldn't tell them apart.
But it still had all the hype and all the trappings, and I made some really good ribs (low and slow cooking is the key).  Nationwide gave us a commercial about kids dying for some reason (seriously that thing was wrist-slittingly maudlin).  Budweiser gave us yet another super-cute commercial about a puppy and his clydesdale friends (what that has to do with watery beer, I have no idea, but hey, puppies!).  Katy Perry will haunt my nightmares with giant robotic tigers, glassy chess piece people and singing sharks and beach balls (I wonder how many hungry kids could have eaten for the cost of that stage show alone).  I found out that Missy Elliot is still alive (ambiguous about that knowledge), also that Lenny Kravitz can still hold a guitar and pretend to play it while looking very handsome indeed (very slightly pleased about that).
I am left this morning with an empty feeling (and an unusual penchant for parenthetical statements).
I'm just feeling kind of deflated (well played Andrew Luck).
Even the news of marmot-based weather forecasting has failed to rouse my spirits (six more weeks if you care).
I really have most of the same questions and feelings about the Super Bowl that most people have:
Why didn't they give Marshawn (Beast Mode) Lynch the ball on the one yard line with the game on the line? (See Pete Carrol, clueless guy)
Why isn't it Superbowl IL in Roman Numerals? (Because of the rules of roman numerals, where you can't subtract I from L, only from X or V and you can only subtract X or V from L or C, etcetera).
Why was Missy Elliot involved in the halftime show? (Got nothing on that one).
Why does Chris Collinsworth get paid to talk about football games?  (Life is not fair in any way shape or form).
Why did we spend so much time talking about deflated balls? (Because we want life to be fair in any way shape or form).
Why do we invest so much of our energy into a game? (????)