Theology
I find it interesting how people will argue about various religious details at length, but very rarely talk about the overall theology that guides their thinking. Maybe they have one but it operates unconsciously. Or maybe they are just repeating bits of things they’ve heard, which may well be contradictory. This is no way to conduct business.
A couple of the core questions that need to be addressed: what is the deal with humans? And why is God interested in us? I am sticking to Christian worldview here; clearly the conversation could be much broader. Here is my latest thinking.
When you ask the question “is man inherently good, or evil?”, most Christians will start talking about Original Sin and quote verses on our falleness. Though they are right about the corruption, to take this as the starting point inevitably leads to a situation where the foundation of God’s relationship to man is one of pity. Why does God care about us? There is no real reason, we got lucky so you better not blow it. What is his purpose with us? Not sure, just do what he says and don’t rock the boat.
Yet if you go back to the beginning, our creation was billed “very good”. The Fall is a transition to a corrupted state; the original state was uncorrupted. This sets up a different dynamic, one of restoration. Like a piece of defaced artwork, the original design was subverted. God is the artist, and he wants his pieces back the way he designed them. It adds intention to the relationship.
In addition, it decouples God’s interests and intentions from our own. Restoration is not about us; it is about God fulfilling his intentions. God is jealous, and he doesn’t appreciate having his stuff messed with. Imagine God paints the Mona Lisa, and she later decides to grow a moustache. You better believe the paint thinner is coming out, regardless of Mona’s opinion on the matter.
Fortunately, God’s restoration is ultimately in our best interest. He does love us and care, and will give every opportunity to get with the program. But do not be fooled; if you insist on standing in front of the steam roller, you will be flattened. There is a larger agenda at work. Do not mistake being a beneficiary of God’s work for God answering to you.
This touches directly on prayer as well, and gave me a new lens on the below comic. Where did we get the idea that God would be interested in doing something just because we said he should? It is laughable that we might choose a deity based on whether they complied with our wishes. Being fallen, shouldn’t getting our way be cause for suspicion more than anything?
Blowing people’s minds
I’ve noticed an interesting dichotomy among people. Some accept things at face value, while others have a need to fit anything new into their existing mental framework. Two examples: I have a t-shirt with a design of a guy pointing a gun at his shadow, and I have some Fivefingers shoes that are sort of like slippers with separated toes and a rubber sole. The first group will say things like “I like your shirt” or “that’s interesting” or “are those comfortable?”. The other group will say “what is it?”. For the shirt I might say “it’s just artwork” and for the shoes “they are shoes”. But this is not enough. “But what does it mean”? “But what ARE they? Are they water shoes?”. The intensity of the questioning is a little disturbing sometimes. I can tell that the uncertainty actually bothers them. I wore the shoes to the airport and they pulled me aside for special screening because the guard could get his mind around the idea that they weren’t exactly socks and weren’t exactly shoes (his manager was annoyed and apologetic).
Dude, that ruler rules!
I like language. Remember as a kid you would have measure things in class, and would get out your trusty ruler? Then you got older, Bill & Ted had their excellent adventure (somewhere in there), and suddenly if something “ruled” it was pretty awesome. Yet the rulers we had at school were pretty much the opposite of awesome. To be a ruler that does not rule seems like some kind of karmic punishment.
Anyway, I gave it some thought and became pretty pleased with myself. As a device, the ruler took measure of things; it was the standard that ordinary items were assessed against. As a person in charge, the ruler is the one who makes the rules. That is to say, they set the standard of behavior, and evaluate cases to determine when an act fails to measure up. Now this is just amateur etymology, and you probably could have come up with the same thing if you thought about it. But I’d encourage you to keep the mental association between measurement and justice/leadership/administration. The qualities that define a good “ruler” are strikingly similar across both meanings.
Prison? Hilarious!
Sometimes at work they will have a “lockup” in the atrium, where the police show up and will “arrest” the person of your choosing if you make a suitable donation to charity. The person then either has to serve their time for an hour, or can bail themselves out by making a similar charitable contribution. Yeah, I get that it is for charity and all in good fun, so it seems touchy to complain about it. But the last time they did this it hit me… the idea of getting locked up seems funny to us precisely because it is not part of our daily reality. It works for the well-off, mostly white banking audience. But I suspect there might be a different reaction if you tried to run a similar event in the hood, where the same cops doing the fake lockup had maybe done a very real lockup just the night before. Imagine playing “concentration camp” with some Jews shortly after WW2. I really don’t want to become so humorless, but the idea of an event that is only funny because we aren’t usually on the business end of the cops just seems a little backward to me.
What’s wrong with the Church
Nah I’ll save this one for later.
Motorcycles and Zen
In college, I was very interested in Zen. “Zen and the Art of Archery” was one of my favorite books, and I quoted it in probably 25% of the papers I wrote. I remember learning about “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, but I had zero interest in motorcycle maintenance so I never got around to reading it. So fast forward 12 years, and now I have a motorcycle and the book seemed to capture 2 of my interests! Lo and behold, it turns out the book is not actually about zen at all, or even motorcycle maintenance really… it is just this dude’s kinda sub-standard philosophy! I feel like some slice of my mental bandwidth has been wasted for over a decade. W.T.F.
Sometimes I think I could create an interesting chronology of my life by laying out a series of outrages. One of the first was when I begged and begged mom to buy me Mrs. Butterworth’s maple syrup… she finally gave in, and when we got it home I said “ok, turn it on”. How was I supposed to know it didn’t talk and move around like in the ad? Can’t trust anything… This zen and motorcycle thing feels kind of similar.
Actual motorcycle experience
So, more interesting than the last section, this summer I learned how to ride a motorcycle and bought one of my own. If you are considering following a similar path, by all means take the MSF class at your local community college! It was perfect for a total beginner; they provide the bike, and start you out from absolutely rock-bottom basics. It is 2.5 days of instruction, mixed between classroom and the field course.
The classroom portion is very repetitive and boring, a clear case of instructional design principles gone wrong. Some of the information turned out to be actually helpful, but you don’t realize it until you are actually out and can feel it for yourself on the bike. If you are reading this blog I suspect you will have a similar reaction to the classroom portion as me, but tough through it because the riding is a different story.
Getting on the bikes for the first time is a mix of exhilaration and mild terror. Going slow is the hardest kind of riding, but you are too scared to go fast, so you wobble all over the place and hope you can remember how to stop. At first you just go straight and use your feet in a “power walk”, then going on the bike’s power, later working your way up to circular laps and weaving through cones.
More elements are continually added (shifting, turn signals, weaving), and I was always just on the edge of cognitive overload. It is hard to worry about using your signal when you are hoping not to tip over. For awhile I had a bad habit of grabbing the front brake with a bit of a downward twist, which also opened the throttle. But you can’t let it get in your head, the less you think about what you are doing the smoother it goes. By the end we were doing emergency stops and figure 8s in a tiny box, and I was feeling pretty confident.
Getting home to my own bike was quite a shock. They taught us on little 250cc bikes that you could toss around pretty easily. Mine is a 1050cc, and I found out pretty quick that you can’t ride it the same way as the little guys. It is also very different being on a real street compared to a glorified parking lot. My first ride through the neighborhood I was in the middle of the street and didn’t even think about looking at the controls or in my mirrors. I passed a woman pushing a baby carriage, and was paranoid that I would run them down.
It is crazy that you can get a learners permit and legally be on the road by simply taking a written test at the dmv without having any road experience. Even with the MSF class I was somewhat hazardous. Fortunately I was able to practice a good bit on the back roads, and now am able to get around with a pretty good degree of safety. The acceleration is amazing… I can go as fast as I care to go, as far as I dare to open up the throttle. You experience the road in a different way; every bump is felt, you can smell the air and the oil on the road and flowers and anything really… What has surprised me the most is how other riders will wave, but pedestrians and people in cars will give dirty looks, even when you are friendly and wave at them. My bike is not obnoxiously loud, and I am not popping wheelies or doing anything stupid. Oh well, screw them I suppose. It starts to make sense why bikers tend to stick together.
Random Stuff
For whatever reason, people haven’t been seeing me recently (visually). If there is a chance of someone stepping into my way or turning around and bumping into me, I will definitely happen. I’ve gotten to where I can see it coming and get out of the way, but what the heck. Maybe I need neon clothing.
Counseling… is not for me.
If someone says “I think that answers my question”, and the answerer says “Excellent”, are they saying that their answer was excellent? What, precisely is it that managed to excel?
The post office in the basement of our building used to have a stamp vending machine. It was recently removed, replaced by a sign that says “you can buy stamps at blah blah, 50c a piece”. Stamps are 44c currently right? Is it even legal to sell stamps for more than the face value?
There are some who do horrible things, but seemingly feel no effect. All actions leave their scars; what becomes calloused is not the abused area, but the pain receptors. It is a form of leprosy, the soul is still damaged even if the pain is not felt.
Scams – If you really hate a particular musician, you could buy up all the tickets to their show, and then refuse to be searched at the door, and they have to refund your money. They would end up with no ticket revenues, but still have the expense of renting the area, all the promotion, etc. Evil genius.
Health Care
This is the number 1 issue that is pissing me off right now. I realize that it is not my problem to solve, and no one will listen anyway, so my goal is to lay out my points here and then leave it alone. I am coming to believe that with our democracy, we get exactly the kind of leadership we deserve. When the citizens are ignoramii, one can hardly expect the government to consist of wise statesmen. So I will say my piece and then just watch.
First – if you believe that there is nothing wrong with the current health care system, then have the balls to come out and say so. If you are going to protest the democratic plan, then you have to either come up with an alternative, or give your affirmation to the current system. Seeing as no alternatives are being presented, I have to conclude it is the former. But if that is your position, then you need to answer why it is acceptable that we pay more than other nations, get worse results, and have so many people being ruined by medical bills. If you are going to block reform, you de facto prefer the status quo, right? That is fine, but own up to it and be ready to accept accountability.
Second – Insurance is NOT a “value-add” industry. Meaning, a pool of money is collected from a broad set of people, and redistributed based on medical need. The amount of money is fixed; the industry does not add to the pool, it can only shrink it based on administrative costs and the profit margins required for investors in the private companies. Because there is no value add, THE VIRTUES OF COMPETITION DO NOT APPLY! There is no such thing as insurance innovation, there is no “better mousetrap”. All you can do is reduce administrative costs as much as possible. And as a result, when you have 2 insurance companies splitting the pool, you have duplicate administrative costs (two buildings, two CEOs, two advertising campaigns, etc). Make the companies private, and not only are their administrative costs, but you also have to build in a profit margin to keep the investors happy. HAVING DUPLICATIVE ADMINISTRATIVE FUNCTIONS IN ADDITION TO REQUIRED PROFTS CAN ONLY INCREASE COSTS!!!! One can legitimately argue over how efficient a single gov program would be, but a single gov plan has huge advantages coming out of the gate (which I don’t believe a set of multiple private plans could ever overcome, but that can be debated).
Third – All the talk about “revenue neutral” and reform costs relative to GDP are a red herring. The reality of what needs to happen is somewhat “socialist”, which is why people won’t come out and talk openly. But the idea is that the gov takes on health care instead of private industry, and as a result the gov spends a lot more than currently. But since industry no longer is paying for private coverage, you could easily institute taxes to reclaim a similar amount of spend and fund the more efficient program. Yes, the government is spending more money than before, but they can also collect more since industry gets a huge gift by no longer paying for employee coverage. At a national economy level, it IS revenue neutral. But to insist that the gov not spend more than they do currently hamstrings the whole thing; the whole point is that healthcare is paid for centrally. No one thinks it is socialist for the gov to manage all the roads, so I’m not sure why this gets people so worked up.
Fourth – Please please please, if you are going to talk about this issue, focus on solving the problem (i.e. don’t tell lies). These people who are going to town hall meetings and shouting down the speaker and refusing to engage in actual discussion; what do they actually want? Are they really so thrilled with the current state of affairs that they can’t bear to even discuss alternatives? Or have they been mislead by media personalities? Hmm, if we look at other countries and they are getting better results than us, what is so bad about DISCUSSING whether we could emulate what they are doing? Maybe there are good reasons it wouldn’t work here, maybe not. But to refuse to even talk about how we might make things better? Bunch of jackholes.
Fifth – Giving everyone insurance does not solve the problem. As mentioned, the role of insurance is to spread the costs around, so that no individual suffers a debilitating loss. This is important, because I think most of us recognize that health is something that transcends an individual’s ability to pay (we do not want a society where poor people are dying in the streets, and the furor over “death panels” would seem to back this up). Because we aren’t refusing treatment to anyone currently, and nothing in the discussion suggests we are about to start, no amount of monkeying around with insurance coverage is going to change the total amount the country spends on healthcare, and that amount is on a steep upward trend. To reduce costs, we need to talk about strategies outside of insurance. Here are some possibilities (we can debate relative merits, but savings have to come from somewhere, unless we are happy with status quo): remove administrative costs by consolidating current insurance companies, use national insurance leverage to negotiate reduced drug/service prices for care, allow important of prescription drugs (forcing prices down), offer preventative care to everyone regardless of ability to pay (prevention is cheaper than cure), publish actual costs so patients can price shop on care, close emergency rooms to those who can’t pay, etc. I haven’t heard a single argument from the conservatives for how costs can be reduced, just obstructionism against anything the liberals propose. If they love the current system then fine, but then they need to answer for it.
Light and Dark
I heard a song with the lyric “It’s like Darkness and the Light going toe to toe”… this is the only conflict that really matters. We need to understand it. But I don’t think “toe to toe” is the right description. Darkness doesn’t “exist”… it is the absence of light; the presence of light negates darkness. Toe to toe the fight is over before it begins. We aren’t talking about two cavemen hitting each other over the head with clubs.
I hear people talk about the conflict, and they usually reference external things that impede their religious impulses; the car wouldn’t start, the police wouldn’t let us distribute food outside the library, the gov wouldn’t approve our tax exemption. These are not the fight.
The fight is one of perseverance, of faithfulness. So long as the light shines, the dark is defeated. Corruption of the will is the true enemy. “What you are doing doesn’t matter”. “No one cares what you are saying”. “For every one you help, two more will fall”.
You cannot see the true results. What you see with your eyes does not matter. For as long as you burn, the Light will win. Guard the fire, it is all that matters.
Song
