Words

The abnormal rarity of goodness

Andrea Elizabeth — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:43:02 +0000

4. We must guard against the feeling that there is ‘safety in numbers’. It is natural to feel that if all men are as bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excusable. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at that school feel till they learn that there are other schools where ninety per cent of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again, many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human society—some particular school, college, regiment or profession where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal (‘Everyone does it’) and certain others as impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad society we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our ‘normal’ was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our ‘Quixotic’ was taken for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the ‘pocket’ now turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil—an isolated bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection. But is there any evidence—except Christian doctrine it’self—that this is so? I am afraid there is. In the first place, there are those odd people among us who do not accept the local standard, who demonstrate the alarming truth that a quite different behaviour is, in fact, possible. Worse still, there is the fact that these people, even when separated widely in space and time, have a suspicious knack of agreeing with one another in the main—almost as if they were in touch with some larger public opinion outside the pocket. What is common to Zarathustra, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gautama, Christ1 and Marcus Aurelius, is something pretty substantial. Thirdly, we find in ourselves even now a theoretical approval of this behaviour which no one practises. Even inside the pocket we do not say that justice, mercy, fortitude, and temperance are of no value, but only that the local custom is as just, brave, temperate and merciful as can reasonably be expected. It begins to look as if the neglected school rules even inside this bad school were connected with some larger world—and that when the term ends we might find ourselves facing the public opinion of that larger world. But the worst of all is this: we cannot help seeing that only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet. The standard which seems to have come into the ‘pocket’ from outside, turns out to be terribly relevant to conditions inside the pocket—so relevant that a consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would fill the earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease, and that nothing else will. It may be the custom, down here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of perfection: but even now, everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every man of us his life. It is then that we shall envy the ‘morbid’ person, the ‘pedant’ or ‘enthusiast’ who really has taught his company to shoot and dig in and spare their water bottles.

Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). The Problem of Pain (pp. 55-58). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

The Problem of Pain, Ch 3, Divine Goodness

Andrea Elizabeth — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:40:33 +0000

Any consideration of the goodness of God at once threatens us with the following dilemma. On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil. On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good’, while asserting that His is wholly other than ours, is really only to say ‘God is we know not what’. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity—when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing—may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.

Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). The Problem of Pain (pp. 28-29). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

The purdah

Andrea Elizabeth — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:35:33 +0000

It was 1913 when H.G. Wells wrote the following in his novel, The Passionate Friends. He describes the viewpoint of those who succeeded in loosing social constraints less than a decade later.

There are no universal laws of affection and desire, but it is manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate association, and any real fellowship between men and women turns an extreme readiness to love. And that being so it follows that under existing conditions the unrestricted meeting and companionship of men and women in society is a monstrous sham, a merely dangerous pretence of encounters. The safe reality beneath those liberal appearances is that a woman must be content with the easy friendship of other women and of one man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have one sole woman intimate. To all other women he must be a little blind, a little deaf, politely inattentive. He must respect the transparent, intangible, tacit purdah about them, respect it but never allude to it. To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but it is reality. If you live in the spirit of any other understanding you will court social disaster. I suppose it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs to us Strattons because it is in our nature to want things to seem what they are. That translucent yet impassible purdah outrages our veracity. And it is plain to me that our social order cannot stand and is not standing the tensions it creates. The convention that passions and emotions are absent when they are palpably present broke down between Mary and myself, as it breaks down in a thousand other cases, as it breaks down everywhere. Our social life is honeycombed and rotten with secret hidden relationships. The rigid, the obtuse and the unscrupulously cunning escape; the honest passion sooner or later flares out and destroys…. Here is a difficulty that no bullying imposition of arbitrary rules on the one hand nor any reckless abandonment of law on the other, can solve. Humanity has yet to find its method in sexual things; it has to discover the use and the limitation of jealousy. And before it can even begin to attempt to find, it has to cease its present timid secret groping in shame and darkness and turn on the light of knowledge. None of us knows much and most of us do not even know what is known.

[...]You will learn soon enough as you grow to be a man that beneath the respectable assumptions of our social life there is an endless intricate world of subterfuge and hidden and perverted passion,—for all passion that wears a mask is perversion—and that thousands of people of our sort are hiding and shamming about their desires, their gratifications, their true relationships. I do not mean the open offenders, for they are mostly honest and gallant people, but the men and women who sin in the shadows, the people who are not clean and scandalous, but immoral and respectable. This underworld is not for us. I wish that I who have looked into it could in some way inoculate you now against the repetition of my misadventure. We Strattons are daylight men, and if I work now for widened facilities of divorce, for an organized freedom and independence of women, and greater breadth of toleration, it is because I know in my own person the degradations, the falsity, the bitterness, that can lurk beneath the inflexible pretentions of the established code to-day.

I think he may have a few points, but if there is any justification for what has since happened in our social climate, it is not that offenders should be able to flaunt themselves, but that since purity is so hard to come by, judgement and condemnation should be more self-directed and mercy given. I also think a more Orthodox view of sin and salvation would be helpful.

Regarding the purdah, I agree, but not with his point that it is intolerable or impossible. I think passions and issues such as he describes have to be dealt with in an Orthodox contxt of confession and prayer, without doing away with the rules.

The problem of uncertainty

Andrea Elizabeth — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:24:15 +0000

Why would a loving God make uncertain people? Or certain, mistaken people?

It’s not his fault, it was the fall that did it.

Even Adam and Eve weren’t sure what the Tree of Life was about.

That’s because they were supposed to have faith and be obedient.

Then why do we have the capacity to rationalize?

To give us freedom, I suppose.

So we choose between living with uncertainty and obedience, or certainty with the probability of being mistaken?

Pretty much. This must be what apophaticism is about.

Some people take that to mean we can’t know anything at all about anything. Like that Monastery show on PBS where the former Buddhist said it depends on what you mean by “do”, “you”, “believe”, “in” and “God”. The monk replied that he wants him to consider what God incarnate means, which was a good answer, but he’s a Catholic, so does he even have it right?

Another atheist question

Andrea Elizabeth — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:41:17 +0000

How does an atheist explain how horses and other animals and plants seem especially suited for use by people? Did people adapt to the lower species that came before? So we sit the way we do because horses are shaped the way they are? This logic sounds better regarding our dietary needs, but not for transportation.

On the other hand, I don’t like the totally utilitarian approach that says God made plants and animals just for the service of man. I think they should be able to enjoy their own telos’s apart from us.

Is insanity better than despair?

Andrea Elizabeth — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:43:30 +0000

I don’t know why The Next Three Days only got 50% on Rotten Tomatoes unless the critics didn’t like the large gaps in the story telling that didn’t get filled in until after an unusually long time. I found it intriguing and trusted that I wouldn’t have to keep guessing the whole movie. Russel Crowe is good a playing smart, think outside the box, people. Consider this quote:

John Brennan (Crowe): So, the life in times of Don Quixote, what is it about?
Female College Student: That someone’s belief in virtue is more important than virtue itself?
John Brennan: Yes… that’s in the there. But what is it about? Could it be how rational thought destroys your soul? Could it be about the triumph of irrationality and the power that is in that? You know, we spend a lot of time trying to organize the world. We build clocks and calendars and we try to predict the weather. But what part of our life is truly under our control? What if we choose to exist purely in a reality of our own making? Does that render us insane? And if it does, isn’t that better than a life of despair?

The movie speaks more to belief than irrationality, unless some find them to be synonyms. Do you believe in the system and utter submission to it, or are we free to choose an alternate code to live by? And is it just men who are free, or are women free too?

Being talked about

Andrea Elizabeth — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:01:32 +0000

The problem with talking about being is that once you do, you’ve sort of frozen being by removing yourself from it and taken a snapshot of it or cross section based on memory. That which was is no longer to some extent, and isn’t the art of being, being in the present? Just being almost takes an emptying of your mind, but to keep us from Buddhism, yoga, or charismatic delusion, we focus on Christ, who is the source and giver of our being, which by ourselves we can’t truly know.

Being alone

Andrea Elizabeth — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:29:23 +0000

Hoda and Kathy Lee just reported a statistic that part time working moms are the happiest, full time working moms are the next happy, and stay at home moms are the least happy. If this is true, then perhaps it is because real life is harder than escape, diapers aren’t as pleasing as computers, children are immature companions, and being alone takes monastic, desert dwelling discipline.

That said, there is something to say about if mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy. I think women should have another interest, but one that can be done at home seems better. And I wonder about the happiness of the children. If they are home alone because mom’s out having a fulfilling career, then it’s a selfish happiness at the cost of the children’s. Some kids may be happy with their childcare, but again I wonder if it’s an escapist type happiness.

Aw shucks

Andrea Elizabeth — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:24:10 +0000

I get kind of disappointed with these history’s mysteries debunk shows. I say let the people keep believing that their squashed 1911 Colt 45 bullets actually were the ones taken from Bonnie and Clyde’s bodies, that President Grant really was in Morristown on July 4th, 1876, that General George Washing really slept here, and that most Americans are part Indian. They try to spin it positively by saying the actual lesser connection is better than the myth, but you can’t really cover over the let down caused by the disconnect.

I’m finding a connection with my last post, these things should be done more gently.

Iconoclasm

Andrea Elizabeth — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:14:21 +0000

After reading the part in The Deerslayer, the first of The Leatherstocking Tales by James, Fenimore Cooper, where Deerslayer comes across an ornate chess piece in the image of an elephant, I am rethinking idolatry. Not understanding it’s use as a chess piece, Deerslayer at first thinks it’s a graven image and an idol and thus should be disposed of. Even after he understands that it is part of a game, and thus justified (not sure how that makes a difference with his logic) he does not believe it should be given to the Indians who would make an idol of it. Indeed, his faithful Indian companion, Chingachgook, is quite captivated and enraptured by it.

I understand that things are to come after God in our hearts. And I understand that the purest Saints were never attached to things, and in extremely pious cases, rejected even their mother’s milk for Communion. They were unusually attracted to God alone (setting aside the different context in which the Protestants put these two words). In most cases, however, people form attachments to things that either end up breaking their hearts, or they grow out of, or sadly don’t get past while their appetite for it increases.

My current inclination is that idol smashing can be too harshly done. Burning books, which is criticized in this story, though to me the scenario was similar; dynamiting statues; and defacing icons seem heartbreaking instead of relationship to God building. Protestants point to Old Testament examples, but like killing God’s enemies, this can be too easily and simplistically applied. I think people’s bonding to these things should be seen as immature attachments, like to a baby’s security blanket, and not so much as letting evil influences have their way, though I wont totally discount that. I believe these objects should be gently replaced, but in the case of icons, they are part of the replacement, given the proper context, which was needed and amended in the 8th Century.

Weaning too soon and too harshly wounds the person and can cause them to put up walls against the God they are supposed to believe loves them and has a better way. I believe this happened with the American Indians in the lower 48. Canada and Alaska have different stories, and in Alaska’s case, I believe that it is because their fragile hearts were more respected by the Orthodox missionaries.