Category Archives: Bible and Theology

#65: Being Married

March 11, 2016 M.J. 1 Comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #65, on the subject of Being Married.

These young couples, they don’t know–
They just think we’re old.
We took the silver years ago–
We’re going for the gold!

I have often thought about writing a piece about being married. My wife has argued that I am in no position to give people advice about marriage, and she has a point. Ours has been a rough marriage from the beginning. However, that beginning is now–well, these web pages stay up a long time, but as I begin this I note that we are closer to our golden anniversary than to our silver. It has been a long time. I have been married twice as long as I was single.

I don’t presume, though, to give you any insights I have learned for how to keep a marriage together from my own observations. Rather, over the years I have heard a lot of advice, and I have found some of it to be quite valuable, incredibly valuable. I do not remember where I got it all, but I’ll try to note those points I can credit.

Before we married, my father said that I needed to ask one question, and have an answer: why are you marrying this person?

My father’s experience gave him this, and it’s worth recounting. He had been dating a girl–I’m not certain whether he was still in high school or already in college, but she kept talking about what they were going to do when they got married. Finally one day he interrupted this by saying that he was not certain he was ready to marry just yet. He was quite surprised three months later to read that she was marrying someone else. Some people, he suggested, were in love with the idea of being married. That’s not a satisfactory reason to marry; you need a reason to marry this person.

The value of this particular bit of advice cannot be overstated. Believe me, the day will almost certainly come when you are going to ask yourself this question: Why did I marry this person? If you have already answered it, you will know the answer when the question comes. It can get you past some serious complications, knowing the answer, and particularly if it’s a good answer. Even if you are already married, take a moment and give yourself that answer if you can. If you’ve answered it adequately in the good times, the answer will be there in the time of crisis.
I think I had already heard or read this somewhere before we married, but I remember that one of the many counselors we visited in attempting to work out our difficulties in the early days repeated and reinforced it: divorce is not an option. That was our attitude going into this, and it’s an important one. Sure, people get divorced, even people who had no intention or expectation of doing so. However, if your attitude is, “If it doesn’t work, we can get divorced,” you’ve got a vulnerability, a weak spot in your corporate armor. The thing about marriage–about any commitment–is that it takes work, effort, in a word commitment. If you’ve given yourself an emergency exit when you’ve built the thing, you’re going to be more inclined to use it when things get tough. Face it, life has tough times, and there will be times when it will look like it would be easier to quit than to fight. If quitting is off the table up front, fighting is the only choice, and you are more likely to put the effort into getting through.

I should caveat that not every marriage can be saved. Some relationships are so broken that one party or the other is not willing to embrace the grace and forgiveness needed to heal it. Some people are so broken that they need to be mended themselves before they can be part of someone else’s life (but if you are that person, finding a different partner is just seeking to ruin someone else).
This one comes from Bob Mumford, but I’m not entirely sure whether he was applying it to marriage or to church relationships. It’s true either way: God gives us the person we need, not the person we might want. Mumford did say that God made one man and one woman, and they’re very different. That’s an important part of it. God is working to form you into his child; your spouse is part of that process, pressing you to become more loving. That means it will sometimes be difficult–as someone has said, it’s easy to love those that are lovely, but God calls us to love when we really don’t feel loving at all. You’re not always going to be happy with His choice, but ultimately His choice is going to be best for forming you into who you ought to be, and thus for your ultimate happiness.
The ideal spouse is an illusion, and the more so when you think that it is some spouse other than the one you already have.

C. S. Lewis addressed this somewhere, noting that to some degree the fact that you have been married has already been part of the process that makes this person your “other half”. Be married to someone for a week, and both of you change–maybe not in the ways either of you wishes, but the process has begun. That process is rocky, sometimes painful, sometimes seemingly counterproductive, but it is moving both of you toward what God wants you to be.

Meanwhile, the axiom that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence does not mean that it is, but that it appears to be so. When you look at your reality, you see the bad parts; when you look at your fantasy, you see the good. The fantasy is unlikely to be as good as the reality. For one thing, you will be bringing your self into the next relationship, and you have just as much potential to spoil that one as you had to spoil this one, plus a bit more because you have added a track record for failure in the first relationship. If you could not make the first marriage work, you have less chance to succeed with the second.

It is true that the percentage of marriages which end in divorce has been rising over the years. However, part of that is because second marriages are less likely to survive than first ones, and third marriages less than seconds. Your best shot at long-term marriage is usually your first one. If you let that break, you prove that you are the kind of person who will let your marriage break.
The way forward in life is always into God. If our direction is taking us closer to God, it is moving us forward; if it is the right way forward, it will take us further into God. That often can help as a measure of which is the right path, as if we can see that one path takes us toward and the other away from God we can be pretty certain that if we’re seeing it clearly the former is the right choice. It also should be seen as assurance: if this is the right path, whatever it looks like from here, it is going to bring us closer to God. God says that He hates divorce. As a rule of thumb, then, breaking a marriage is moving away from God, and affirming one is moving toward God.
You are going to have to give up your expectations.

You probably will say that you don’t really have any expectations, but that’s not really possible. You formed an image of what a marriage is like, of how it works, from the relationships of your parents and other adults among whom you were raised. You are to some degree going to emulate that, and to some degree reject it; but similarly you are going to expect that your spouse has some of the same expectations about how it works as you do–and your spouse is going to have different expectations, for both of you.

That means the wife is not just going to fall into the role the husband expects, and the husband is not automatically going to be what the wife expects. Here are some “typical” clashes:
- Each party has a belief about which of them manages the money and pays the bills. Sometimes they won’t agree, and money is one of the top tensions in marriages. Even when it is agreed as to which of you will balance the checkbook and cover the regular bills, there is still going to be an issue concerning the control of the “extra” money–what do you have to do to be able to buy yourself a new outfit, or a quick lunch? Your parents probably had systems for this, but it is probably not the case that you both grew up with the same system.
- In some houses, the man is expected to fix anything that breaks, because that’s what men do; in other houses, if something breaks you call a repairman or buy a replacement. This is a simple example, but your relationship will be filled with things each of you thought, without ever considering it or recognizing that you thought this, was the way it would work.
- It has gotten more complicated. In today’s world, we cannot assume we know who washes the dishes, or who cooks the dinners. Child care expectations are no longer simple. There are also cultural expectations. Interracial marriages mean cross-cultural marriages, which means that his family and her family both have ideas about what a bride or a groom ought to be and do, and they are not going to match. You both will find yourself trying to explain to your extended families that this is not how things work in your spouse’s family, and that you have to adjust–without making them think you married someone who does not know how to be your spouse. Complicating it, you probably are not completely convinced that your family is wrong. After all, that’s how it worked when you were younger.
- Then there are the wealth of holidays. It is not even just which holidays you celebrate, but how you celebrate them. Do you have a Christmas Tree? Is it cut, balled, or artificial? Does it go up the day after Thanksgiving, or the last weekend in Advent, or Christmas Eve? When and how does it come down? On what holidays do you have a big dinner, and on which ones is snacking the order of the day? You expect that such celebrations will continue as they did when you were young, but so does your spouse, and there’s not a very high probability that those expectations will match.
These are just obvious ones. The point is that you expect each other to be and do certain things, and you expect that you yourself will fall into a specific role, and the role you envision for yourself is not going to match the one envisioned by your spouse. That’s normal. All of us take years figuring out how to make our relationships work, and you should not expect less for yourselves.
This was actually one of the first things I realized, and one of the hardest to apply; I still fail at this frequently. You must learn to express your love in two languages–the one you understand, and the one your spouse understands.

Near the end of Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye starts singing to his wife Goldie a song that asks, “Do you love me?” Her first reaction amounts to, what kind of question is that and why are you asking me this now, but they have had three daughters reject parental guidance and marry for love (and a slippery slope it proved to be, as the first married a good Jewish boy and the third a gentile Marxist). Ultimately, though, she lists all the ordinary household chores she has done for him, like cooking and cleaning and washing, along with bearing and raising his children, so she concludes that that she must love him: “I suppose I do.” He replies, “And I suppose I love you.”

We learn two things from this; the first is about speaking two languages.

You think that all those things you do, which on some level you are doing for your spouse and which on some level that fact that you are doing them means your spouse does not have to do them, is expressing your love. Whether it’s going to work, paying the bills, cleaning the house, making the meals, raising the children, maintaining the yard, driving, shopping, washing, repairing, whatever it is you do, you do it, on some level, because of love, and you think that’s understood. Your spouse thinks the same thing about everything of which you are spared because your spouse handles it. Yet you don’t see that as an expression of love for you. In fact, at least sometimes you think that your spouse likes to do those things. It does not occur to you that he hates driving, she hates laundry, but does it because of love for you. On the other hand, it sometimes occurs to you that you are doing the driving, the laundry, because of love. You are expressing love in a language you understand. That is important, because it reminds you that you love this person, and will do this because of that. However, your expression of love is not being heard.

You need to speak the other language, the language that will be understood. Michelle, ma belle, sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble, sings Paul McCartney–in French, Michelle, my lovely, are the words which go very well together. Most of us do not need to learn another spoken language; but we do need to communicate in a way that our spouse recognizes as an expression of love–whether it’s flowers and candy or dinner and a movie, or breakfast in bed or a sporting event, or simply saying the right words at the right time, the unexpected display of affection, some way of letting that person know that there is love here.

It also helps if you can learn to perceive the expression of love your spouse is constantly making in the language you don’t understand. It’s probably there, and it is a mystery to the other person why you don’t realize it, just as you don’t understand why your expressions of love go unrecognized.

The other thing we learn from Tevye and Goldie is that for the purpose of marriage love is not primarily somethng you feel; it is something you choose and do. Throughout history in most of the world, marriages were arranged: families chose brides for grooms and grooms for brides. It is really the “normal” way; selecting your own spouse is only a recent and limited practice. That means that most people learned over time how to love, or show love to, spouses who were selected for them by someone else. It is not really that difficult to decide to love your spouse. In the modern world, most people in arranged marriages will tell you yes, they do love their spouses. It is a choice you make. Feelings are too erratic to be the basis for commitment, but they will follow from decision.
In I Corinthians 7:32ff Paul comments that the unmarried man worries about pleasing the Lord but the married man worries about pleasing his woman, and then says the same (gender reversed) about the unmarried and married women. What is interesting is that Paul does not say that this is wrong; rather, he seems to be indicating that if you are married, pleasing your spouse is (at least) as important to you as pleasing the Lord, and that’s as it ought to be. Sure, he says that it is better not to marry for that reason, but he also says that for most people it is better to marry, and that means that for most people there is that one person in life, the spouse, who matters as much as Christ. We don’t like to think of it that way, but Paul says that we act that way, and he does not condemn us for it. Spouses are important.

I was developing this for a “permanent” web page in the Bible and Theology section of the site, but decided that that was not the best way to do it. That’s partly because when I had eight points I kept thinking of a ninth and then forgetting it before I had the chance to write it down, and then while I was trying to think of it I remembered the one that falls ninth here, which I know is not the one I kept forgetting. I conclude two things from this.

The first is that no matter how many things I remember and put in this page, I am going to miss something, something that undoubtedly helped me through one of the true rough spots in my life and marriage, and I’m going to wish I had included it. I could hold the page until I died, and still not manage to include everything. I thus hope these points will help you now, and perhaps before we reach our fiftieth (should we both live so long) I’ll post a few more.

The second is that I am not always going to remember all of these points–and neither are you. Make note of them, come back and read them again (as long as we manage to keep the site online through your support), and think about them more than just on the read-through. They are all worth remembering; they will all help keep your marriage together a little longer.

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Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#58: Acceptable Killing In Our Society

February 22, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #58, on the subject of Acceptable Killing In Our Society.

This began because someone of my acquaintance posted a video supporting abortion. The blurb under the video read, in part:

There are many reasons why a woman might decide to end a pregnancy—and many barriers to safe and legal abortion.

I did not want to start a fight, but I found that statement quite offensive–offensive enough that I felt it necessary to reply:

There are many reasons why a parent might want to kill his or her own child, but that does not mean we as a society have to approve that.

The question is whether an unborn child is still a child. The answer cannot be so easily presumed.

I included a link to mark Joseph “young” web log post #7: The Most Persecuted Minority.

She replied:

You are close in trying to identify the correct question in regards to this issue. The real question though, remains when in the stages of pregnancy do you develop a child? Only when than [sic] can be determined, should it be appropriate to address your question. In our society, the answer is yes. It is acceptable to kill. We kill in war. We kill on the streets. We allow for capital punishment. We allow for assisted suicide. I am never going to argue if abortion is morally correct. But what you attempted to address is the one question others throw out there with buzz words like “kill,” and “child.” If the question was simply, should a pregnant female be given rights to determine to carry a child to whatever capacity she chooses, then hotheads would have little to rage over. What America is trying to measure with your argument Mark, is can we limit human potential, and if so, to what extent?

I could see that pursuing this in that format was going to become unwieldy, so I pondered for a while and decided to respond here.

I will confess that I am not entirely certain of everything she meant in that post, particularly at the end concerning the phrase “limit human potential”. Is she talking about limiting the potential of mothers by requiring them to bear the children they have conceived, or of children by killing them before they breathe the air, or something else? That, though, is not the bulk of her comment, and it is the other part that particularly disturbs me. She raises the question of whether in our society killing is acceptable, and affirms that it is, following this by a list of “acceptable” situations for killing. I am going to change the sequence some, but I argue that killing people is not acceptable behavior in our society, despite her examples to the contrary.

Let’s begin with

We kill on the streets.

I doubt she means in traffic accidents. Vehicular homicide frequently results in at least an involuntary manslaughter charge. Certainly there are accidents in which someone dies and it is ruled that no one is at fault, just as if a bit of space debris happens to crash into your house you can’t sue NASA. That amounts to an admission that we accept that modern technological life is a bit dangerous and some people are going to die through no one’s fault. Yet clearly, although there are vehicular murders (and they are so treated), this is hardly an example of society accepting that we are permitted to kill each other.

Killing on the streets seems rather to imply the intentional action of killing each other, and we have a fair amount of that in gang warfare and drive-by shootings. That we have them, though, does not mean we accept them. Every such incident is treated as a homicide investigation with the intention of bringing murder charges against the perpetrator. They are not all solved, and not all the perpetrators are convicted, but we don’t really accept that these killings are blameless despite their frequency in our society. Sometimes we call it “terrorism” and make a federal case of it.

On the other hand, it is sometimes the case that the police shoot people on the street and are exonerated. The famous cases are of course when a white police officer shoots a black person, but black police officers shoot white people also. In every case of an “officer-involved shooting” there is an investigation, the officer is usually suspended pending the outcome of the investigation, and in some cases charges ranging from disciplinary actions to murder convictions follow. That in most cases our officers are cleared of guilt indicates bias only sometimes; it more often commends the training they have been given. After all, there are situations in which we excuse and even justify killings–self-defense and defense of third persons the two that most commonly apply in these cases. Yet when a claim is made of self-defense or defense of third persons, there is always an investigation to determine whether indeed those claims are justifiable.

Our justification for killing the unborn is that they pose a threat to the life or physical well-being of the mother, but no one investigates whether that claim is justifiable, and “the health of the mother” has become a phrase with little more meaning than her convenience.

So what of this:

We allow for assisted suicide.

Do we?

The most current information available to me says that four states–California, Oregon, Washington, and Vermont–have passed legislation permitting physician-assisted suicide, with very specific guidelines (patient must be a resident of the state, at least 18 years of age, have not more than six months of life expectancy remaining, and have requested help from the physician at least once in writing and twice orally not less than fifteen days apart). One state, Montana, has a state supreme court ruling allowing physician-assisted suicide for state residents, without any clear parameters otherwise. There are four other states in which the law is uncertain–Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and North Carolina. In the remaining forty-one states, if you assist someone in a suicide you may be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In no state is it lawful for someone who is not a physician to assist. That hardly counts as “acceptable”. It is also illegal in most countries around the world, although a few have permitted it under specified conditions.

Certainly there are a lot of people who think that we ought to permit suffering terminally ill persons to end their own lives, and allow medical professionals to help them. There are also people who think we ought to do this for the severely handicapped, without their consent. To this point, the bulk of public opinion is against the idea that people should be permitted to kill themselves, or to help others kill themselves, with impunity.

Our justification for assisted suicide, in those places where it is permitted, is that the patient wants to die, is suffering terribly, and will not live much longer anyway. No one asks the unborn child if he would rather live or die.

The next might be more difficult:

We allow for capital punishment.

Yes, in many cases we do. As of last year, thirty-one states had a legal death penalty; of those, four had such a law but with a moratorium declared by the governor so that there could be no executions until specific issues were resolved. Nineteen states have made the death penalty illegal, and although they include populous states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, they do not include the most populous California or the significant Ohio, Texas, and Florida. Popular opinion seems to favor the death penalty.

However, death penalty cases involve what we call due process: judges and juries must listen to the evidence and arguments presented by trained legal professionals, and reach the conclusion that this individual deserves to die.

One of the two objections to the death penalty, the one that is the more cogent in practice, is that given human fallibility it is entirely possible that we are killing the wrong person. That criminals on death row are later released (not usually because they have been exonerated but because some flaw in the legal process leading to their conviction or sentencing has been identified) certainly demonstrates that fallibility. That, though, only means that were we completely certain of the guilt and desert of the criminal the sentence would be accepted. The more significant objection, in our present concern, is whether anyone ever deserves to be killed. As Gandalf says to Frodo, many died fighting in the war who should have lived; if you are unable to restore them to life, do not be overly quick to take life from another, however guilty you might think him. We might agree that someone ought to die, but object to the notion that any of us therefore ought to kill him. So we have this argument, and gradually more and more of the country is rejecting capital punishment.

However, we are having this argument precisely because we have an agreed moral/ethical principle that it is wrong to kill another human being, and we disagree as to whether this is a viable exception to that rule. Yet if it is, it is based on the conclusion that this person deserves to die.

No one has attempted to say that the aborted child deserved to die, or if they did it was by transference of hatred toward the parent to the child.

That leaves only the most difficult example:

We kill in war.

Yes, we do, and we consider such killing justified, at least when we do it. Yet it is important to understand why.

There were quite a few wars in the twentieth century. They occurred for one of two reasons:

One group believed that their lives or freedoms were threatened or compromised by another group, and initiated a war to free themselves from this threat.
One group desired to take possession of the territory, population, or resources of another group, usually based on some claim of right, and so initiated war to seize possession.

Throughout the twentieth century, the United States has always sided with groups we perceived as the oppressed or threatened and against the aggressors. Our justification for being involved in the war was always the defense of third persons or, ultimately, defense of ourselves. Our motives might be impugned in many instances–did we defend Kuwait for the sake of Kuwait or because of American oil interests?–but enough of us considered the defense of the people of one country from the aggressions of another a viable moral basis for becoming involved in a war that had already started that these fit the general pattern. We do not approve war; we do not find it acceptable to wage war for any interests other than stopping someone else’s aggression or oppression.

The reasons for killing in war again do not apply to killing an unborn child.

There are ultimately only three questions concerning abortion:

Is it wrong to kill a human being, absent some specific justification or excuse? If you answer no to this question, you invalidate all laws against murder and manslaughter and all liability for accidental death.
Is an unborn child a human being? This is the usual point of the argument, to which I note first that in the absence of certainty we ought to err on the side of caution and defend the life of a “potential human being”, and second that most vegetarians who won’t eat chicken won’t eat eggs, either.
Is the convenience of a parent a sufficient justification or excuse for killing a child? If you answer yes to this, you justify infanticide, and must find a point at which that no longer applies. People usually say “viability”, but on the one hand medical advances are pushing back the moment at which a child can survive outside the womb, and on the other hand if viability means the ability to survive completely unaided by anyone else, there are few adults in this country who could do so absent the infrastructural support of thousands of others who provide the necessities of life. I’m not viable anymore; I could not survive a month in the wilderness unaided by supplies provided by others.

I thus disagree that our society has accepted killing, in the sense that it is acceptable to kill another human being. If we had, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Boston Marathon would not have been crimes. We pretend that abortion is a justifiable killing because the victim is unable to speak for himself. That applies, though, to thousands of infant, handicapped, and elderly persons, and society is not ready to justify the killings of those people, because we recognize them to be people and do not regard the killing of people as “acceptable”.

Bible and Theology, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning

#51: In Memoriam on Groundhog Day

February 2, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #51, on the subject of In Memoriam on Groundhog Day.

My father died a few days ago, at noon on January 27th, 2016. There will be memorial visitation on Saturday, February 13th, from one to four in the afternoon at the Van Emburgh-Sneider-Pernice Funeral Home on Darlington Ave in Ramsey (New Jersey) near the home he has shared with my mother since I was twelve. Before that we lived in Scotch Plains, and in Freeport, Long Island. He came from Sardis, Mississippi, by way of an Electrical Engineering degree from Georgia Tech. I will always remember him working decades for Western Union, but it had been decades since he was there and he had held a number of other jobs since. He did not speak much of his education or his work, but I gather he had completed a masters at Stevens Institute of Technology, and worked sporadically toward a doctorate. He held patents in focusing microwaves, and headed engineering in Western Union’s Data Services offshoot in the late 60’s. He was the only person I knew who had worked in assembly language.

He was Cornelius Bryant Young, Jr. Technically, he was the third, but his grandfather had died while his father was still young, and his father married old, so my granddad took “senior” and made him “junior” (although they never, as far as I know, called him that). Since his grandfather was “Cornelius” his father was always “Bryant”, and he wound up with “C.B.”, although it was often reduced to “Seeb”, which is what my mother generally called him. He hated nicknames–I never understood why, and as “Mark” always wished that there was a more familiar form distinguished as “my friends call me”. (I might then have felt that I had friends.) My mother wanted to name one of us Cornelius Bryant Young IV and call him Neil, and my father always said, “If you want to call him Neil, name him Neil.” My little brother is Neil Bryant Young. My wife also wanted to name a child Cornelius Bryant Young IV and call him Cory, but my father said–well, you know what he said. My second son is Kyler Cornelius Bryant Young, and my third has Cory as a middle name.

I will remember many of the wonderful things he said over the years. They come to mind particularly because he often quipped about today–Groundhog Day–saying “If the groundhog sees his shadow, we will have six more weeks of winter, but if he doesn’t, it will be a month and a half.”

Cornelius B. Young, Jr., in 2015 at his brother-in-law's birthday party. — Cornelius B. Young, Jr., in 2015 at his brother-in-law’s birthday party.

He gave the name Young’s Theorem to a quip he created and put on signs in a working lab he headed before I was born. People working on various projects would find that they did not have the particular piece of equipment they needed, so would substitute something similar–“not the same, but not really different”–and then be surprised at the results. My father’s sign read, “Things that are not the same are different.”

It was from him that I first heard Murphy’s Law, and he delighted in collecting such witicisms. He gave me (appropriately, given the recent reaction to my article a few days ago on the X-Files sexism flap), “I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not certain you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” I was still in Cub Scouts, having trouble working on a Pinewood Derby model car, when he said, with a wonderfully instructive facetiousness, “If you cut it too short you can always stretch it, but what can you do if you cut it too long?”

He was the most patient man I ever knew (although once when I said that to my mother, she told me to remember that he lost his temper at me more than once). I only heard him swear once in my life, in a famous story of our effort to navigate Skinner’s Falls on the Delaware River when it was several feet above flood stage. He remained constantly calmly rational–my model of unemotive rationality long before Spock appeared. It has impacted me significantly, as I, too, am generally not effusive in my expressions of emotion, regard foul language as an indication of a poor intellect, and choose rational response over impatient reaction. Yet it had its negative side. He would often praise my efforts after a success in my school days, such as a band or choral concert, but because he knew that his cool rationalism would not sound sincere he forced an enthusiasm that always sounded less sincere in my ears, and so I never received praise well from him–and in turn I made a point with my own sons not to attempt to sound enthusiastic in my praise. I can only hope they understood that I was sincere.

He was always there for us when we were in trouble. I think perhaps we relied too much on him. I wonder, often, whether his available support caused me to rely less on God in times of trouble, or whether it taught me that a father is always there for you. I probably called him for help about a tenth as many times as my wife suggested. I knew I was a disappointment to him in that area, and that that was important to him. I shall need more help from others in the years ahead, I expect, as he is no longer there.

He was, and in a sense continues to be, the reason for much that is in this web log. Because of my law school degree (for which he paid a significant portion, and for which he never received an adequate return on his investment) he regaled me with articles, clippings in envelopes and links online, claiming that President Obama was not legitimately elected because he was not a “natural born Citizen” as required by the Constitution. That led to the composition of my series on The Birther Issue and the addenda on The Birth Certificate, and my title as Newark Political Buzz Examiner. The law and politics section of my website has been expanded to many times its previous size by those articles, and I still keep an eye on the political news and write about it here sporadically. One of the last clippings he sent me before he died was an insightful piece on whether Ted Cruz was a “natural born Citizen”, although I had already addressed that. I have not checked my e-mail since before his final hospitalization, but expect that I will find something there from him that might require me to respond here.

I miss him. We rarely talked, and always when we did I felt that I had failed in the ways he had most hoped I would succeed, but I knew he loved me despite his cool exterior, and I know that my life will be a lot harder and a little lonelier without him.

He was a Southern Baptist in Mississippi, but had settled into the (calmer and less conservative) American Baptist Convention churches by the time I was born. He often expressed doubts and raised questions about Christian faith, and I wanted him to read the draft of my hopefully forthcoming book Why I Believe (tentative title). I don’t know whether he expressed those to me because of my degrees in Biblical Studies, and I never could be certain exactly about his faith in Christ, but I have good reason to hope that he has had those doubts resolved and is in the presence of our Lord even now.

Dad, if you get this message, my long-remembered college friend Steve Freed established the rendezvous location for us and I promised to meet him there, along with everyone else: East Side, Center Gate. I hope to see you there in a few short years.

With tears on my face,

I love you, Dad.

Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#36: Ligation Litigation

January 3, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #36, on the subject of Ligation Litigation.

Let me begin with ideas that might not seem immediately on-topic.

You are certainly welcome to stay for supper. You’re in luck–we do not often have a roast, but someone gave us this boneless pork loin, and it’s almost finished roasting…what’s that, you don’t eat pork? Well, I’m very sorry. Unfortunately, I roasted the carrots and potatoes and onions in the same pan, so if that’s a problem, I’m not sure what to say.

Maybe I could scrounge something up for my unexpected guest, but really, my extended hospitality is to share what I have, not what I don’t have.

Just relax, we’ll reach the hospital in a few minutes. What? Yes, I have morphine. No, I can’t give you morphine; it would be illegal, for one thing. A doctor has to say that you should have it. Of course I care that you’re in pain, but I’m not going to risk my job to give you something that quite possibly you shouldn’t have.

Of course, I could give the morphine–I am certainly physically able to do so–but there are good reasons for me not to do so.

No, I’m not going to go deer hunting with you. I know it’s legal; I know it’s even considered necessary: in a world in which we have decimated the predator population we must also kill the prey animals or they will overpopulate and starve themselves. Kill them if you wish, but please don’t ask me to be part of it. I don’t really enjoy killing animals, and I do not want to become the kind of person who does.

I’ll have to think about whether I’ll eat your venison, and obviously I know that someone kills the meat I do eat, but it doesn’t have to be me.

Rebecca Chamorro, mother of a third child, is suing Mercy Medical Center in Redding, California, a two hundred sixty-seven bed hospital sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy of Auburn. She claims that the hospital violated her rights by refusing to permit her doctor to perform a tubal ligation while delivering her third child by caesarean section.

The hospital claims that such an operation violates the “ERDs”, that is, the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, a document of health care directives established by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The document bans abortions; I presume it also bans euthanasia, although I have not read it (being neither Catholic nor employed in a medical facility). It lists these things as “intrinsically immoral”, and includes on that list direct sterilizations, certain prenatal genetic tests, and most forms of contraception. The Catholic Church maintains that children are a gift from God, and participation in sexual relations is an open invitation to God to give that gift; therefore refusing the gift or misusing sex for something other than reproduction is an affront to God.

Obviously, you may disagree with the Roman Catholic Church. Even many Christians of other denominations, including many (but not all) conservative Christians among the Evangelicals, the conservative Lutherans, and the Eastern Orthodox churches, allow many forms of birth control while remaining adamantly opposed to abortions and abortofacients. That, though, is not the point. The point is whether a Roman Catholic hospital should be forced to permit the use of its facilities and equipment for procedures it regards immoral.

The plaintiff’s primary argument is that the refusal to perform legal medical procedures is discriminatory. There is a sense in which it is not–the same restrictions against tubal ligation also apply to vasectomies–but the argument is that pregnancies are unevenly discriminatory (much more of a burden on women than on men) and thus the refusal to assist in their prevention is unevenly discriminatory. This, though, is founded on the premise that the hospital is a public institution offering a commercial service–and that’s not exactly true.

At one time all, or nearly all, hospitals were run by religious orders, most of them Roman Catholic. The nursing staff of such hospitals were nuns–volunteers who devoted their lives to the service of others through the church, tending the sick, compensated essentially with room, board, and basic necessities. Priests served as doctors, in a time when only a few went to university and those who did were doctors, lawyers, or priests, with some overlap. People supported the hospitals with their gifts; patients were treated based on need.

Certainly the world has changed. Hospital staff now includes many employees, most of them paid and not all of them Catholic, although many Catholic hospitals are still staffed in part by nuns and other volunteers. Medicine is overseen by licensed physicians, because laws forbid the practice by those who do not have such licenses. However, the mission has not changed, nor the motivation: to help sick people heal. These are non-profit hospitals, and the church runs them voluntarily to help the sick.

If you complained that I did not make something special for you as an unexpected dinner guest when you did not want to eat my roast pork, I would politely suggest you find somewhere else to eat. If you complained that I did not give you morphine on the way to the hospital, I would tell you to talk to my lawyer. If you complained that I was unwilling to go deer hunting with you, I would tell you to go–well, I wouldn’t, because I’m not like that, but it would put a serious damper on our friendship.

The Roman Catholic Church, of its own volition, offers medical care to persons in need. They offer more charity care than most hospitals, although they welcome paying patients and insurance programs. However, they are specific about what care they do–and do not–offer. If you don’t like it, there are other hospitals. If it is inconvenient for you to travel to a hospital that is willing to provide the services you desire–and note that this is in no sense an emergency situation here, it is not as if the hospital is refusing life-saving treatment to a patient brought in to the emergency room–then it is apparently inconvenient for you to get the elective procedure you desire. That seems fairly straightforward to me.

I am concerned that any other answer ultimately becomes an imposition on the faith of the Roman Catholic Church, and indeed on other religiously-affiliated medical facilities (and many churches support these). It is a small step from asserting that the hospital must permit sterilization procedures it find immoral to asserting the same about abortions; and if (or more likely when) it becomes legal, it is a small step beyond that to requiring hospitals to permit euthanasia in their facilities.

If that happens, I am fairly certain the Roman Catholic Church will close its many hospitals and look for some other way to help needy people. A two hundred sixty-seven bed homeless shelter might be a great help.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#34: Happy Old Year

January 1, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #34, on the subject of Happy Old Year.

At this time of year, readers are bombarded with “year in review” pieces, part of the media’s need to have news even when there is no news, to make news out of nonsense and trivia–the reason Time Magazine first created its “Man of the Year” issue (the first was Adolph Hitler). When I was at The Examiner, I began doing something of the same thing, creating indices of articles from the year for readers who missed something or who vaguely remember something. Quite a bit has been published this year, and it might help to have a bit of a review of it all, as some of you might have missed some of it. We have articles in quite a few categories.

The web log is of course self-sorting, and you can find articles in its various categories by following the category links, or in subjects by following tag links; still, it will be worth touching on those pieces here, and there are also quite a few “static pages”, that is, regular web pages added to the site, that you might have missed.

At the beginning of the year we were still writing for The Examiner; all of that has been republished here, much of it which was originally done in serialized format consolidated into larger articles. My reasons for that are explained here on the blog in #8: Open Letter to the Editors of The Examiner, if you missed them. It is still hoped that the Patreon campaign will pick up the slack and pay the bills needed to support continuing the efforts here at M. J. Young Net.

Let’s start with the law and politics pieces. This is a good place to start, because when at the beginning of the year we moved everything from The Examiner, we included a final New Jersey Political Buzz Index Early 2015, with articles on Coalition Government, Broadcasting, Marriage Law Articles, Judiciary, Internet Law, Congress, Discrimination, Election Law, Search and Seizure, Presidential, Health Care, and Insurrection, most subjects covering several articles consolidated with other articles, along with links to earlier indices. There was also a new main law/politics index page, appropriately Articles on Law and Politics, covering the old and the new, and we added a static page to that, continuing a series on tax we had begun previously, What’s Wrong with the Flat Tax?.

We’ve also had a number of law and politics posts on this blog, including

We also covered New Jersey’s 2015 off-year election with a couple posts, #12: The 2015 Election, and #15: The 2015 Election Results.

There were a few web log posts that were on Bible/theology subjects, particularly last week’s #32: Celebrating Christmas, about why we celebrate, and why this particular day; plus some that were both political and theological, including #3: Reality versus Experience, #23: Armageddon and Presidential Politics, and #24: Religious Liberty and Gay Rights: A Definitive Problem.

Then there was the time travel material. This also included some that were originally published at The Examiner and moved here, sometimes consolidated into single pieces. We started the year with a serialized (and now consolidated) analysis of Predestination, followed by one of Project Almanac. We also gave a nod to (Some of) The Best Time Travel Comedies and (Some of) The Best Time Travel Thrillers, before moving here.

Once here, we began our temporal insights with a couple of web log posts, the first #6: Terminator Genisys Quick Temporal Survey, and then #17: Interstellar Quick Temporal Survey, both thanks to the generosity of readers who provided for us to see these films. We eventually managed to add a new analysis to the web site, Terminator Genisys, one of the longest and most complicated analyses we have yet done–but we were not done. Remembering that our original analysis of the first two films in the franchise made some suggestions concerning a future direction for the series, and having commented on the problems with continuing it after the latest installment, we wrote #28: A Terminator Vision, giving some ideas for a next film. Then in response to a reply to the analysis, we added #31: A Genisys Multiverse, explaining why we don’t think a multiverse-type solution resolves the problems of the film.

The site was expanded on another long-neglected front, the Stories from the Verse section: the directors of Valdron Inc gave me permission to serialize Verse Three, Chapter One: The First Multiverser Novel; as of today, the first forty-seven of one hundred twenty-six chapters (they’re mostly short chapters) have been published; there is an index which conveniently lists all the chapters from the first to the most recent published in the left column and from the most recent to the first in the right, so that you can begin at the beginning if you have not read it at all, or find where you left off going backwards if you’ve read most of it. The chapters also link to each other for convenient page turning.

I don’t know whether it makes it more interesting or takes away some of the magic, but I also began running a set of “behind the writings” blog posts to accompany the novel. These are my recollections of the process that brought the pages to life–where I got some of the ideas, my interactions with the editor and other pre-publication readers,, changes that were made, and how it all came to be. There are now seven of them in print–

–and I expect to publish another tomorrow for the next six chapters.

Looking at the few posts that have not yet fit in one of these categories, whether logic or trivia or something else, one, #29: Saving the Elite, was really advice for writing a certain kind of story. Our first post in the blog, #1: Probabilities and Solitaire, was a bit of a lesson in probabilities in card games, and #26: The Cream in My Coffee applied physics to how you lighten and sweeten your hot beverages.

So that’s what we’ve been doing this year, or at least, that’s the part that sticks above the water. We’ve answered questions by e-mail, posted to Facebook (and PInterest and Twitter and LinkedIn and MySpace and Google+ and IMDB and GoodReads and who knows where else), kept the Bible study going, worked on the novels, and tried to keep the home fires burning at the same time. That’s all important, but somewhat ephemeral–it passes with time faster than that which is published. Here’s hoping that you’ve benefited in some way from something I wrote this year, and that you’ll continue encouraging me in the year ahead.

Happy old year.

Happy new year.

Bible and Theology

#32: Celebrating Christmas

December 25, 2015 M.J. 1 Comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #32, on the subject of Celebrating Christmas.

I can remember wondering whether Jesus was born on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Night. After all, it is obvious from the accounts that he was born during the night, and if he was born on Christmas, by our way of reckoning, that would be Christmas Night. But it always seemed that Christmas Eve was the time that was celebrated, so maybe he was actually born on Christmas Eve, but after midnight, so it was already Christmas Day. It all made more sense when I learned that the Jewish way of identifying days started them at sunset (nice to think that you start your day by getting some sleep), and thus what we call Christmas Eve would have been the night that is part of Christmas Day, and what we call Christmas Night would have been the beginning of the day after Christmas, what is variously called Boxing Day or the Feast of St. Steven (yes, mentioned in the carol “Good King Wenceslas”, which is actually a Boxing Day Carol, not a Christmas Carol). So that would suggest that He was born on Christmas Day during the nighttime hours that came before sunrise.

Of course, he wasn’t. Our Jehovah’s Witnesses friends are correct in their assertion that Christmas is not a biblical holy day. The Bible does not specify when He was born, but we know that shepherds don’t tend their flocks in fields in late December in Palestine, and they do do that in our spring, say, April. So if we know that our date for Jesus’ birth is entirely wrong, why do we celebrate it? And particularly, why do we sing all those silly songs about snow lying on the ground on Christmas night when Jesus was born?

If we mean why do we celebrate it on December 25th, the answer is simple: for a couple of very pragmatic reasons.

The first any pagan can tell you: it was already a holiday. For the Romans, it was Saturnalia, but since it was the winter solstice nearly every culture in the world had a holiday marking the astronomical event of the sun reaching its southernmost point and starting to return north. For some, this is a fatal accusation: we are celebrating a pagan holiday and trying to Christianize it. However, this was actually pretty smart of the church. People want their celebrations. If you say, “don’t celebrate because this day has been set aside to celebrate something that Christians should not celebrate,” you wind up with a lot of people celebrating whatever-it-is anyway (a problem with the objections to Halloween, which even has a Christianized name). The better answer is to give them something else to celebrate at the same time. We don’t celebrate an astronomical event or a supposed tie between that event and a pagan god (nor even, really, between the astronomical event and God–in that sense, the astronomical event is incidental). We celebrate something about which Christians can rejoice, while others are celebrating whatever they choose.

The second pragmatic reason has to do with the church calendar. After all, we are given something like a date for Easter–not exactly a date, but a connection to Passover, which is fixed to the Jewish calendar. We don’t really celebrate it on the right date because we’ve disconnected it from both calendars and connected it to astronomical events and a specific day of the week, but we do retain the fact that Easter is celebrated in the Spring, and it would be a bit of a crowded calendar to put the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus all within a few days of each other. We also have a pretty well established date for Pentecost, and so to put everything in some kind of orderly fashion it makes good sense to celebrate the birth of Jesus a few months before the celebration of his death, so we have time for other things like Lent, and for some time that is not really connected to a holiday. Besides, there is a poetic benefit to having this joyous holiday mark the winter solstice, in the notion of the best thing to come to humanity coming at the darkest time of the year. (It doesn’t work that way in Australia, of course, but it’s only an incidental.) It’s a good time to celebrate it.

But the more fundamental question is why we celebrate the event at all. It is clear that our first century predecessors did not do so; if they knew the date they chose not to record it, and only two of the four biographers give us any information about that birth at all. The day that God became man was not particularly important to them.

However, the fact that God became man was of paramount importance. John’s Gospel does not tell us anything about the birth of Jesus, but this: “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father.” God became man–a turning point in all that God was doing for man–and that was something to celebrate every single day.

We, however, are not all that good at celebrating something every single day. The very concept of a “celebration” to us requires that it be a divergence from the norm. Many of us celebrate a Sabbath, even if we have moved the Sabbath to the day after the Sabbath, in part because we need the reminder that our time is God’s time, in part because having that moment of specific devotion helps to refocus us on the ordinary devotion that should permeate the rest of our lives. In something of the same way, celebrating the coming of God into the world on a specific day brings it forward afresh, so that we are a bit better able to celebrate it every day.

The snow and the cold? Well, that’s just because these are the conditions which accompany our celebration. It reminds us that Jesus came into our lives–there might never have been snow in Palestine during His entire life, but there is snow in our lives, and He comes into those lives where we are, as we celebrate where we are, in the midst of our own situations and conditions. I live in the snow and the cold, and Jesus came into my life, which I am celebrating. If I lived in Australia, I’m sure I’d sing Christmas carols about shrimp on the barbee and swimming in the billabong, because those would be my life situations during the celebration. Jesus joins us in our lives, as he did in Bethlehem two millennia ago. That is what we celebrate; that is why.

Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#24: Religious Liberty and Gay Rights: A Definitive Problem

December 6, 2015 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #24, on the subject of Religious Liberty and Gay Rights: A Definitive Problem.

Christians today are being forced to recognize the marital unions of homosexual (and lesbian) couples as just as valid as those of heterosexuals, and even to participate in the celebration of those unions by providing services, from signing marriage licenses to baking wedding cakes and taking photographs. Many Christians hold the view that homosexuals cannot legitimately be “married”, that homosexual relationships are an affront to God and to nature, and that it is an affront to our faith to be forced to participate–akin perhaps to insisting that Muslims and Jews participate in a feast at which a pig will be roasted and served to all the guests. We ought to be excused from such offensive events. Yet time and again the courts rule against us, despite the First Amendment to the Constitution which protects Americans from government intrusion into religious faith and practice. It is confusing, at the least. Why is this happening?

The answer is that over the past century or so the meanings of several critical words have changed just enough that our objections have been voided. Three words in particular have taken altered definitions, and left Christians behind.

Of course the word marriage has changed meaning over time. It comes into English through French from Latin, the Latin referring to a sexual relationship and thus, for the Romans at least, to an ongoing sexual relationship between a man and a woman. The Romans were rather specific about this, and that definition came with the word into English thanks largely to the Roman Catholic Church. A marriage, well into the early twentieth century, was a permanent commitment between a man and a woman with a view to producing and raising children; it was definitively a procreative relationship.

It was also primarily regulated by the church in most of the western world, even in the United States. Marriage “licenses” were created originally to bypass “the banns” (we’ve discussed this before), the rule that required an intended marriage be announced publicly several weeks in advance of the wedding in the home region of the couple so that objections could be known in advance; the parties could in effect post a cash bond guaranteeing that there were no impediments to the marriage, and so marry more quickly or in a place where one or the other was a stranger. They were optional, even through the early twentieth century–but they had become required first for interracial marriages, gradually for all marriages, and for the very telling purpose that the government wanted to regulate the number of mixed-race children and then additionally prevent incestuous marriages. Marriage licenses were about regulating sex, and guaranteeing that a couple who had sex would thereafter be jointly responsible for the children produced by their act.

Several things happened in the twentieth century. One had to do with the Federal Income Tax system, because someone decided that if a couple had children, or was trying to have children, that probably meant one of them (usually the woman) would not be working, and the income of the other would have to support both–and since the government wanted to encourage procreative relationships, such couples, identified by a legal “marriage”, were given a lower tax rate.

The second thing that happened was really many things. Divorce law changed such that gradually it became easier for couples to separate. Divorces being very messy cases, courts and legislatures tried to disentangle themselves from the mess by moving toward a system by which what had been presumptively permanent commitments now became readily dissolved. Further, attitudes toward sex changed, and the judiciary took the view that it was inappropriate for government to regulate sexual activities outside those special cases in which it was likely that someone was being compromised (rape, incest, possibly prostitution). That meant it did not matter whether someone’s sexual preferences were “aberrant”, as long as they were not abusive. Any adult could have sex with any other adult, and the government would mind its own business if no one was being harmed. There is still an issue as to whether anyone is being harmed in these relationships, but the government has decided that in most cases they aren’t even if they are, or at least that they assumed the risk that they would be harmed when they entered the relationship.

The upshot is that marriage is no longer defined as a permanent procreative relationship, but rather as a disolvable partnership between friends. A critical element has been changed.

The word homosexual did not not exist in the nineteenth century. Such men were called “sodomites”, and it had a very negative connotation. Early in the twentieth century someone in the psychology field coined the new word to identify what was then regarded a psychological aberration for study and treatment. The word itself was criticized as a nasty hybridization of a Greek prefix (homo, “same”) with a Latin root (sexual, “pertaining to gender”).

As attitudes about sex changed in the mid twentieth century, part of that was the notion that two persons engaging in sex were not hurting anyone and ought to be permitted to enjoy themselves. This justified what had previously been called fornication but was now called free love, what had previously been called adultery but was now called having an affair, and, eventually, what had been called sodomy but was now called same-sex love. What had been an unspeakable perversion in the nineteenth century by the dawn of the twenty-first was simply a different lifestyle.

However, the definitional change goes deeper than this. This is not so simple as a different lifestyle. It’s not like choosing whether or not to be a vegetarian, or deciding to join a convent, or moving to a farm. Although science has produced not a shred of evidence that homosexuality is genetic, homosexuals have insisted that they are born that way, and that therefore they cannot really be classed as “men” and “women”, but instead are two more, different, sexes, that homosexual male is no more heterosexual male than heterosexual female. The assertion is that they are a separate group, another sex, very much like a race. With the most recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems that the law has agreed.

Therein lies the key problem, the reason our bakers and photographers and caterers and honeymoon hotels are all being told that they cannot refuse service to homosexual couples. Under the law, it would be the same as excludng service to Blacks or Chinese because of their race. We went through this in the sixties, as Whites–not just southern Whites, it happened also in Chicago–tried to segregate Blacks by legislation and private practice, when restaurants would not serve persons of color and school boards sent black students to their own schools. It was an ugly time in that regard, and while we can argue to what degree racial discrimination has been ended (we’ve addressed that before, too) we can probably agree that things have improved from then, and that we do not want to go back to that. However, the problem is that under law homosexuals are in essence the new Blacks, the group we are not permitted to segregate or exclude, not permitted to refuse to serve, because they are not ordinary men and women engaged in a disgusting sexual perversion, but newly-recognized genders whose different proclivities are ordinary for them and protected by law.

The upshot is that homosexuality is no longer defined as an aberrant sexual practice, but rather as a third (and fourth, and maybe fifth and we do not know how many more) sex, to be protected as women are protected, and any expression of a different attitude on the subject has legally been defined as discrimination.

One more word has changed its meaning significantly over the past century. The word is wrong.

To say that the word wrong has changed its meaning is, well, wrong; it still retains most of the meanings it ever had. The problem is that in jurisprudence the acceptable meaning of the word has shifted, and things which were once almost universally understood as “wrong” are not. Not that this is news, nor even different–society has always been in flux concerning what it regards as wrong in the details. However, there has been something of a fundamental shift, not a problem with what specific things are wrong but a problem with what constitutes “wrongness” itself.

Jonathan Haidt has studied morality, and has written rather persuasively that the kind of morality we have in “Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic” (acronym WEIRD) societies is based primarily on one of six fundamental moral values that the rest of the world, now and from time immemorial, shares. For progressive liberals, the moral value that matters is dubbed “care/harm” (making the lives of others better, not worse), although they also recognize a “liberty/oppression” value (the primary value recognized by libertarians, individual autonomy). There is a third value, “fairness/cheating”, recognized, to which we will return.

Conservatives recognize these values, but also recognize three others that are embraced by most of the rest of the world (outside WEIRD areas). These are “loyalty/betrayal” (what makes it wrong to be a “traitor”), “authority/subversion” (respect and obedience within a hierarchy), and “sanctity/degradation” (the notion that some things, whether churches or flags or sports teams, deserve respect, and others are perversions deserving disgust). Thus for most of the world, yes, it is wrong to hurt others, wrong to oppress, wrong to cheat, but it is also wrong to betray your own family, to disobey your leaders, and to disrespect your flag or other culturally identified artifacts of identity. These meanings are not completely lost on people–when someone says, “That’s just wrong,” he is probably tapping into this notion of sanctity/degradation. However, progressives are so far from these understandings of morality that many of them consider them the enemy, obstacles to what genuinely matters.

I said we would return to the “fairness/cheating” value, because it is universally held but at the same time it is expressed in two distinct ways. For progressive liberals, “fairness” is about equality of outcome; the ideal for them is the socialist model, in which everyone gets everything he needs regardless of how much he is able to contribute. For everyone else, “fairness” is about proportionality, that you reap as you sow, that people who work harder should earn more, people who contribute more to society should get more from it. Thus for most of the world, it is “fair” for potentially procreative heterosexual couples who commit to long-term child-raising relationships to receive benefits which enable that which are not available to others (e.g., tax breaks), but for progressive liberals–and for the current United States legal system and that of other WEIRD countries–it is unfair for such couples to receive such benefits merely because they are giving society a future population.

Christians are thus stymied in finding an appropriate legitimately legal response to what a century ago would have been universally recognized as a complete perversion of the legal system, because over time the meanings of these three words have changed. To have said then that recognition of a procreative union between two members of the same sex engaging in sexual relationships is a perversion of that which is inherently sacred would have made perfect sense. Today the words “homosexual marriage is wrong” no longer mean that. They mean something like, “It is unkind to allow members of one sex to have the same rights available to those of other sexes regarding temporary relational partnerships,” which is not something anyone believes. To Christians, the old meaning is still the meaning; to the progressive liberals and their legal system in western countries, it is akin to saying that blacks cannot function as free people and need to be slaves. The world has changed, and expects us to keep up.

Yet as we have also previously said, keeping up with the world is not always the right thing to do.

Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#23: Armageddon and Presidential Politics

December 5, 2015 M.J. 1 Comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #23, on the subject of Armageddon and Presidential Politics.

A popular atheist recently suggested that Presidential candidates, and particularly Republican candidates, needed to be asked a theological question: do you believe that the end of the world is imminent, and if so is that a good or a bad thing? If war in the Middle East is positioned to blossom into Armageddon and the return of Christ, do we want to prevent the war, or encourage it?

Austrian forces ascending Mount Zion in World War I

That might be a good question for a potential leader of the most powerful military forces in the world, but it might also be a good question for the rest of us. At least, we should consider what answer our leader ought to give.

Despite what many prophecy teachers say, the sequence of events leading to the end of the world is not at all clear–some predictions touted as major parts of some theories are almost certainly predicting the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. by Titus. I have briefly reviewed the major theories (in The Sandy Becker Theory of Eschatology) along with some of the strengths and weaknesses of each and why I believe we cannot resolve the matter. However, there are many who are quite persuaded of one theory or another, and the one currently in ascendancy, indeed since early in the twentieth century, has been a version of “pre-millenialism” (if you do not know what that is, read the other article and return) in which Israel plays a major role and there is a massive world war centered in the Middle East. Every skirmish that occurs in the region, from the battles which took the territory from the Ottoman Empire in World War I to the Yom Kippur War to the current Islamic State battles, sparks anew the expectation that this might be the fight that brings all the armies of the world together to be defeated by the return of Christ.

The return of Christ is an event which Christians around the world have been anticipating for nearly two millennia, whatever our beliefs concerning what precipitates it. Late in the first century, the book variously known as The Revelation (from the Latin for “unveiling”) or The Apocalypse (from the Greek for “uncovering”) introduced to the faith the word which in English we make “Maranatha”, “Come, Our Lord” (although whether the original was marana tha, “Come our Lord”, or maran atha, “Our Lord has come”, is a question that cannot be settled from the manuscripts). We are instructed to watch for that coming, to anticipate it, to be prepared for it, even to want it and to work to hasten it–and in times when the world is falling into chaos and wickedness and darkness, it is easy to want it more.

On the other hand, we are told by Peter that the delay is an expression of God’s mercy: the moment Jesus returns, the door closes, and anyone who has not entered may not do so. It does not seem to be our place to call for the end of mercy, the closing of the door, and many of us would not do so merely because we have family or friends or colleagues who have not turned to Christ for forgiveness and salvation. I would rather not see strangers excluded from grace, and while I often note that there is no one apart from myself I am completely certain without any doubt has been forgiven and accepted by God, with varying degrees concerning other specific persons from “almost certainly” to “probably not”, I am not really in a hurry to have God terminate the free limited-time offer of acceptance into His family, and I don’t think that other believers should be so, either. Don’t get me wrong: I would love to have gone home already, if I were the only person who mattered. I just don’t think that I’m the only person who matters, even to me, nor to most believers in the world, and certainly not to God.

How, then, do we hasten the return of Christ and the end of the world, without hastening the end of the world as a path to the return of Christ?

The first thing we need to understand is that the one leads to the other, but the other is not the path to the one. That is, whether or not theories about a literal military battle at the Valley of Megiddo (har-megeddon) in which all the armies of the world are defeated in combat against an angelic host led by the resurrected and returning Jesus, we do not make that happen, indeed, we are completely unable to cause that to happen, by leading the world into war in the region. The return of Christ brings the end of the world as we know it, but it is possible that the world as we know it could end without bringing the return of Christ–indeed, arguably that has happened several times in history, most notably with the fall of the Roman Empire.

The second thing to grasp is that if such a battle is in fact the solution to the mysteriously metaphorical explanations of future events in John’s great apocalyptic vision, we will not be able to prevent it–but that does not mean we are not obligated to attempt to do so. “God has called us to peace,” and while that was Paul’s reason in I Corinthians for why a Christian whose spouse had been unfaithful should let the unfaithful spouse decide whether to preserve the marriage or get divorced, it is used as a fundamental principle of Christian conduct: we do not pick fights. We were instructed once by Christ to take swords with us if we had them, so we certainly have a basis to justify fighting when it is clearly necessary (and to debate just what fights are clearly necessary and when the right choice is to suffer the injury, to “turn the other cheek”). Yet our preference should always be for the peaceful resolution, even while keeping our sword within reach.

So for our Presidential candidates, the “right” answer to the question is probably this:

I eagerly anticipate the return of Christ, and whatever events will lead up to that, but I do not know with any certainty what those events are and will not be party to a war we can avoid honorably for any reason other than it is necessary for the safety of this country and the world in terms that persons of every faith or no faith can at least recognize as plausibly legitimate.

That is also the answer we should give if we are asked that question.

Bible and Theology, Elections, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning

#10: The Unimportance of Facts

October 24, 2015 M.J. 1 Comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #10, on the subject of The Unimportance of Facts.

In connection with the recent Presidential debates, one columnist bemoaned the issue that candidates often would make statements which in the aftermath of the debate political junkies who read sites such as Politifact would learn were inaccurate, misleading, or simply untrue. He speculated that voters did not care about facts “because they don’t encounter enough of them.” I considered that, but immediately thought that there might be another reason.

Of course, we have all heard the quip, “My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts,” and while no one ever says that of himself (and many attribute it to those with whom they disagree), it is a true description of the attitude some people have. I prefer, however, to think a bit more highly of people. It is a failing of those of us who are intelligent that we tend to assume others are also intelligent, and sometimes become frustrated when they demonstrate otherwise, yet I find that if you treat others as if they were reasonably intelligent, and if you assume they have some intellectual integrity, they frequently rise to your expectations. That is to say, most people base opinions on what they believe to be the truth. I think the problem lies elsewhere.

In discussing freedom of expression we mentioned the popular axiom History is written by the winners. We noted then that it was not outside the realm of possibility that Holocaust deniers could so shift public belief that the Holocaust itself might become one of those bits of history no one believes ever really happened. That attitude, though, has come to permeate all of culture, all of education. We are on some level taught that there are no facts, or at least no reliable facts. One cannot know anything with certainty. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable. Media is biased. People who want to tell you something have an agenda, an objective they wish to achieve by the telling, and scientists are not above this. Evolution might be an atheistic deception, global warming might be an environmentalist scare tactic, intelligent design might be an effort to infect pure science with religious nonsense, the Bible might have been written by the church centuries after the time it purports to report, or edited to tell the version of events the priesthood wanted told, and the list is endless. When I was young the world still had facts, and still respected them, and even when you did not know what the facts were you knew that facts existed and believed that they were ultimately discoverable. It was said, The Truth Will Out, meaning that facts could not be kept secret forever. Now we have conspiracies and conspiracy theories, spin doctors and media manipulators, textbook editors and politically correct speech enforcers–thought police of all types working to ensure that what you believe to be the truth fits their agenda. Further, we are fully aware of this aspect of our reality. As a result, we do not really believe what we believe, not in the sense that we think it might be true. We believe it because it is useful and connects us to people who believe as we believe. We are taught to believe concepts that have no basis in facts, and to be suspicious of any data claiming to be factual that is contrary to those concepts. Whether it is the lie that there is no correlation between the number of guns in an area and the amount of gun violence, or the lie that gun free zones are safer places that would never be targeted by mass murderers, we accept the statements that fit our conceptions and reject the facts that are awkward, and never worry about whether any supposed fact is true, because facts are not about being true but about supporting already established convictions.

Voters are not interested in the facts because the facts are irrelevant, and whether any alleged fact will be regarded true depends on who you ask. It not being possible to know the truth of such matters, seeking the truth on them becomes foolish. For the voter, what matters is whether the candidate believes what the voter believes, not whether any of it is factually true. The only truth that matters in today’s world is the subjective truth, the opinion of the one who believes it. Reality is irrelevant. We, as a society, have been taught and have embraced the lie that there is no truth, or if there is, it is completely undiscoverable.

That, sadly, is why facts are not important in the debates.

Many of the issues brushed in this discussion are discussed in more detail on pages in the law and politics section of this website; see Articles on Law and Politics for a list.

Bible and Theology

#3: Reality versus Experience

September 28, 2015 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #0003, on the subject of Reality versus Experience.

I recently attended a family gathering at which a particular gentleman, not a family member, is often in attendance with his wife. My father usually seats me near him, as he is an intelligent man, a retired sociology professor with schooling from a liberal seminary, and we both seem to enjoy our conversations even though I do not know that we agree on much. (That is, after all, part of an education: examining and considering differing viewpoints. If you never got that ability, you were probably not well educated.)

On this particular occasion the Supreme Court decision on marriage was still pending, and that introduced a discussion of the subject of homosexuality. As I often do, I turned to Paul’s Romans epistle, and began to observe Paul’s (and, to my theology, God’s) point that homosexuality (like adultery and fornication) was not so much the sin as the punishment, the self-destructive conduct stemming from yielding to a pernicious and continuous temptation to which some were condemned.

His response was, That has not been my experience.

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 24: Libby Enloe (2nd L) and Amanda Adams, both of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, embrace and kiss after being married outside the U.S. Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill July 24, 2013 in Washington, DC. Enloe's mother, Mary Ann Enloe (L) and Adams' sister, Meredith Boggs (R), were witnesses to the ceremony. A couple for more than 21 years, Enloe and Adams decided to get married outside the court after the justices struck down the Defense of Marriage Act last month. The location is symbolic, Enloe said. "This makes it official which is what we were waiting for," she said. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) — WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 24: Libby Enloe (2nd L) and Amanda Adams, both of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, embrace and kiss after being married outside the U.S. Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill July 24, 2013 in Washington, DC. Enloe’s mother, Mary Ann Enloe (L) and Adams’ sister, Meredith Boggs (R), were witnesses to the ceremony. A couple for more than 21 years, Enloe and Adams decided to get married outside the court after the justices struck down the Defense of Marriage Act last month. The location is symbolic, Enloe said. “This makes it official which is what we were waiting for,” she said. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

I am fairly certain that there are many things that are outside my experience which are undoubtedly true. It is undoubtedly true that as you approach the speed of light time slows and mass increases, but I have no direct experience with that. It is similarly true that I have no experience with the notion that gravity decreases with distance from the attractive mass, and that it is dependent on the mass of that object, but I have never been anywhere where that rule could be directly observed. There is a degree to which much of what I know to be true is known because someone I trust informed me. Assuming I trust that Paul was writing what God had told him, I have better reason to trust that than I do my own experience, or that of anyone else. But that is something of a subjective assessment. Most people undoubtedly believe the Bible to the degree that it is confirmed in their own experience. That is theologically dangerous–after all, many of us do not have the experience of perceiving ourselves as villains, selfish brats seeking our own interests at the expense of everyone else, even though the Bible identifies us very like that (and for most of us, there are people who would attest to that description concerning us, although probably not concerning themselves, who to us seem so like that). Yet it is at least a fair objection that one wants to find that the Bible is true before trusting it. For some of us, it is sufficient that the Bible have been demonstrated to be God’s message in its totality to support the acceptance of its details; for others, each detail must be individually and independently confirmed before being believed. That is a fundamental difference of viewpoint that cannot easily be argued either way. As with a textbook, either I trust that it is fully trustworthy (absent evidence to the contrary) or I do not trust it at all and get my information elsewhere.

I am digressing, to some degree, but that is very much the point which must be demonstrated.

I have within my nearest family and friends circle a man who is, at least to the knowledge of all his friends, an alcoholic. I do not know whether he believes that about himself. He is usually among the nicest guys I know, a hard worker, helpful in many ways and the sort of person who looks for ways to help. He is a diligent worker when he has work. He has a lot of problems, and probably drinks to escape them. However, if he is given a paycheck and a day off, he proceeds to drink the paycheck and is largely out of commission for several days, usually losing his job. Bill Cosby has said (in Bill Cosby Himself) that as an employer he finds that his employees do not know what to do with free time, as they always return to work hungover and complaining about the weekend. This person epitomizes that, and frequently loses jobs because he is too sick from drink to return to work on the scheduled day. Yet he does not believe he has a drinking problem; it is not his experience that alcohol is the problem, as for him it is the means temporarily to escape the problems.

We know someone else whom we have helped through some hard times, whose background includes cocaine use. He is generous to a fault, hard working, helpful, a wonderful nice guy. His employers are usually glad to have him. When he was staying with us he told us that he would never do anything to hurt us. Then he starts using the drug, and although in one sense he does not change at all, suddenly he finds himself in trouble and has to fix it, so he steals from his employer or from friends. He had a “crackhead” girlfriend who was in trouble with her supplier, so he stole one of our checkbooks and forged checks for about forty times what we had in the bank. Nice guy, though. Would give you the shirt off his back.

I can see in these lives that the alcohol and the drugs are destructive. Yet if you were not with these people long enough, you would not see it. They themselves do not recognize it in themselves (although they recognize it in each other).

I believe that these self-destructive lifestyles reflect the wrath of God on the world–not necessarily on these people individually, but on humanity as a whole. Paul says in Romans that people who fail to acknowledge God are subjected to such self-destructive judgements, immorality, impurity, and depravity–that is, infidelity and fornication, homosexuality, and the inability to identify destructive and self-destructive conduct and make wise choices. Just as the alcoholism and the drug addiction of my two examples are destroying their lives, so I believe the temptation toward homosexuality is destroying the lives of these people.

It is, of course, entirely the choice of the alcoholic and the cocaine user to pursue their addictions, and something only they can choose to stop. In one sense, it is not up to me to decide for them–impossible on its face–and if they prefer to continue destroying their lives that is their choice. That does not mean I ought to affirm that choice. I can recognize and disagree with the choice and still love the people who are so destroying themselves. If, as I am persuaded, homosexual conduct is a similar choice and “homosexuality” is a self-destructive condition like alcoholism or addiction, then I should not affirm such choices. I need not have experienced that self-destruction first hand to know that it is there. My experience tells me that the Bible is usually right about such things, and just as the adulterer and the fornicator are destroying some important part of themselves in the ability to form fidelitous long-term relationships, so too I think that the self-identified homosexual is destroying some part of himself related to the image of God and the nature of humanity. The Bible and I might be wrong, but my experience has been that the Bible has always been right, and that when it does not immediately comport with my experience it is usually that my experience is too limited.

The author has previously addressed homosexuality from theological, legal, and psychological perspectives in Christianity, Homosexuality, and the E. L. C. A., In Defense of Marriage, Homosexual Marriage, and Miscellaneous Marriage Law Issues.

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Category Archives: Bible and Theology

#65: Being Married

#58: Acceptable Killing In Our Society

#51: In Memoriam on Groundhog Day

#36: Ligation Litigation

#34: Happy Old Year

#32: Celebrating Christmas

#24: Religious Liberty and Gay Rights: A Definitive Problem

#23: Armageddon and Presidential Politics

#10: The Unimportance of Facts

#3: Reality versus Experience

A generalist: learning less and less about more and more, one day to know nothing about everything.