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I have been accused of saying nothing new. It happened awhile back with one of my essays, where someone commented that it was old news and was rather disappointed by it. It was a valid accusation: I wasn’t saying anything new, and I knew it. And I kinda felt like I was cheating, not saying anything “new”, per se, just rewriting what I already believed. But I thought, at the time, that it need saying again. Recently I was reading a book, a memoir, written by a woman who had been raised conservative Christian and who is now (I think it’s fair to guess) a theist without being set on the particulars. She is highly educated, with a Ph.D, and like many people with higher education, she puts a lot of value on logic and reason. At one point in the book she’s being counselled about her relationship with her ex-husband, and her friend’s advice did not make sense to her. But she tried it anyway. And it worked. She said she had taken her friend’s advice on faith, unable to accept that it made sense. And her conclusion was that sometimes, “faith is better than reason.” And I frowned at that, disappointed. It occured to me that when Christians talk about sin and forgiveness and atonement and so on, that we immediately get hammered for spreading fear and false guilt. But when Christians start talking about forgiveness and salvation and new life and spotless souls, we immediately get nailed for eliminating personal responsibility. We can’t win. A lot of you are not going to agree with this. I’m not asking you to. I just had to get some thoughts out. They’re about government, and Christianity, and the origins of my beloved nation. Is the United States really all that special to God? More special than other nations? I don’t see it. Y’know, there’s this thought that goes around that good cannot exist without evil. And in a way, I can see where that comes from. I’m unfamiliar with the details of the philosophies that teach it, but anyone who’s spent enough time thinking about things can work out that bad actions can have good consequences, and vice versa, that destruction can be as important as creation, that we need both darkness and light. Our own language has proverbs like “every cloud has a silver lining” or “tis an ill wind that blows nobody good” (it took me awhile to figure out that it meant that “it would be an extremely horrible wind the likes of which nobody has ever seen that could possibly not have some upside or other”, but I’m just slow like that.) And there’s the idea of contrasts, that you don’t appreciate light without dark, health without illness, joy without sorrow, and so on. So this last week I finally saw Avatar. And afterwards, I was reading about the movie, and the audience reaction to it, and lo and behold some people had a rather unexpected response to it: they got depressed. The story goes that the CGI world of Pandora was so breathtakingly beautiful that in the days after watching it, some people found the real world to be utterly grey, and empty, and unsatisfying. And I know how some people would react to that: “Oh come on! It’s imaginary! Some artists dreamed it up! Getting upset about make-believe is just sad.” But my brain, being my brain, went in a different direction. I said, “Okay, Avatar was beautiful. The artists did a fantastic job. But how can you say it’s better than the real world? Have you seen the real world?” So here’s a question for y’all: why do we have rules? This is an especially fun question for Christians, seeing as we go on quite eloquently about how our salvation makes us free, and how we are no longer Under The Law. If I were the kind of person who liked baiting, I would have lot of fun with this. “Christians are free, correct?” “Yes! We are saved by grace! We live under Love, not the Law! Christ has set us free!” “So why do we have rules?” “Oh, see, but–” So I’m going to talk politics. (Oh, boy, if that isn’t comments-bait, I don’t know what is.) I’m going to talk politics in a way that’s been smoldering along in the back of my head for years. This is not borne out of the current political climate. I was thinking this way four years ago. I began thinking this way in college. It is, I hope, completely irrelevant to which party is in power, and which side any of you stand on. I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to drill this home quite as much as I’d like to, but I’m gonna give it my best. One of my favorite things on television right now is Doctor Who, a very old, very weird, very British sci fi about an alien who goes traveling through time and space and saves the day through sheer ingenuity. Just recently, there was an episode that gave me pause about the nature of belief. (Sci fi and fantasy are very good for philosophy, because they can throw out all the mundane problems in favor of asking a question you may never have thought about.) We like justice. We like rules. We like to draw lines between things. One place on TVTropes.org that I like to tool around in is the Morality section, especially those parts pertaining to heroes and villains. It’s got all kinds of classifications. Hero, antihero, villain, antivillain, chaotic good, lawful evil, true neutral, incorruptible pure pureness, and Complete Monster, just to name a few. And there’s this one fascinating page called Even Evil Has Standards. It lists all those badguys, from stories of every kind, who had a personal threshold which they would not cross. In each case, for some reason or other, there came a moment in the plot where someone did something – or even suggested doing something, which the badguy just could not take. There was a standard that a villain could not cross, that he could not conscience or wave away. The reasons are myriad, but they all lead to the same thing: people, however villainous have standards. They have things that they will not do, and which they will stop – or punish – if someone else does them. |
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