Eugenics...what's the big deal anyways?

Last week, at the NCFCA National Tournament, I learned a lot.

I learned from two consecutive speakers in Persuasive that parents should have the liberty to raise their children as they see fit, providing that they do not harm the child in the process, and that homeschoolers are upset that the government is essentially legislating morality by forcing themselves into the role of the parent. As it turns out, in the realm of parenting the government is not well equipped to solve matters of personal liberty. Huh.

I also learned that eugenics is a big problem. Apparently, there are some wicked people out there who arbitrarily kill babies because they don't meet our arbitrary standards of perfection and beauty. I mean, I don't get it...we can sometimes kill children, or even adults who don't meet those same standards, but killing babies is suddenly this raging epidemic that is going to conquer all that is good and holy in society? What's the big deal with killing innocent people? It's not like their quality of life was going to be that great anyways if we let them live, and we wouldn't want to have to spend our hard earned money {aka, tax dollars, if you're Barack Obama} to support people who are bound to be screw ups anyways. Better to just end their life, because redemption is too expensive, and the right to life doesn't mean a lot if we aren't rich & attractive, anyways. Patrick Henry, ftw!

Speaking of Patrick Henry, it turns out that America has become evil again. This is something else I learned at the mercy of homeschoolers, last week. This may surprise you, but America has walked away from God, and is evidently ignoring the ongoing alter call. I'm so glad that I now know that a nation can actually fall away, and be saved again--there is hope for John Piper after all! I was a little confused as to why we were supposed to be praying for America (like the White House? the Washington Monument? I'm still not entirely sure I understand what "America" is other than a collection of some people, a few of which used to wear funny hats and grow corn with the Indians) until I found out that America was God's favorite place to hang out, excepting Israel. I'm glad I don't have to worry about the rest of the world, because honestly that was a bit of a drag.

It's amazing how much you can learn in a few very long days.

Constitution Barbeques

In history class today, we learned about abolitionists in the US before and during the civil war. Abolitionists do not sound like the kind of people with whome you would want to spend a relaxing afternoon. On the 4th of July, they would burn the Constitution and talk about how evil America was. I think they probably barbequed meat too.

America was pretty evil then, incidentally. Even those who opposed "the South", pretty much still hated black people, and many of them were not against slavery so much as they just wanted to keep the problem in the South and change the laws that let southern police come up north to take black people. The South wasn't a whole lot better, obviously. Aside from the fundamentally wicked institution of slavery, they called for a federal police force, proving that they weren't really so much in favor of states rights after all.

So the abolitionists had a point. But they weren't very popular, and I imagine them all looking a little like Ron Paul. If there were abolitionists today, I'm not sure we'd like them as much as we like Ioan Gruffudd in Amazing Grace; they would be the kind of people like Ralph Nader that everyone makes jokes about, but nobody puts signs in their yard for. Conservatives would mock them and liberals would probably ignore them. They would sound kind of like Tom Stockman in Enemy of the People, though maybe less articulate and more passionate. If there were abolitionists today, they would not be polite or politically correct.

Abolitionists were probably not nice people.

In retrospect, it is easy to side with abolitionists, because we mostly think slavery was wicked and that it is good that people like Lincoln faught wars to make it stop, and make the US into "we the people" (thank you, Nicholas Cage, for that little tidbit). It was abolitionists and not racists like Lincoln who probably did the most to actually lobby for equality in the long run, but it's hard to image ourselves in their places. Saying that black people should be equal to white people was like saying that money is wicked, and that making a profit should be outlawed. There would be lots of people who kind of sympathized with you, but ulimately liked making money and used profit to feed their families. There would be even more people who thought you were insane, and probably some that thought you were a Marxist. It may even be like declaring yourself as a Russian during the Red Scare. Lots of people would say you were un-Patriotic (given your 4th of July rituals, they may have a point), and Joe McCarthy would put you in jail.

Wearing peace signs and shopping at Urban Outfitters is cool, but being an abolitionist is not cool at all. Being an abolitionist means that you are wildly unpopular, disliked and if you walk down the street, some people might spit on you, or crucify you, or write nasty articles about you in the Collegian. Being an abolitionist means that you care more about your cause than anything else in the world; even more than you care about money or fame or your own life.

People like Jesus and Ghandi and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr are abolitionists.

I would like to be abolitionist.

However, due to the environmental ramifications, I do not suggest, or plan on, burning the Constitution.

Metaphors We Live By

Argument is war. Strategies are employed to win arguments. Your opponent defends his position by attacking yours.

Hope is light. A glimmer at the end of a tunnel. A ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds.

Time is money. It can be wasted, carelessly invested or saved.

I like metaphors because they say much more than almost any other combination of words. In fact, those statements right there prove the point, but I’ll get to that later.

“It’s just a figure of speech,” you might say – and that’s where you’d be wrong. Metaphors are much more than figures of speech. They are powerful indicators of the way we think and act towards others. In their book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write that “Metaphor[s are] pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. They govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.”

Enter the grammar Nazi: A metaphor is not a simile. A simile is when I compare one thing to another: “Jack eats like a pig” or “Jill looks like a model.” To say that something is like something else, is to simultaneously admit that it is not in fact that thing.

A metaphor is similar to a simile, grammar Nazi leaves in favor of the redundancy police, in that it links two unrelated topics. But what if I said “Jack is a pig.” I have made a statement about Jack’s character, not just his eating habits. If, to me, Jack isn’t just like a pig; he is a pig, how do you think I will treat Jack? You’re right; like a pig. Better yet, let’s look at the second example I gave: “Jill looks like a model” has a meaning completely different from “Jill is a model.”

So what? How does this affect me? Why does it matter? That is what I call a question that answers itself. The key is in the question “why?” Why do you automatically link the concepts of argument and war, hope and light or time and money together? The answer is so obvious, it is often ignored. You link time and money together because you believe that time can and ought to be treated like money, just like Jill can and ought to be treated like a model.

Let’s take an easier example, something you probably experience in your day to day life. Say there is an old crooked tree at the intersection where you turn to go from your house to the grocery story. Naturally, you refer to that corner as the “crooked tree” corner. If you told your oldest son, “turn right at the crooked tree corner,” he would know exactly what you’re talking about. Assume this goes on for 5-10 years. Sadly, the old crooked tree is struck by lighting and is cut down. Even when the tree is gone, you will naturally refer to the corner as “crooked tree” corner, whether the tree itself exists or not.

Metaphors are no different. They are the natural product of habit—you come to understand time to be like money so in your mind time becomes money, not like money, but it completely takes on the role of money in your mind.

It doesn’t seem like a problem until you turn on the radio or the TV or listen to yourself talk. Then you start to get scared. Really, really fast.

Exhibit A: War metaphor
Last December, CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network, published a story entitled Christmas Under Siege “From Georgia to Oklahoma, the biblical foundation of Christmas is under attack.” This opening statement begs the question, “under attack by whom?” the answer is obvious: the devil, or better yet, the ACLU. The article goes on to quote David Cortman, Senior Legal Counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, “The attacks on Christmas are simply part of a larger war being waged on anything and everything Christian. The American people, common sense and the Constitution are clearly winning the battles against Christmas waged by the Left.”

Whether or not you agree with keeping Christ in Christmas, and I do, it is important to understand that this was a legitimate legal debate about the use of public property. If Nietzsche somehow came back from the dead and spent your tax dollars on placing elaborate “GOD IS DEAD” signs all over your public library, you’d be upset too.
Here is the mistake we often make when discussing the battle in churches:
We make the same error that CBS and other fanatical “warriors” often make: we mistake unbelievers for our enemies. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that we “wrestled not with spiritual forces, but with Democrats, Muslims and Frenchmen.” When we speak of the “fight” for Christian morals in our nation, the “war” for family values and the “battle” for Christ, we are fighting, in some sense, successfully, the wrong enemy.
Dan Nejfelt of Faith In Public Life, a religious blog, writes that “The purpose of war metaphors is to cultivate a sense of fear, outrage and victimhood, and if fear, outrage and victimhood have to be cultivated with absurdly exaggerative rhetoric, those sensibilities are unwarranted. Before we pride ourselves on the fact that we have discovered a new kind of scriptural misinterpretation, we should take a quick look back into history.
The persecution of “heretics” began centuries before the birth of Christ in 385 BC. It wasn’t until 1184 AD, though, that the church began its first official inquisition, most commonly called the Medieval Inquisition. More famous is the Spanish Inquisition, which lasted from 1478 to 1838, nearly 400 years. During this period, Jewish and Muslim converts were executed if they were suspected of adhering to their former beliefs estimates of those killed in the name of religion range from 8.4 million to a startling 112.5 million.

But during the holocaust, war in the name of religion struck a little closer to home. It’s is a sickening reminder that one of Hitler’s primary goals was the elimination of homosexuals in Germany. When we speak carelessly, even in jest, of “shipping all of the gays to France and bombing them” we should immediately realize that we are aligning ourselves with one of the wickedest men that walked the earth.

We are in a battle, a war against spiritual forces, but our war metaphor, specifically that which appears in the church, must be directed at sin and not sinners. We must recall that like homosexuals and yes, even liberals, we frequently make mistakes. If we hate sin, we must learn to hate it in ourselves and in the church before we hate it in others. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 5:12, “I’m not responsible for what the outsiders do, but don’t we have some responsibility for those within our community of believers? God decides on the outsiders, but we need to decide when our brothers and sisters are out of line and, if necessary, clean house.” It is imposters within the church, and not sinners outside of it, that we are called to judge.

Exhibition B: Economic Metaphor

I invest in my friendships, I value my family. Your relationships enrich your character, and those who have no friends lead impoverished lives. Did you catch it? We commonly think of our relationships, our love, in economic terms. Donald Miller, in this collection of essays, Blue Like Jazz writes that, “The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did. I used love like money, but love doesn’t work like money. It is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose.”

The other day I was at this graduation for my older brother, and the speaker was a politician with a very strong Cajun accent said something that made me smile, because a friend of mine said it to me months ago and it made me think. “Relationships are like ATM’s,” he said, “you have to make deposits in order to make a withdrawal.”

Put that in your pipe and chew it.

Things get a bit more complicated here:

A study completed by the Schwartz Center shows that metaphors are fundamental to individual and collective expression, [they] are also capable of creating or perpetuating stereotypes, and stigma. If we think of people purely as an economic boon, when they no longer benefit us, we will have no reason to love them unconditionally. How then shall we live? Instead of thinking of love as money, Miller suggests that we use “magnet” metaphor or “free gift” metaphor. What if you could make deposits with no hope of a withdrawal? What if you did make deposits with no hope of withdrawal.

Words are powerful weapons.