| Morality |
From Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation:
One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not -- that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral -- that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings.
This explains why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year. |
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| What she said. |
"There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
-- Madeline Albright |
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| Life in the house of sick. |
 For the past 3 days I have become obsessive compulsive with disinfecting everything in sight. Since coming home from seeing The Phantom of the Opera on Saturday night (6 rows from the front!!), I was greeted with a pukey kid.
From Saturday night onward, Emma has had several bouts of nausea that has tested my resolve as a mama. (ha! Resolve. That's another name that I'm acquainted with these days -- it's the name of a carpet cleaner) I consider myself a pretty compassionate person, but vomiting is where my sympathy draws a line. I'm just tired of having to clean up, wash up, laundry up, and disinfect up everything in sight. I've gone through Emma's bed linens twice in the last 3 days. So far I've resisted taking a Lysol wipe to Emma, despite my exhausted and germaphobic state.
I've heard that this is a three day flu, which hopefully means we're at the tail end of it -- just in time for Jerry to get sick, of course.
On the bright side of vomiting, who knew that collecting air sickness bags was so interesting? The bag above is from a virtual museum of barf bags, and here's a site that collects bags from all over the world. |
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| Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere |
WASHINGTON—In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they are baffled, by the sudden and seemingly random, appearance of commas, in our nation's sentences. The epidemic of errant punctuation has spread, like wildfire, since signs of the epidemic first, appeared in a Washington Post article, on Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben, Bernanke. "This, is an unsettling trend," columnist William Sa,fire, told reporters. "We're seeing a collapse of the grammatical rules that have, held, the English language, together for, centuries." Experts warn, that if this same, phenomenon, should occur with ellipses…
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| Threat vs. Warning |
So our Mormon visitation is continuing -- while I think Jerry is getting a little tired of it all, I'm still keen on having them come over. Maybe it's because I like being friendly to them in a big-sister kind of way. I just figure that they must be rejected, mocked, or not taken very seriously in most of their visits -- and at least in our home we're not out to deconvert them or to recruit them to our "right" religion. Besides, these guys epitomize the meaning of "nice" (though I think you could also find their faces under the words "sheltered" and "naive").
Anyway, last week they brought one of their Mormon sisters along for the visit, in order to better talk about the LDS church's view of family relationships. Now up to this point, I've been pretty quiet in these visits, with occasional outbursts when talking about the church's view on black people and homosexuals. This visit, however, was about family roles -- my roles -- as a wife and mother. This is where things started to get really interesting.
The elders passed out the LDS church's proclamation on the family for us to read. It's pretty standard religious faire -- the male "presides" over his family, the woman "nurtures" it, blah blah, blah. The objections I have to their views on roles are pretty similar to the ones I've always had in traditional evangelical churches.
The only difference in this conversation was the discussion of gender, and its role in our pre-mortal, mortal, and eternal life. Apparently our pre-mortal spirit has a gender, though when we pressed our guests on how gender is defined, they could only point to the assignment of sexual organs. This adds a whole new dimension to things, or as Jerry put it, "the power of the penis."
Toward the end of the proclamation, this is stated:
We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God. Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.
I pointed out this statement toward the end of our talk, and asked them if these statements were supposed to be a threat (I later asked for clarification about which "calamities" were being specifically referred to). The reply to my question was that this wasn't a threat, but instead, a warning.
Which puts a whole new spin on things, doesn't it? I suppose it's all in how you view what's being said. They see this as a warning to nonbelievers, I see it clearly as a threat for those who don't comply with their doctrines. Maybe that's one of the (many) reasons of why I'm not involved with religion anymore. I couldn't accept these types of righteous threats as warnings, and because of that, I didn't want to involve myself with any of its doctrines or practices.
So while I may not be any closer to converting to Mormonism, I am getting better perspectives on the human traditions of faith -- and also learning more about myself in the process.
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