Category: vaguely

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Thinking about repentance

Watching A Christmas Carol last week I was struck with the theme of repentance. I was trying to decide how it fits with my thoughts on good intentions. What does repentance really refer to and how do most people use the term? Most simply, repentance is usually thought of as being sorry that you’ve done something wrong. This is sometimes coupled with the expectation of not repeating the mistake. If we separate intentions from actual outcome, any mistakes or sins of which we might repent happen in one of three ways.

1) We intended bad and we did bad.

2) We intended good and we did bad.

3) We weren’t really paying attention, had no particular intention, and the outcome was bad.

Is repentance available for all three? If yes, do we consider it the same kind of repentance, or are there different flavors?

1) Bad -> bad
This seems the least likely candidate in my mind for repentance. If you had a thought to do something bad, then took the time to consider it as bad, then decided to act on it and create bad in the world…well you probably aren’t concerned with God’s opinion or anyone you might be hurting. So repentance is an option for you, but you probably won’t seek it. I can’t say what repentance would mean in a case like this, because it’s difficult for me to imagine a person truly wanting a bad thing to happen and only later seeing it as wrong. (Lying to yourself about your intent is something a little different which I’d put in category 3.)

2) Good intent -> bad
You meant to save the life of a chipmunk by swerving your car and ran over a cat. It is definitely a mistake which you can learn from (swerve more gently next time) but would the learning experience be considered repentance? You are probably sorry and vow to not repeat the mistake. My guess is that most people would not consider this repentance. If it is, then it’s a lesser variety.

3) Indifference -> bad
This I would imagine is by far the most common reason for bad actions/results. This includes anything you didn’t think through or didn’t think about. This is every case of stupidity that transmitted a sexual disease and every drunk who crashed into another car. This is me in high school basically telling a friend that homosexuality is disgusting and later realizing he was probably gay. It was stupid and uninformed and probably messed this guy up. This is what repentance means for me. I wish so hard I hadn’t done that. I am really sorry. I will never repeat the mistake. And I really didn’t have a particular intention when I did it, I just hadn’t thought about my own opinions much or what it might be like to be gay in a Catholic town.
Having no particular intention is what we are doing most of the time with our lives. How many of us really micromanage our thoughts to find ways of being good at every moment? I think far more often, we skip that part. It can be unintentional as my above examples are. But I would also include willful inattentiveness in this category. If you see leftover snacks from a college event and the cleanup crew are all back in the kitchen, can you take the food? Maybe. It’s very possible they are going to throw it away. Or maybe the leftover food is meant for the kitchen help or another event, or is going to a food bank. You could ask, or you could stop yourself from even considering these things because, you know, you really want snacks and it probably doesn’t really equal stealing. I am 99% sure they were just going to throw those snacks away and would have given them to me. But I don’t know for sure. And since I’ve ignored possible outcomes like this, I can see how easy it might be to ignore bigger things and tell yourself it’s probably fine. Until someone points out what actually happened. Which brings we to my original reason for posting; my pondering on Ebenezer Scrooge’s repentance. As a youngster I assumed it was the unlikely type of repentance I mentioned in example 1. He was a bad guy doing bad deeds because he liked it, then somehow saw the error of his ways and became good. Only I don’t think this is how it was meant in the book, or the numerous movies. I don’t think Scrooge was as frightened by the threat of eternal punishment as he was touched by the thought of Tiny Tim’s death as an innocent. Scrooge didn’t think that by underpaying Bob Cratchit he was sentencing a young boy to death. He should probably have thought more about all the things he was doing. And it seemed he did in his younger days before he got sidetracked by his career. It was the knowledge that he was doing things that harmed others that finally reminded Scrooge to pay closer attention and make some changes in his life. My guess is that most repentance looks like this.

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If you met a homeless person

Second set of open questions:
What would you do if you met a homeless person?
What would you say to him?
How long would you hang out?
What would you expect to give or get from the meeting?

And finally, are any of your answers similar to the Jesus question?

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If you met Jesus

Open question to reply or think about:
What would you do if you met Jesus?
What would you say to him?
How long would you hang out?
What would you expect to give or get from the meeting?

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Prayer and intent can be excuses for laziness

I’m starting to sense a pattern with certain people and groups in terms of how they view prayer and the intent for good. As you may have figured out by the title, I think they can be a great option for making people feel ok about laziness. Prayer is nice if it makes you feel more positive about things you cannot change, or gives you peace amid turmoil. But there are many things in life that we can work towards changing. If poverty bothers you, don’t just pray about it, go donate clothes for people to wear to job interviews. If hunger bothers you, volunteer at a food pantry. Sometimes prayer really is the only thing left to do. But the rest of the time, get out and go help someone. I really only have a problem with prayer when it is used as an excuse to sit on your hands. I think God gave us free will so we could use it to decide to help each other, not so we could sit back and expect him to make things happen.

Intent as a problem is harder to pin down and as far as I’m concerned easier to excuse. Intending good is wonderful. It’s the start of anything good you might ever do. But it’s only halfway there. You have to carry out good actions as well. And you have to be willing to really look and listen to where your actions led to make sure it was somewhere good. And the really tricky part comes next. If you see that your good intentions inadvertently caused a bad result, you have to change.

A story to illustrate:
Mice get in my house and I have to get them out. The standard kill trap rarely works right because our mice are too small to trigger it. The only traps that work are glue cards which mice can’t really get off once stuck. I used to trap mice on the cards then kill them by freezing, figuring for them it would be like falling asleep. I later learned that freezing is probably incredibly painful- the exact opposite of what I wanted. While I did feel extremely guilty, I then found out what I could about traps and learned that mice can actually be freed from glue traps by dissolving the glue in oil. My intent was to spare mice from suffering but instead I was probably causing it. I could have responded in any number of easy ways that ignored what I’d done and continued causing harm. But I wanted to fix it, at least for the future. So I did.

Intent for good is not an excuse for you to do whatever and be ok with whatever results. I probably should have done more research on mice and glue traps and stuff before any of what I did. Then I could have started with good intent and used it to good outcome. As it is I got a bad outcome and have since moved to a better outcome. We need to recognize the difference between intent and outcome because its a way to improve. Good intent is good. Good action is better.

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Good examples vs. bad examples

So I was wondering recently if people decide how to behave based more on good examples they see or bad examples they see. Imagining for a second that people are either good or bad (which I don’t believe)- are good people that way because they’ve seen and admired goodness, or because they’ve seen and been repulsed by evil? Do we only know what good is because evil exists? I suppose this is the premise of the garden of Eden story. Adam and Eve didn’t know good or evil. Once they found out good was a thing and evil was a thing, they could compare one with the other and see good is much nicer than evil. If we somehow created a paradise here on earth could we keep it? Or, lacking evil to remind us how things could be, would we screw it all up? What are we dismissing as unimportant today because we don’t see it? I’ve never seen war or even a single person dying. If I saw these things often or even once, would I leave my job and spend my whole day trying to stop war and death? I know for a fact that my attempts to be accepting of those deemed different or weird by society are directly related to my own negative experiences as a child feeling ‘weird’. Maybe the best way to learn is by a bad example.

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Good vs. Evil

I wanted to talk about good and evil. In trying to start I realized there are several problems which I am going to mention, then gloss over.

First: I think English is flawed. Good is a broad term but evil is not. Evil means intentional and enthusiastic badness and anti-Godness. Evil is extremely awful. Good can range from extreme to moderate and is usually secular. I use good to describe socks that fit, web pages I like; I’d never call ill fitted socks evil. A true antonym for evil should mean extreme loving kindness or helpfulness and how God would like us to act. I am just going to use the word ‘good’ and hope you can figure out whether it means just ok or the opposite of evil.

Second: I think maybe theologically I’m coming at this from a quasi-Catholic standpoint which may or may not line up with beliefs in other types of Christianity. Catholics have the whole confession to forgive/erase sin. So one of the things I sort of believed growing up was that people were in flux between good and evil based on sins making you evil and confessions making you good. This leads me to what I was actually wanting write about.

I don’t think that way anymore. I don’t believe a person is good or evil, or flipping between the two. That’s way too simplistic. People aren’t either sugary or lemon rinds. Everyone is ziti. Ziti can taste better or worse but it never tastes like sugar or lemon rinds. If you say my ziti is sweet like sugar it can only mean you are using a metaphor. Same with calling someone good or evil. It’s a decent metaphor as long as you remember it is just a metaphor. I don’t think people should actually be lumped into ‘good’ or ‘evil’ because the categories are problematic.

For one thing, no one is static. Lives change, choices are made, people change. A person who you’d class as good can do a bad thing. And vice versa. Calling someone good or evil locks up your opinion of them forever. It lets you not think about the actions they take. It gives you a pass to be mentally lazy.

Another problem with having boxes labeled “good” and “evil” is that it encourages a sort of mathematical look a person’s nature/personality. How many good things does it take for a person to be called good? How many new good things must you do to be “good” if you’ve been “evil” most of your life? Is this really how God is seeing us and how we should see each other?

I think we retweak our ziti recipes every day by our thoughts and the actions that reflect those thoughts to the world. Any day’s ziti could be awesome or awful reminding someone either of sweet, delicious sugar or ucky yucky lemon rinds. And yeah if you fix terrible ziti enough days in a row I might be inclined to call you evil. But rarely would I actually go ahead and do it. And I still would consider it something of a metaphor. No person is fully evil or fully good. Even if you literally buried your ziti in sugar or lemon rinds it would still be ziti under there.

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Be Nicer to Atheists et cetra

I’ve been thinking for a while that Christians need to be waaaay nicer to the ‘out’ groups. What I mean is, stop being hurtful, pushy, mean, and condescending to anyone you believe is living a sinful life. It isn’t our place to judge people, God is going to figure all that out in the end. If someone is sinful and unbelieving enough to be sent to hell, I say that’s the best argument of all for being nice to them. What on earth would possess you to be mean or hurtful to someone you think is going to burn for eternity? If you really think that’s where they are bound for, this life is the best it’s ever going to be for them. Go and buy them cake and ice cream! Do it now! Throw them a party! Buy them gifts! But don’t ever be mean to them. If you are right about them, they are going to get nothing but mean in the afterlife. And if you are wrong about them, and they are going to make it into heaven- you’re going to see them later so don’t you think you’d better be nice to them? In fact, just be nice to everyone. Yeah, that’s right. And you know what? Since now it doesn’t matter whether they are going to hell or not, you can also stop judging them. There, I fixed it!

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Be Nicer to Atheists et cetra

I’ve been thinking for a while that Christians need to be waaaay nicer to the ‘out’ groups. What I mean is, stop being hurtful, pushy, mean, and condescending to anyone you believe is living a sinful life. It isn’t our place to judge people, God is going to figure all that out in the end. If someone is sinful and unbelieving enough to be sent to hell, I say that’s the best argument of all for being nice to them. What on earth would possess you to be mean or hurtful to someone you think is going to burn for eternity? If you really think that’s where they are bound for, this life is the best it’s ever going to be for them. Go and buy them cake and ice cream! Do it now! Throw them a party! Buy them gifts! But don’t ever be mean to them. If you are right about them, they are going to get nothing but mean in the afterlife. And if you are wrong about them, and they are going to make it into heaven- you’re going to see them later so don’t you think you’d better be nice to them? In fact, just be nice to everyone. Yeah, that’s right. And you know what? Since now it doesn’t matter whether they are going to hell or not, you can also stop judging them. There, I fixed it!

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Maybe Christians shouldn’t believe in Santa Claus

I’ve decided not to give my kids the story about Santa Claus. Ok, maybe I should talk first about my own experience with the whole Santa thing. I believed Santa was real for a relatively long time- until I was ten years old. I asked my parents to verify his reality around that time and they told me nope, he’s not real. They guessed I had figured it out. I hadn’t, but another kid at school told me. I didn’t actually believe this other kid and wanted an adult opinion to bring back to her the next day. So it was an honest mistake on my parents’ part thinking that I was finally questioning.

Learning the truth was rather upsetting. It also made me want to protect all younger kids from the horrors of discovering Santa wasn’t real. I knew the kids would have to be upset by it someday, but I wanted to put it off as long as possible. Our culture also seems to have this pervasive need to keep the truth of the Santa myth a secret from the poor innocent children. There are so many movie in which the plot does this: 1) cynical character asserts Santa is not real 2) little kid is upset and seeks Santa 3) Santa is revealed to both little kid and cynical character whose faith is restored! It is seen as a terrible thing to tug off the beard of a mall or parade santa. The kids might see! Local news stations now often ‘track’ Santa’s progress as he flies around the area. Kids write letters to Santa that parents then ‘mail’ and poof, Santa brings what they asked for in that letter mom ‘mailed’. The whole thing seems like it’s designed to play a big trick on the tiny children, like some massive practical joke. Why does everyone buy into this when it’s actually teaching kids lies?

The difficulty I think Christians ought to have with Santa is based on the part where we lie to children about an invisible being. As a Christian teaching your kids about God, you want them to know He’s real. If you teach them Santa is real and then take that away, how are they to trust God is also real? God is supposed to be an equally mysterious entity you never see who also keeps track of how good you are. How is this not confusing to kids? As a child I saw Santa as the best solid evidence God existed. No human being can delivery toys at the rate Santa is expected to do it. No deer fly. When I wondered about how these phenomena occurred I knew it was with God’s help that they must have happened. Like all those biblical miracles. This was our only miracle left today. Except it wasn’t. And all the grown ups were conspiring to give us this huge show and lie to us about where it came from.

For a while I bought into it and the whole “Don’t reveal it, it’s the magic of Christmas!” stuff. Everyone says little kids need this. But I’m thinking now that even more, little kids need adults to lie less to them. Then they won’t need to be disappointed at the truth. So when I have kids I’ll tell them about a game we play at Christmas called Santa Claus. On Christmas morning the presents will all be from someone real (mostly mom and dad) and we can take turns playing Santa and pretending he’s the one that brought the gifts. There’s no reason Santa has to be ‘real’ for them. And I’m good with that.

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Life-Saving Abortion, Savita and Catholic views

I want to post about a news story. It’s really been bothering me and on my mind because there’s some stuff I need to say about it.
Here is a link to an article about it:

Article

Several weeks ago a woman named Savita Halappanavar was taken to a hospital in Ireland, 17 weeks pregnant and in pain. She was miscarrying the child and it would not survive. It seems pretty clear from all I’ve read that there was just no saving that baby. Savita herself was succumbing to an infection which required removal of the dying baby/fetal tissue (we can argue semantics later). Doctors at the hospital refused to do the removal because 1) the baby had a heartbeat 2) this makes it abortion 3) abortions are illegal in Ireland under all circumstances. So this mom suffered for three days and finally died along with the baby. Once Savita had learned the baby would not make it, she requested an abortion; she requested it more than once. Doctors said no. The baby inside her was killing her by poisoning her blood (septicemia), but she couldn’t get treatment to save her because it involved killing a dying baby.
*By the way, people do not even all agree that at 17 weeks it should be called a baby. No delivery is EVER viable until more than 20 weeks. Deliveries before 23 weeks are extremely likely to result in the child dying soon after or having severe disabilities requiring lifelong care.

Many people are outraged by this story. I am one of them. Ireland has it on the books that abortion is illegal. Some years ago a court ruled that legislation be passed to make it allowable in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. The only problem is that no such legislation was passed. To my shame, this rule is a result of the heavy influence of the Catholic church in Ireland. The Catholic church is very zero tolerance when it comes to abortion. Apparently the reasoning goes like this: if you actively remove or dismantle a fetus you kill it directly which counts as murder. Even if it was dying already and taking mom along too, you must at all cost avoid the primary action that causes fetal death. This suggests that actions are to be counted in terms of whether we sin or not, whereas inaction absolves us. In this case it means failure to treat Savita (which did kill her) would not count as murdering her. I find this strange because embedded in the Catholic mass is the confiteor. When we say this we state “I confess I have sinned through my own fault…in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.” This clearly calls us to be responsible for wrongs we did AND wrongs we allowed to happen. Action and inaction; I believe this is called sins of commission and omission. The stance regarding Savita should have been to save her, since through inaction doctors allowed her to die, and as I said, the baby was lost no matter what they did.

I guess I’m pretty removed from this as its happened in another country, but it upset me enough that I thought I should mention it. Maybe someone else will mention it to someone else who will mention it to someone else… Someone mentioned it to me and now I can’t shut up about it. Maybe other people still need to hear about it.

What should happen now is lots of people saying this was wrong. Like a really really lot. It sounds like a lot already are. I’m hearing plenty of pro-life views that this was incredibly stupid and sad and that Savita didn’t need to die. Then the Catholic church should condemn this type of neglect by doctors and call on Ireland to write in a legal exception for life of the mother. Then Ireland should write up the legislation. Should. I don’t really know what’s going to happen though.