Category Archives: religion

April Fool

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I don’t really do April Fool’s Day jokes, and I despise when high-profile web sites or bloggers try to pull pranks on this day each year. It’s just lame.

When I was a kid, I tried my hand at pulling April Fool’s Day pranks, though, and one, which I think my sister dreamed up and I executed, came to mind this morning while I was grumbling to myself about the many stupid jokes I’d see online today.

Mom was into writing calligraphy style. I believe she took classes, and she would write things in the fancy script for people. For a cousin’s wedding gift, she painstakingly wrote hundreds of wedding invitations. Dork that I was, even as a child, I had “from the library of” name plates for my books, and she wrote my name in her fancy script in a bunch of these. Most of those books are long since gone, but I still occasionally find one with one of the name plates in it. She had a bunch of calligraphy pens and refill cartridges to go with them, and I gather these were pretty expensive. In any case, she guarded them carefully, and it was clear that they were not for any old person to use for, say, scribbling or doing homework (which would have been hard anyway, given the shape of the pens’ tips).

We had a little white poodle named Bo Peep. She was a hunter and I gather (my memory being pretty faint) something of a chewer-upper. She made a habit of digging up moles and bringing them to our doorstep.

For our prank, my sister suggested that I run into Mom’s room, crying urgently that Bo Peep had found and was chewing up Mom’s calligraphy pens. I composed myself and did just that, apparently rather convincingly, for Mom jumped up and snarled “Where is she?” and prepared to go salvage what was left of her pens and punish the poor dog who knows how (I remember vividly that when Bo Peep would pee or poop on the floor, we would put her in the corner, and she’d stay there like a forlorn little child, hanging her head). Or maybe my sister did the acting. It gets fuzzy for me here. I suppose I said “April Fool” or that my sister and I did as much together. Whether Mom was mad at us or cooled right down I don’t remember.

And that’s the story. Kind of a crummy plot arc, I know, but it’s what I remember, as best as I remember it, and I wanted to capture it. Mom died almost two years ago, and I think about her a lot lately.

Cheers, Decadence, Poverty, and the Littlest Pianer I Ever Seen

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Let me set the stage. We’ve chopped some organic vegetables and put aside a dozen organic eggs and are going to mix them with a bit of local raw milk to make a quiche for dinner. A friend is coming over to watch our children so that we can go to the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s blogger’s night, which afforded me the opportunity to get free tickets to a KSO performance in exchange for blogging about the event. I emerge from my home office at the end of the workday to the panicked sounds of my wife saying that the oven won’t turn on. It’s been on pre-heat for a half hour, but it just won’t come on, and what are we going to do about dinner and the timing and all the vegetables and the homemade crust and we’re going to be late? Simple. We order a pizza for the kids and sitter and the two of us head out early to grab dinner in Market Square.

On the way there, I chatter to my wife about the program notes I had read online, noting that the daughter of the great violinist Itzhak Perlman will be playing piano tonight. The elder Perlman once came to the university I attended what feels like a million years ago, and I remember hearing much buzz about him and regretting that I didn’t attend, myself. I’ve since seen him on PBS a number of times. “Is his daughter Rhea Perlman?” my wife asks. She’s joking, of course, but the jest isn’t entirely tangential, since there’s to be a wine-and-cheese reception (with Rhea as barkeep? we spend the evening looking for a Danny DeVito clone to pair with the pianist) following the performance at which I envision meeting a few of the local bloggers I’ve been reading recently as I try to cultivate a stronger sense of geographical belonging.

I’ve lived in Knoxville nearly ten years, and I figure it must be about time to call it home and become more involved with the community (even if mostly the online one) around me. In all that time, I’ve never been to the Tennessee Theatre, which is the venue for the performance.

And what a neat venue it is! I knew to expect an old-fashioned theater, but this thing is just over the top. The style of the building (says wikipedia) is apparently Spanish-Moorish, with various influences from other parts of the world. In purely visual terms, what that seems to mean is lots of plaster to make textures, lots of red and gold patterns on the walls, big drapey curtains, patterned grates backlit with colorful lights, and everything’s big. When the house lights are up, if you look up at the big oval tray-type ceiling, it’s sort of a light aqua color (with lighter I think gold or yellow textures) that seems to move in contrast to the red/gold surrounding it and is really sort of dizzying. I can’t help thinking it’s supposed to be sky-like, and this is reinforced by the way the illusion of movement actually gave me a similar vertiginous feeling that I get sometimes when looking at moving clouds. When the lights go down, the ceiling glows a royal blue. The theater is a neat place to be.

Here I’m going to digress for a moment and talk about being a fish out of water. This was apparently a big concern of bloggers invited to attend last year. Those of us who are new to the KSO don’t know what to wear. I’m a flip-flops and tee-shirt kind of guy, and I joked that I’d wear my usual attire to the performance. I wound up going with okay-looking jeans and a sweater. When I went to the bathroom before the show, I noticed that lots of the older guys were wearing suits and long overcoats and hats and such, and I couldn’t help wondering if they weren’t sizing me and my jeans up and thinking about how it was types like me who were really lowering the bar and ruining the significance or specialness of the experience for them sort of the way a group of loud teenagers at a decent sit-down restaurant can kind of take away from the experience of a nice dinner out.

Mencken famously lambasted the South and its appreciation of the arts in a 1917 essay entitled “The Sahara of the Bozart.” His essay ultimately helped to catalyze the growth of the arts in the South. A brief sample of what he had to say:

But consider the condition of [the South] today. The picture gives one the creeps. It is as if the Civil War stamped out every last bearer of the torch, and left only a mob of peasants on the field. One thinks of Asia Minor, resigned to Armenians, Greeks and wild swine, of Poland abandoned to the Poles. In all that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate there is not a single picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera-house, or a single theater devoted to decent plays, or a single public monument that is worth looking at, or a single workshop devoted to the making of beautiful things.

Them, it turned out, was fightin’ words. More:

Virginia is the best of the South today, and Georgia is perhaps the worst. The one is simply senile; the other is crass, gross, vulgar and obnoxious. Between lies a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence… As for the cause of this unanimous torpor and doltishness, this curious and almost pathological estrangement from everything that makes for a civilized culture, I have hinted at it already, and now state it again. The South has simply been drained of all its best blood. The vast hemorrhage of the Civil War half exterminated and wholly paralyzed the old aristocracy, and so left the land to the harsh mercies of the poor white trash, now its masters.

As I walked into the restroom downstairs from the auditorium, I had a sudden fear that maybe this was the sort of bathroom that had an attendant whom I wouldn’t know how to address or whether to tip. Luckily, there was no attendant, but my sheepishness at going in highlighted to me how out of water I felt. I wasn’t a fish out of water so much, I guess, as a small-town Southern boy in culture. And it was hard for me not to imagine these fedoraed gentlemen thinking of me and my jeans and sweater as some remnant of that poor white trash that killed culture in the South.

So when I found my seat six rows back from the stage and saw what was a teensy tinsy piano-looking thing, I leaned over to my wife and whispered in her ear in a put-on yokel voice, “That there’s the littlest pianer I ever seen.” After consulting the program notes, we learned that, duh, it was a harpsichord to be played during the first piece of music, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. Bach was apparently not terribly well-known during his life, and Mendelssohn (whose Italian Symphony closed the evening) was largely responsible during the hundred years following Bach’s life for bringing Bach’s music to the public. This revival reminds me of the Southern revival of culture clearly in evidence during the KSO’s performance.

And yet during the concert, I found myself looking around at other attendees and wondering how many were here because they really enjoyed the music. Don’t we sometimes pose in order to give the impression of learnedness or culture? Do my references to Mencken enhance this little article or do they serve primarily to give the impression that I do know literature and culture in spite of my written assurances that I’m a redneck who doesn’t know the triangle from the violin? I thought of the beer commercial from the last year or two featuring two guys attending the opera with their girlfriends clearly against their personal wills. They sneak bottled beer into the concert and are busted when a high note shatters the bottles of beer in their coat pockets (a guy in front of them conspiratorially waves a can of beer at them). How many people were at this performance of the KSO more or less against their wills? And how many thought about their taxes or mentally composed an email to send at work tomorrow? How many were there out of some sense of duty to something they couldn’t name? (And how many were listening to the music while writing six small notepad pages of notes that would inform a later blog post?)

It’s a strange thing for most of us to sit and listen to music as our primary focus for an hour-and-a-half. Music is usually a background. It’s something you turn on to drown out road noise or (quietly) to provide an air of sophistication or elegance at a dinner party. Sitting and doing nothing but listening to music, it occurred to me, denotes that the listeners are people of leisure. Else we’re just too darned busy and in need of multi-tasking for it. This is why it’s traditionally the haughty upper-class types (e.g. the wealthy overcoated restroom gentlemen) who we think of as orchestra-goers.

As I sat waiting for the concert to begin, I leafed through the printed program notes, which seemed mostly to be advertising. I saw, for example, an advertisement by ImagePoint, a 60-year-old local company that seems recently to have shut its doors and left many people without work. I saw ads by several area insurance providers and the Pilot Corporation and Clayton Homes. In the back of the notes was a list of donors, and I read that Clayton Homes — which routinely and (from a business perspective) understandably has to evict people from the homes they’ve bought — and the Pilot Corporation made $100,00-or-above donations to the KSO in the last year. ImagePoint donated between $25,000 and $49,999. Eleven individuals or groups made donations between $10,000 and $14,999; 30 between $5,000 and $9,999; 19 between $2,500 and $4,999; and more than I was willing to count at lower tiers. The decadence of going to the symphony much less of donating large sums of money to it while some of those very donors are experiencing financial difficulties that put people out of work or are in industries whose pricing or general administration causes great hardship to people who live paycheck to paycheck made me most uneasy.

Walking from the parking deck to the theater, I worried about seeing homeless people. This always bothers me for a variety of reasons having to do with social awkwardness, guilt, sympathy, and other things. My ears went numb from cold in the three or four minutes the walk took, and some people have to live in these conditions while the rest of us stream into the warmth of an opulent theater to spend an hour-and-a-half of otherwise unoccupied time listening to beautiful music. Uneasy indeed. It certainly put the catastrophe of a nonstarting oven and an aborted quiche in perspective.

The concert itself was lovely. Although the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 gets a little old to me, I love the style of music, and hearing in person the quiet richness of the eleven-person ensemble playing it was a treat. Listening to the music in person, I think you get a greater sense of texture than you can get from a recording. I could feel the contrabass resonating in my chest, and I’m a sucker for the lower pitches in music to begin with, so I really enjoyed the piece.

Next up was Mozart’s Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, which I wasn’t familiar with. I’m not a big fan of the piano fronting an orchestra. It seems to me that the piano makes an utterly different sort of sound that doesn’t blend well with the rest of the music. I imagine Perlman’s performance was virtuosic, but my bias against the piano and my tin ear left me a little underwhelmed by the piece.

Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 I hadn’t known by name, but I recognized it instantly once the music started. According to the program notes, Mendelssohn considered this one of his jolliest pieces, and jolly it is, save for the second movement, which was somber and processional and gorgeous (the low notes here really struck my fancy again as, later, did the improbably quiet buzzing of the string instruments during a very quiet part of the piece). I liked this one quite a lot.

I was optimistic about getting to meet a few local bloggers at the reception after the concert, but I managed to foul that up. I spoke briefly with Doug McCaughan but then cowered behind a pillar having forgotten, until confronted with the fact, that I am an absolute wreck around strangers, and particularly around larger groups of them. Katy Gawne, a performer and the official KSO blogger, graciously answered a couple of questions I had (what’s the difference between a symphony and a concerto? the concerto usually has a soloist out in front of the orchestra; what exactly is a scherzo [which I learned is pronounced not "sure-zo" but "scare-zo"]? it’s a type of musical construction). There was no Rhea Perlman acting as Carla slinging drinks, but Navah Perlman did show up and seemed personable and approachable. After standing around awkwardly for a few minutes, we opted to grab our coats and run. I had hoped the reception might be slightly more intimate and give me a chance to meet a few fellow-bloggers and get a little more plugged into that community, but my own sociopathy, inflamed by the press of people, prevented that.

Still, it was a nice night. I enjoyed seeing the theater and having a chance to see and hear the orchestra. I’m glad that the KSO is reaching out to try to pick up an audience that’s not composed simply of the crusty types I imagined in the restroom were looking down on me. In fact, the KSO does a number of neat programs in the community; my wife always takes our daughter to see the ensemble that tours the libraries from time to time, for example. And the outreach to bloggers is a neat idea. It’s clear that the KSO cares about giving music to people and accommodating even novice redneck listeners like me.

The only downside for me was the uneasy feeling I get when I contemplate the decadence of doing things like going to the symphony when there are people nearby without homes or healthy (or any) food. For all that I think it’s a good idea to support the arts, I have trouble reconciling large donations to the orchestra with the sad fact that there are always people huddled with their small bundles of personal effects in front of the homeless shelter just a few blocks away from the Tennessee Theatre.

By assuring the availability of the arts, which demand the leisure to patronize them, do we guarantee that there’s a greatness always to be striven for that, once attained, affords people the chance to help those in poor circumstances? Or is it all so much puffery? I’m not making a judgment either way. I suspect reality lies somewhere between the two extremes. If the KSO will have me back next year after this ambivalent (but at its root ultimately enthusiastic and grateful, I promise) article, I’ll probably attend again. But maybe I’ll also donate to the local shelter or food bank in the amount of the tickets in order to offset the weight of my relative prosperity on my conscience.

Little Bo Cheeses

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Although I am an atheist, there’s a whole lot of religious music I really really like, from holy music to old time spirituals to the Statler Brothers (select songs) to Christmas songs. I don’t think I sing a whole lot normally, but get a soaring rendition of O Holy Night going and I find it really hard not to ruin it with my own caterwauling. Lennie got a little kid’s karaoke machine type thing from her granddaddy for our early Christmas gathering, and in anticipation of this, Mleeka had been practicing Christmas songs with her in the week or two preceding our visit. On the drive to Dad’s, we had the music going, and everybody was enjoying it (Finn even does a pretty good Deck the Halls Fa la la la la). At a break after Away in a Manger, Lennie piped up and asked who Little Bo Cheeses was. It was really hard not to laugh (in a “that’s so precious” way), but it also kind of hit me in the face with the fact that she’s getting old enough to begin to be exposed to this whole side of our culture — a very dominant part of it, no less — that we haven’t introduced her to overtly before. We’re not interested in teaching her that the stories in the Bible (and particularly the ones that we take to be supernatural) are all true, but it would be a real disservice to her not to provide at least a fair history and culture lesson.

This turns out to be tricky when you’re trying to do the following things:

  • Provide an unbiased report of what most people in our culture believe to be true
  • Not do too good a sales job when telling her about it (she can figure out what she really thinks when she’s a bit older)
  • Explain why we don’t believe this stuff when, for example, her granddaddy does, without being patronizing or painting Granddaddy in anything but a positive light
  • Accomplish all of this using language and concepts that a four-year-old can understand

So, who’s this Little Bo Cheeses guy and why are people always singing about him? Here’s more or less how we handled it (given in something resembling a monologue).

The name is actually Jesus, and he was this baby that a lot of people believe was very special. Well, not just special, because all babies are kind of special, but it’s almost like he was a magical baby. (Here I get a little uncomfortable because this could very well be construed by an adult as our making sort of a mockery of what people believe about Jesus, when we’re really honestly just trying to find a way to explain it that a little kid can grok.) And so people think this baby is so cool and special and almost magical (really, we didn’t want Lennie to show up at her granddaddy’s asking what’s up with this magical Bo Cheeses because that could really come off as if we’ve been denigrating the belief, and that’s no good way to kick off your Christmas gathering), so they think about him a lot and even write songs about him. Now, we don’t believe the baby Jesus was magical or anything. We think he was just a regular baby, special like all the others. But we grew up with the stories and songs, and the songs are very pretty, so we like to sing them. It’s sort of like the stories we read. Do you think Liza Lou (a story from Mleeka’s childhood that we still read from time to time) is 100% true? But we still enjoy reading it, right?

At some point, I think Lennie asked why Granddaddy believed the stories when we didn’t, and I think we said that it was just the way he’d grown up and that we simply developed different opinions as we got older.

She seemed to sort of understand it, and I think and hope we were pretty sensitive all around (to friends and relatives who are religious, to our own desire not to indoctrinate our kid into religion, to our desire to maintain Lennie’s innocence and openness).

When we got to Dad’s, she pretty quickly found a nativity scene and announced that the baby was Little Bo Cheeses. Over the course of the evening, Mleeka taught her the names of the other figures, and it wasn’t at all traumatic for anybody. She hasn’t recounted the tale to me yet, but I understand she knows the basics of the whole Christmas story now.

It’s kind of a hard line to walk. I do want her to understand the culture she’s rooted in. I don’t want her to get saved or whatever at a young friend’s church before she can really understand what it means. And I’m in fact very iffy on the notion of letting her go to any church while she’s young. But on the other hand, I don’t want to stunt her intellectual and social growth by refusing to expose her to the stories even at a young, impressionable age.

I think for the moment we’ve done well.  I understand that people I value whose beliefs are at odds with mine may recoil at some of what I’ve said here and will think we’ve done anything but well, surely having consigned our daughter to the fires of Hell. Within my own context (which I know those folk would say is irrelevant, for the only context is God’s; which I call out here not in order to argue against or anything but merely to acknowledge that I understand the schism between worldviews and that providing my own context isn’t useful to all), I’ve done what I wanted: I was fair to a belief system I don’t buy; I exposed my daughter to something of a pillar of our culture; I didn’t compromise my own beliefs in any way; and I believe I explained things in a way that was sensitive to the fact that most people around Lennie do believe the Bible to be at least largely true and often literal.

The first beast

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been carrying my camera with me everywhere I’ve gone in hopes of snapping a photo of this guy. I saw him a couple of times on a corner on my route to and from the gym, and I was curious about what he was peddling. I have to say that displaying a big sign like this on a busy corner isn’t the best way to get your message out. I was never able to read it. Of course, he also has a little microphone setup, but I was never able to hear him (thanks, Doppler). He also has, um, a dummy whose mouth he moves as he talks. It’s all very intriguing.

The other day, I saw him and was able to read something about Noah’s having received a revelation and using his ark as the instrument for its fulfillment. The sign also said something about his (street corner guy) dummy being the instrument for his revelation’s fulfillment. Or something like that.

Mleeka recently got a few pictures of him, and in one of them, you can get the gist of one side of his sign. Here’s my transcription (all obvious things sic):

God reveal to me the first beast over 23 years ago Revel.13 18 Ronald Wilsom Reagon 666. Also one of his seven heads or members was wounded unto death an was healed Revel.13.1,3 Now the second beast is out their an he is coming from this nation. Also he might be in power Now is know time for you to be living in sin. My friend turn unto the lord Jesus now people and he will save your soul. Jesus is the only way.

So, there you have it.

Better Hide the Weenie

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Via Erik: Down with Dildos! In short, in Tennessee senate bill 3794, it’s proposed that anyone who “sells, publishes, advertises, or exhibits”  “any three-dimensional device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs” can be charged with a misdemeanor. Notable exceptions include the display of such items in libraries (public or school).

Question: If I exhibit my penis to my wife, can I be charged?

The article’s author notes that in spite of the recent overturning of portions of a similar law in Georgia, the tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum responsible for the legislation “went ahead and introduced their bill last Thursday, and on Monday, it passed a perfunctory first reading. In other Monday developments, Tennesseans died from a lack of health care, remained poorly educated and were among the most obese state populations in the nation.”

SJR127: Eroding Tennesseans' Privacy

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The speakeasy-type abortion clinic I’ve previously blogged about as a harrowing possible scenario in South Dakota shouldn’t scare only South Dakotans. As progressive and rational as the citizens of Tennessee are renowned for being (ahem, Scopes trial), our government is also seeking to pass legislation that would erode women’s privacy and quite probably force some women into such dire straits. The offending bill is SJR127, and, procedural “WHEREAS” type stuff aside, it reads as follows: “Nothing in this constitution secures or protects the right to an abortion or requires the funding of an abortion.”

According to an alert published by the Tennessee ACLU, here’s why this is a much more dangerous bill than it appears on the surface:

The introduction of this amendment is the result of the ACLU/Planned Parenthood victory in the Tennessee Supreme Court. We successfully challenged several restrictive provisions in the Tennessee Abortion Statute. In September 2000, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that several provisions were unconstitutional and that the Tennessee Constitution afforded women a right to privacy regarding their right to seek an abortion. The decision is momentous because it reaffirms the right to privacy found in the Tennessee Constitution.

In short, the idea in South Dakota, Tennessee, and other states is to slowly introduce legislation that erodes women’s privacy so that when Alito and Roberts overturn Roe v. Wade, women in these states will have no rights to an abortion within their states. To pass these laws is effectively to hand state sovereignity on this issue to the federal government.

This matter is of very little consequence to the daughters of the sorts of privileged people who pass such legislation. Their rich white daddies will fly them secretly to the progressive state of their choosing for an abortion should one ever prove necessary. Meanwhile, the welfare mom raped on her way home from her second job will have no choice but to bear an unwanted child she can’t support or rely on an unsafe alternative for an abortion.

If you have an opinion on this issue, please consider contacting the relevant politicians. Tennesseans can find contact information pretty easily using the following links:

An Abortion Manual

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The other day, I posted a quick jab of a comment about the recent South Dakota legislation making it illegal for abortions to be performed in cases in which the mother’s life wasn’t in danger. I was angry because the thinking behind such a decision seems hypocritical and a little dim. The tradeoff in many cases is the physical, emotional, and mental health of a functioning and victimized woman for an unwanted potential life devoid of anything approaching the actual worth of the woman. To cry that it’s immoral to abort a fetus on the grounds that life is precious, even when saving that fetus contributes to the spoilage of another person’s life, just doesn’t compute. So I was mad, and I posted a quick bit about girls whose dads rape them and cause them to get pregnant.

That sort of blather isn’t really very useful, though. It’s just a vent for concerns and sympathies that even a couple of days later I can’t pretend to express eloquently. So to follow up, I’d like to point you to something that is useful. It also happens to be one of the scariest things I can remember ever having read.

A blogger named Molly has written the first in a series of tutorials on how to perform abortions. It can be done relatively inexpensively at home, and she explains how. Apparently, in the ’60s and ’70s, an organization called Jane provided abortions to the Chicago area, and it is in response to a likely need for a similar organization in South Dakota and probably elsewhere (including my state) in the coming years that Molly writes her tutorial.

When I first got the link to the blog, I thought it was going to be something satirical, an over-the-top description of what the world would be like for many women if abortions were outlawed. And at times it does read rather like such a story. But she’s in earnest. She’s providing a mostly detached and clinical, but straightforward, description of the procedure as performed in a non-medical environment. I’m picturing now a world in which poor women go to their friends’ houses to have kitchen-table abortions performed, and as surreal as that vision is to me, I can’t help thinking that for some, it’s not too far off. Here are some of the things that scare me about the tutorial:

There’s no way you can see into the uterus. From here on out — this is the scary part — you will have to operate on feel alone. Don’t feel too afraid. Each element in the uterus feels different from the others, and as long as you are careful and understand exactly what the procedure involves at each step, it will not be too difficult.

Save the material until the end of the procedure on a piece of plastic, so that you can be sure the entire fetus has been removed.

Scraping softly could leave tissue behind, and if there’s anything you don’t want, it’s that.

When you feel the curettage and removal is complete, make sure you examine the fetal material you have already extracted. If you’re missing anything obvious — for instance, a head — make sure to find and remove it.

Imagine for a moment that you have a daughter or a niece or a sister who’s been raped but who for whatever reason doesn’t have the means to get a medical abortion. Maybe she’s too poor to leave work for a week to travel out of state and get an abortion. Or maybe your niece’s parents are fundamentalist Christians who would force her to endure the pain and shame of bearing her rapist’s child even at the cost of her own well-being. And imagine further that, poor or controlled as she is, she’s resourceful after all and finds someone who will perform a kitchen-table abortion for her. And so there she lies, nervous and stripped of a family support network, the pressure cooker (to sterilize instruments) ticking behind her, with a friend or, worse, an anonymous home abortionist (perhaps a profiteer) scraping out her uterus like a Halloween pumpkin. Is the feeling of moral superiority for having prevented doctors from being able to perform abortions with expertise and under sterile conditions really worth all that?

I know it’s tempting, when you strongly belive something that has pretty black and white ramifications (life and death, no less) to base your conclusions on black and white premises. It’s very tempting to think that if the means of legally getting abortions is cut off, abortions will not be performed. But people often don’t operate according to such principles in real life. If people need abortions, they will get them, one way or another. More women will become ill or die from infections (thanks to fetal matter left behind during amateur procedures, for example) than currently do, and the babies will be dead as well. (Some who cite the sanctity of life to buttress their argument will chuckle that these women got what they had coming. Did I mention hypocrisy?) Since there’ll be no oversight, abortions will be performed late term. Maybe some crass home abortionists will even find a way to make a profit from the fetal tissue. Moreover, maybe they’ll actively seek clients and will provide bad (not to mention unqualified) advice to women who might otherwise choose a different option. It’s an ugly prospect to consider, but it’s how some percentage of the world population works, and crying that they shouldn’t doesn’t change the fact that they will.

Accordingly, I think we’d do better to make sure that those who need abortions can get them safely, lest we lose two lives instead of just the one for any given abortion. An appreciation for the sanctity of life really demands that we try to guarantee as much. There’s more to sanctity, I think, than an appreciation of simple existence. To force a life where none is wanted is to demean that particular life rather than to revere life in general. Forcing such a life is like eating food simply because it’s on your plate rather than because you need it to nourish your body. It is a sort of gluttony, a form of greed, and the worst, most misplaced, sort of moral masturbation.

Desperate women in South Dakota now have what appears to be a workable, if frightening, set of instructions for terminating unwanted pregnancies. I’m not generally a squeamish person, but thinking about these home-grown procedures and all the things that can go wrong — a tiny arm left in the uterus by a first-time scraper, for example — all the things that can go much more wrong in such a setting than in a clean environment with a practised professional — makes my gorge rise a little. It’s terrifying.

In a not-at-all quaint, nostalgic, roaring-20s sort of way, I can’t help thinking of the home abortion clinic as a sort of modern-day speakeasy. Say the password, slip the bouncer a little cash, and make your way in to the seedy if necessary back alley. What a grim picture.  Have we forgotten how Prohibition turned out?

It’s very much in opposition to that grim picture that Molly writes, and she’s rendering a valuable service, if an unsavory one. How much more palatable is her scenario than one in which a coathanger is used to perform an abortion and in which antibiotics aren’t even a consideration? And how much less so than the alternative currently (if, alas, fleetingly) available in most states? It breaks my heart that there may be a need for such a document, but I’m glad somebody’s been pragmatic enough to write it.

If Your Daddy Fucks You

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Beware, adolescent females of South Dakota: If your daddy fucks you and gets you pregnant, you’re shit outta luck.

The South Dakota House today approved a bill banning abortions in all cases in which the life of the mother isn’t at risk. The potential life of a potential human being thus trumps the actual life and rights of a person physically mature enough to produce offspring.

Small clump of cells 1, victimized child 0.

Chicken or Egg

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In arguing against naturalistic accounts of how the world got to be as it is, some religious folk advance the argument that it’s inconceivably improbable that the earth could have come into existence more or less randomly, given how well-suited it seems to be for the life that thrives upon it. For example, it’s often pointed out that the earth is just the right distance from the sun to get sufficient light without getting too much heat for the life that thrives here. On the surface, this seems a compelling argument in favor of an intelligent designer.

But in fact this is a backwards approach. It’s not that the earth was especially formulated to accommodate the physical makeup of human beings and the other extant organisms. Rather, it seems reasonable to suggest that the planet emerged as it did and that whatever organisms could survive under its conditions survived. Organisms that require extremely high or low temperatures or greater or lesser light than our sun provides simply died out. For those of us left, it may seem as if the earth was especially formulated to our needs. And while that is perhaps a plausible assumption, it certainly isn’t a necessary assumption, and it doesn’t on its own make a very good case for the existence of any intelligent designer.

A thought experiment may be useful here. Consider a basketball tournament. Let’s assume that all games are played on the same court. Initially, there are many contenders for a championship title. As playoffs progress, less able teams are pared off the bracket. Finally, you get down to two teams, and one of them prevails. Now one could suggest that the basketball court was created in such a way that it was ideal for the team that ultimately won. That is, it was created in such a way that its court and rims and backboards provided just the right bounces for the winning team, that its acoustics were just right, so that cheering in favor of the winning team bolstered the team, while jeers went essentially unheard. In this case, one must surely credit the builder of the basketball arena for the team’s victory. But this is backwards. It was of course the team’s collective skill that led to its ultimate victory.

Similarly, in the matter of the fitness of the earth for its inhabitants, one must conclude that the inhabitants of the earth are those who were suited to inhabit it and not that the earth was suited to its ihabitants.

Miracles

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The recent mine explosion and the deaths and heartache it caused has made me think a lot about the nature of certain aspects of faith. I blogged the other day about the impotency of prayer, for example. Another topic that’s come to mind has been the popular understanding of miracles. Many have suggested that the survival of Randy McCloy is a miracle. I suppose that in a twisted way, you can call this a miracle. I say twisted because it seems certainly a mixed blessing that anyone should survive with probable brain damage. What’s so miraculous or great about someone’s surviving to remain a vegetable or a shadow of himself? What kind of blessing will it be for McCloy’s wife and children to have (if this turns out to be the case, and let’s hope it doesn’t) an invalid to care for over the next 40 – 50 years?

The notion that any miracle has happened here seems even stranger when you consider the bigger picture. Twelve fucking people died in the mine! How can you label “miracle” a situation in which the alleged miracle-inducing agent allowed twelve to die while half-saving one? It would take a demented god to produce a people that can see a miracle in this situation. And it would take a demented god to permit a situation like this to begin with.

Of course the reason people see miracles in such situations is that they’ve been told for their whole lives that God is merciful and omnibenevolent, etc. And it’s hard to let go of deep cultural conditioning like that, especially when clinging to it in spite of reason somehow actually does help you to get through tough situations. To reconcile pain and suffering with an omnibenevolent god, the religious must always be on the lookout for a silver lining to attribute to the god, nevermind that he’s the author of the much more substantial thundercloud itself and should thus be vilified rather than praised (think of it in human terms: if a person killed a dozen people but only maimed one, we wouldn’t praise him for maiming the one while writing the twelve off as the reasonable product of mysterious designs). I can understand the emotional gymnastics people have to go through in order to negotiate this reconciliation, but viewing it from outside the funhouse mirror room of faith is sure maddening.