A Desperate Plea for Thanksgiving Day

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
- President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963)


Good morning!  Good afternoon!  Good evening!  Whatever time it is for you when you read this, HAPPY THANKSGIVING!  One of the wisest men I've ever known, Dr. Paul Stewart, once said to myself and an assembled Sunday-school class that Thanksgiving is the best holiday, because of the "big four" holidays it is the least centered on getting some thing for oneself, and the most centered on giving gratitude and benevolence to others.

This seems, to me, somewhat undeniable.  There's no Easter basket expected, there's no Halloween candy, and we all know that we organize the schedule of things we want in late autumn conveniently around December 25th.

What's more, Thanksgiving is so simply and amazingly pleasant, at least in my experience thereof.  It most closely resembles what I think Christian feast days are really supposed to be: we come together amiably, we consume a prodigious amount of food, during which and after which everyone is essentially required to do their best to be on their best behavior toward everyone else.  Thanksgiving is the best holiday, and everyone deserves Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, not everyone (even among those who do celebrate Thanksgiving) gets a Thanksgiving.

More unfortunately, you and I and the people we know and love have probably all contributed to this deplorable state of affairs, more or less directly.

Across the United States, on this most wonderful of holidays, there are probably millions of people at work.  Some of these people do genuinely need to be at work, because they're working jobs that cannot go unfilled: the police officers, the fire departments, emergency service workers, prison guards, and so on and so forth.  Some, unfortunately, do need to miss at least part of the day, for the good of our society.

But does the cashier at Walmart need to carve out 6 hours of work when she'd rather carve out 6 pieces of turkey and a relaxing evening with her family?

Do workers at Denny's, select McDonald's, Pizza Huts, Burger Kings and other restaurants need to serve their customers burgers when they could be serving their families another helping of mashed potatoes?

No.  No, a thousand times.

And this brief list doesn't even take into account workers who must go to sleep early to get up for Black Friday store openings at 6 A.M., or workers who must either sleep through a large portion of the day or forego their sleep in order to work a midnight opening so that you and I and our not-so-Great-Aunt Ethel can get $40 off select Apple products in-store-only between the hours of 2:16 A.M. and 8:47 A.M.

Of course though, we can all lament that people have to work on holidays, with varying degrees of fervor.  But what I would point out, what I have to say, is that if you are out shopping, or eating, or getting gas, if you are doing anything that necessitates the presence of an employee at any place of business anywhere, you are the problem.

Stores would not pay their workers to keep the store open if keeping those stores open did not provide profit for the business, and stores would not receive profit for opening the store on a holiday if people weren't shopping there on the holiday.

If we want everyone to have a full, unfettered Thanksgiving, if that is not too much to ask for the underpaid, underprivileged human beings that market capitalism turns into ground meat on our holidays, not too much to ask from the gigantic businesses that seek to separate you and I from our hard-earned money, then we must stop shopping on these holidays.

Be careful when you stock up on food for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or Easter, write a list if you have to, take an inventory of your kitchen before you go shopping, but whatever you do, don't go shopping on the holiday.

Get the best deals you can, if you must, on stuff for yourself and your friends, but for the love of your fellow human beings and their families, don't do it at a 12 A.M. Black Friday doorbuster.  The store will be just as open tomorrow, or later in the day, and in all likelihood you can probably find a better deal on Amazon.

All I'm saying here is that by utilizing services and places of business on Thanksgiving, we become part of the problem; we create a social place where there is a need for work.  And if you love Thanksgiving like I love Thanksgiving, and if you want everyone to be able to enjoy it just the same, I hope and I pray that you will join me in staying home and enjoying a nice, calm day at home with friends, family, and food.

God bless, and happy Thanksgiving.

The Mackelmore Fallacy and the Elephant in the Room

"Whatever god you believe in
We come from the same one
Strip away the fear, underneath, it's all the same love"

There is a story, more of a parable really, that is quite frequently used in the modern world to describe what is quite possibly the most simultaneously well-intentioned, arrogant and diminutive generalized perspective on "religion".  The parable goes something like this:

There were, walking along the road, a number of kind, old, blind men.  As they traveled together they happened upon a large elephant and began describing the great beast to one another.  "It is long, slender, and flexible," said one man, gently petting the trunk.  "No, it is large, strong, and rough," replied another, holding onto the beast's leg.  "No," said yet another, as he lightly stroked the elephant's ear, "it is soft, and thin, and light; it moves freely like a butterfly."  Still another, grasping the tusks, chimes in, "You are all fools!  It is hard, smooth and very sharp!"

The idea in this amazingly didactic parable is that religion is a single, general, complex and multifaceted entity, and because of this, individual religions and religious perspectives are not so much expressions of truth as they are useful pieces of truth.

This is, I think a major problem in modern (generally secular) religious thought that I believe is fully present in Mackelmore's song Same Love, and although I'm willing to admit I may be reading a perspective I hate into a song over which I feel cautious, doing so because of the perspective's prevalence in the city of Seattle from whence the song comes, I think that within the full context of the song the lines quoted above provide evidence of the perspective.

And, if this perspective is not present in this song, it is quite certainly as virulent as a plague in America and it's still worth talking about.

Just in case you haven't heard the elephant parable before, you may recognize the same perspective as typified in remarks like, "All religions lead to the same place eventually," or "I'd say I'm spiritual, but I try not to isolate myself to one particular tradition."  I don't want to demonize this perspective, but I would like to point out some of its key flaws

1.  The Elephant

The first big elephant in the room with the parable of the blind men and the elephant is, well, the elephant.

The problem is that the moment you typify or symbolize a broad-painted (and thoroughly western) conception of "religion in general" as one entity, you have begun from the individual perspective that there is such a thing as "religion in general" and that, furthermore, all religions are expressing in different ways the same essential essence.

This is a notion that is very easy to romanticize, but it is far too simplistic.

Muslims conceive of God as completely transcendent of humanity, and believe that his goodness lies in his arbitrary decision to make us, to sustain us, and to love us, absent any notion of compulsion and definitively not in any way identified with or existing in any plane of existence we can understand

Christians conceive of the same God as three entities in one entity, a doctrine called absurd by critics that at least one believer has called "so absurd that it must be true."  We believe that the infinite being in whom Muslims and Jews place their faith made himself finite and, what's more, definite in a single person and then assumed that definite (read: human) nature into his own infinite nature.  So the infinite becomes finite and makes the finite infinite while being at once one single being who is three infinite beings who can be defined as not the same thing as one another.

Meanwhile, those who fall under the great variety of traditions and schools normally labeled Hinduism believe that all substances, both visible and invisible, are ultimately one substance, which they call Brahman.  So all finite things are ultimately a part of the infinite reality of all existence, while still remaining definite from one another: after all, within the Hindu conception it is crucial that "atman is brahman", the individual soul is also the world soul...

But this is made explicitly distinct from Buddhist teachings (at least within the Theravada school) that the self does not ultimately exist.  Actually, when you get down to the core of it, Theravada Buddhism insists that what we call existence is only an illusion and that the ultimate reality of all things is that there is no ultimate reality of anything; or, for that matter, any reality of anything, ever.

At the modern edge of all of this, Scientific Atheists like Richard Dawkins tend to insist that the physical universe as we observe it is ultimate reality, and that furthermore that reality is, by the very principles that govern it, multiplied across dimensions into every conceivable possibility that has ever been, well, possible.  There is, understandably, no God in atheism, but there is a radical, beautiful, and sublime cosmology of possibility and instance that firmly deserves consideration within the spectrum of the religious systems it denies

At the very least, can we please acknowledge that the perspective which says that all of these incredibly different perspectives are the same thing is DEFINITELY in and of itself a completely separate perspective?

Furthermore, the "blind men and the elephant" perspective assumes that where the greatest religious and atheist minds of human history have tried their hardest to understand the ultimate meaning (or absence thereof) of all things and come up quite genuinely disagreeing with one another, modern, casual, impious speculation has found the real answer and can see that in the end there is, in fact, an elephant for the blind men to see.

2.  The Blind Men

I don't have much to say on this point, except that the perspective and the metaphor that best exemplifies it is just fundamentally offensive.

"No," says the modern spiritual person to the religious person, "you don't really know what it is that you're talking about.  It's all fine and well that you've spent your life in prayer and contemplation, that you've gone to worship services and dedicated your fear and trembling to the questions of your existence.  As a matter of fact, good for you, so very good for you that what you're doing makes you happy, but really you're like a blind man grasping at a thing that only a lack of commitment can help you understand.

Jesus?  Saladin?  Ashoka?  The Buddha?  All of them were blind men, and even though they disagreed (probably because they were silly enough to endorse individual perspectives) they were really looking at the same thing and apparently just didn't realize it.

Sorry, but this whole model is diminutive.  I am a Christian, others are Muslims, others are Vaishnavites, others Buddhists and others fall under innumerable other categories I cannot list here.  We can all respect one another, hell, we can all believe that maybe we'll all be more or less on good terms, whoever ends up being right.

But we do not have to resort to saying that everyone is wrong and everyone is right to do that.  We can believe, actually believe something that is fundamentally different from something that someone else believes and we can still have respect for one another when we do that.

The Macklemore Fallacy and the Importance of Orthodoxy

"God loves all his children is somehow forgotten, but we paraphrase a book written 3500 years ago."

So rings one of the most poignant lines in Mackelmore's hit song "Same Love" off of his collaborative album with Ryan Lewis.  The song, if you haven't heard it, is on the whole a much-needed and very welcome hip-hop endorsement of legal rights and social acceptance of those persons who fall within the LGBTQ spectrum, and it's profundity is perhaps only matched by the amount of musical talent and insight poured into it.  Being a piece by Mackelmore, it's primary narrative impetus comes through rapped verses, although a hauntingly beautiful chorus which echoes the essential cry of the persons with whom the song is concerned is provided by Mary Lambert.  What's more, the song as a musical piece is given a kind of musical grandiosity and a decidedly religious bend by both several lines, one of which is quoted above, which make direct reference to God and/or religion in general, and in case the religious point of the song was not driven home thoroughly enough by Mackelmore and Ms. Lambert, the song fades away to the attributes of love as listed in 1st Corinthians chapter 13.

This is a good song, a well-needed catchy and universal cry for LGBTQ rights, and it deserves almost every bit of praise that can be given up to it.

Nonetheless, there are two specific problems I find with the song's stance on religion.  Both of these problems, while well exemplified here, are far from rare and deserve, because of their befuddling and pervasive presence in 21st century life, special consideration

The first of these is the line quoted at the start of this article, a statement which seems agreeable and tempting at first, the faults of which are evident upon even the lightest inspection.

There is, of course, the somewhat obvious (though nonetheless significant) issue that the Bible, the obvious target of the remark, is not a single book, and while most of the Bible is likely drawn from a strict oral tradition reaching back maybe 3500 or so years ago (although that does set things back quite a ways), even the book of Leviticus, the earliest explicit condemnation of homosexuality in the Biblical text, was likely actually written down closer to the 6th or 7th century B.C.  It is, of course, easy to dismiss the difference between 2500 years ago and 3500 years ago, but let us be clear that we're talking a difference of 40%, but one thousand years.  If we assume a very generous average lifespan of 40 years, this comes out to twenty-five generations of people, and although the world didn't change terribly much by modern standards in that thousand years, it did significantly change and, more fundamentally, 3500 years and 2500 years are quite simply not the same thing, so the comment is first and foremost careless in its misuse of dating.  This is not likely done for intentional reasons to cloud the judgement of persons listening to the song, but it is incredibly ignorant, an extreme exaggeration, or some amalgamation of the two.

Still, this dodges the real implied meaning of the line.

The obvious point in saying that "we paraphrase a book written 3500 years ago" is that we, in this context "we" being those who do not endorse LGBTQ rights, have not only made a general human error, but have done so by misinterpretation of an old text with which we have allowed ourselves to become out of touch.

I want to be clear here, I really do love Mackelmore's music, I love this song, and I consider myself a firm supporter of LGBTQ rights, but this notion as presented in an otherwise admirable song is a farce.

On the one hand, there is the principle issue several (though limited) verses in the Bible openly and unambiguously condemn homosexual sexual acts.  Leviticus 18:22 and 20:10, along with the first chapter in the book of Romans, unambiguously condemn homosexual sexual acts as sin.  And let us be clear here, these are not verses taken out of context.  The sections of Leviticus from which these verses are lifted are quite literally lists of rules, more or less designed for lifting individual rules out of textual context and applying them unambiguously to a clear situation - this is why the Levitical law is so seemingly hell-bent on the infinite minutia of different situations - law is, in a sense, meant to be taken out of context and applied, and Leviticus is a book of law.

Furthermore, in Romans 1 it is similarly almost perfectly clear that Paul's condemnation of homosexual sexual acts is explicitly what it seems to be, a condemnation of homosexual sexual acts.  There are arguments on this particular matter that Paul is only talking about unnatural homosexuality, but this presents still more problems.  Several verses throughout the New Testament that do not explicitly mention homosexuality nonetheless prohibit what is variously translated "fornication" or "sexual immorality", and there is no honest examination of what these terms mean in their 1st century context that does not include homosexual sexual acts.

Nonetheless, even with these scriptural points being set aside, the core problem with Mackelmore's assertion (which is shared by a good deal of the vaguely "spiritual" culture in which we live) is that it asserts that those who do not completely accept, embrace and endorse the unmitigated practice of all the actions that fall within the LGBTQ spectrum for Christian religious reasons are in some sense out of touch with a vaguely conceived "original" religion or "original" Christianity that they have contorted through modern and/or recent misconceptions.

This is once more a tempting out, but an examination of history quite simply reveals it to be false.

The simple fact is that, the last 60 or so years being excluded, there has never before been a movement or a current in widespread Christian thought that homosexual sexual acts were acceptable.  Quite to the notable contrary, there is a long tradition reaching back through the ages within the Abrahamic traditions of rather specifically condemning homosexual sexual acts as one particular sin among a great multitude of other sinful acts.

The point here is that if we read the Bible, however long ago it was written, and paraphrase it to say that homosexual sexual acts are sinful - we are not arrogantly disposing of some original conception of God loving all of his children and using our religion to manufacture hate - we are interpreting passages of an admittedly old text in the exact same way they have been interpreted since they were written.  We are, in a word, practicing an unfamiliar pattern of orthodoxy.

G.K. Chesterton in his venerable, but quick book Orthodoxy says that Orthodoxy as an idea is "the democracy of the dead," in other words, that it is the meaningful consideration of what we might call the cloud of witnesses who have lived and died before our time, an appropriate rendering of respect to those who do not have the good fortune to be alive at one particular moment.  It is the idea that people who did something long before us, who passed it on to the people who passed it on to the people who passed it on to us, may have had some idea of what they were doing.

In this particular instance, however unfortunate or unpopular or uncouth it is to say, and whatever other subtleties absolutely must be added to a consideration of LGBTQ rights and practices in modern society and in modern religion, the unpopular idea is the orthodox idea, and whether Mackelmore likes it or not, the conviction that homosexual sexual acts are a sin is the conviction which is most closely tied to the great rope of historical interpretations of the Biblical text.

In summary, my great frustration on this point is that the culture as a whole seems to have adopted this somewhat warped notion as fact.

YES, we must always show the love of Christ to all people and NO, as Pope Francis has pointed out it is not our place to judge other persons and YES, if you ask me, all persons of all sexualities, genders, sexual expressions and gender expressions should all have equal rights and freedoms under every law, everywhere, all the time.

But NO, saying that homosexual sexual acts are not sinful IS NOT more faithful to the 2,000 year long history of Christian doctrine, and no amount of insistence that it is can change the fact that we have 2,000 years of Christian history in which homosexual sexual acts were consistently considered sinful, and as is the nature with Orthodoxy we have a chain reaching back 2,000 years of people in our tradition who have held that position who show us that, unsurprisingly, that was their position

It is unpopular and it is very uncomfortable to assert these matters as a Christian in the 21st century.  It is awkward, it can feel antiquated and it often feels irrelevant.  But it is NOT unorthodox.

The aforementioned second issue, often called the elephant problem, will be addressed in my next article.