Toward virtue without pride.

Lord, please make me wise, but grant me patience, especially with the foolish.
Lord, please make me virtuous, but keep me tender toward even the wicked.
Lord, please make me charitable, especially toward the stingy.
Lord, please make me clever, but allow me to find delight even in the dull.
Lord, please make me holy, but always incline my heart toward the profane.
Lord, please make my marriage strong, but preserve my compassion for those whose marriages fail.
Lord, please make me a good parent, but keep me from despising those who are not.
Lord, please give me good friends, but help me to be a good friend to those who do not deserve one.

Forgive me, Father, for I have judged, and in so doing, forgotten that only by Your gifts and generosity do I have anything of worth at all.

How sin evades the spotlight.

One of the great difficulties in teaching ethics is something I call “sin-protection bias.” This is the built-in defensive power all sin has to shield itself from the sort of careful scrutiny that might lead to its exposure and eventual expulsion. Sometimes this manifests as anger or outrage at the person raising the questions, especially by fixating on some minor flaw in the presentation rather than dealing with the substantial challenge being raised. But another way it shows up is in the impulse to relativize moral concerns.

The truth is that something might be “mostly wrong” or “usually wrong,” but if you say this instead of saying it’s “always wrong” or “absolutely wrong,” the people who need to hear it most will almost always interpret it as meaning their own circumstances constitute an exception. Sin always wants to wiggle away from a potential moral critique.

An additional problem for some Christians is their distinction-blindness about a third moral category between “absolute prohibition” and “matters of individual liberty.” Many things are mostly wrong (or right), but this doesn’t mean that they are merely matters of individual conscience. It means that the applicable objective moral concerns don’t make the behavior categorically wrong, but situationally wrong, which means there are some exceptions. “But,” they think, “if a generally wrong behavior might sometimes be okay, it must mean it’s really nothing more than a matter of individual conscience.” Thus with a sigh of relief, they just dismiss it as not applying to them.

The sin-protection bias loves abusing or ignoring these moral nuances to excuse itself from being threatened, which is precisely why it’s sometimes more productive to present a “usually” rule as if it’s an “always” rule, at least for now. Nuance and exceptions can wait until after the main issues are taken seriously. A child needs to learn to never lie and always obey his parents before he should ever be allowed to consider times that might not be best.

What's a tautology?

If you’re at all familiar with the Theory of Evolution, you’ll know that one of the key ideas in that origins story is the notion of “survival of the fittest.” The simple concept is that when things reproduce, variations occur in the offspring. Some of those offspring are more fit to the environment, which means more capable of surviving until they reproduce offspring of their own. Some are less fit, which means they either die prior to reproduction or fail to reproduce for other reasons. Thus, fitness means staying alive long enough to produce offspring.

But this raises a pretty obvious question. If the “fittest” are all those who survive to parentage, then what’s the difference between fitness and survival to parentage? Well, none. Any evolutionist will tell you that the concept of fitness is defined by reproductive survival. So, things survive because they are fit, and things are fit because they survive. In other words, “survival of the fittest” is really just “survival of the survivors,” which isn’t quite as catchy.

Now I don’t generally mind how any theory defines its terms, and it’s not as though this is any deeply hidden secret of Evolutionary Theory. But “fittest” does encourage people to think that survival is always a matter of genetic “betterness” rather than, say, luck. I mean, after all, even the fastest gazelles sometimes just happen to be on the wrong side of the herd or stumble on an ill-placed twig. But most evolutionists are so enamored of their theory that they are driven to explain every structure in terms of its advantage, explanations whose compulsive ingenuity often make me chuckle.

I guess I just believe that when someone says, “The most expensive dress was the one that took the most money to buy,” it’s important for people to not think he’s actually giving them new information.

Why would you do it, then?

Is parenting a good investment?

Well, one way of thinking about it would be whether children wind up being economically beneficial. Unless they happen to grow up and send you massive payments as recompense, most parents would say that children are not the sort of economic investment from which you recover much of your principal.

But perhaps they are a different sort of investment, where you put money in to get something else of even greater value such as companionship or admiration. So, maybe parenting is more of a wise purchase than an investment, technically speaking. But here again there are problems. Even if some children perform quite well, they still have massive negative balances from all their inconvenience and frustration costs (in addition to money). Plus some children never pay off at all.

So it seems like children aren’t enough of a benefit to justify the cost. But what’s the purpose, then? Well, you get to grant another being existence, nurture, devotion, and sacrifice, all of which they will never fully appreciate. And that is precisely why you don’t become a parent because it’s a good investment. You become a parent because it’s a God-like investment.

What isn't prose?

You just can’t translate poetry. It’s a problem anyone who has ever tried knows quite well. But the reason is fairly interesting.

See, poetry (at least good poetry) is always a complex mixture of cadence, sound, emphasis, grammar, rhyme, nuance, hinting, and presumed cultural references. Way, way, way down on the list of things in a poem is the logical, propositional content of the words. But when you translate poetry, this is the only thing you really have left.

The way the words hung together in the original. The way they reflected off each other or their subject. The way your ear replayed their melody. And the way it all felt in combination. All this is lost in the butchering of even the most careful extraction from the original expression. It’s also why any particular poem would become a completely different one with other words even in the same language. Every poem is inextricably embedded in its particular languagidity.

This, in short, is why Christians believe in the eternal resurrection of your body.