my good name

Minor spoiler alert regarding The Dark Knight. In one of the closing scenes of the movie Batman has to decide whether or not to allow the inhabitants of Gotham believe that he committed murders that someone else committed. He has to make this decision because he believes that if the citizenry of Gotham found out who actually committed the murders they will be disillusioned and unable to stand up to corruption in the city. This concept has stuck with me.

I mentioned in my last post that it is a little rough sitting through sermons on the same passages every year. That is probably not entirely fair because there are always new things to discover in worn passages. They just don't jump out at you. This year I spent some extra time contemplating the following passage from Luke 1.

"'How will this be,' Mary asked the angel, 'since I am a virgin?' The angel answered, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.'

"'I am the Lord's servant,' Mary answered. 'May it be to me as you have said.' Then the angel left her."- Luke 1:34-38

While I have heard sermons and lessons allude to the fact that infidelity was a serious matter in Palestine at this time and that Mary could have been stoned to death, I don't think the sacrifice that Mary made is fully appreciated. Even though she was a virgin, everyone she knew would believe that she was loose or weak-willed at best, or an adulteress if Joseph decided to keep his name clean at her expense. For a woman in a culture where family honor is so tied to the woman's sexual purity that it is considered acceptable to kill her to restore that honor, Mary had to understand the gravity of telling the angel that she was God's servant. Even if she were not stoned to death she in all likelihood was accepting the life of a social outcast over something that she did not even do.

It sounds trite or even sacrilegious to compare Batman to the mother of Christ, but both situations illustrate a concept that has been on my mind. I care about my good name enough that it would drive me absolutely insane if everyone mistakenly thought that I had committed some misdeed. I would spare no energy in defending my name and this fact illustrates one of my spiritual weaknesses. This is just one more thing that can and will stand between Christ and me unless I let Him change that aspect of me. Having a good reputation is fine, but if I'm not willing to sacrifice that reputation I have not given God everything I am.

thoughts on the holiday

As it is now Christmas season I have been enjoying the downtime, but also contemplating a few things about the holiday.

First, I really do not like most Christmas movies. I have known this for a while, but I have only recently taken the time to figure out why. It's because there are only two or three potential plots to a true Christmas movie and they almost always attempt to compensate for a lack of quality with saccharine-sweet sentimentality.

Second, I wonder if the appeal of the holiday to some people is that Christ is depicted as a baby. We went through a major lights display a few nights ago and I was struck by the number of baby-laying-in-a-manger scenes, even in situations where there were no Mary and Joseph depicted. Kind of like Ricky-Bobby, do a lot of people prefer not to think of Christ the adult if presented with the opportunity to think of him as a baby? If so, this cannot be healthy. There's a reason that the Gospels focus on the adult Jesus far more than the child Jesus.

Third, I think that Easter should be more important than Christmas to Christians. From a practical perspective the resurrection is the fulfillment of the Old Covenant and the initiation of the New Covenant. Easter represents the most important event that ever occurred, and Christmas represents an event that was necessary for the resurrection to occur. That said, Christmas is the more important in our culture because of the consumer aspect and because it conveniently splits the school year in two. I don't really see this as a soapbox issue for me, so I'll drop that specific issue here.

Fourth, while I'm on the topic, Christmas and Easter sermons are generally the worst sermons of the year. You do not have to have attended church at all to know the stories of Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. These are the foundation of the Christian faith, but they are also milk rather than meat. A sermon should teach the congregation something that they do not know or do not know well. It is frankly hard to do that when your source text is Matthew 1-2 or Luke 1-2, which everyone in the congregation has heard taught one month out of every year for their entire lives.

Fifth, the above points made, the idea behind the virgin birth and Jesus' very existence on this earth is pretty spectacular. The unpredictability of everything Jesus did and how he fulfilled the Law, even when so much of how this would go down was prophesied, should give pause to people who read prophesies into modern-day events. The methods that God uses to do what He is going to do are unpredictable even when God has provided prophesy about what is going to happen, because God operates more spectacularly than we can imagine.

Sixth, buying and wrapping gifts for the holidays is the most inefficient means of giving someone else something ever dreamed up by mankind. I know that is part of the value of giving and receiving gifts to many people, the knowledge that it requires some effort. In an already busy season, though, is it wrong to long for some efficiency?

One very good thing about the holiday is that I usually take quite a bit of vacation time. I do enjoy taking multiple weeks off from work. It provides a nice way to de-stress. No doubt about that.

the placebo effect

Something that has been rolling around in my brain for a few months is the concept of a placebo and how ethical it is to use or not to use. There is deception involved, but it could be argued that the placebo effect is positive. Is the risk to damaged trust worth it, though?

The placebo effect is known to be real in medicine. It goes beyond that, though. An expensive placebo is more effective than an inexpensive one. If you pay a dime for a sugar pill you think is going to cure what ails you it will work, but not as well as if you pay a couple of dollars for it. Placebo surgery has even been found to be effective.

The question I have is, how ethical would it be for a doctor to prescribe medicine for a patient that he or she knows only has value as a placebo? What if there is no good medicine and the placebo really is the best option? Would requiring the patient to pay a lot for it, since that will make the placebo more effective, be acceptable? How do you measure the rightness or wrongness of the deception in that case? What about surgery? Is going under the knife as part of a mental game wrong if it is done for the right reasons?

What makes this scenario so perplexing is that it contradicts the freedom to choose that is so ingrained in American culture. In this situation, once you have the information necessary to decide whether you want the placebo it is going to be worthless to you. You know that the medicine has no specific physical benefit, so the placebo effect disappears. So, by its nature, placebo medicine has to be forced on those who have not given consent.

What do you think? Does the benefit of a placebo outweigh the risk? How does the potential loss of trust if the patient finds out about the placebo factor in? Are the patients being taken advantage of here, or is ignorance bliss?

two sentences

I have been using Facebook less than three years, but already it is a significant part of my life. I generally think that Facebook, and social networking in general, has more positives than negatives. If there is one thing that I seriously dislike about the site, though, it is that it is causing me to lose some respect for some people because of their political comments.

This isn't about agreeing with me. This is about the nuance that is lost or ignored in a two sentence status update. Real, controversial political issues usually have multiple, intricate facets that require in-depth understanding in order to have an informed opinion. What I am used to seeing on Facebook is one or two sentences that amount to little more than an ad homonym attack on whoever might disagree with the commenter with zero appreciation for those aspects of the issue that conflict with his or her position. Let me provide a fictional example of what I am talking about.

The hot political issue as of late has been whether the Bush tax cuts should be extended in full. On the one end you'll have people who boil it down to, "The rich already pay more taxes and taxes damage job growth." On the other end you'll have people who rebut, "The income gap is extraordinarily high and the Bush tax cuts are far more expensive as a whole than the Obama healthcare plan." Of course, they'll say it more condescendingly, frequently make erroneous claims along the way, and make appeals to concepts like liberty or equity, but that's the gist of it.

The tax issue is actually far more complex than this, though. Whether the individuals making the most money should see their tax cuts extended is part of a much larger philosophical question where each side has enormous pitfalls and some advantages as well. A very scant few of the comments that you see on Facebook relating to a political topic like this will even allude to how complex this is.

On the pro-tax-cut side, if you are being consistent the only way you can justify keeping all of the tax cuts is to take a hatchet to all government programs, including the military. You have to be willing that some people who rely on the current system (welfare, health, education, etc) will suffer extraordinarily and many will die for the greater good of the economy as a whole. Finally, you have to acknowledge that an increasing gap between the most wealthy and least wealthy individuals in a society frequently leads to instability in that society (think France in the late 1700s or Russia in the early 1900s) and that we as a nation might be headed that direction.

On the anti-tax-cut side, if you are being consistent you have to acknowledge that you are expecting a very small portion of the populace to bear almost all of the financial burden of the government system. You have to acknowledge that a percentage (no one really agrees on what the percentage is) of small employers are taxed as high earners and that the taxes will diminish new hiring to some degree as a result. Finally, you have to acknowledge that you are sacrificing a level of economic performance for the economy as a whole and incentive to work and innovate in order to assure that the bottom earners have an increased quality of life.

This is even forgetting the fact that this is part of a larger question of what a proper overhaul of the tax system should look like, and who should bear the brunt of those changes. Arguing about the tax cuts is sort of a way to sidestep the more complicated structural questions.

In conclusion, I wouldn't want to live in a Libertarian, Conservative, Socialist, or Liberal paradise with the serious drawbacks that they all bring, but that is exactly what two-sentence statuses ultimately advocate. That is why I do not like most political comments on Facebook.

the amazing disgrace

I have watched The Amazing Race every season since it started. One thing that I have been noticing more lately is how much some people take from their significant others. I am probably noticing this more because I am paying attention for it rather than because there are more verbally abusive relationships on the show. Indeed, the most verbally abusive of them all was Jonathan Baker in 2005, so verbal abuse has been a constant for years on the show. In the past, though, in my mind it seemed like the relationships with excessive shouting were in the minority on the race. In this season there have been several couples where I have wanted to strangle the guy for what he said to his wife or girlfriend.

How typical are these types of relationships? I am not talking about Mr. Baker abusive, but rather blame-her-for-everything-that-goes-wrong abusive. It's not far enough that most people would consider it abuse, but the result is similar to abuse. I have a sister and I have a daughter, and I do not want either of them learning to tolerate that treatment from a man. Even more than that, I don't want to inadvertently be that man to Golden. The guys who were doing that appeared to be clueless about it, so it can be too deceptively easy to think that I am beyond that poor behavior.

While the show sounds like it would be fun to be on, I will never apply to be on the show with Golden. The main reason is that I am a competitive person and she is not, which would ensure friction throughout the race. One thing that has bounced around in the back of my mind, though, is that I wonder how I would react in some of the stressful situations I see in the show. It can be all too easy and convenient to blame your partner when the right reaction is to encourage or support your partner. I really don't think that I would be that person who shouted insults, but I have to acknowledge that I still have some things to learn about properly handling stressful situations. This might be something about myself that I simply do not want to discover.