Three Movements, the Church, and Our Understanding of Doctrine

Two broad protest movements have been swirling around the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints for the last several years. One is Ordain Women, an organization whose goal is the ordination of women to the Priesthood. The other is related to gay marriage, demanding that homosexual relationships are treated by the Church the same as heterosexual ones. This is not news to anyone close to the Church, and there is a lot of attack and defense of the Church related to these subjects. I don't feel a need to delve into most of it, as it's been done, and as I've done a good deal of thinking about it in other settings. But there is one particular comparison made by protesters and critics which I think is enlightening to approach. You see, leaders in both of these movements draw comparisons to the ordination of men of African descent to the priesthood. And so I would like to look at these three different movements, primarily from an LDS theological point of view, to point out some of the issues with this comparison.

The key theological understanding from which you need to approach these movements is what we refer to as "The Plan of Salvation." At its simplest, it's the idea that God has a broad plan involving Jesus Christ by which we can be saved. It's not an accident, God knows what He's doing. There are a lot of specifics that one could delve into, and most of them aren't necessary for our present discussion, but there is one thing which is both peculiar to Mormons and totally relevant: The end goal of that plan.

For Mormons, the greatest end of God's plan isn't for us to sit around all day playing harps. Rather, God's goal is that, as He is our Father and we are His children, He wants us to grow up to be like Him. He has the power to make more of us than we can imagine, and He wants us to have that joy, and in basically every way it requires us to "grow up" and be more like our Heavenly Parents. That last phrase is also peculiar to Mormons: we believe that in addition to a Father in Heaven, we have a Mother in Heaven. So, in the end, both men and women are supposed to grow to be like Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. That is the end of God's plan: More than a place, it is about a state of being.

Now there are actually a lot of things that are kind of fuzzy about that final state of being. But a couple of things are at least sort of clear about it. One thing that is pretty clear is that the very nature of that state of being requires man and woman working together. Just as Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother are working together eternally for the joy and salvation of Their children, so it must be with us. A fact of LDS doctrine is that marriage was originally instituted by God. While many purposes for marriage can be talked about, perhaps the most important reason for it is to prepare the couple to work together in eternity and to be able to receive, together, the greatest joy which God intends to give them. To Mormons, the scripture is literally true, "Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord" (1 Corinthians 11:11), in that the joy God intends for them both cannot be achieved without their being bound together eternally in marriage. They have to be together, bound by the priesthood power of God.

At the same time, this is a joy which God intends for everyone. "Behold, hath the Lord commanded any that they should not partake of his goodness? Behold I say unto you, Nay; but all men are privileged the one like unto the other, and none are forbidden.... And he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile" (2 Nephi 26:28, 33).

These two principles will suffice. Let's start by looking at the issue of blacks and the priesthood.

Where I just quoted in 2 Nephi, I explicitly chose the part where it says, "black and white," and also the part about "Jew and Gentile." This one verse makes any restriction based on race or ethnicity (or, really, anything) for any blessing from the Lord completely out of line. At the same time, there are certainly examples of this. Biblically, we have the fact that only people of a very particular tribe (Levi) of the Jews had any access to the priesthood from the time of Moses until Christ. Much more recently, we have restrictions for anyone of African descent. The simplest way of understanding this issue is to note that God has an eternity to "work things out," He's not just limited to this life, so He can make it right. But still, that's difficult to swallow and kind of awkward. In fact, even many of the top leaders of the Church thought so while the priesthood ban was in effect. Spencer W. Kimball, who was the prophet when the ban was lifted, spent a long time praying in the Salt Lake Temple because he could not understand it, and because we can understand from verses like the ones I quote in 2 Nephi 26 that this cannot be the Lord's real, permanent plan. The priesthood ban always was theologically problematic, though some members of the Church tried their best to come up with explanations to understand it. In the end, even the Prophet, President Kimball, felt that the ban could not be removed without direct revelation from the Lord, and so he plead with the Lord on the behalf of these faithful brethren and sisters who could not receive all the blessings which the Lord seemed clearly to intend for them (based on scripture), at least they could not receive those blessings in this life. Eventually, as many in both the membership and the leadership of the Church expected, the revelation came, though it came in the Lord's time. The most interesting things about the Lord's timing, in my view, are that the Church (both many of the private members and many of the leaders of the Church) had been pleading for this revelation for some time, and that it came at a time when protests against the Church had been pretty limited in recent months (this is particularly noteworthy to me as some modern protesters look at this revelation from 1978 and speak as though it indicates that protest against the Church is a perfectly good way to get the Lord to change His mind, when in fact the history would seem to indicate, if anything, the opposite).

As to the original reason for the priesthood ban, that is purely a matter of speculation. I started writing some of the ones that seem most likely to me, but frankly, I would rather not that my speculation be taken as doctrine. What is essential is that the ban was in place, it was theologically problematic, but it required a revelation for it to be removed. That revelation came, eventually, after people humbly asked the Lord. This is a change which was pretty much demanded by the fundamental theology of the LDS Church.

The second movement that I'd like to mention is Ordain Women. In my view, the goal of this movement is certainly not required theologically, but not outright against the most fundamental aspects of the theology. The thing to remember is that, in LDS theology, men and women must fundamentally be taken together. The idea of comlimentarity of the sexes is really enshrined in the very nature of the end goal of the Plan of Salvation. You can't understand LDS theology by wholly separating men and women, as doctrinally they are so completely interdependent. At the same time, the idea of women being ordained to the priesthood is not obviously contrary to the fundamental theology. I frankly don't expect it, I frankly believe that the existence of the distinction between men's and women's roles in the priesthood is a matter of divine design and a part of the eternal Plan of Salvation (in ways which I do not yet fully understand), but I think it possible that the Lord will one day reveal that it is time for women to be ordained to the priesthood. I cannot tell you how it is that this cannot be, that it is contrary to the Lord's plan that women ever be ordained to the priesthood, but I also cannot see how it would be required that women are ordained to the priesthood.

The third movement is about homosexuality in the Church. Here, there is a fundamental difference and issue created by the very nature of the Plan of Salvation. Given that the ultimate goal of God's plan fundamentally requires man and woman bound together in marriage for the very existence of the final desired state, I cannot see the Church budging on the larger questions related to homosexuality. Perhaps the Church will, as it has in recent decades, come to understand better the difficulties those who are alternately called "same-sex attracted" (a term which the Church uses because it is very clear in differentiating the desires and attractions of people from their choices and actions, which is a key component of the Gospel understanding of moral agency) or LGBT (a term which has the advantage of being better recognized and accepted by the community it describes, but which the Church only uses occasionally because the way the terms "lesbian," "gay," etc., are used often make the distinction of desire and choice more difficult to see) face and so better seek to address the needs of this community, but I do not think that certain fundamentals can change, because changing them would be to act directly at odds with the eternal joy which God desires His children to eventually receive. As this is so, it seems that what the Lord considers a chaste life, and what the Church will continue to consider a chaste life, will require our "gay brothers and sisters" (as one friend so wonderfully puts it) to remain celibate.

This fact requires a bit more commentary from me. If a faithful, orthodox member of the Church reads this blog, I want you to consider carefully that fact, and how much it stinks and how hard it must be for our gay brothers and sisters. I only got married about a year ago, and chastity required celibacy of me until that point. Well, sometimes that's hard. But think harder, it's worse than that for our gay brothers and sisters. You don't just have to remember the difficulty and pain of not being able to fully connect or express yourself romantically. You have to add to that a missing hope. I always had hope that I could get married and receive all the associated joy in this life. At best, our gay brothers and sisters who are seeking to be faithful to the teachings of the Gospel can hope that such blessings will be available to them in the next life. And, worse, given that "neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man," this is a Church that is built around families. So for the whole of their lives, our faithful, gay brothers and sisters cannot so much as hope to receive all that you might hope for, stuck in a place where they can see that they're missing out, left behind in a Churh that seems to be built for everyone else. Yes, they can build their lives in other faithful, positive ways, but my point here is that as faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, even while we acknowledge the almost certain permanence of the Church's position, it is our absolute duty to understand to the best of our ability the struggles of others, to build empathy for their plight, to "mourn with those that mourn; yeah, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort" (Mosiah 18:9), to love, to support, to uphold, to help, and to serve. This is always true: even when you feel it is your duty to defend the Church (as it sometimes is), you cannot shirk your responsibility to be kind in the least.

Climate Change

Now I want to consider the science of another complicated issue: climate change. I'm not going to worry about the policy, just present what I understand about the science.

The first thing I want to say is that it is very complicated. The earth's climate is an extremely complicated system exhibiting nonlinear chaos and dominated by complex feedback mechanisms. So I guess the place to start is a general discussion of feedback.

All feedback can be classified as one of two types: positive or negative feedback. Positive feedback takes an input and amplifies it. Negative feedback takes an input and shrinks it. So in terms of climate change, a positive feedback would take an increase in temperature and make it larger. One example of a positive feedback in climate change is ice melt. Ice reflects most of the light that hits it, so sunlight hitting ice caps isn't converted into heat. When ice melts, less of the sunlight is reflected, so more of it is converted into heat, which should contribute to a further temperature increase. An example of a negative feedback (though not a very strong one) is the temperature dependence of the Stefan-Boltzmann law. The total power in radiation emitted by a hot object increases rapidly with temperature, so that a small amount of heating will increase the energy that leaves the earth through radiation, thus causing cooling (or, more precisely, counteracting some of the heating).

Some types of feedback are not understood. For example, cloud formation could be a very strong feedback, but we understand how they form poorly enough that we can't even say whether it would be a positive or negative feedback. Generally speaking, clouds (which are basically white when viewed from space) reflect more incoming sunlight than the ground below them, so that increased cloud cover will reduce the amount of sunlight that is converted to heat, leading to cooling. However, it's hard to say whether warming would result in increased or reduced cloud cover. Warming should increase the water vapor in the air, which should make it easier for clouds to form. But it's hard for clouds to form when the temperature is higher. With our poor understanding of cloud formation, it's hard to say which of these effects will dominate.

So on the whole, there's a complicated competition between positive and negative feedbacks, some of which are so poorly understood that we just can't model them. This isn't saying that climatologists are bad scientists. It's just that climatology is really, really hard. So it's no surprise that we have a very hard time finding models with predictive power in such a complicated system (more on that later).

Now we need to think about CO2. CO2 is actually a relatively weak greenhouse gas, by itself it can't do all that much to the earth's climate. However, it is a greenhouse gas, and it's silly to think that releasing it would not have a warming effect, though it might be very small. The trick is that in a feedback-dominate system, it's hard to say what the end result of even a very small effect will be. If positive feedbacks always strongly dominated under all conditions, then even the tiniest perturbation from CO2 would cause the earth to enter runaway heating, continuing to heat forever. Of course that's silly, because such a system would be so unstable that we would know it (or, rather, we wouldn't, because we couldn't be here), but it does serve as an illustration of what the real fear in climate change is. If positive feedbacks dominate over some range of conditions, then the earth will heat through that range. Conversely, if negative feedbacks dominate, then we'll have to push pretty hard (release a lot of CO2) for the earth to do anything very big. And of course reality could be anywhere along that spectrum. But the point is that we are releasing CO2, and that can only have a heating effect, but whether that effect is significant or not depends on lots of very complicated feedback mechanisms.

This brings us to modelling. I have some objections to the most politically charged model. In this model, global temperatures slowly increase for a while, then bend up and really go crazy, increasing very quickly (this has been called the "hockey stick" model because of the way the temperature suddenly curves up on a plot). I have two objections to this model, and three reasons for the first objection, one for the second:

1. The model assumes no significant negative feedback (I think it includes some relatively minor ones, such as the Stefan-Boltzmann temperature dependence), which I think ludicrous because
1. We would be in the case where positive feedbacks dominate, and some perturbation over the history of the earth would have driven us to ridiculously high or low temperatures already.
2. There are other potential negative feedbacks, such as cloud formation (my instinct is to say that cloud formation should be a negative feedback, because you can counteract the increasing temperature by simply forming clouds at higher altitude, and you can't counteract the increased humidity), and ignoring these completely because we don't understand them instead of putting them in as error bars seems a pretty weaksauce way of handling things.
3. It's very rare to find systems in nature that are positive feedback dominated over such a long range. They do exist, so this makes this reason for the objection very weak indeed, but things in nature almost always do end up in regions where negative feedbacks dominate, so I thought it worth making a note of this.
2. The model has not been successful in making predictions. In fact, it's been predicting that we're about to turn the corner on the hockey stick for some two decades now, almost since its inception, and it hasn't happened yet. Its authority has come from the fact that it can be made to fit past data, but the truth is that if you add enough parameters you can make basically any model fit the past data. The test of a model such as this is in making predictions. If it can't successfully predict the future, then the model doesn't explain the phenomenon well enough to explain how it works, past, present, or future.

So I'm not willing to give much credence to this model or arguments built around this model. In fact, this system is so difficult and complex that I don't think that any model is particularly reliable yet: you're almost guessing when you choose a model (since you need to guess on some of the feedback terms), and if you're going to do little better than throwing darts at a board to choose your model, you may as well throw darts at a board for your temperature predictions. That's not to say that modelling is a complete waste of time (I am exaggerating a bit when I compare it to throwing darts at a board), as perhaps someday they'll find one that really does prove to be accurate, just that no model, to my knowledge, has shown itself better than so many others which make such vastly different predictions, so it seems senseless to say that we know very much from these models.

If we've yet to draw meaningful conclusions from modelling, what is left to us? Well, there is history and geology, anything that can tell us ancient temperatures. This gives us an idea. Looking back in time, we find that earth has often been basically stable (you might say "quasi-stable," meaning that it's not really stable, something eventually jarred it out of that mode, but it looks pretty stable for some time), but it's jumped between these quasi-stable modes very quickly. For example, we can look at ice ages. If you look at the Wikipedia article for "Quaternary glaciation" (the most recent ice age), you see all kind of graphs showing rapid changes between some relatively stable periods. More recently, there's the "little ice age" and "medieval warm period."

What does this say to me? It makes me think that the hockey-stick model is half right. You can explain these quasi-stable modes and mode hops in terms of positive and negative feedbacks: whenever negative feedbacks dominate, you're in a quasi-stable mode; whenever positive feedbacks dominate, you mode hop. Then history says to me that there are regimes in which positive feedbacks dominate, and others in which negative feedbacks dominate. The "hockey stick" could happen at a transition from the negative to the positive dominated region, and would correspond to the start of a mode hop. What the hockey stick misses is that geology and history say that the "hockey stick" levels out again, that you enter another negative feedback dominated region. It should be noted that climatologists are aware of this, and surely they limit the range over which they consider the "hockey stick" valid, but of course news reports and politicians aren't so careful about the limit of validity. Also, this kind of just confronts us with a different question: Will we mode hop, and if so, how large will the mode hop be? Major glaciations in the last ice age have led to variation as large as 8 C. But much smaller mode hops exist, on the order of a couple degrees C or smaller. The warmest temperatures I could find in the geological record in my short search (mostly just Wikipedia) were in the Devonian and Cambrian, 7 C above modern temperatures, though over shorter sections of those periods temperatures may have been even higher.

Me? I'll venture a guess. I think CO2 emission has precluded a mode hop to another glaciation, and may induce a smaller mode hop to higher temperature. I think that continued release of CO2 could result in a mean global temperature anomaly of 1-5 C, with 2-3 most likely (we're around .5 now, meaning that we're about .5 C higher than we were before we started emitting lots of CO2... I think 2-3 most likely because that seems to be on par with a lot of past mode hops). I do not think that the 10 C which is given as the doomsday scenario is reasonable, in part because that exceeds what I can find when we look back in history and geology. However, 5 C would have a significant effect (I think even 2-3 C would, but I can say 5 with a good deal of confidence), whether for good or ill on the whole, I cannot say. My initial point at the start, that the earth's climate is much too complicated for us to predict the future, holds for the effects of climate change as much as anything else (of course, there are some things we can say confidently could only be bad things for us, such as sea level rise).

This last point is important, too, and I want to hammer it home: I once attended a talk by my adviser's adviser (my "grandviser," if you will), who happens to be noted for his thoughts on this issue: Steve Chu. He put up evidence that warming is causing problems, but frankly, his evidence was awful, and I'm not particularly proud of him as a physicist for this one. His evidence, the only piece of evidence that he gave for climate change making things worse, was that costs of natural disasters had gone up. The top 10 most expensive natural disasters have all been in the last 50 years or so, he noted, and if you just look at data for natural disaster related insurance claims in the US, they've been steadily rising. The problem with this evidence is that he didn't do anything to control for increases in population or prosperity. If disasters cause twice as much damage in inflation-adjusted dollars, but there's twice as much property value around (also in inflation-adjusted dollars), then the disaster likely wasn't any more severe, it just had more stuff that it could destroy.

In thinking about this, there are a few good ways to control for this economic effect. One would be to track GDP and population changes in the areas affected by disasters. It may be difficult to amass all the data required to do this correctly, and it may be undermined by the fact that we've been getting better and better at engineering things to resist natural disasters, but it could help. A second method would be to compare earthquakes and weather-related disasters. Nobody believes that earthquakes are influenced by climate change, so increases in earthquake-related damages are probably a result of economic and demographic changes. This would allow a direct control for these factors. However, this method may be undermined by the fact that hurricanes and earthquakes don't always happen in the same places. If Florida has been growing in population and prosperity at a different rate from California, it may prevent direct comparison. Even so, some combination of these efforts may allow us to see what effect warming has on natural disasters.

Of course, I honestly don't think that hurricanes are the most significant question. If the mean global temperature rises by 3 C, two things may be more significant. First, ice that melts on land could lead to sea level rise, which would be a big deal for coastal cities. Now, if the sea levels were just a few feet higher and always had been, I don't think this would be a big deal: We'd simply have built our cities on the actual coast. However, there's certainly a transitional problem, and if there's significant sea level rise, it may be expensive for us to deal with.

Even more important, though, is arable land. In the long run, this is the main concern for climate change. We can find solutions for cities that would be slowly flooded, people can move inland or we can engineer good dike systems (though that's a solution we may need to be a little wary of... just look at New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina). It's expensive in transition, but in the long run, there's a solution. However, changes in temperatures lead to changes in wind patterns. This is another thing that I think is very complicated (which I think is the main reason Chu didn't present anything about this: he probably would have presented it if we had a good idea of how arable land will change), but changing wind patterns lead to changing rainfall. In the very long run, the total amount of arable land could change, as the changing wind and rain patterns could change fertile soil to desert, and vice versa. For all I know, the Sahara could become a great breadbasket, or the Amazon could become a desert (those seem far-fetched to me, but I have to admit just how deep my ignorance on this is). For all I know, on the whole, climate change could make the world a better place on the whole by increasing the total arable land, thus allowing us to grow more and better food for everyone. Or, on the other hand, it could mean that we have to work harder to produce the food we need. But I will say this: If arable land changes significantly, even if the total increases, it's certainly a transitional problem. After all, if arable land changes significantly, where it is will also change. It's hard for me to believe that the Sahara Desert will suddenly get lots of rain, but if it does, those kinds of changing global wind patterns won't just leave every breadbasket in the world untouched. It'll take us time to figure things out, and in the meantime, there will be drought. It's even been suggested that this is currently a factor in the drought in the Western United States (droughts like this, and even worse, have happened in the past, well before the industrial revolution, but it is possible that climate change has made this one worse than it might have otherwise been).

This has been a very long post. So, in summary:
-The climate is very complicated.
-Exactly what will happen is hard to say, exactly how significant it will be is hard to say, but warming from CO2 emissions seems like a pretty sure bet.
-Climate change may have either positive or negative effects in the most important, long-term sense, depending on complicated issues involving wind patterns and arable land, but if its effects are significant, they will certainly be negative in the short term.

Patterns of Perspective in Politics

I've noticed certain perspectives common to certain causes in politics. Sometimes I suspect that the perspective underlies the cause, other times that the perspective is actually a result of the cause, though I'm often not sure. Often, the differences in perspectives cause people to talk past each other, not realizing that there's an issue of basic assumptions being missed.

Perhaps an example is in order.

It seems that if I talk to someone in the liberal camp on issues of race, I'm sure to hear something about "privilege." If I talk to someone in the conservative camp, I won't, but I might hear accusations that a particular attitude is racist. The liberal will assert that there's no such thing as reverse racism, which might upset the conservative. But here they are talking past one another.

To the liberal, what matters about racism is the idea of privilege, that external factors from society give one group an advantage over another. High violent crime rates, poverty, and broken families can all work against particular groups. These, along with biases (and, indeed, the statistical facts of high rates of violent crime and single-parent households can lead to negative stereotypes even if such biases wouldn't otherwise exist), particularly hurt blacks in the United States. If you really push, you can even get conservative blowhards like Bill O'Reilly to admit that these external realities are a factor working against blacks. If you are conservative, it is in this context that you have to understand a lot of liberal positions related to race. For a liberal, there can't be such a thing as reverse racism because racism means not being a part of the privileged class ("privilege" can be understood as not having these external factors working against you) because of race. This perspective understands society as broken down into different groups, and you have to admit, there is some truth in it: blacks have, at a bare minimum, a higher probability of having more external factors to overcome than whites do. Liberals prioritize this idea of privilege, saying that we need to work to break down the divides between these different groups and classes by breaking down the differences in privilege.

The conservative perspective is simply different on this issue. To the conservative, racism is primarily an individual thing: it is about the biases of individuals and about seeing people differently based on race. To the conservative, making a distinction between people based solely on race is what makes a policy or a person racist. The conservative is likely to call things like affirmative action racist because he or she sees it as making a distinction between people based solely on race. The conservative believes that the path to overcoming racism is for individuals to be virtuous and to see one another first as fellow children of God (or, if you like, as fellow humans). He or she also believes that each individual can carve his or her own path, that one is not bound to one's class by some overpowering fate. To the conservative, privilege is a myth, not because they don't agree that external factors can matter, but because it isn't an overpowering fate. Beside that, they see efforts to deal with privilege as problematic because they require us to legally see race as making a difference, which is what they fundamentally see as making racism. Their perspective understands society as composed of individuals and families, and you have to admit, there is some truth in it: the prosperity of individuals makes up the prosperity of society, the virtue of individuals makes up the virtue of society, and the biases of individuals make up the biases of society. Conservatives prioritize this idea of individual prosperity, virtue, and bias, saying that we need to break down the divides between individuals by helping every person to have a better opportunity to prosper, teach each person to be more virtuous, and help each person break down his or her biases.

Of course, conservatives and liberals aren't monolithic, so there will be variations here. But the fundamental point is to see that there is something underlying others' views. This extends beyond the particular issue of race. There is a perspective, and it has truth, rationality, and meaning. Political opponents aren't simply motivated by hate or power or racism, their perspective isn't fundamentally bigotry or a demand for sameness. At bottom, there are good intentions in most policy positions, and while you may dispute the wisdom of the position (good intentions don't imply good policy), be slow to spread invective, quick to seek out the truth in political opponents' perspectives, and prepared to incorporate the good their perspective affords and to compromise.

Religions of Peace

Islam gets a bad rap sometimes.

This is understandable in a world with Al Qaeda and ISIS, but not everyone is in these organizations. In fact, these kinds of terrorist organizations comprise the tiniest minority of Muslims.

At the same time, it's not correct to say that members of ISIS aren't Muslim. They're actually very strict in reading the Koran and following it. Indeed, their very problem, it might be said (at least if this article, which is a very interesting and insightful, though long, read, is to be believed), is that they are too strict and literal in their reading and interpretation of many aspects of Islamic scripture, and they fail to recognize that they're doing any interpretation at all. This same article gives an example of a very peaceful, quiet branch of Islam that is just as strict in its interpretation of the Koran, which views ISIS as neglecting some of the most important aspects of Islam (particularly unity of the umma, or Muslim community) in favor of the particulars they focus on so heavily.

So Islam is (as so many have been proclaiming the last several years) a religion of peace, yet, apparently, it can give rise to atrocities. How can this be?

Well, the same way that Christianity could give rise to the Inquisition.

I'm not a scholar of Islam, so I can't say whether the analogy is perfect, but you have to realize that any written word is subject to interpretation. Of course, some things are clearer than others, but even such definitive statements as "Thou shalt not kill" are complicated a bit by translation (some have suggested that it should really be translated "murder" rather than "kill," and then you can get into shades of meaning and things), and anyway the Children of Israel were elsewhere commanded to go to war. So if you really want, you can play interpretation games even with things that seem relatively clear.

In the case of the Inquisition, it seems pretty clear to me that there's some pretty bad interpretation going on, possibly colored more by aspirations for power than by sincere searching for truth. There's really no sign in the Bible of the Lord approving of torture, and it seems pretty clear to me that the response of the Church to sin that is approved of by Christ's teachings and the writings of the apostles doesn't include torture and killing. In 3 John, we hear about a branch of the Church that seems to be falling apart, with unquestionable apostates (they won't even allow the apostles to come speak to them), yet there's no sign that John was planning to inflict any physical punishment on these people.

Still, Christ did say that he "came not to bring peace, but a sword." So maybe Crusades and Inquisitions make sense? Never mind that this is a single verse, and that the context is His saying that His followers must choose to follow Him even if it causes division. Never mind that He further explains this concept, that even families might be divided for the sake of the Gospel, and set against each other. Clearly the only valid interpretation is that we must take up arms against unbelievers. Actually, you might be able to make some kind of a case for that interpretation, but it seems rather thin to me, especially in light of Christ's response to Peter coming to His defense (if you're not familiar, Peter cut the ear off a servant in the crowd that came to arrest Jesus, and Jesus healed the man). Still, you could make the case.

So Christianity is a religion of peace, one centered on the Prince of Peace, yet in His name some rather horrible things have been done. It just requires a bit of creative interpretation.

Now, lest the secularists in the audience claim that this is the fault of religion, I'd like to point out one more good thing which has been used to justify terrible things. You see, both the Nazis and the Soviet Union called their regimes the first "scientific" systems of government. They acted in the name of science. Sure, it required some pretty horrible interpretations and misunderstandings to get from real science to Soviet policies, but still, if you're going to hold the interpretations that a minority assigns to a religion against the whole religion, you'll have to do the same thing with science.

In short, whether you believe in Christianity, Islam, or nothing beyond science, someone has used what you believe in as a justification to do something terrible. So be charitable in judging others' beliefs.

Perfect Parents

You'll never be perfect, as a person or as a parent. But the Lord is.

The only way to give your children a perfect parent is to point away from yourself.

Modest Dress

This has been a prominent topic lately, framed almost entirely in terms of what women wear and what men see. As such, I realize that it may be assumed that I cannot possibly have anything worthwhile to say (I'm just part of the patriarchy, right?), but at the same time, why shouldn't I think about it? And anyway, modest dress does not apply only to women, any more than controlling thoughts does not apply only to men. These are merely more prominent topics of discussion for the respective genders.

Anyway, to start, I would like to highlight four perspectives that I think cover pretty well the narratives on this subject (though of course you could have variations on these or narratives that fall between two of these):

1. The whole idea is a symptom of sexual repression and/or of the repression of the patriarchy, controlling women by telling them what to wear.

2. Women tend to feel uncomfortable when they wear less, and it may be appropriate to teach girls to recognize what they feel comfortable wearing. Modesty may be appropriate if it help a woman feel comfortable and therefore empowered, but the pertinent factor is how she feels, others should not influence her dress.

3. Modesty is a matter of respect for self as well as others. Showing self respect and being comfortable with one's self and one's dress is important, but certain kinds of dress may show a lack of respect for those around you.

4. Modesty is required to keep men from losing control of themselves, as they cannot exert self-control.

Let me say at the outset that I subscribe to the third of these. This is likely unsurprising: Previous posts establish that I believe that sexuality is sacred and ought to be respected as such. Thus, I believe that:
1. God has commanded that we respect sexuality, including by maintaining certain standards of dress which do not expose the parts of the body involved in sex and reproduction to be exposed to scrutiny and mockery. It is a matter, first and foremost, of obedience to God and respect for the sacred.
2. Dress can influence how you feel about yourself, and modest dress, particularly in Western culture, is likely to enhance self-respect. Further, with a view to the sacredness of sexuality, even without considerations of Western culture, it may be an act of self-respect.
3. While others are responsible for their own thoughts and actions (you do not have the primary responsibility here), it is true that your actions do affect those around you, and you do have a duty to them. You are your brother's keeper.

All three of these, I believe, are important considerations with regard to modesty. I also think that I've put them in order of importance, but you may debate that if you wish, ultimately God hasn't told us. Of course, I think I may need to defend my third point, because it may sound to some like the idea that men can't control themselves. But I feel I need only say a few things in that defense.

First, that you influence others is not the same as that they do not have ultimate control and agency over themselves. Regardless of what a woman is wearing (or a man, for that matter), it is the man's (or whoever is sexually attracted to that person) duty to treat them and sexuality with respect all the same. But you can have an influence. Everything we do influences those around us, including this. No man (or woman) is an island. So I fully reject the idea that I am not an agent and not responsible for my actions and thoughts, but I accept the idea that others' actions can have an influence which makes it easier or more difficult for me to do the things that I should do.

My second point: As I said, no man is an island, and we are supposed to be our brother's keeper. In general, we have a duty to think of those around us as well as ourselves. I'm not just talking about modesty here, but it does have meaning. Given that you can influence those around you, you have a duty to them in your decisions. Is it the only consideration? Basically never, there are almost always other considerations, and my guess would be that more often than not there are more important considerations. But that doesn't mean this isn't important. As such, I reject the idea that, as long as you're personally comfortable with it, it must be okay (well, I reject that based on the idea that God has a stance on the matter as well). If a woman is comfortable walking around topless or a man is comfortable without pants, it would still be disrespectful to the men and women around her or him, so those around you should certainly influence your dress (as I believe that respect for others has value), though it is not the all-consuming determinant.

I hope it's clear how a middle ground can exist on this particular point, and whether or not you believe that respect is the appropriate understanding, I hope that you can at least respect my view on the matter. But there's one more implication from this view: how we teach this. Religious people of many faiths believe in modest dress as a value, but it is important that we teach it in the context of the actual principles associated with it. In this case, we need to teach respect and the sacredness of sexuality, and keep modesty contextualized in that respect. Though I haven't actually heard teaching position number 4 on my list (that men can't control themselves), judging by the discussion on the internet, people are either teaching that, or at the very least failing to contextualize and teach so that the idea comes across that way.

Oh, and, uh, finally, I guess that I should, for completeness, mention perspective number one on my list. I reject the idea that modest dress is merely a matter of sexual repression, that it cannot have any value as a principle, because I do think that it can be a matter of respect. Saying that it can be a matter of respect (as I believe that respect has value) is, I think, equivalent to rejecting the idea that it cannot have any value.

"Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her..."

My last post is five months old, but I will begin exactly where I left off. I would like to address topics related to sexuality and chastity one at a time, and I would like to start with something which is typically seen as a male problem. I want to talk about sexual objectification and lust, about seeking sexual pleasure from how you think of people around you. I want to start here, with my own duty before anything else. Of course, that is not to say that women never sexually objectify men, but that's not typically what we think of.

As I emphasized last time, at bottom, this is about respect. Anything which does not show proper respect for people, for sexuality, and for the body is bad.

Pornography requires us to think of these things as existing merely for our pleasure and fails to treat them with respect. In addition, pornography has been linked by scientific study to a variety of problems (for example, aggression, as documented in this article), so even one who does not believe as I do concerning sacred things ought to be a bit suspicious of the media.

But beyond pornography, it is quite possible to be disrespectful. A guy staring at a woman's breasts tends to make the woman feel violated. This is precisely because he has, whether she catches him at it or not, disrespected and violated her. If he is seeking to be aroused or treating her as nothing more than her body, or her body as nothing more than an object for his viewing pleasure, then this is a violation of basic respect.

Let me consider a nuance. I am not saying that you should feel terrible and disrespectful for simply noticing that someone is sexually attractive. Noticing something is not the same as mentally undressing someone. But there's a definite line. It is defined by respect. Is there disrespect in how you look at or think of a person? Do you seek sexual pleasure in a situation which is not in line with the sacredness of sexuality (the appropriate situation requires both marriage and consent... and even if you don't believe in the sacredness of sexuality as I do, I hope you at least recognize the necessity of consent)? Do you look at or think of someone as less than a person, as an object for gratifying your sexual desire?

One final point: society at large seems to do its best to ignore this, especially when men are the offenders (I have a complicated relationship with the word "feminism" because it has so many meanings, but on this point I'm a rather unabashed feminist). Nobody ever seems to tell a man that there's anything wrong with pornography, and the only problem with staring is that she might catch you. So if you're a man and you're reading this, it's probably a challenge to what you believe, what you've been taught. But give it some thought. Remember that thoughts lead to actions. Then think about what respect would ask of you in how you look at and think of women.

Title: Matthew 5:28