The Language of Abortion, Part III

            Hello again. The month of May seems to be my blog posting period, I suppose. Truthfully, I would like to write more, and one thing I’ve discovered is that more people read if you write consistently and  frequently. Well enough. I would add that you should only write consistently and frequently if you also have something to say. I haven’t discussed abortion in a while. In fact, it’s been three months to the day since my last posting on this subject, but more material has come to my attention regarding the language and arguments surrounding abortion.

            Today, I want to consider the growing consistency of pro-choice arguments. There is certain language surrounding our laws that alarms me. Consider:  you’ve heard of a ‘wrongful death’ lawsuit, I’m sure. Basically, that’s a legal action where you argue that someone else’s actions or neglect resulted in a death. This sort of suit is usually, though not always, brought about against doctors, and we can easily understand why. If a doctor prescribes the wrong medications after surgery and it kills you, your family is naturally upset and wants some sort of payback from the hospital. While there’s debate on the types and degrees of wrongful death suits that are available, I think most of us can understand what drives someone to bring that sort of action against a hospital or against a particular doctor.

            How many of you, by contrast, know what a ‘wrongful birth’ lawsuit is? I’m not being sarcastic and I’m not making this up. There really is such a thing, and the more I think about it, the more alarmed and disgusted I become both as a Christian and as a person that might’ve been a victim if I’d been born to different parents. A wrongful birth lawsuit is arguable if you can claim that:  (A). The doctor failed to correctly perform certain prenatal tests or to inform you that your child stands a good chance of being born with congenital birth defects; (B). you’ve been burdened with a large amount of unforeseen financial expenses because of your child’s birth with defects; and (C). that you would have aborted the child if you’d known about the child’s birth defects. There’s a good legal definition and some case examples in the Free Online Law Dictionary.  http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Wrongful+Birth.

            On the theoretical level, lawsuits like this are merely a natural outgrowth of both legalized abortion and of more comprehensive genetic testing. After all, you wouldn’t have been able to make this claim in a court of law before 1973, because until abortion was recognized by the supreme court in Roe v. Wade, it was illegal. So you didn’t have the option of arguing that you would have aborted your child if only you’d known. The other half of that is our more advanced knowledge of genetics and our technologies for genetic testing. After all, without the ability to accurately diagnose both current and likely future genetic difficulties, you wouldn’t be able to make this claim either. In 2012, though, our knowledge of and our ability to test for latent or present genetic defects are improving all the time. Now, this is not going to be a philippic against the supreme court or against genetics technology. I just want to point out that those two things together make cases and issues like the ones I’m going to talk about possible in the first place.

            No one will deny that the law is convoluted and that lawyers’ perspectives don’t represent most of us in our views. So as long as I was talking about mere points of law, you might have been able to wave your hand in dismissal and go, “that’s lawyers for you.” As an aside, my apologies to my lawyer friends out there, but that profession isn’t highly esteemed for some understandable reasons. Back to the main point. We’re not just talking about theoretical points of civil law. Parents have actually made these arguments. I want to highlight a couple of cases before sharing my thoughts on this new consistency in pro-abortion thought.

            First case. In 2002, Daniel and Amara Estrada had a son, Aiden. Aiden was born with Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, a genetic abnormality that can result in anything from mild mental retardation to profound mental impairments and malformed body parts and organs. It’s a disorder with a wide range of symptoms. In any case, the Estradas’ doctor didn’t catch this possibility until after Aiden’s birth, but he told them it wouldn’t happen again. So in 2004, the Estradas gave birth to Caleb. As it happened, Caleb also turned out to have SLO syndrome. The Estradas sued their doctor and the University of South Florida and won. It took an act of the Florida legislature in March of 2010 to actually get the Estradas their payout, an amount totaling over twenty-five million dollars. More information is available here.  http://www.genomicslawreport.com/index.php/2010/08/17/resolution-in-florida-wrongful-birth-case/

            Now then, in the Estrada family’s defense I do not see that they ever claimed that they would have aborted their first or their second child if they had been properly informed of the children’s genetic abnormalities. I still don’t know what I think of suing under those circumstances. Though as far as I can determine, they sued specifically because of the errors made by the doctors on-hand. The reason this case made it into my blog post is that the Estradas had to utilize Florida’s wrongful birth legal framework to bring this action against USF at all. In 2007, Florida State Senator Victor Crist acknowledged the scary slippery slope that this legal action could set in America, “In the 15 years I’ve been in the Legislature, I haven’t seen that kind of issue. This has a potential moral question that could become a potential political issue. I don’t know what the Legislature will do with that.”

            Second case. This is the case that inspired this post, and it makes me angry as well as scared. I’ve known about it since it made the news two months ago, but now it’s time to discuss it. Arial and Deborah Levy of Portland gave birth to their daughter Kalanit in June of 2007. Kalanit is the Levys’ third child and their only daughter up to that point. I don’t think they’ve had any children since, but I don’t know that. Kalanit was born with Down syndrome, a fact that previous genetic testing didn’t turn up. What makes this case different from the Estradas’ case is that in their suit against Legacy Health Systems of Portland, the Levys actually claim that they would have aborted their daughter if they’d known she would have Down syndrome:  http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/03/portland_couple_sues_legacy_he.html. In March of this year, the jury awarded the Levy family around three million in damages to care for this child.

            This family has taken a firestorm of criticism because of their legal action up to and including death threats. I don’t condone death threats or violence, but I understand the public outcry and the anger. Remember, they didn’t just claim that the doctors screwed up. The doctors might or might not have. I don’t know about the ins and outs of genetic testing or the error rate of the tests they had done. They actually claimed that they would have aborted their child—that means killed if you’re not paying attention—if they had known their daughter was going to have Down syndrome, and that, not the malpractice angle, is what has people up in arms over the case.

            Before we move on, I have to say that I could have been a victim. If I had been born to these parents and had genetic testing turned up anything funky, or even if they’d detected physical abnormalities that would have led to my blindness, I might never have been born. That’s scary. I was outraged along with the rest of us. What angered me most was the family lawyer’s claim that the Levys love their daughter very very much. Sorry, but suing a hospital because you would rather have aborted your child does not constitute an act of love. However, and here we reach the point most relevant to conservative Christians who want to throw stones, we are still called on to love and to pray for the repentance of the Levys. I’m reminded of Little Finn, a Down syndrome child in one of Randy Alcorn’s novels. One day, the Levy’s will have to answer to that child and to God about the unworthy motives that led to this legal action. I don’t envy them that. Meanwhile, death threats and fire and brimstone sermons aren’t helping us or them. Righteous anger is one thing, but we must move beyond that if the Christian community is to serve the Levys at all now. Having said that, let’s get back to the issue of abortion.

            Let’s get away from legal cases now. As another blogger pointed out, cases like these mark a potentially broader shift in the abortion debate. It’s a particularly twenty-first-century development as well. My last two postings on the language of abortion argued that we often use language to conceal and soften our intentions. Calling a baby ‘tissue’ or using language such as ‘terminate the pregnancy’ are examples of such vague language, but what happens when people come face to face in linguistic terms with what they’re doing? Well, as Randy Alcorn’s son-in-law properly points out, they either stop what they’re doing or they harden their consciences still further. Let’s look at the second of those possibilities.

            You use words like ‘terminate’ or ‘rights’ or ‘tissue’ to make the topic less divisive, more emotionally disconnected from the participants in the conversation. Yet, what is at play when you make statements like those in this Slate Magazine article from February 27. It’s written largely in the mother’s own words, and I’m going to refer to it heavily, so have a look. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/02/rick_santorum_and_prenatal_testing_i_would_have_saved_my_son_from_his_suffering_.html When Rick Santorum was contending for the republican presidential nomination, he made no secret of his opposition to certain kinds of prenatal testing, arguing that those tests led to increased abortions, and abortion is something he opposes. Ok, I have nothing to say about his point and whether or not genetic testing leads to abortion. What concerns me here is one very vehement response he received as a result of that stance. Now, Emily Rapp writes intelligently, articulately and at length. She uses language and terminology aimed at the well-educated and well-read. This is not an unlettered diatribe. She can’t be accused of not having thought this through. For all of those reasons, the problem here is ever so much worse. That is to say, she knows exactly what she’s saying.

            Emily talks about her two-year-old son, Ronan. Ronan has Tay-Sachs disease, a genetic disorder that has quite a number of severe symptoms and that leads to an early death for just about anyone who has it. It’s not pleasant for anyone involved including both the parents and the children. It’s terrible, painful and heart-rending. I will face up to those facts right now. I understand that Ronan will not live long and I agree that his quality of life is, by human standards, abysmal. I don’t envy Emily for everything she must be going through watching Ronan suffer, and my heart goes out to her as she deals with this tragic situation.

            What hurts me, though, is her chosen response to it. She doesn’t ask God, “why did you let this happen to me?” That’s an understandable and frequently posed question. Job asked it. We all do. To ask God why he allows something to happen, for all that God is God and we don’t know why he does most of what he does, this is an understandable question and it has one thing going for it. The very question acknowledges that God is in control and that he has a reason for what he permits. The atheist and agnostic version of this question would be, “if there is a God, why would he allow this to happen?” Even that form of the question admits of a discussion about God and his divinity. Emily doesn’t ask either question. In fact, she asks no questions at all. I could wish she would ask questions. Instead, she makes statements like this one:  “I would have found out what the disease meant for my then unborn child; I would have talked to parents who are raising (and burying) children with this disease, and then I would have had an abortion. Without question and without regret, although this would have been a different kind of loss to mourn and would by no means have been a cavalier or uncomplicated, heartless decision. I'm so grateful that Ronan is my child. I also wish he'd never been born; no person should suffer in this way—daily seizures, blindness, lack of movement, inability to swallow, a devastated brain—with no hope for a cure. Both of these statements are categorically true; neither one is mutually exclusive.”

            When she talks about her statements not being mutually exclusive, Emily means that she doesn’t see contradictions in the statements, “I’m so grateful that Ronan is my child,” and, “I also wish he’d never been born.” Well, as a linguist who is trained in philosophy and logic, I first want to say that I do perceive a contradiction. I do not see how both statements can be true. If the first is true, that she’s grateful for her son, I don’t see the second as being possible. Regret his suffering? Yes. Regret her own sufferings as his mother and an observer of this terrible disease? Absolutely. Wish he’d never been born? … No. Put the other way around, if, as is clear from her extended article, Emily believes it would have been better to abort—again that means kill—her son before he was born, then on what grounds does she make the statement, “I’m so grateful that Ronan is my child.” What, exactly, are you grateful for? That’s my question here. I want a list. I have a list of the reasons she wishes he hadn’t been born, but again as a philosophizing linguist, I say that the first statement about being grateful for her son is wholly unsupported in this long lament. Let’s go on.

            In another section of her discussion, Emily says of her own birth as a person with a disability:  “My mom did not have a choice about terminating her pregnancy, although when I was born and she was told that I might be retarded, that I might never walk, and that given these possibilities she might want to consider institutionalizing me, she probably wished she'd had the choice.” She probably wished she’d had the choice? That’s very presumptuous of her to say and possibly very hurtful from her own mother’s point-of-view. Did her mother tell her that? I doubt it. If she had, the word ‘probably’ wouldn’t have been in that sentence. What is likelier, if we’re going to deal with probabilities, is that her mother doesn’t or didn’t think of the question in Emily’s terms and that Emily is projecting her own disregard for life—because disregard for life is what’s at the bottom of this whole discussion here in the twenty-first century—backwards onto her mother’s own situation

            Now, I realize that saying that someone or that many someones display a disregard for human life is a very serious statement. However, such a disregard for life is at the bottom of the new shifts in the abortion debate and so I will endeavor to prove it. At the close of her article, Emily Rapp has this to say:  “Santorum believes that all life is inherently valuable, no matter how compromised or of what limited quality; that is one view. I believe that we need a more nuanced discussion about what quality of life is, and that it should be a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy when the path of her child’s life is as compromised—and as terrible—as my son’s.”

            Let me put this into plain English. Emily Rapp’s considered opinion is that a woman should have the right to decide whether her child lives or dies based on what she, the mother, feels would be that child’s quality of life. She talks elsewhere about women having reproductive freedom and the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. Second point first, she does have that freedom. Outside of rape and incest, sex is a choice for both a man and a woman. You can choose to have it … or else not. But when a new life is conceived, we’re not just talking about the mother’s body anymore. I’ve already spoken at length about this in the first blog posting devoted to this subject. The baby is not the mother and his body is not her body, so enough of this, “it’s my body,” rhetoric. It’s rhetorically misleading and biologically untrue.

            As to what Emily says in the quote above, it goes beyond the traditional “my body, my choice” rhetoric. Emily freely admits that we’re dealing with another life. She’s not trying to argue that Ronan is part of her own body, though her  article is generally couched in those terms. What she’s actually saying here is that she, Emily, should have the power of life or death over Ronan and that she should be free to choose death for him. In fact, she comes out and says that she would have chosen death for him if she’d known about his condition.

            Is it just me? Am I the only one scared by the shifts in the abortion discussion? Suppose I was conceived today. Suppose the doctors told my mother that I had a whole slew of physical defects that might crop up and that it’d be best to abort me. As it happens, I was born with a whole slew of physical complications. I had every organ system in my body shut down at one time or another. I was given less than a day to live at one point. I had a hole in my heart when I was born. No doctor at my birth or even before it had any reason whatever to suppose that I would live. None. And I was born a decade later than Emily Rapp, remember. So according to today’s thinking, my mother could abort me and justify it by saying, “Brad would have had a terribly poor quality of life. I didn’t want him to suffer.” Well as it happens, the only lingering physical consequence from that tempestuous few months of my mother’s pregnancy turns out to be total physical blindness. Thirty years later, I’m hard pressed to complain.

            Emily asks for a more nuanced discussion. More nuanced than Rick Santorum’s idea that all human life has inherent value. The only real way to nuance that would be to say that all human life has inherent value, but some human lives are inherently more valuable than others. And, Emily, why are we just restricting this to physical defects? Should we agree that a mother on welfare should be free to decide not to raise her child in poverty and so he or she gets aborted? Or should we perhaps say that if I don’t want to raise my child in the lower middle class, I should have an abortion? Maybe we could narrow this down further. Crap, what if I live in south central L.A? Supposing I don’t want a child of mine to go to these schools or be exposed to these gangs, but I can’t leave L.A. Maybe I should have an abortion and just reconceive later on when I’ve moved to Seattle. I’m not being outrageous or exaggerating her point. I’m merely offering the nuances that Emily Rapp asks for when she insists on a more complicated view about quality of life and abortion.

            When you open the door that Emily and people like her want opened, the door behind which quality of life is freely and openly used to justify abortion in the most straightforward of language, you get another word that goes beyond abortion. That word, my friends, is ‘eugenics.’ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/eugenics Eugenics is the study or practice of improving the human population by selectively weeding out undesirable traits e.g. not allowing a child with a potential or actual genetic defect to be born, lest they pass it on. Or not being allowed to conceive because you’re a carrier. When we get to a point that genetic testing is used solely to determine whether or not to have abortions—and that’s not very far off—then we will be practicing a grassroots form of eugenics. We have all but eroded moral objections to abortion. The legal cases and the Slate article above merely showcase the extent to which we as Americans have stopped thinking about abortion as something you ought to do or ought not to do, and started thinking of it in its most utilitarian terms, “Do I want to raise this child? Should this child be allowed to live given these problems?”

            Let me leave you with a futuristic situation. Supposing I’d been born twenty years from now. Suppose further, let’s say fifty years from now when I would be 30, that I was dating a woman and I asked her to marry me. Suppose finally, that she, being in love with me and finding me in every way suitable, she said sure. Only thing is, would I mind getting a genetic test. We do the test, and I show up as a carrier of an obscure ailment that I might pass along to a child. Supposing then she decides not to marry me based on this genetic test. Or as an alternative, supposing she does marry me anyway. Then she gets a genetic scan done and I come home to hear, “Well, I had to terminate today.” When I ask why, she might say, “Well, honey, it’s that thing on your thirty-second chromosome. Well they said our baby might develop it when he’s forty. I didn’t want that! You wouldn’t either, would you?”

            You know the worst part of that scenario, both of those scenarios? We don’t have to wait fifty years for either of those things to happen. They could happen today. We’ve got the technology and there are such things as genetic councilors. We’re well on our way to having the mindset too.

            When you stop thinking that all life is inherently valuable, you begin deciding for yourself which lives, whose lives, are valuable and whose are less so. What is  the result? The results are abortion based on genetic testing and eugenics-like thinking. Proverbs 21:2 tells us, “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes.” There’s a second half to that verse, but this half contains the message we need to hear. Emily Rapp uses words like ‘moral’ and ‘value’ in her piece. While I don’t doubt her sincerity, she doesn’t use the word ‘God’ even once. When you eliminate God as the source and standard for your value judgments, that doesn’t mean you’re incapable of making what you perceive to be value judgments. Just like if you decide not to spend money issued by the treasury, that doesn’t stop you from printing your own money and spending it if you can get away with it. But the fact that you can make your own money doesn’t include with it the idea that you ought to, nor does it invalidate legal money. Similarly, the fact that you can form opinions about moral standards on your own strength of intellect doesn’t make those standards right. Just the opposite, in fact.

            Last but not least, why does God make—or allow to be made—children with physical defects? Tough question. I don’t claim to have the answers. Here’s one possibility though. Is it possible that God allows a child with Down syndrome to come into the world so that the child might be instructive to the parents? Is it possible that Emily was gifted with Ronan, not that she might bemoan his fate, but that she might learn grace, patience, unconditional love and charity from him? No, unconditional love does not entail wishing your child had never been born. It excludes that wish, actually. I don’t know why Ronan or Kalanit are here. Jesus won’t ever answer that one for me. Like Aslan, he tends to tell people no stories but their own. But it is possible. Finally, I will tell you what I do know. I know that God does indeed allow children with physical defects to come into the world. I leave you with this thought:  “But Moses said to the Lord, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.” Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man's mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak (Exodus 4:10-12).

America's Worship of Science

When it comes to the perennial divide that separates science and religion in America, three things occur to me. First, our culture worships science. Second, we worship science because, try as we might, we have not suppressed the desire within us to seek out God and devote our worship to him. Finally, miracles, the supernatural events Christianity is built on, can be shown to have a rational place in our discourse. This last is an offering to all my rationally-minded friends who like to argue so passionately and at such length about the impossibility of the miracle. Are these three things claims? You bet. Now, in the spirit of reason and rational discourse, I have to offer you proof for all of them. One note:  as with all my blog posts, this one is America-focused. While what I’m saying is probably applicable to Europe and to other parts of the world,, this is my country, this is my culture and this is the only one I’m qualified to talk about at length. Still, if C.S. Lewis’s cultural examples were mainly British and he could talk about these issues half a century ago, I think I can still pull it off today in the good old U S of A. How often have you ever watched a conversation like this happen, or perhaps taken part in it yourself on one side or the other?

First Man:  “Haven’t you heard about those new green widgets made by X-corp? They’re made of that new metal.”

Second Man:  “Yeah, so?”

First Man:  “Well, believe it or not, they can change shape on their own. It’s cool.”

Second Man:  “Oh come on. That’s crap! Nothing just changes shape. Not even green metal widgets. You know that as well as I do.”

First man:  “These widgets do though. There was a study where scientists proved they could change shape on their own. Without help! They could become anything! Something about the chemicals in green metal widgets or some stuff like that.”

Second man:  “Really?

First Man:  “Yep. It was on the news. These Harvard scientists figured it out.”

Second man:  “I’ll be damned. Green widgets. … Never would’ve thought it.”

            Substitute green widgets for just about any discovery (real or fake) and you’ve got a conversation that happens every day, all the time. I’ve noticed that there’s no quicker way to legitimize your own position about something than to claim that there exists “scientific” proof of it. Science and truth have become linked in many American minds, and the reason, I believe, is that many people have been taught—and so they now believe on one level or another—that science not only presents us with what is true by evidence or observation, but that science itself is that truth. We, and by we I mean the everyday American, not just the educated elite or just the very poor or just the very wealthy, but everyday Joes, we accept scientific claims as though they were gospel truths. Indeed, to many they are gospel truths.

            This has been coming for a while. Truth be told, it’s nothing new. Rather, it’s a situation that has worsened as the twentieth century gave way to the present one. When the holy name of science is invoked, all questions stop. On the one hand, this is understandable. The everyday Joe doesn’t know how to question the claims of science because he’s rarely taught how to. In part this has to do with training. Not everyone is trained in the scientific method. Present most people with a study about a given thing, and most people simply won’t know how to ask about the particulars of the experimental design or the reproducibility of the experiment or what the researcher’s colleagues in the field published about it a year later. This is well enough. I’d never claim that all people should be versed enough in the scientific method to be able to critique a research article the way another academic or scientist can.

            Yet I’m disconcerted at how the notion of science can put a stop to discussion on a given thing. Claim that X has been proved by science, and X is thenceforth accepted as rock solid. It may not matter that subsequent science has proven X to be wrong or that the author who came out with X was a hoaxer, science’s name has already been invoked. Ergo, X will remain fast in the minds of many people for a very long time. It’s a conversation stopper in the sense that it shuts down opposition in daily conversation.

            America has come to the point where it worships science. The word ‘worship’ brings to mind a certain awe and reverence for the worshiped, and it is this increasingly reverential attitude for and awe of the sciences that leads me to the concept of worship. The hypothetical conversation above is a template that showcases that worship even though people wouldn’t use the word ‘worship’ to characterize it.

            In that way, then, science has taken on the worst aspects of many purveyors of church doctrine. That is, there are some in the church who question your faith if you ask probing and difficult questions quite apart from any answers they might be able to help you find or how sincere you may be in seeking out the truth. Likewise, questioning science’s findings can lead to a perception that you’re a know-it-all, a show-off, or should you question scientific endeavors from a religious or ethical standpoint, you’re considered closed-minded, bigoted or possibly even downright irrational. Substitute ‘irrational’ for ‘heretic’ in the minds of many decently educated folks, and you can perhaps see the worth of the parallel I’m drawing.

            It’s not a perfect parallel, I admit. There is no scientific inquisition set up to test you for rationality the way the inquisition once sought to test people’s orthodoxy. Though if people like Sam Harris have their way, there would be. The twentieth century was the greatest single century for scientific progress in the history of mankind on many a front. If anything can be said about the twenty-first century as yet, it may prove to be the century that sees the greatest rationally-based rejection of theism in general and Christianity in particular that’s been seen to date. I won’t be alive at the end of the century to verify any of this. So I’ll say here and now I could easily be wrong about this century. But my intuition suggests otherwise.

            For most of the twentieth century, if you rejected religion, you kept your rejection to yourself. It wasn’t popular to trot that out. You could find yourself being shunned by your local community, failing to get reelected or enduring any number of other negative consequences. To an extent that’s still true. I doubt America today would elect an openly atheist president, though it well might. One interesting thing about the last decade has been the publication of books by men like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Victor Stenger, and so on. What they’re saying is really nothing new. SO in that sense the term ‘new atheism’ that’s been applied to them and their writings is unwarranted. What is noteworthy is that they’ve popularized the atheist or, as they like to call it, the antitheist position.

It’s becoming increasingly acceptable to criticize religion in general and Christianity in particular in the strongest possible terms, taking no prisoners and making no concessions. Whereas before now, your open atheist was probably an academic or a scientist or a philosopher whose views were known to a comparatively small number of people, books like The God Delusion and The End of Faith have hit the bestseller lists and many people have picked them up and read them. Young students are leaving Christian homes, coming to universities and being exposed not only to the liberality and relativism that pervade our institutions of higher learning, but they’re coming across these highly readable and very popular publications. That is, atheism is no longer the purview of college profs. You might find these books on any dorm room shelf.

Many Christians deplore this state of affairs. I consider it a blessing. In the emergent climate of honest or even openly hostile atheism, you are far likelier to find out who believes what. If a person doesn’t profess their disbelief in God because they’re afraid of social censure, that doesn’t mean they really believe in God. Indeed, with atheism now on the ascent in acceptance, it means you’re far likelier to get an honest answer if you find yourself conversing with someone about their beliefs. There’s something to be said for honesty.

Well enough, you might say. We live in a society that turns more and more to rationalism as defined and advocated by the scientist for our every answer:  biological, physical, ethical, moral etc. If that constitutes a worship of science, then we do indeed worship science. So what’s this about us worshiping science out of a misplaced desire to worship God? This isn’t something that many scientifically-minded people are going to agree with. Not, mind you, that many of them would have agreed with some things I’ve already said. To illustrate this point, I draw your attention to a certain 2008 project in Berkeley California.

The philosopher Jonathan Keats wondered what a temple to science would look like:  http://io9.com/5049671/call-to-worship-at-the-temple-of-science. If stained glass windows depicted patterns of microwave radiation rather than nativity scenes, and if you could form a liturgy out of cosmic sound effects that represent the big bang, what kind of service and space would you get? The project was overseen by the Judah L. Magnes Museum. At first I thought that an actual building had been constructed, but when I called in search of more info, museum  director Alla Efimova told me that that was not the case. Keats’s temple was a thought experiment. The project ran for four months from September 2008 to early 2009. Now, Keats himself isn’t a “militant atheist,” as biologist Richard Dawkins styles himself, though his views align mostly with the scientific notions of rationalism. Nivair Gabriel’s  brief article (whose url is reprinted here for you) quotes the mission statement from the project’s now defunct web site. The mission of the Atheon, as the project was called, was to create an alternative to god-based religion. Most interesting of all is the statement, “our credo is to make faith rational.”

Now that, my friends, is an extremely interesting statement with implications well beyond what Keats intended. First, the statement itself. In reply, I would argue that faith is rational to a certain degree. If you believe in a God who made the universe and you arrive at that belief via evidence within Mankind or the universe itself, whatever that evidence may be, then you could argue that faith is a form of inductive logic, if admittedly a larger inductive leap than logicians will allow for. But I’m not here to shape an ontological argument. Not this time. The more interesting thing to note is that the statement was made at all. The Atheon’s proponents weren’t, as Dawkins in the God Delusion freely admits to doing, trying to abolish notions of faith altogether. Nowhere do they say that. Rather, they wish to redefine the terms on which faith exists. That’s a far cry from claiming that there is or ought to be no such thing as faith and/or worship.

Rather, the supporters of the Atheon tacitly admit to what C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain calls the experience of the numinous. That is, there is a certain reverent awe, a feeling of inadequacy of self when you contemplate yourself compared with the object of your reverence, be it the universe or God and so on. Richard Dawkins would tell you that the notion of numinous anything is bunk. Yet, “our credo is to make faith rational.” It surely sounds to me like they’re admitting to faith. “What ought we to have faith in,” seems to be the Atheon supporters’ question. Their answer is science.

We regard a collider or the human genome or a cosmic string with a certain degree of numinous awe. One scientist, let's say the biologist Stephen J. Gould, looks at a human DNA molecule and sees a complex chain of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine, and perhaps he is amazed at the systemic complexity that has evolved. He can’t fully explain it, but it amazes him, this handiwork of nature. Another scientist, perhaps Francis Collins, the man who headed the human genome project, looks at the same strand of DNA, sees the same four elements and sees there the fingerprints of God. Both scientists have encountered the numinous to a degree. It’s only a question of what each scientist regards as the right and proper object of his reverence. Yet, even this sort of reverence for the DNA molecule or the zero-point of the universe is encouraging. When scientists like Steven Weinberg ask how science can best fill the needs that religion satisfies in so many, they tacitly admit to the existence of those needs and they tacitly admit, too, that science is inadequate to fill them. I’m sure Richard Dawkins would love to argue his way out of that one, but it remains a fair point.

The truth is there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the numinous, with awe or with feeling that there’s something greater than yourself. Every culture throughout history has had a god concept, after all. As I’ve said before in another blog post, there are no exceptions. No culture has ever been godless, and the communist regimes of the twentieth century don’t count, because their atheism was forced on the people from above and not a natural outgrowth of those peoples’ intellectual history. The type of rationalism that spawned the scientific method and the types of atheistic thinking that are considered only natural by many thinkers today is, indeed and in truth, a jonnie-come-lately in human cultural and intellectual history. C.S. Lewis’s consideration of this point in Mere Christianity is telling. Though I had this thought before I ever read his book, I choose to credit him with it. If you are a Christian, one thing you do not have to believe is that all the major religions of the world are wrong. You believe that all of them contain some element of the truth, a glimpse of it. Some contain more truth than others, and, being a Christian, you do believe that where your faith differs from theirs, yours is correct and there’s isn’t. Though some may come much closer to the truth than others. If you are an atheist, you must believe that all cultures and people who believe in or who have ever believed in and worshiped a god of any sort are ipso facto mistaken, misguided, willfully ignorant or in any and every case, wrong all round on this point, whatever their reasons for being wrong happen to be.

To conclude these first two points, we Americans worship science, because it fills our need to encounter the numinous, to have the experience of encountering something beyond our own ken. When we scratch the infinity symbol on our doors or sit there staring at our cosmic phenomenon screensavers--for any of you who might do either of these things—we touch upon the numinous experience. My only complaint about it is that we reverence the created. We reverence finite things and finite concepts:  cosmic strings, DNA molecules, statistical significance and falsifiability. The cure for our misplaced reverences isn’t far to seek. We reverence these various things or others because every human being is created, as St. Augustine put it, with a god-shaped void inside us that only God can fill.

I close with a brief consideration of miracles, a topic I was going to leave out altogether when I started writing this post. There are books upon books written by theologians, philosophers and skeptics alike on the subject of miracles. I’ve never had a problem with them. Still, it seems like almost every time the subject of God comes up, someone always holds up miracles as being impossibilities. Higher critics object to miracles as being textual embellishments to lend the bible’s stories plausibility or authority to more “primitive” minds and cultures. Scientists argue, as though no one before ever figured it out, that we now know how the laws of mechanics and biophysics and astrophysics ad infinitum work, and that in such an ordered place as our understood cosmos, miracles just can’t be, but since no one “back then” understood the running of the cosmos, miracles were all those people had to go on. Finally, there are those in popular science who like to talk about man-made miracles as if there were such things. I once had someone ask me if Man’s walks on the moon weren’t technological miracles. Strictly speaking, no.

The first problem with miracles is a linguistic one. Originally, the word ‘miracle’ as it came into English from ecclesiastical Latin and old French meant something distinctly supernatural, something that you marveled at and that amazed you because it was completely beyond human capability. So, yes, the virgin birth would be a miracle in this oldest sense. So too would the plagues visited upon Egypt before the exodus. Humans couldn’t have contrived them. They’re not natural. They were instigated by a being beyond the physical and natural laws that frame our day to day actions. Clear, indisputable miracles. But then something happened to the word. At some point in the history of English, people began to say that other great events, ships surviving gales at sea, wars being averted or won, or wild fires being contained, were also marvelous, wondrous, miraculous even. When describing this latter type of event, people used this word ‘miracle’ reverently, joyfully,, anything but usefully. Now a miracle can be anything, any event the speaker happens to think is significant enough. Presidential elections can be miracles. We have stripped the word of all of its meanings. So any attempt to deal with miracles has to include somewhere an explanation of what a miracle was and is supposed to be.

Scientists and philosophers who argue that miracles are impossible because they contravene the natural laws of the universe miss the point entirely. They are supposed to break those laws. If a miracle was entirely explicable through natural physical laws, then by definition it would not be a miracle. It might be a great and wondrous thing, but it would not meet this most fundamental criterion for miraclehood. In short, nothing less than an event that, in the ordinary course of things is always utterly impossible in our physical universe, can ever qualify as a miraculous occurrence. My passing my prelims, no matter how impossible I felt that feat to be, was not a miracle. This fact about the quality of miracles also negates any attempts to ‘prove’ that they happened or that they did not happen. They’re not replicable. They are events that are totally beyond the scientific method of inquiry.

Thus, studies like the 2001 Mayo Clinic experiment or the 2005 Duke University study, both of which attempted to determine the effectiveness of prayer in medical settings, are cosmically laughable. Generally speaking, studies like these have had every appearance of scientific rigor. The 2006 Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) that was published in the American Heart Journal is a great example. The team, which was led by a guy from, surprise surprise, Harvard, decided to study the power of prayer in 1802 cases of coronary artery bypass surgery. These people went all out:  double blind treatment protocols, balanced groups of patient participants, and  even a specific expression the prayer teams were to use, “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.” Just as an aside, how often do surgeries like that actually have speedy recoveries with no complications at all? Hmmm. Care to guess what the results were? In the experiment, two groups of patients were told they might or might not receive prayers. So a guy wouldn’t know which group he belonged to, the patient group that was getting prayed for or the bunch that wasn’t. A third group of patients was explicitly told they were definitely being prayed for. In the first two groups, there wasn’t any significant difference in the death rates. In the third group—the patients who knew they were being prayed for, mind you—a significantly higher number of them died. The leader of the study, Dr. Herbert Benson, said after the failure of his experiment that the project wasn’t the last word on intercessory prayer and that they needed additional answers. God is the last word on intercessory prayer as I recall. You can’t prove a miracle and God is not subject to experimentation.

The only plausible course for denying miracles in human history that is really left to the skeptic is to deny those portions of human history where miracles have occurred or to question the veracity of the written accounts. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume once asked which was more probable, the resurrection of Christ or a lying witness. Hume is right enough when he argues that miracles are by their nature improbable. Improbable, however, does not mean impossible. The only impossibility I see where true miracles are concerned is the impossibility of making them ourselves. As I said before, if we could, they wouldn’t be miracles. Miracles are, in the final analysis, probably the most potent example of the numinous. They point the way not to science, but to the one who made the scientists.

A Blind Man's Views on Color

            Hello again. To catch you up on events in light of my last posting, I am grateful to say the department has come through. I have been offered an additional $2400 in summer funding. This is great news! Summer and the next academic year are now set.

            So, a blind man and the race issue. What are my credentials to be able to have anything to say about racism, you ask? Just one. I’m blind. Notice I didn’t say that I’m White or Black or of mixed heritage. I am blind, and that includes color blindness. Walking down Green Street, I can’t tell White pedestrians from Black pedestrians from Asian ones. Speech patterns, accents and dialects help, but they’re not foolproof. So for our purposes, remember that I am totally blind and keep that in mind as I take apart both sides in our current racial climate, if you would. Just a note, I’m going to focus mostly on the Black-White divides because they’re most pressing right now. Though what I say can and should be applied to everyone.

            Everyone today holds up the Trayvon Martin case as an example of blatant racism, and no blog post about racism, it seems, would be complete without talking about it. Well, I’m not going to. The media is notoriously unreliable, I don’t have all the facts, and even if I did, building a case for rampant racism based on one incident which may or may not have been racially motivated demonstrates just the sort of logic I take points off for in student term papers. So for those reasons I am saying nothing about the unfortunate death of Trayvon Martin, the racial motivations of George Zimmerman or anything else related to that case. Moving on.

            What is noteworthy to me is not the Trayvon Martin murder case per se, but rather the polemics that have emerged because of it. White republicans poopoo any notion that there could be race-based animosity springing up today. White democrats and liberal Black folks are ready to go to war over what they see as the continuing oppression of just about everyone in this country except White males. Moderates, it seems, are keeping their mouths firmly shut lest somebody get pissed off. And everyone wonders why I don’t align myself with a political party? As a dear friend would say, “hmph.”

            My first encounter with racism on a large scale was the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles. More specifically, I’m referring to the riots that broke out in 1992 following the initial acquittal of the officers involved. I was nine years old when it happened. To put it plainly, I didn’t understand. You see, I grew up in demographically mixed army towns. At that time I lived in Killeen Texas. My best friends were a Black kid and a Hispanic. I was bullied by White kids and helped out by Black kids. I was bullied by Black kids and a Black bully got his ass kicked by a couple of Hispanic kids for messing with the little blind kid. Race just didn’t enter into it for me. Why should it have? So when the beating was reported and L.A. burned for two days, I asked why. Why did they beat the man? For being Black? Why did the people react and burn the city? My family had no good answers.

            I continued to live in demographically mixed cities until I left for college. Memphis was the first predominantly Black city I lived in, and I lived there for five years. Knoxville Tennessee was the first predominantly White city I lived in as a graduate student, and I lived there for two years. Champaign Illinois is probably predominantly White, but what’s interesting is that I live in the campus community, which accounts for better than half the total population. Our Asian population is enormous, and this is my first time living in large Asian-populated areas. I have lived here for four years. Everywhere I have lived, I have observed both racial tension and racial cooperation. There are racists on both sides of any race line, and there are those on both sides of a race line who see beyond color. What have I inferred from this?

            First, racism is not particularly White and not particularly American. Americans talk, both Blacks and Whites, as though America takes the prize for most racist, most racially divided and most racially this, that and the other. Just not most racially peaceful. Never that prize. The truth is that every nation and culture throughout history has had its culturally inculcated (and sometimes legally sponsored) racial prejudices. And within every culture, there have been those who accepted those prejudices unquestioningly, those who took those prejudices to extremes, and those who rejected them. It is the way of our history. I am not aware of a single culture that would prove to be an exception to what I said. I challenge anyone to find me one. This is not to say that I like the pattern. Racism is one of the deplorable aspects of a sinful humanity, one of many. America is no exception, probably neither better nor worse than half a hundred others I could name, that is, if qualitative comparisons like that were either possible or of any real value. I am not sure that they are, so I won’t try to make them.

            Ok, so I’ve established that racism is definitely not just an American thing. So far, nobody would really argue me on that one. But is it a White issue? Are Whites the big, bad racists in this country? Let me tell you a couple stories from my undergrad days. I took both political science and philosophy my first semester at the University of Memphis. In my poli sci class, there was a fellow who once tried to tell me that, being White, I was automatically part of the entrenched empowered elite. He soon learned that he’d picked the wrong White man to pitch that argument to. I pointed out that I was blind, that statistically speaking, more of my demographic was out of work than his (about 70% presently) and finally, that being blind brought as much if not more crap down on my head than being Black brought down on his own. It was a friendly conversation, and while he didn’t particularly care for his idea being rejected, he couldn’t argue with me about it either. You see, I know exactly what I’m talking about when it comes to many types of discrimination. Again, “hmph.” But the philosophy class bears the more interesting tale.

            I’ll never forget this. It was Phil. 1102, a modern issues course. We were talking about hate speech and racism. The instructor of that course, a doctoral student, was leading the discussion. I noticed that all the sample texts we were using that day talked about hate speech in one particular way. Anti-Black hate speech. More specifically, anti-Black hate speech delivered by White supremacists. As the talk went on, I found myself wondering why there was no racial diversity in the discussion of hate rhetoric. Finally, I raised my hand and asked whether anti-White hate speech shouldn’t be given equal consideration as we talked about the issues of the class period. The instructor asked me to explain what I meant by anti-White. When I did, she flatly asserted, “There’s no such thing as racism against Whites.” When I contested this, she responded, “I’m sorry, but you can’t enslave a people for three centuries and then expect them all to like you. I don’t think that just because someone resents the treatment of their race that that qualifies as hate speech.” My jaw dropped. In essence, what she seemed to be saying was that if Black folks like Louis Farrakhan went on anti-White blasting campaigns, what they said was justified and should be tolerated, if not accepted. Hmph. Now I ask you, was that, or was that not, a racist comment on the instructor’s part?

            There are White racists. Many of them. Sadly, there have been White racists who used my faith to justify their twisted notions of race. Some still do. It saddens and angers me. There are Black racists. There are also some, yes, some, Black racists who use Islam to justify hatred of Whites. Thankfully, Louis Farrakhan  does not speak for most Black people or even most Black Muslims who may or may not be part of his organization. The point is that it’s not your color that determines your ability or likelihood of being racist. Whites are not the “worst” or the “primary” racists in this country, and to say that they are, or that White people are the most racist ones out there is unfair in the extreme.

            The law, unfortunately, is not a complete remedy. The Civil Rights Acts, the Affirmative Action Laws, and the myriad other statutes and orders designed to cement racial cooperation and fairness in America have often times been necessary when they were implemented and have since proven to be either not as effective as they meant to be, or to have unforeseen backlash consequences. For example, reverse discrimination. That’s the term for it, I suppose, but it’s simply discrimination. My viewpoint on this is quite simple. Not hiring a Black man because he is Black and you don’t think a Black man should work for you is wrong. No question, no exceptions. On the other hand, hiring a Black man because he is Black and you’re filling a quota is also wrong. Again, I make no exceptions. SO then the popular question gets asked, “Ok, Brad, if you have an equally qualified Black man and White man applying for the same job, which do you hire?” My answer is, “I don’t know. I’d make my decision on something other than race. That’s for damned sure. I’ll let you know.” There are books out there, shelves and shelves of them, dealing with discrimination, anti-discrimination laws, and so on and so forth. I’m not writing one. Suffice it to say that I am pleased we have been trying to find legal means to prevent discrimination on all fronts, and the Americans with Disabilities Act is just such a measure. I’m grateful for it. However, I don’t worship the law. The law is imperfect. It is made by human beings and is breakable by human beings. There is no law that doesn’t have both loopholes and those willing to find them. Finally, there is no law that doesn’t have those willing to overturn it or simply to break it. That is the truth.

            Only when humanity is redeemed will racism disappear. So, here I go again, dragging a Christian theme into my discussions? Guilty. I make no apologies for it. Race or ethnicity or heritage (pick your word) is a gift, not a curse. God didn’t create us all alike in appearance, size, skin tone, background, innate talent etc. In fact, just about the one thing all of us have in common is the ability to communicate. Some would debate me on that point. But work with me here. We don’t look the same, think the same, walk the same, talk the same or anything else the same. Not here on Earth. So then, how do I know or how can I say that race is a gift?

            Repeatedly in the New Testament, the writers make it clear again and again that God wants to call people from all tribes, nations and tongues. Every linguistic,  geopolitical, cultural, racial and ethnic background will be represented in Heaven, I believe. If we were all intended to lose those portions of our identities, I’m not sure we’d have them to start with. C.S. Lewis, in his preamble to The Great Divorce wrote, “… The creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.” I think we can make the application to the current discussion.

            There is no shame in being what you were made. Being Black is to be what God made you, and you should rejoice in being so. Being White, contrary to the social conscience movement and what it would have you believe, is a gift of equal value. I am as proud of my heritage as anyone should be. As a linguist I draw your attention to the verb phrase “should be.” I did not use “could be” for a very good reason. I find no shame in being White. Nor do I want to be something else. This cherishing of our racial and ethnic identities doesn’t become wrong or sinful or lamentable until that moment when I, being White or Blue or Green, use my ethnicity as a club to beat you over the head because of yours. No matter who wields the club, that wielding of the racial club is wrong.

            In closing, I just want to say that I know there are those out there who will label me a racist based on some comment or other I’ve made. I trust there will also be those who read carefully and consider what I’ve said. There are those who will dismiss what I’ve said because of these last two paragraphs, the ones containing the Christian angle. The truth is, I’m not necessarily trying to make any argument, call anyone to a course of action or denigrate any point of view except the racist ones. So there you have it.

Is There a Problem?

            There’s probably some blogosphere law out there that says that if I don’t post every X number of days or weeks, you can just stop reading altogether. Maybe so. It’s been an interesting and hectic couple of months. April in particular. You know as a graduate student, you start out the month thinking, “ah, nice paycheck. I’m going to set aside this much and have that much for spending money and pay bills with the rest.” Sometimes it happens that way but often it doesn’t. Sometimes your income taxes come due, your research expenses loom etc. and you end the month thinking, “Well thank God I had the money to do all of that.” Well it’s not the end of the pay period, but I can certainly relate. I know, I don’t normally write blog entries about my personal life, but this is going to be a bit of an exception. … Maybe I should be more personal in my blog. That’s something to think about.

            To catch you up, my research is going well. I collect the last of my data and pay the last of my subjects today. Paying for my dissertation is not over, however. Next comes data analysis. That also has to be paid for and could get pricy. On the credit side, I’ve been appointed my German department’s Max Kade fellow for the coming academic year. A scholarship, more or less, for those of you who don’t know about such things. I certainly won’t complain about that. Next year is unquestionably my last year here. There’s no doubt the dissertation will be completed. What is more, the academic job search will get underway. Last Fall it was suspended because I needed to collect more data. Now it really gets underway. One could say last Fall was practice for this Fall. That’s fine with me. This summer, though. Now that’s the interesting part.

            Right now I don’t like summer much. When I was a kid I loved it. Who doesn’t love summer. As a grad student, it’s hard to love summer. Your paychecks are guaranteed you only September to May. Between June and September … you’re screwed unless you can secure summer funding. As a professor making $50,000 a year, this is generally not a problem. As a grad student making less than $15,000 a year, however, this becomes cause to loathe summer passionately until the end of your schooling. At my level of study summer funding  usually means teaching or some sort of research support. Those decisions are still being made. At the moment I might have $900 in summer funding. The class has the required number of students enrolled in it, so I don’t see it being canceled. The concern, when you’re me, then becomes how to stretch your last paycheck into three months of summer cash flow. You can’t. And when you’re blind and living in a college town, half the summer jobs are outside your abilities. Driving a cab or waiting tables? Now that could be comical, even life threatening, but it’s not practical. So, you keep looking. And, when you’re me, you write to your department hoping to secure additional funding and you scour the campus looking for extra cash. And finally, if you’re like me, you pray. Most diligently do you pray and not just because there are no atheists in a foxhole as the old saying goes. You pray because you know that there is an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient God who knows your needs and provides for them. You just don’t know how he’ll do it. Meanwhile, it is of little value to me for people to say, “at least next year’s covered.” While I know what they mean when they say this, it doesn’t help. Next year is next year. This summer is this summer. I’ll even grant you that a lack of funding for next year would have been a much bigger problem than this summer’s woes, but it didn’t happen that way. Yet, this summer must still be dealt with. But that’s the situation today, May 3. That situation actually brings me to the main topic I wanted to consider.

            Let me ask a brutally pointed question. Have you ever noticed that your problems are huge to you and small as crap to those you often look to for aid in solving them or to those on whom your future depends? I’ll call this the relativity of problems and troubles. This plays out especially when there’s a hierarchy of power involved. When you’re a high school student, that final in algebra looms large. You didn’t get the hang of factoring polynomials or of dividing matrices, so how are you going to pass that big exam? Your algebra teacher, on the other hand, has a couple hundred tests to grade and is writing a paper for the master’s class she takes at night and is worried about completing her M.ED. this year or her contract won’t be renewed. Your problem to you is massive. To her, your failure to grasp the concepts is unfortunate, but she has other and bigger fish to fry. In college, that term paper you got back with blood red ink all over it and that you have to revise for your Holocaust studies course looks daunting. You have to revise it, study for that classes final and take five other finals. Yet your instructor himself is a student, balancing teaching and grading with a whole slew of courses that he’s taking and studying for his M.A. exams or his Ph.D. qualifiers. Maybe in his heart of hearts he doesn’t give a damn about your particular term paper on the radar of his own issues. SO to you, your term paper represents hours of work, sweat and tears. To him, it represents one more thing he has to grade before picking up his Adorno and studying some more or finishing his own paper on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers. In grad school especially at my level of study, it’s your doctoral thesis that matters. For many, it consumes them. It worries them. They have to write a 200-page paper and if it doesn’t happen they’re out of luck. By the way, this isn’t what I struggle with. My dissertation is going well and it doesn’t bother me, but for most people like me, what I just said is very true. To the professor overseeing the project, though, this is one more student whose work she’s overseeing. She has six other advisees, not to mention classes to teach, committees to sit on, projects to oversee and budgets to juggle. And for giggles, she’s coming up on promotion and is worried about her own employment if she fails to advance in rank. One more example? Ok then. When you work for the company and you know layoffs are coming, you pray like hell you won’t be one of them. You’ve put in a lot of work for this company, right? You’ve been valuable to them. Besides, you have two kids to support even if your wife is working. Yet your boss, the one who will or won’t fire you, is watching the bottom drop out of the company’s profits and shares and is facing a layoff himself if your company is bought out. TO you, it’s your life. TO him, you’re one more cog in a wheel that’s coming close to dropping off the axle, taking him, his job, and incidentally you too along with it.

            Is that not so? Isn’t it often just that way? I submit that it is. But why? Well firstly, I agree that no matter how bad your situation is, someone out there always has it worse. Some people, I’ve noticed, take a certain miserable pride in wallowing in their circumstance. This attitude, if they put it into words, would come out  as, “ain’t nobody got it worse than me. I’m at the bottom! So shut up with your problems!” I’ve known people like that. Haven’t you? The ones who are almost perversely proud of being able to boast that their lives suck the most?

            On the other hand—and here we come to the heart of my question—is it fair to tell a person in trouble that they shouldn’t worry because someone else has it worse than they do? “Well, Brad, that’s tough. But it could always be worse.” How helpful is that. Does it solve my problem, whatever that is? No. Does it show me a solution that I can find myself? Not even close. Does it comfort me in my situation, whatever that is? Well, let’s think about it. It’s certainly meant to. It’s meant to give me perspective on my own problem and by that, to settle and comfort me, to get me to accept my circumstances. if it did offer comfort, though, what kind of human being would I be? Think of it this way. If all the comfort I could take in my situation was that some poor wretch out there had it worse than me, what would that say about how I thought of myself or about other people? I ask you to really think about statements like, “Well, it could always be worse,” “there are worse things that could happen,” or, “people in other countries don’t have it as good as we do, so stop complaining.”

            Rather than this way of thinking, I want to suggest something else. It is true, I grant you, that for any given problem, there is someone out there somewhere who has a worse one. On the other hand, there are many out there who don’t have it as bad as you do. These are often the same ones who want to tell you not to worry or that you shouldn’t complain because you’re not as bad off as you could be. These are also the people you want to smack really hard for saying such things too, but that’s beside the point. The main problem, as I see it, is that we compare and relativize each other’s problems. We like to make those comparisons. I don’t have it as bad as X, that wretched man. Or, calm down, Mac, at least you’re not Mr. Y, and you know what hard times he’s fallen upon.

            It’s this whole line of thinking that just needs to be ripped up by the roots. How would it be if we were able to take each friend’s problems and think about them totally from their perspective without even the slightest trace of comparison or belittlement, intended or not? If we could hear X’s problems and then Y’s unquestionably worse problems, without giving one moment’s thought to how good X has it compared to Y … or even compared to you. Well, we’d probably make for better friends or employers and so on. What do you think?

            It occurs to me that this ability to think about each person’s problems without reference to others’ issues or to oneself may be an ability that only God has. God, being beyond space and outside of time, has the capacity for listening to the prayers of countless millions and acting on each of them with the same degree of attention that you or I would give if we were devoting ourselves wholly to one person’s issues or to a single problem. That’s not to say either that we should strive to be godlike or that we should simply give up since we can’t function as God does. Either is dangerous and neither is what I mean. I think that if we tried to stop diminishing others’ problems by comparing them to ourselves or to yet other people’s troubles, we would find a few things happening.

            First, we would find our ability to sympathize to be on the increase. You can include empathy in that too. I don’t draw a fine line between sympathy and empathy. I leave that for my social work and psychology friends. But we would find our sympathies on the increase and untainted by cynicism or skepticism. We would also, I think, find ourselves being more creative and sincere in our efforts to help find solutions. After all, when you truly care about a problem, you work at it until a solution presents itself or until you’ve hunted down a solution and dragged it kicking and screaming into the daylight.

Finally, this non-relative way of thinking about problems would give us a healthy perspective on our own issues. I think we would stop using our issues as a club over the head of someone else. The, “look at me,” attitude some people adopt. I think we would also be a bit more honest about what’s troubling us. In this culture, we put on a front to hide our problems. It’s the, “Nobody’s gonna care about that, come on,” or the, “why should I lay this on him? He doesn’t need this?” Or the, “lots of people have it worse than me, so I’m going to just keep silent,” mentality we were raised with and that pervades our culture. I don’t think that we’d be perfect even if we could think about our own and others’ problems as I suggest. Sadly, I also don’t think what I have wished for here is even possible. I just think it’d be nice. Don’t you?

Well, at least I'll have more time to work on my blog. Now there's something.