That's a Laugh

To think, that the corrupt government of a corrupted society could possibly by the determiner of laws! Laws are created to regulate and bring justice. What could a law be based upon, what standard, what truth, where it up to but a corrupt group of old men (and women...) in fun-looking robes who argue all the time? Yeah, we should give to Caesar what is Caesar's, but this authority is all God's my friends. 

Not Fear, But Love

How would I respond to this? I suppose I would respond with my character more than anything. This passed summer I worked with three females who were all lesbian, and one got married while I was still with them. I never hated, I never treated any of them any different. I actually became good buds with them all, proved myself through hard work (I was a Restoration Laborer) and deep, insightful conversations. If we had ever discussed the topic, I do not think they could accuse me of being that kind of hateful, judging person. If at all possible, I would prove with my character that real Christians know how to say "I love you, I just cant "walk" with you" (walk meaning the walk of lifestyle). I would know, then, how to assert this point. What good does it do for either persons' agenda if I hate? Besides the feelings that would get stirred up, which would lead to no good in and of itself, but logically, what good would come of that? There is plenty of evidence after mentioning this - Biblical, Scientific, and all the crossroads of the two - to support where I stand and how I choose to act about it. How exactly I go about introducing these things and just how successful I am will depend on the temperament of whoever I'm talking to.

A Necessary Evil ?

Q:    Sarah and Mark think that the government is not involved enough in the family.  What do you think should be the limits of government involvement in parenting and why?

A:    This is a rather touchy subject. As a Christian looking in on a Secular world, I find that it will be very difficult for a society with no base for their values to answer this sufficiently. If I were to get right to the heart of the matter, I would say that parenting - both in discipline and lunchmaking, as these seem to be the topics at hand - should be completely dependent upon parents. However, the reality of mankind's fallen condition makes this impossible. Because people are inherently untrustworthy, because there is no single foundation upon which to base that which is "proper parenting", and because people come from so many financial and ethnic backgrounds, some regulations by an overarching authority (government) must by necessity be set forth. In a society where the attitudes of the people and the realities of their lives determines the state of mind held in that governing body, those regulations will inevitably be imperfect and oftentimes dissatisfying in one way or another.

        All this being said, it honestly is hard for me to care one way or another what government regulates. In all three of these articles, the issue at hand actually reminds me of the gay marriage legislation going through Washington state right now: throwing the problem of discipline (behavioural or in terms of food intake) at the state and throwing the desire for gay marriage to be legalized at heart contain the same basic motive, the same basic yearning. It is a cry for normalcy. Nothing more, nothing less. The only reason people even need question if the government should or shouldn't regulate something is because they no longer know how to do it themselves. Without the Bible as your basis for both your personal standards and the standards of general consensus, you are left floating out in space. Basic instinct inside you calls for a human society, a loving family, all these good things...however, without the proper base, humankind has no way to properly meet those ends. Gay marriage is in question because marriage is a standard for life that people want. Do they even know why they want it? A structured, able, caring family that knows how to discipline properly (as the writers of Proverbs did) and know how to properly care about their children's physical and mental needs is something strongly desired by all, but with no all-encompassing means to that end. 

        My point is that it may become necessary that the government become more involved. Life now is not like the life Mrs. Obama had - people are more casual, less respectful. There is a greater and easier access to the foods that are detrimental to one's health, and there are fewer mothers able to set time aside to cook a family dinner because so many have to work now. But that is mainly on the part of foods. If a child is being abused, and they tell someone, the parent can be arrested and the child protected. CPS is enough when it comes to regulating the way a parent can discipline their child. With the overarching philosophies of the modern day consisting of a skewed view of tolerance, a complete lack of moral character, and a "you can do anything" message, a reality check can really only come from one's family and/or church family. Or friends, whoever closest to any particular individual actually has a brain between their shoulders. 

        This does not mean I am by any stretch of the imagination a proponent of government involvement in any of this - quite the opposite really. And while I hold absolutely no expectations towards man's behaviour -so often they err on the side of sinful- I have every hope and every faith in the God-shaped hole inside them. This hole cannot help but recognize God's goodness and the beauty of the simple complexities that are His flawless plan for the life of man, especially if thrown in contrast to the reality of how broken a godless world truly is. 

        So I suppose this still leaves me on the fence, save on the singular point of discipline. I do not want the government regulating that ever. That can only lead to more brainless, moral-less proponents of marijuana (and other sinful behaviours/lifestyles, haha). In this case, I see the "necessary evil" of government as more detrimental than "necessary". Perhaps I am just disaffected and ignorant of what life is like when one is actually, actively dancing the government's tango - that is very possible. But that LAST article especially just seemed to be a whole lot of nothing. 

Biff and My America

   "I tell ya, Hap, I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know — what I’m supposed to want...I’ve always made a point of not to wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I’ve
done is to waste my life." (Biff, Act I).
    ...Aye, there's the rub. Biff Loman is caught in quite the predicament for most of the play: he is enamored with the idea of working with his muscles, and is completely caught up in the simplistic beauty of helping colts deliver their foals and watching them together. At one point, Biff even gets Happy caught up in this idea of working together, just two brothers and their physical abilities. This was his dream. However, Willy completely disapproves: "when he was young, i thought it's good for him to take a lot of different jobs. But it's more than ten years now and he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week!" (Act I). Willy's dream is monetary and success-driven, associating the worthiness of a being with their job status. Sadly, with Willy's combined disapproval and threats of suicide, Biff feels like his Texas dream is not only taboo, but a serious waste of life-energy. He tries, for his father's sake, to start living the corporate dream and being "successful" by going to Oliver's office and trying to get a job. When that falls through, Biff's momentary delusion evaporates and he sees more clearly than ever the fallacy of chasing after Willy's american dream.

"He walked away. I saw him for one minute. I got so mad I could've torn the walls down! How the hell did I ever get the idea I was a salesman there? I even believed myself that I'd been a salesman for him! And then he gave one look and--I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been! We've been talking in a dream for fifteen years. I was a shipping clerk." (Act I)

Biff confronted his father with combined shame and resolution, and at wit's end tells his father "Pop, I'm nothing! I'm nothing, Pop. Can't you understand that? There's no spite in it anymore. I'm just what I am, that's all...Will you let me go, for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?" (Act II). Biff, although still broken over the fact that he feels like a failure in the world that is his father's house and his father's dream, comes to terms with the fact that Willy's dream is not only fruitless, but actually damaging to one's life. In the very end, Biff acknowledges completely that Willy had "all the wrong dreams" (Requiem), and completely embraces his own.


     Biff's journey to his dream contains a pretty simple message - the corporate american dream achieved through Willy's methods is flawed, broken, and fruitless. The real american dream, the only reliable dream even in this growing corporate world, and the original american dream, is found through hard, honest labor and being true to your natural abilities. Trying to reach for a wealth and status you cannot attain, or degrading yourself into believing you have attained it, is complete folly. It is better to do what you love and can do well, and break your back doing it, then working a dead-end job just to pay the bills. 


   My dream is the same - mostly - and actually rather similar to Biff's. In the end, Biff made a decision based on who he finally realized he was. My junior year essay was about establishing who I am in Christ, as opposed to figuring out what I'm going to fill my future doing. With college looming, however, what I'm going to be doing is becoming a much more pressing question. Not a question I'd like to tackle so preemptively, the whole college and scholarship process honestly disgusts me. I hope that, like Biff, I can find something I love to do that fits into who I am. What concerns me the most is how well, or...extremely un-well...my dream will fit into the current secular regime. I really should have been born in like the 1500s or something, where a simple trade was passed down from mentor to apprentice. I feel that'd give me more time to develop my person, while still doing something productive that brings me into contact with other people. I really don't have a forte - I'm just relatively good at a lot of things. So finding a forte, even if I got an apprenticeship somewhere, that I'd like to pursue is near-impossible. I suppose I'll just have to trust that the Lord will take me where I need to be, because I KNOW I need to do something - I want to be active with my life, as opposed to wasteful... but I honestly do not know what that means for me. We'll see, I suppose. 
     

My Picture Walk

               Well, there’s been a lot on my mind lately, but first…let me be honest: I don’t – can’t, really – go on walks to think. I think too much. I tend to over-think and over-dwell, so walks for me have always been a release from thinking, where my mind can be quiet and alone…just me and God’s creation. So when I took my walk the morning after Christmas, it wasn’t much different. I did a lot of thinking over the past few days’ events when I got up early, worked out and showered, but my walk was - as the prompt says - for me. I used it to let go. Well anyway, I’ll give a brief overview of what I thought of before hand. But first, a little history on the situation.

               When I was in middle school and the early years of high school, I had a number of self-worth problems. To remain as brief as possible and yet remain candid, I’ll say this much – I tried to kill myself a few times. One day on the way home from church a few years ago we learned my great-uncle’s ex-wife killed herself just a day previous on my brother’s birthday. As my family discussed it, one thing my father said stood out to me: he said it was a horribly selfish thing to do, with no consideration of the people who cared for you. Initially I chuckled bitterly to myself, tying that woman’s choice to myself – yeah, what care? Surface-level care doesn’t merit a thing. That’s how I felt at the time – my family “cared” for me, but told me outright they didn’t understand me. To this day I believe those wounds hold more than simple “teenage angst”…quite literally, my family didn’t get me. Well, after my father said what he did, I got thinking about selfishness. See, even though I hurt, I was not inconsiderate towards who my family was to me – I was very conscious of the work they did to keep me afloat with a good home and education. One thought struck me hard (and this was how my mind worded it at the time, my feelings of worth were so low) – my parents wasted so much of their lives on me…I’m not worth enough to take that life-energy and time they spent to let it mean nothing. It was that day I swore I’d be the kid they didn’t have to worry about – I would not ever do drugs, I would not get drunk, I would not let the world pull me away from my God, no matter what. I swore I’d do the Sitterley name proud.

               That last bit there, “doing the Sitterley name proud”, is where much of the last few days’ events (and my pre-walk reflection) begin. See, that has always been a very big deal to my father – knowing that we, as his children, were representing the family well. Since then I have assumed that responsibility and felt its weight immensely. That was why when my brother decided to make a scene in Starbucks the other day, my face and my heart just burned. It seems stupid…we were on our way to help with the Firefighter outreach and my brother wouldn’t stop shoving me while we were in line, but when my dad made him stop he flipped. My dad was wearing his Commissioners’ sweatshirt and it had his name emblazoned on his chest. I could feel the eyes on us; I could almost taste his shame. When the situation was brought up again during an argument between my father and brother at home on Christmas eve, I was bitter. Ever since my ..ex-great-aunt? killed herself, I had put so much effort into representing our family well, and now I was looped into this very public mess. Well the argument went on – my brother being a ridiculous hot-head and my dad with a raised voice – and eventually (because the origins of the argument were not found in this Starbucks event…the principle just carried over) it turned into that classic “lesson for everyone” situation. Roque, work on how you react. Madi, work on not harassing your brother. Victoria, you need to watch your tone. I don’t know what it is about you and your mother, but sometimes your tone comes across as harsh even when you don’t mean it. Okay, don’t judge – but my reaction went something like this: first I was super hurt…I know my voice has that problem, but I literally do not know how to fix it. I was also bitter – because the joy and warmth and kindness that works into my tone comes from REAL sources of joy, like when I said “hi Kaitlyn!!!” in the hallway. The moments where people like my dad aren’t making me self-conscious about how I talk ..that’s when my voice auto-corrects. Then I got angry – I feel, felt, like I was actually doing a decent job representing our family, and my father seriously needed to give me some credit and back off on talking about my voice that I can’t bloody well fix. That was a strange reaction…often when I felt insulted by the people closest to me, I just felt hurt..i wouldn’t get angry, I didn’t put enough value in myself to get angry. So I guess there’s two things to get out of this story that tie into the next – 1: my feelings of value have increased. 2: I REALLY care about representing my family well.

               That brings us to the carry-over of the events on Christmas. My grandma and I got into a discussion about my future and college and all that jazz…and let’s just say….we don’t see eye-to-eye. My father and my grandma didn’t, and she and I don’t either. My father grew up being told to go be a doctor, and now I’m getting that treatment too. She’s very education focused. She claims to keep her eyes towards God, and do not get me wrong, she is a very VERY respectable mother and woman, but I have my doubts. Her eyes always seem to be on what “you” can do and what “you” can accomplish and all these things of workings in the world that I really don’t have any taste for. She even (again, please don’t judge) said I would be a pioneer for my mother’s side of the family because of their college-education situations. Now that ticked me off. NOTHING about how “amazing my brain works” makes me ANY better than the amazing men and women on my mother’s side of the family. My mother didn’t go to college, and quite frankly I feel we as children benefited from her stay-at-home situation. My grandmother was appalled when I said, with my brain, that I would be okay with a stay at home situation too. Now, I know she was in no way trying to disrespect the rest of my family..her values are just different than mine. Hers are rather worldy, and mine are entirely spiritual. I was kinda depressed afterwards, thinking about how I was going to deal with basically becoming a disappointment to my grandmother. I am not going into the medical field, that isn’t my place. Then I got thinking: my father tried, having gone to UW initially to become a doctor, but he eventually had to drop it and now has an entirely different job. I searched through my memory banks to recall any moment where he spoke of how he dealt with also being a sort-of “disappointment”, but I couldn’t find a thing. The most I could come up with was him just acknowledging the let-down, and letting it go in his contentment and amazement in his relationship with Christ. While I was content with that answer, I couldn’t really figure out how he would deal with it when he faced it directly in his heart. Did he just put it away? What would I do? Then I took a step back.

               I thought to myself, “you know what? All things considered, which of her children do you think your grandmother is most proud of?” My father’s side of the family is…troubled. My aunt and uncle have made some horrible life choices, and it’s screwed them up. My father alone stands above the crowd. That was enough for me. Even if I wasn’t a doctor, I could still stand above the crowd for my grandma. My father is an amazing man of God with a heart of gold, and that flows over into blessing the other aspects of his life as well. His focus on the spiritual has naturally been mine, and therefore I was content. I would still be worth something.

               That evening, my grandmother did say a few things right. I shouldn’t limit myself to just one thing – there are, and can be, multiple sides of me and my education. And I’ll be honest, my mind can absorb and understand things from many different sides of life, be it scientific or artistic, and that isn’t hugely common. I don’t put much stock in that. I seriously do not think my brain is so great. My grandma seems to think so, and much of what you’re about to read is really just an argument against my grandmother’s point of view using her premise that “if I have a brain, then I better use it”. Based on that, I then REALLY got to thinking – okay, I’ve never really WANTED to just study and do one thing for the rest of my life. I’ve never had a serious forte, whether of skill or level of enjoyment. The only thing I find real worth and LIFE in is spiritual. Perhaps…just perhaps, I have a bigger responsibility in store for me. You know that Biblical idea where people need to use their talents to the best of their abilities to glorify the Lord? How we are actually RESPONSIBLE for those talents? And how teachers have an even greater responsibility. Well, I turned to the projection of my gramma in my head, and I told her “You know what? I would argue that even more difficult than handling medicine is handling the human heart. It’s all trial and error, whether you’re diagnosing and treating a body, or trying to heal and SAVE a human soul. That’s a lot of compassion. But if I’m to tell the man about to commit suicide that God is the answer, I BETTER be able to back myself up. And what better evidence against atheism and for God than the world itself? Understanding the world we live in, and understanding it well…knowing chemistry AND geology AND biology AND all that other fun stuff well enough to defend your faith….now THAT is a challenge. I could go to school for 12 years and be really good at being a doctor and understanding one aspect of it – or I could dedicate my life to continually learning of how God can be seen in the world, while yet retaining my intense compassion for the human soul.

PLEASE do not think I’m trumpeting my own horn – I reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally do not think I am this good. A lot of this was more response to my grandmother than a response to reality, but I feel like it says a lot about where I stand now as "me". I’ve grown a lot since I was baptized, and I think that this realization might be a challenge for me. Maybe I have the capacity to study and learn hard facts while yet embracing the abstractions of compassion and love for the soul. I don’t know. But if I do, I want to use it. Sorry grandma, I really really really really don’t care what job I have as an adult. Whatever it is, I’ll do it to the best of my ability. I just pray that I can keep loving and uplifting the people around me, wholly and completely, with enough of me left over to stand up for God and do it well. And you know what? God has blessed the Sitterley name through my father, who has a similar disposition. I’m completely confident God will watch over me as well, no matter where I am. And He will watch over you too, always and forever.
Anyway, yeah. That's basically all that ran through my mind before my walk, and I really used my walk to just flush all that out of my system, quiet my spirit, and let God's creation do the talking for awhile. Well, here are the pix! Enjoy!

               

Chaos and Order

Three...that's a good, solid number. More than a little, less than alot...makes the work seem doable, kinda like when things are priced at X-dollars and "99 cents" so that it "feels" like less than the full, rounded-up amount. Makes the consumer feel better about buying it, and more likely to do so, even if the difference is as minimal as seeing "49.99" instead of "50". 


Speaking of buying [into] things without considering the reality of it, and the sweet balance of "threes", let's talk Naturalism.


Q:     Explain three problems about the naturalistic explanation for life.


A:     Well, the major problem with the naturalistic explanation of life is that it does not actually conform to the observations and implications of science, but that is quite the blanket statement. Pure observation has thrown many a doubt in the naturalists's path to a truly naturalist origin of life. Three such areas where science itself has chipped away at the theory of naturalism lie in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. 
        In the Physics department, we are faced with the problem of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that everything is in a state of Degeneration, or, more simply, things tend to move from Order to Chaos. We can see this principle play out in day-to-day life: any created thing, be it a book or a human being, left to nature's devices eventually ages and breaks down in a process that begins the moment the thing begins completion. To say, then, that somehow, in this big primordial soup, chemicals moved in the opposite direction - from chaos to order - over and over and over again, ordering themselves and combining just perfectly so as to create life works completely against this Law. Physics as a study demands constants, but naturalism is basically trying to pull a stunt where this Law somehow didn't exist until human beings were formed. That is a pretty ridiculous thing to claim, rationally or otherwise, considering there has never been any evidence that life ever can, ever has, or ever will work that way. 
         Nextly, in the department of Chemistry, naturalism claims that truth lies in abio genesis. However, considering the complexity of the cell, it's interworking parts, and the nature of DNA, they're going to have a tough time playing with the percentages. By percentages, I mean the likelihood of even a single strand of protein creating itself from a vat of acids. DNA, the methods by which it is undone, and transcripted, and translated into proteins, which are then properly shaped to perform a specific job perfectly with other proteins...the chance ANY ONE part of that amazing machine came about without some form of intelligence to design it is so tiny that it is almost as intellectually hard to comprehend as the depth of Outer Space. To rule out Intelligence just to conform to abio genesis and avoid any potential religious connotations is cowardice and bad science.
          Thirdly - Biology, and the issue of mutations. Even if you somehow managed, by some miracle (<---oh look, a "religious" word in a scientific argument, we're all gonna DIE.) to actually create a single cell, any mutations then that the cell would be subject to would more than likely kill it. See, even today we really have next to zero examples of mutations of the genome being beneficial, and even then, even fewer where the mutation is passed on. Four winged fruit flies die out, resistant bacteria die in the presence of the parent bug, nature abhors the freak. And even if a mutation created something next to beneficial, potential means nothing. Nature, without a mind, cannot look at "potentially beneficial". Either it works or it doesnt, and if it doesnt have all it's parts it dies. Yeah, maybe that second pare of wings would be great if there were muscles attached, but Nature cannot say "oh hey, we should put muscles here". The wings just dont work, the flies die, and the two winged fruit flies live on. There is no evidence mutation enough occurs to create new species today. The only evidence science has for anything remotely evolutionary from any cell ever is for micro-evolution, a form found in the accenting of certain traits in a single species to survive in their surroundings. Never have any of these animals left their species though to become something they're not. There is no evidence in the fossil record, there is no observable evidence, and there is simply no chance that "simple mutation" could bring us to ...ultimately, "us". There just isn't. 
          ...I suppose just as Christians had to learn to stand down to the pursuit of new Scientific theories for the sake of good science, Evolutionists will have to do the same. Look guys, I'm sorry if REAL science leaves you sore because maybe, just maybe, Humans arent all you think they are. But to be a scientist, you need to be able to put your biases and heartaches aside and look at the facts. These are the facts. This is the work of Intelligent Design. This is the power of God.  

Enough About Morals..

Q:      How would I respond to the suggestion that there are no absolute moral values that apply to everyone ?


A:      First, probably by suggesting that they couldn't suggest that, lest they stand in self-contradiction. Then I'd probably ask them "But in any case, if you could somehow be taken logically, then I ask why not?" Then they'd prolly give me all this BS about how different cultures view morals...then i'd prolly jack his glasses or something. He'd get on my case and I'd point out that there are absolutes that carry over - nobody likes things taken from them..etc etc. If this were a scenario where I was talking to a person, I'd probably have to settle with opening this door for them into actually thinking about that little statement they'd made. However, were I to come across this suggestion in written form, where my response would have to be in writing, I'd probably allow myself to go further into the logical journey where moral absolutes do end up popping up, tracing to a source outside ourselves, and eventually to God.