Just Passing Through

On the one hand, I'm completely prudish. At the same time, I would be the last person to legislate regarding public dress codes. Yes, I reject any notion of gender equality because God made women with more assets, and made men to notice them. Women are made to compete on those grounds, and men fail to realize they go all out more for that competition than to actually impress men. That and a large number of other complications, but minimum cover standards for public have been long established. I even go so far as to support having places where nudity is acceptable, but clearly marked so the rest of us can avoid it.

The point is I despise the cultural element which makes sites such as People of Walmart such a big draw. Yes, I turn away in disgust when some blubber-babe shows too much. No, it's not exactly the same as when some cutie shows too much, but I still turn away for both. There is something nasty about the crude comments and laughter which accompanies photos of the former. It smacks of self-righteous smugness, which is never anything less than a sin.

By the same token, I would refuse to take that site down. The problem is not the pictures; they are worthy of note for showing something of human behavior. People do crazy things, and we need not hide away from it. The sin is in how we react to it. Not just the over-exposures of flesh, but particularly when we see the other kind of picture, with outrageous costumes which don't have much of a sexual titillation value. Again, the problem is not the photos, but the captions -- those supplied and those we make up ourselves.

The very definition of "bizarre" includes the notion of transgressing generally accepted boundaries. Prophets in the Bible used it to good effect. My argument is with our definitions, but even more with our underlying reaction, as if outlandish costume is somehow "wrong." This plays into the hands of most people who choose to wear such costumes. We have created artificial standards, which completely confuses the message sent by people who transgress them. Is it some punk who simply looks for anything alarming, out of some juvenile desire to offend? Or is it someone with a righteous ax to grind? We can't know because our culture refuses to recognize righteousness in general, and substitutes an empty materialistic version.

Sure, we understand gender confusion as a sin. A man is not a woman, but does it occur to no one sometimes the confusion is in our own souls, in our broken culture, not in the actual fact of so-called cross-dressing? If a scruffy guy wears a frilly skirt and top, perhaps he's pointing out a weakness in our categories. That is not a sin, but we would hardly know the difference between a carefully crafted dramatic challenge to culture and a deluded, sick, broken soul. We simply assume the latter, laugh and ignore the possibilities.

Walmart is not so evil as it serves as a pronounced symptom of evil. I have long noted that store brings out the worst in Americans. That's the bigger point here: We are shallow, crude, selfish and evil as a nation. Walmart reduces the shopping experience to its essence. You want your stuff at the cheapest price. Scrape away any pretense of moral qualities, loudly denouncing God for daring to place a moral tone on His revelation and expectations of us. We'll eagerly replace His revelation with any number of ways for perverting the truth; sin is defined as anything other than what God says. So we give full vent to our fleshly desires by fighting for the parking places closest to the door, pick through the shopping carts for one that rolls sweetly, run over each other in a hurry to get the cheapest crap any store could stock, make the stockers and clerks miserable for failing our unreasonable expectations, carp and grouch about the long checkout lines, and ignore every civility as we rush back out to our cars, and creep through the vehicles crowding every passage while the drivers wait for their passengers to buy three carts of junk.

Walmart is not the problem; it exposes the problem. That website designed to castigate people for daring to be honest about their sins is another symptom. We reject God's ways, create a cheap substitute, and poke fun at those who don't bother with the pretense. Yes, People of Walmart is funny, but the joke's on us. That's the real America.

Love is not a feeling.
Love is a decision.
Passion is a feeling,
wholly untrustworthy.

In many ways, Western Civilization is utterly foolish. In the Ancient Near East (ANE), various parts of human nature were described as seated in parts of the body. Only in the West are we stupid enough to believe those associations were taken literally. The foundation of ANE thinking was symbolic logic, not abstract reason. Virtually nothing in their "myths" was meant as a one-to-one allegory, but fuzzy and shifting with the context. Saying the same word twice might easily be saying two different things to show a mystical symbolic connection. They knew the real truth about things which truly mattered could not be put into mere human words. So called "myths" were designed to break the mind free of restraints arising from a concrete logical view of world -- a fancy way of slamming materialism.

Love in our society is a word abused. We apply that label to a great many things which are not at all love. The notion of "love" as an overpowering feeling is totally bereft of any redeeming value. That feeling is not love, but cathexis. It is mere emotion, and wholly unreliable for informing you of anything useful about another person. In the ANE, emotions were seated in the bowels, the most sensitive and reactive part of the body. The slightest disturbance there can take the whole system down. That's not just the facts, but a warning not to be led astray by something which can lie to you about what is really wrong.

For the ANE, the heart was not feelings, but the seat of the will, where things are decided, particularly in terms of commitment. When you read phrases regarding the heart in the Bible, don't mistake that for our silly romantic notions. In the ANE, love was a decision, a commitment, to seek the welfare of another. Silly emotions would follow along soon enough, just as the digestive tract can at first complain, but eventually adjust to different food and drink.

Cathexis wears off eventually, and reality comes flooding back into our minds. Then we may realize what a horrible mistake we have made. But, of course the emotions are already addicted to this object of passion. "Breaking up is hard to do."

Don't trust the interest of someone who does not know you well enough to look past your inevitable foibles. Genuine love embraces you with your failings, because everybody has some. Genuine love is there for the long haul. Fidelity is rejecting each temptation as it appeara, because hormones can't be trusted.

I recall my adolescence mostly with some sense of horror. That entire period of human existence is an artificial construct of American culture (such as it is). We have created an extended period of childhood over the last century. Before that, all of humanity experienced those years as something approaching apprenticeship. That is, the emphasis was on transiting as quickly as possible to responsible adulthood. Here in the US, we have laid much more emphasis on delaying the onset of maturity.

Sure, we give lip service to the idea of "grow up," but all the mechanisms and institutions surrounding those years are specifically designed to prevent maturity. Instead, they are designed to inculcate a false adulthood of dependence. Surely you've already heard plenty about our Western world struggling to make everyone a dependent of the Nanny State, and that's all true.

But in the process we go to great lengths to idolize that artificial period of development, to the point we should never be surprised when adults try to go back to high school. At the risk of over-analyzing the story, this 33-year-old woman wanted something which never actually existed. She would have been completely happy with the false life of a teenage cheerleader in the one place where being responsible and godly gets you in trouble.

All the neurosis and psychosis of "Second Life" comes to the fore as we see a world rejecting God's commands, God's way for human life. It's not that we cannot have fun, but we cannot afford to let ourselves be pulled away by idolatry and false heavens. All of them together simply lead to Hell. Yes, crazy people will do strange things regardless of the setting. However, in this case the real fault is with the fallen system. This is not how the world was meant to be.

To what degree do we find ourselves stuck with the global frame of reference passed on to us by ancient Greece? When I talk about health, do you more or less conjure up an image of perfection, such as classical Greek statuary? Is there something of an imagined "standard" of human perfection and beauty, something rather objective? Even if we allow for a subjective difference in taste, the very existence of an ideal is something pretty much invented in Greek culture.

Go back to something older, say Ancient Near East, or even Far Eastern, and you will find the mere existence of an ideal body form and health is missing, or at least ignored. In such other worlds, being healthy was more about function rather than ideals. An ideal for any person might be more along the lines of being utterly at peace with the situation in which they lived, even as they looked for ways to do better in some things.

Here's another question: From whence did the Vietnamese get their notions of romance? Why do they seem to idealize the "broken heart" in their popular culture, instead of the love which stays? It does not appear much in any of their traditional literature. Indeed, when the US invaded Vietnam, some of our soldiers were puzzled by the lack there of what we had always thought of as "romance". I wonder what they lose by embracing our junk culture.