"It seemed like a good idea at the time..."

So tonight I watched the 2012 movie "This Means War" with the ever-hot Reese Witherspoon and a few random dudes.


Movies like this that combine action, sex, and supposedly a few laughs are getting tiresome for me in my middle age, as they are so predictable and dull and without any common sense, but once in awhile I watch if it's free at the library.  Maybe I'll be surprised, I think.  But not this one...I ended up rating it a 5 on IMDB, and was thinking of going lower by the end.  Amazingly, Wikipedia says it made $156 million.

Here's the reason for this post:  2 CIA agents are trying to date the same woman and use every available CIA resource at their disposal.  They wiretap her house, follow her everywhere, and not just from one team, but two teams of agents working against each other.  Likely, millions of dollars of federal dollars are used to track this woman so that each agent can get an advantage.  Sound familiar?

It's really not a good movie, but I couldn't help watching this movie through the lens of all that NSA mess not long ago, in which the federal government is basically watching everything we do and say and  post on the internet.  What was meant in this movie to be Good Clean Harmless Fun is in fact that which has exposed much malfeasance on the part of the government.  It's can't be GCHF anymore, because we're all just sick and tired of what they may know about us.  And so in the end, why on earth would Reese Witherspoon decide to stick with random dude #2?  Any woman who learned what she learned about him in the end, why would she stick with such a moral generate?  C'mon, Reese, you're much hotter than that.

A movie like this could never get made in today's climate because of all the spying stuff.  But it should never have been made in the first place because it just really wasn't very good to begin with.

Charity guilt

Yesterday I'm with my family at Wal-Mart and as we are leaving a guy standing outside comes up to my kids and pushes a tootsie roll into their hands.  Not one of the little ones, mind you, but one of the three-inch kinds that takes awhile to eat.  Now, this guy wasn't like the one at Spangles the other day, an old guy with unkempt beard who came up to Jacob as he was eating ice cream, rubbed his head, and acted like something this side of a child predator.  I was about ready to be forcible when he realized we were ignoring him and walked away.  The guy at Wal-Mart was just an average everyday guy who was collecting for some charity. Not sure what it was...probably not Salvation Army, as it isn't that time of year yet.

The implication, however, was the same:  please give.  And by giving my children candy, the plea was all the stronger:  I gave candy to your kids, so you ought to give to me (and my charity).  In fact, not only ought you to give, you should feel guilty for receiving something and then walking away, you jerk.  But we kept walking, and I'm sure he went onto somebody else and eventually collected whatever his quota was for the day.

In this week's Freakonomics podcast (almost always a good listen) they were discussing charity and altruism, the idea that how one asks often determines whether or not one gives.  Basically, the two points I took out of the podcast were these:  1)Good-looking blondes have a lot better chance of getting your money than others do, and 2)People are much more likely to give if they think they derive some sort of tangible benefit from giving; in other words, you don't give necessarily to help others, you give in order to help yourself.  It makes sense, really...most people are selfish and sexually motivated, so this affects their giving as much as anything else.

So the guy giving my kids tootsie rolls was obviously not an attraction to me, so what else did he have?  He had candy for my children.  Not a tangible benefit for me (and in fact, long-term, probably a negative, as candy makes them more wound up and less well-behaved), but something that might be thought of good for my loved ones.  Shouldn't I then give?  Don't I have a real obligation to give?

It's one thing, though, when I have time to think about whether or not this is a good.  It's a wholly different thing when somebody forces a their 'gift' (and hence their demand) onto me or somebody else.  I probably would have told my children that they didn't need anymore candy, and kept on going.  In the end, his actions perhaps made me less likely to give had he simply asked for some money.  I still probably would not have given, but I wouldn't have been as annoyed as in the end I was, annoyed enough to sit and write out this blog post.

I try to be generous in my life, but don't tell me that I have to be generous.  If you do I'll just keep on walking.

Lord of the Sabbath

Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.   (Exodus 20:9-10 ESV)

And he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath."  (Mark 2:27-28 ESV)

And he said to them, "Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?" But they were silent.   (Mark 3:4 ESV)

This morning I preached on the passages from Mark 2-3 in which Jesus and his disciples pick and eat grain on the Sabbath, then Jesus heals a man's hand on the Sabbath.  The ultimate point I was wishing to make was not that we are simply free to do what we want on Sunday (which is often today how many Christians view their Sunday afternoons, with eating out, shopping, or watching football), but that we are called to affirm life on this day, recognizing that Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath.  If he is in charge, we are called to do good not just for ourselves but make it where others can rest, too.  In an era in which so many have to work on Sundays in order to keep the economy going and make it so that we who are privileged are free to relax on this day, I challenged the church to give up activities that make it where others have to work on Sundays. Don't others wish to spend time with their family, rest, or even attend worship on Sunday, but can't because of our activities?  Though I don't believe in passing Sunday laws and know that one can take this practice to Pharisaical levels ("Hey, you're writing this post on a Sunday afternoon...doesn't that mean that the controllers of the internet have to work so you can write?"), I think it's important that we question whether or not is good that we make cooks and servers work so that we can eat, grocery stockers and checkers so that we can shop, and football players and peanut vendors and grounds crew and traffic cops so that we can be entertained.  

The reaction, of course, was rather indifferent.  Hopefully it will change people over time, but likely not.  Maybe I'm wrong in my interpretations on this subject, though I think that our culture (as well as the Christian subculture) has swung from legalism to libertinism.  Yet here's the two general reactions to what was said that bother me.  

-1)"I like what you are saying, but in our capitalistic world, we can't really stop what Sundays have become."  This attitude basically admits that Christians as a whole are impotent to shine a light in our culture.  Sure, we pass laws all the time telling people how to live their lives, but moral influence?  Forget about it.  This says more about the weakness of genuine Christianity today than it does about the world.  Don't we believe in the power of the gospel to change the world?  I guess not.  

-2)"You may be right, but I'm still going to do what I want to do."  Now, nobody will say this directly, but it's what we do.  Maybe I made some people uncomfortable today, but after they've had their dinner at Applebees and then spent the next two hours looking through shops at the mall, they've forgotten about why they weren't very happy with the preacher this morning.  Many Christians today are so comfortable in their own culture that they refuse to be changed.  Yes, the preacher might say things that they know are right, but are they willing to change?  Are we as hard-hearted as Pharaoh?  

Fake Life

My old seminary buddy Bruce Bates linked to a terrific article about a film that takes on the subject of how internet porn has affected an entire generation.  I especially liked the comment from the film's writer, director, and star: "Are you watching these images and concluding how this is how real life should be?"

Porn is certainly a serious problem for many many...but I'm wondering how much 'fake' life affects the rest of reality.  It's not enough that a woman that doesn't have a size 0 body is now considered chunky in our modern society or that sex isn't always like it is in movies (both porn or mainstream).  How much other kinds of fantasy do we live with from the stuff we allow into our homes.  It comes in so many flavors:
-Romance novels that make a woman think that prince charming shouold be coming on his white horse to save her from the losers in her life
-TV dramas that make us think that criminal cases can be wrapped up easily within an hour
-Talk radio that makes people believe that their own extreme positions can and must prevail or nobody will win

Though I've not really had an appetite for porn and avoided it as much as possible (I've always found it somewhat disturbing, though in honesty I do know what my lust triggers are) and I've sought to stay as grounded in real life as much as possible, I've noticed that fake life has impacted me as well.  I am a child of the first wave of the video game culture.  From Space Invaders onward, we've been taught to believe that nothing in life is permanent.  First we would put another quarter in, but later on we learned the beauty of switching the home consoles on and off.  Don't like how the game is going?  The reset button is right there.  No problem, right?

I'm wondering if this kind of denial of the results of our games causes more problems than we think.  Let's start with a simple game of Pac-Man that isn't going well.  You get distracted by the kids, you lose focus for a moment, and soon enough you're dead.  Just hit reset, problem solved.  But life isn't that easy.  Many people daily make horrible choices and think that there are no consequences.  As a parent I am daily trying to make my children understand that what we do matters: if my daughter throws a tantrum, holding her to punishment doesn't seem fair to her.  If my son spends all of his money on something frivolous (and yes, the frivolity of the marketplace is ever-stunning in the crap that it produces) and therefore has no money later to buy something of substance, not then loaning him five dollars may seem cruel.  But consequences exist...have video games tried to convince us otherwise.

A few years ago I became interested in a game called Football Manager and still probably play it too much (finishing 30 seasons...yeah, that's too much).  Basically, you take control of the management of a team and see where it takes you.  I'm really quite good at working the game, getting the right players, and putting them in the right spots.  But this game is so good in part because it leaves a lot of things to chance.  Players get hurt, or we lose a match we should have won, or my team owner is demanding unrealistic results and fires me for not achieving them.  But early on I learned how easy it was to not live with the results...quit early from the game in which your player gets hurt or you lose to Wigan.  Who cares, right?  But think about how video games makes us view sports: our team loses winnable games, and we think the coach is a bum.  A player gets hurt, and we scream and rant because it's not just fair.  Part of the problem of fan behavior in our modern society may come from the fact that we haven't accepted the reality of the results.  Because we have no outlet to give us an upset button if, say, Sporting Kansas City loses tonight, we get upset and bitter.  Our fake life has made it where we don't want to deal with the reality of life.

I don't know that we can ever go back to the way things once were.  Many people even now spend all their time in Second Life or the Sims or playing some other game or watching porn or absorbing a romance novel.  The escapism from reality may seem comforting for a moment, but inevitably it makes returning to the real world all that much more difficult.

Expecting Equality

Once again in the news today we find that the Republicans in Congress are trying to block Obamacare.  It's not enough that they've voted to repeal it over 40 times, continually criticize it, and seek to have the supreme court strike it down as law of the land (all the while blaming Obama because of the problems it will inevitably have)...now they are trying to starve it out of existence.  Foolish, I know...but nobody is accusing modern conservatives of any kind of common sense.

Here's the great question nobody is asking, though...do we believe that all people in our country, no matter how rich or poor, no matter their social status, and no matter their health history, deserve the same quality of health care?  It's a question that nobody is asking, and nobody is getting close to answering.  For if we believe that all people deserve the equal opportunity of treatment when it comes to health care, should we not simply make it a right, and thus make socialized health care a fundamental basis of our social system?

For example...let's say a young person with no money in her checking account comes down with cancer.  Do we offer her the same drugs, the same screenings, and the same treatment as somebody whose insurance can pay for it?  Or do we go ahead and let her die, because economically treatment for her is impossible to be paid for by herself or her family?

Or think about an older man who needs a liver transplant and can afford the finest medical care.  Do we believe that a different man, without money, should have the same right to the same kind of treatment, even though he can't afford to pay for it?  Let's be blunt: does the wealthier (or more resourceful or the better connected) person have a greater right to live than somebody else?

It's interesting that in much of life only the most ardent communists would believe that people should have the same access to a product: almost nobody believes that we are all entitled to drive a lexus, live in a fancy house, or have the opportunity of an Ivy-league education.  Some might feel entitled to such things, but that's usually more a problem of the rich in my experience.

Yet increasingly we believe that there are many other elements of life in which we ought to strive for equality as much as possible.  Only the most hardened people do not believe that inner-city kids do not have a right to a quality education, as hard as it may be to get it.  Only the most embittered would say that low-income defendants do not have the right to at least a competent level of legal defense, though often that is more of a goal than a reality.  In some areas of life, we have determined that people have a particular right to equal opportunity, regardless of their social standing or their wealth.

So why not health care?  What I'd really like to be asked to politicians on both sides of the aisle is this:  do the poor have the same right to health care as the wealthy?  If we can come to an agreement about this as a country, the health care debate might well get a lot more simple.