Culture: January 2018 Archives
Matt Walsh writes:
"Our godless society has long been engaged in this campaign to alleviate feelings of guilt, not by discouraging the actions that provoke them, but by making the person who feels them into a victim. You'll notice that we have a 'disease' or a 'condition' to explain just about every vice. We make guilt into a medical or psychiatric issue. A man who has intense feelings of guilt and shame may consult a psychiatrist and come away with a prescription for pills that will numb his conscience. We are always trying to make the feelings go away without ever stopping to consider whether we have the feelings because of how we are living.
"In the realm of sex, we turn guilt and shame into a legal matter. If a woman feels bad after sex, she must be a rape victim. It could not be her fault. It can never be her fault. We cannot allow moral guilt. We cannot put responsibility on the woman; we cannot 'blame' her for her own decisions. We cannot leave her with her guilt because then we allow her no relief other than prayer and repentance. But that means we must acknowledge God, which opens up a whole new can of worms.
"So, as cowards, we retreat back under the shelter of deflected blame. We start talking about 'consent' and 'rape culture' and whatever else. Anything but personal responsibility. Anything but shame. Anything but guilt. Anything but sin. And nothing gets better. And we never feel better. But, we tell ourselves, at least it's not our fault."
Ideas: Breaking the Walled Garden of Childhood
David D. Friedman writes:
"One exception used to be the Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization that I have been involved with for a very long time. I was taught to use a sewing machine by a twelve year old girl; a few years later she was the moving spirit behind a puppet theater. But that has gradually changed. More and more over the years, children who come to SCA events are expected, not to help set up the hall or cook the dinner or run the event, but to attend 'children's activities.'
"What set off this post was the discovery that at the Pennsic War, the SCA's largest gathering, a two week long camping event with something over ten thousand people and a Pennsic University with about a thousand classes (some of which I teach), there is now a new rule. Nobody under eighteen can attend a class unless accompanied by parent or legal guardian. When I complained to one of the people responsible, I was assured that they had made special provision to allow children to attend children's classes.
"I have long held that there are two fundamental views of children: That they are pets who can talk, or that they are small people who do not yet know very much. The wrong one is winning."
(In linking to this, I need to say that I disagree with his nonchalant attitude toward early exposure to internet pornography and find his barnyard analogy inadequate. There is a world of difference between two bovines un-self-consciously engaged in the reproductive act and videos of human sexual interaction organized to arouse a jaded consumer. The medium itself is a message that we don't want children -- or anyone -- to take to heart.)
The Fragile Generation - Reason.com
Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt write:
"In earlier generations, this would have seemed a bizarre and wildly overprotective upbringing. Society had certain age-related milestones that most people agreed on. Kids might be trusted to walk to school by first grade. They might get a latchkey at 8, take on a newspaper route around 10, start babysitting at 12. But over the past generation or so, those milestones disappeared--buried by fears of kidnapping, the rise of supervised activities, and the pre-eminence of homework. Parents today know all about the academic milestones their kids are supposed to reach, but not about the moments when kids used to start joining the world.
"It's not necessarily their fault. Calls to eight newspapers in North Carolina found none that would take anyone under the age of 18 to deliver papers. A police chief in New Albany, Ohio, went on record saying kids shouldn't be outside on their own till age 16, 'the threshold where you see children getting a little bit more freedom.' A study in Britain found that while just under half of all 16- to 17-year-olds had jobs as recently as 1992, today that number is 20 percent.
"The responsibility expected of kids not so long ago has become almost inconceivable. Published in 1979, the book Your 6-Year-old: Loving and Defiant includes a simple checklist for what a child entering first grade should be able to do: Can he draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored? Can he ride a small two-wheeled bicycle without helper wheels? Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to a store, school, playground, or friend's home?
"Hang on. Walk to the store at 6--alone?"
Fred Bass, Who Made Strand Bookstore a Mecca, Dies at 89 - The New York Times
'Following his father's playbook, he pursued a policy of aggressive acquisition.
'"At first I used to think he was crazy," Mr. Bass told the cable news channel NY1 in 2015. "Why are we buying extra books? We haven't sold all these. But we just kept buying and buying. It was a fact -- you can't sell a book you don't have."
'The 70,000 books in the Fourth Avenue store swelled, at the Broadway site, to half a million by the mid-1960s and 2.5 million by the 1990s, requiring the purchase of a storage warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. By the time Mr. Bass bought the building for $8.2 million in 1997, the Strand had become the largest used-book store in the world.'"
Why young Christians can't grasp our arguments against gay 'marriage' | Opinion | LifeSite
John Stonestreet writes: 'The only argument for conjugal marriage they've ever encountered has been the wooden proof-texting from the Bible. And besides, wrote Rine, "What the article names as a 'revisionist' idea of marriage--marriage as an emotional, romantic, sexual bond between two people--does not seem 'new' to my students at all, because this is the view of marriage they were raised with, albeit with a scriptural, heterosexual gloss."
'As Rine points out "the redefinition of marriage began decades ago" when "the link between sexuality and procreation was severed in our cultural imagination."
'And if marriage "has only an arbitrary relationship to reproduction," then it seems mean-spirited to Rine's students to argue that marriage by its very nature excludes same-sex couples.
'And where do students get the idea that marriage "has only an arbitrary relationship to reproduction"? Well, everywhere--television, church, school, their homes, in youth groups....
'What can we do to win back our children, our churches, and the culture? In our recent book "Same Sex Marriage," Sean McDowell and I lay out a game plan. We offer strategies for the short-term and the long-term, with the ultimate goal: re-shaping the cultural imagination towards what God intended marriage to be, starting with the church. Come to BreakPoint.org to pick up your copy.'
