The Pants That Won the West

It wasn't until high school that I learned that communism is a system of economics, not a system of government. I tried to write the story from the perspective of a 10 or 11 year old boy in the 50s, the way I would have written it at the time if I had written it at the time.

I agree that elementary school is no place for democracy, which is why the principal should have issued the order instead of trying to make it look like it came from the kids. Those people were being paid by the taxpayers to mold us into good citizens, and this was certainly not the way to do that, not that anybody cared except me. The kids quickly forgot about it, and I suspected that our parents were in on it from the start. Looking back on it now, I'm not so sure about that. When my mother first read my story, she claimed that the only reason she bought those perma-press pants for me was that somebody told her that's what all the kids were currently wearing. She wondered why I had gotten so mad at her, and now, decades later, she finally knew.

Long hair and blue jeans are about the only things of value we salvaged from the 60s. The sexual revolution went off the rails when they brought the gays on board, and the lessons of Vietnam seem to have been  forgotten. I don't know if abolishing the draft was such a good thing after all. Military service was kind of a rite of passage in those days. Whether you went or didn't go, you were never quite the same afterwards. I don't think  kids today have to face anything like that, and look how they're turning out.

I'm surprised that the blue jean thing didn't make a splash in your school. Maybe it did and you weren't paying attention because something else was going on in your life. Back in the 70s, I read an article about it in Reader's Digest. They didn't mention the student council aspect of it, so maybe that was only in our school. They did say, however, that there was a big push all over the country to eliminate blue jeans from the American scene. The reason it ultimately failed was that we all grew up and took over the country. Looking back on it now, I can see where it was part of the Master Plan all along. Blue jeans were the pants that won the west, and are as much a part of our heritage as the six shooter and the saddle carbine. I can see them now, in their smoke filled rooms plotting against us: "First we go after the blue jeans, then the guns, then the cars. After that, there will be nothing left of the American heritage worth fighting for and they (meaning us) will just lay down and passively allow us to clamp on the shackles." Good thing we stopped them when we did!

Speaking of heritage, I'm sure I mentioned before that the Bible is an important part of our literary and cultural heritage. Whether or not we believe in it religiously, I don't see how we can ignore it when we talk about morality. That would be like talking about politics without mentioning the Constitution. I know you don't believe in that either, but it's there, like the elephant in the closet.

blue jeans and democracy

First I have to quibble.  It's not democracy vs communism.  You can have a democracy and still have communism.  Those socialist European countries, that to you tea partiers might as well be communist, all have functioning democracies.  It's communism vs capitalism, and totalitarianism vs democracy.  I do realize that at that time communism was what we called anything that was threatening, the way nowadays we call anybody we don't like a coward, though in fact they may have been very brave.

Just for the sake of argument,  I think you would have to agree that a grammar school is no place for a democracy.  Soon the only reason to go to school would be for the recess which would go on all day. 

I don't know that blue jeans were such a burning issue.  On the other side of 55th Street at dear old Tonti hard by 59th street I can't say it had any import, certainly less than yoyo season.  I don't think we ever had any elections about anything, hence we never became disillusioned with democracy the way you commie ridden Sawyerites did.  Well except for Beagles, who still believed in democracy.  It was just people he became disillusioned with.  I guess not that much has changed, he still believes in these rigid ideals and looks with dismay on the rabble beyond the gates of Beaglesonia.

Long hair was a big deal, back in my hippie days.  People would make fun of you, harass you sometimes.  On certain occasions we were forcibly shorn.  A lot of times people wouldn't hire us because of our long hair.  It wasn't right.  We were discriminated against.  I think maybe we won that battle, we can now walk the streets without hearing, "Hey you, get a haircut.  Get a job.  Join the army," but that hasn't turned the world into the hippie paradise we envisioned.  As a matter of fact it used to be the crewcut construction guys who harassed us student types, and now the student types are generally clean cut while the construction guys look like the Grateful Dead.

Back before the Soviet Union fell apart much was made about how those die-hard commies would kill for a pair of blue jeans.  This made us Americans proud.  If foreigners liked our blue jeans, didn't that mean they liked us, and henceforth our way of life, our democracy, our liberty? 

No it didn't.  They liked us because we were rich, and they wanted to come here and get rich too.  All those huddled masses yearning to be free, were really yearning to be rich, or any rate to be less poor.

Oh I think I was going to say something about bible study.  In fact I saw a reference to it in one your earlier posts but it seems to have been edited out by the time the weekend is over.  I guess I just wanted to say that I didn't see what relevance the bible had to morality to two non-believers like ourselves, and these excursions into the goings on of Ezekial and Jehosphat just seem pointless, and way too long.

What's Wrong With This Story?

You still don't get it, do you. They just got done teaching us about democracy and why it's better than other forms of government, then they turned around and trashed the democratic process right before our eyes. It seemed like they were saying, "Okay, we taught you about democracy because we were required to do so, but we really don't believe in it ourselves. What we really believe in is deception, manipulation, intimidation, and raw power." These were the very qualities that they had criticized about the Soviet Union. Coincidence? I think not! It looked to me like they were a bunch of Communists, sent to Sawyer Elementary to subvert the democratic ideals of America's youth. I am still not totally convinced that wasn't the case, but I'm now willing to admit there might have been other possibilities.

As "The Lost City" pointed out, those people were nervous about losing control of their schools. We certainly had them outnumbered, but whose fault was that? We didn't tell them to make all those babies at the end of World War II. It's good that they made you and me, but we could have done without many of the others. Anybody who has studied the subject knows that, if you want to maintain control of oppressed people, you can't cut them a bit of slack. "Give them an inch and they'll take a mile.", as the saying goes. Another thing you've got to watch out for is the development of any kind of solidarity. Blue jeans was becoming a kind of a national uniform among the youth, which might have raised a few red flags among the Establishment. Funny, though, the kids at St. Galls a few blocks away had been wearing uniforms since forever, and nobody was worried about that. Maybe that was because their uniforms had been imposed upon them from above while ours were the spontaneous upwelling of our developing mass consciousness.

That still doesn't explain why they felt the need to trash American democracy in the process. They could have just as easily issued a decree from the principal. We had no reason to expect democracy in our schools because we had never had it before. First they had to teach us about democracy so that we would know what they were depriving us of. I guess it's no fun fucking with somebody unless they know they're being fucked with.

What you said about Western civilization got me to thinking that blue jeans are as much a part of Western civilization as anything. Long before they became a fashion statement of American youth, they were worn by cowboys, farmers, miners, and lumberjacks, all honest hard working people who helped make America great. Jeans were invented in 1873 by Levi Strauss, a poor San Francisco sail maker, who made the first prototype out of sail cloth remnants because he couldn't afford to buy a decent pair of pants for himself. It's a rags to riches story if I ever heard one, the Great American Dream come true. Anybody who goes against blue jeans goes against America and, in those days, the only people who went against America were the Communists.

I suppose that a lot of my classmates became cynical about American democracy from this experience, but I didn't. If that was the intent, well it didn't work on me. All I became cynical about was school.

8/30/15: I looked up Levi Strauss on Wiki, and it turns out that he didn't start off all that poor. He wasn't a sail maker either, he ran a dry goods store and made some tents on the side. The scraps he used to make his first pair of jeans were probably from one of his tent projects. Also he didn't make them himself, he had some help from a guy named Davis. I got my original story from an episode of the old TV show "Death Valley Days", and it was advertised as true. Man, you can't believe nothing nowadays! Nevertheless, I still believe that anybody who doesn't like blue jeans is not a true American.

bamboozling the rabble to preserve Western Civilization

I remember reading that.  It's a good story, well-written.  I don't think our current discourse comes up to that level.  I'm sure it took more than one day to write. 

It seems like maybe if our posts came less frequently we could write better ones.  Sometimes I feel I get off a pretty good one, but sometimes the muse is not whispering in my ear and I dash it off with one eye on the clock because I want to get to my painting or whatever.  On the other hand I always look forward to seeing your new post first thing every morning.  It's like breakfast.  I digest it and begin to formulate my reply, and then my fingers get to typing.  If I only got a post every other day, or every third day, I don't think I would like it that well.

I don't remember anything like that in Tonti.  If we had a student council, I never heard of it.  I wasn't paying much attention to clothes then, but I don't remember anybody wearing blue jeans.  It seems like I had good clothes and play clothes.  I hated it when I got a little older and my mother was still calling them that.  Maybe those were the wash pants you were talking about.  Probably when they were new that's what I wore to school, and probably when they got beat up they became play clothes. 

Good clothes would be what I wore when I was forced to attend Elsdon Methodist Church.  I hated them.  I hated the feel of them, and I hated the way I knew I had to stay straight on the sidewalk and not veer off into anything interesting. 

I probably didn't get to wearing nothing but blue jeans until I got to college.  I only started wearing dress pants (and these were generally pants I bought at the thrift store) when I started working those office jobs around 1985.  Still hated them, would tear them off as soon as I got home.  They stank of work.

I wonder whose hare-brained scheme that blue jeans vote was.  Maybe the principal, or at least somebody in his office.  Wouldn't it be nice if we got the kids to vote against blue jeans, then we could get rid of blue jeans and at the same time not get the blame for it, and what a nice little story if the kids voted it themselves.  Dollars to doughnuts that mild mannered teacher was not in the teachers' lounge that afternoon and that's how she got stuck with that unpleasant chore.

I was just speaking of juvenile delinquents in the last post.  JDs they were sometimes called.  We shortened hoodlums to hoods.  Later they would be called greasers.  It wasn't so much that the boy hoods wore jeans as it was that the girl hoods did too.  Jeans on a girl was pretty racy.  And there was that whole thing about the fly.  Girls' pants always had the fly on the side, and I think it was kind of shocking when they started wearing jeans with the fly in the front.

Pretty sharp move on your teachers' part to declare that your vote didn't count due to the previously unknown rule that being out of order earlier negates one's voting rights.  I am sure she never had any intention of staying late after those fifteen minutes when school let out.

See, being a substitute teacher has changed my outlook.  Formerly I would be all for Beagles standing up for his rights against authority, but once I was a sub I became authority.  I was the embodiment of Western Civilization, and they were the rabble that rose every year.  You finish up with one sixth grade and the next year last year's fifth graders are ready to take their place, and behind them fourth graders, the third graders, and it just goes all the way back to the maternity wards of the nation where the docs are smacking the backsides of savages looking forward to a hunter gatherer life of rapine and violence, who will need to learn the new enlightened strictures of Western Civ. 

And there are maybe thirty of them, and there is one of you.  You are stronger, but you can't hit them.  But you are smarter too, and bamboozling is fine because isn't that one of the principles of Western Civ?  And threats like keeping them, and yourself, past the bell, which you have no intention of carrying out, are just another form of bamboozlement, and making up that rule on the spot, bravo.

Well shit, more to say on this subject, but the hour is getting late. 

As far as that bible study stuff, oh hell, that will have to wait over the weekend too

Blue Jeans and Bibles

 

THE GREAT BLUE JEAN CONSPIRACY
by Talks With Beagles

 

When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I somehow got myself elected to the student council. I wouldn’t have even ran for it if I hadn’t been talked into it by my teacher. She promised me that I would get to see democracy in action. We had just finished learning all about American democracy and why it was better than the Communist dictatorships in the Soviet Union. The teacher said that I had shown more interest in this subject than anyone else in the class, so I was a natural for the student council. Also, I kind of felt sorry for her because she couldn't get anyone else to run.

At my very first meeting, the teacher [not the same one who talked me into it] announced that the first order of business was that we had to pass a resolution that said kids couldn’t wear blue jeans to school any more. This kind of stunned everybody for a minute and I was the first one to break the silence with: "You can’t do that, that’s Communism!" Now, you may wonder what blue jeans have to do with the theories of Karl Marx. Actually, not much at this point. You see, in those days, Communism was thought of as the ultimate evil in the world so, after awhile, it had became a generic term for anything that was really bad. I suppose people today would say," That sucks!", and it would mean about the same thing. At any rate, the teacher told me I was out of order and to shut up and sit down. As soon as I sat down, somebody else took the floor and tried to explain to the teacher in a more rational manner why we just couldn’t do this. You see, in Chicago in the 1950s, all the kids wore blue jeans and all the adults didn’t. When I say "all the kids", what I really mean is "all the boys". Girls probably wore dresses or something, but nobody paid any attention to girls in those days.

There were only two other kinds of pants in the world in those days, good pants and wash pants. Good pants were expensive to buy and had to be dry cleaned when they got dirty, which also cost money. When you wore good pants, you had to be good so as not to wreck your pants, which is why they were called “good pants“. Kids only wore their good pants to church or other places where they had to be good anyway, so it didn’t really matter. Wash pants were worn by adults who worked in jobs that would wreck their good pants if they wore them there. The trouble with wash pants was that they had to be starched and ironed after they were washed. Also, they were so thin and flimsy that you could wear the knees out of them in about one day. No self-respecting kid would wear wash pants, so the only thing left was blue jeans. This must sound pretty elementary to you, but the teacher just didn’t get it. Teachers in those days were even dumber than the kids they taught, but that’s a whole nother story. All she kept saying was that there had been enough discussion and it was time for somebody to make a motion, which nobody wanted to do. Right in the middle of this, some stupid girl got up and announced that a new type of wash pants had recently been invented. These new wash pants did not need to be starched and ironed, and they were even cheaper to buy than blue jeans. This is a perfect example of why nobody paid any attention to girls in those days.

By this time the teacher was beginning to realize that this wasn’t going to be an easy sell, so she decided to tell her side of the story. It seems that, sometime after World War II, a whole new category of kids had been invented. These kids were called "juvenile delinquents" or "hoodlums". The hoodlums wore blue jeans too, of course, because they were still kids. I don’t know why they even invented these hoodlums in the first place, because all they did was give the rest of us a bad name. Some adults were beginning to think that all kids were hoodlums which, of course, was not true. Apparently, some of these misguided adults held a meeting and came up with the brilliant idea that, if they could make the hoodlums stop wearing blue jeans, then they wouldn’t be hoodlums any more. One of the kids at our meeting came up with a pretty good solution to this whole problem, but the teacher wasn’t interested. Why not make only the hoodlums stop wearing blue jeans and not us? Then it would be easier to tell the hoodlums from the rest of us and they would stop giving us a bad name. Like I said, the teacher wasn’t interested, because she already knew what she wanted us to do. Another kid had a pretty good idea too, although, it would still be Communism. Why not have the principal make this rule instead of the student council? It’s his job to make rules anyway and, if we do it, we won’t have a friend left in this school. The principal had nothing to lose in that respect. The teacher told us that option had been considered, but it was decided that it would "look better" if this idea came from the student council.

At this point, I had to go out of order again, because this light bulb lit up in my head, and I had to tell everyone about it. "You know what?" says I, " This really *is* Communism! This student council is what they call a ‘puppet government’, just like what they have in the satellite nations of the Soviet Union!" The students were delighted with my statement, because they thought I made it up just to be a smart aleck and aggravate the teacher, which is what she deserved. Of course, I hadn’t made any thing up at all. We had studied all about this stuff not long ago, but I guess I had been the only one paying attention that day.

Things got really crazy after that. I guess the teacher was frustrated because we weren’t as easy to fool as she thought. We had all known her for years, and she had a reputation for being kind of mild mannered, for a teacher, but now she got real mean. She told us that there would be no more discussion and that it was time for somebody to make the motion, which nobody still wanted to do. She said that school was letting out in about fifteen minutes, which was true, but that nobody would be allowed to leave until this resolution was passed, and that we would stay here all night if we had to.

There was a lot of mumbling and grumbling from the kids, but I don’t know if everybody was thinking what I was thinking or not. What I was thinking was that I was walking out that door when the bell rang even if I had to fight my way out, but I never got to do that. Some brown nose (which was what we called a big suck in those days) made the motion, and another one seconded the motion, which was a real disappointment to me. Then the teacher said, "All those in favor , say ‘aye‘.’’. A few people said "aye", but not very enthusiastically. Then the teacher announced that the motion was passed and entertained a motion for adjournment. It was the teacher herself who was out of order now, because she never called for the "no" votes, and I told her so. "Very well", says she, "I’ll call for the "no" votes; but there better not be any, because I want this motion to pass unanimously. " Well, too bad for her.

This was my finest hour. When the teacher called for the "no" votes, I stood up like a tall oak tree and proclaimed with a voice like thunder;" NO! LET THE RECORD SHOW THAT TALKS WITH BEAGLES VOTES ‘NO’ ON THIS MOTION!" The secretary was starting to write this down when the teacher said; "Don’t write that down. Talks With Beagles has been out of order all day, so his vote doesn’t count. Let the record show that the motion passed unanimously." So, If you go down to the Sidney Sawyer Elementary School today and look up the minutes to that student council meeting it will say that the motion passed unanimously, which is not true. That’s why I’m writing this story now. I think that, after all these years, somebody should set the record straight.

You may wonder why I call this a conspiracy, well here’s why: All over the city of Chicago, during that very same week, student councils were passing that very same motion. By the weekend, signs had been put up on business establishments all over the city saying, "No one admitted wearing blue jeans." It got so that a kid couldn’t go anywhere in that town wearing blue jeans. Our parents must have been in on it too because, when I got home from school that day, I found several pairs of those new wash pants laid out on my bed. Coincidence? I think not!

I wish I could tell you that we organized a strike or a boycott to fight this thing, but we didn’t. We were only kids after all, and the 1960s were still a few years away. Sure, we talked about it a lot but, in the end, we folded up like a pair of cheap wash pants.

Years later, when I came home from the Army, I found that everybody was back to wearing blue jeans again, even the girls, who people were starting to pay attention to by then. Even some of the adults were wearing them. This was probably because all the people who used to be kids had turned into adults and taken over the country. So, I guess you could say, we won in the end.

Be that as it may, the most important part of this story is not the part about the blue jeans. The most important part of this story is the part about that student council meeting. You see, I originally joined the student council to see democracy in action and, instead, I saw Communism in action. Now, there is nothing wrong with teaching kids about Communism, but you should call it “Communism“, and not try to pass it off as democracy, like those people did. It is for this reason that I have never voted to approve a millage proposal or anything else for the schools, and I never will. If I didn’t learn another thing from this experience, I learned how to vote "no", and I have been voting "no" ever since. TWB

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It was easier to reprint the whole story than it would have been to tell it all over again. All the grades weren't represented in the student council, just the upper ones, either fifth or sixth through eighth. There wasn't actually an election. Our teacher asked for nominations, but everybody who was nominated declined. Later, she approached me privately about it and, like I said, she talked me into it. Now that I think of it, she must have persuaded some others too because there were 10 or 20 kinds in that first meeting. I attended a couple of meetings after that, but my heart wasn't in it. One day the teacher announced another meeting and I refused to attend. I don't remember hearing anything about a student council after that. Maybe it was an experimental thing and they gave up on it after awhile. Or maybe they had formed it for the express purpose of passing that blue jean resolution and dissolved it after they had gotten what they wanted. Do you remember having a student council at your school?

I don't understand, you said that you wanted to talk about morality from a philosophical point of view, but not from a religious point of view. What's the difference? Okay, technically religion is theology not philosophy, but it seems there is a fine line between the two. Until a few centuries ago, all intellectual people were called philosophers, but then the other disciplines branched off on their own. Even today, though, we sometimes speak of philosophy in a narrower context, like political philosophy or artistic philosophy. If you want to isolate morality from religion, you are chopping off a few thousand years of its history. Secular humanism only dates back to about the Enlightenment of the 18th Century. Anyway, there is lots of philosophy in the Bible. The whole book of Proverbs immediately comes to mind, and most of the myths seem to have a philosophical slant to them. The letters of Paul in the New Testament contain a lot of his personal philosophy, although most religious people have historically taken it for gospel. Technically, "gospel" only refers to the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Gospel means "good news" in Greek, and it has been applied to the life stories of Jesus. Just because something is in the Bible doesn't make it gospel, although a lot of people seem to think it does.

There is nothing about the 50s that I remember fondly, except the trips I made to Michigan.

back to that other book

Well that whole jeans controversy is a lot more nuanced than I thought.  So who composed this student council?  Was it like one student from each grade, each classroom?  How were they chosen?  Did each classroom or grade vote their own representative?  How did you get nominated?  What was your platform? 

Was this a binding vote or just a resolution with no teeth?  What were the circumstances of the vote?  Was their clearly a majority after the ayes had expressed their opinion?  How can you know that other council members opposed the issue?  You know politicians, they will always act like they agree with you.  What was the nature of your being out of order all through the meeting?  Maybe you're lucky you didn't have to stand in a corner for the rest of the semester.

And don't tell me what Ezekiel had to say about voice votes.  I don't think I talk that much about religion.  I talk about morality a lot, but it's mostly in philosophic manner.  I talk about the institutions of religion sometimes, and I certainly want to talk about the St Nicholas, but I don't see much biblical relevance to any of that.  Well i don't know, it just seems to me that we are talking about something philosophical and the next thing I know we are deep in biblical weeds and I am at a loss to understand how this has anything more to do with what we are talking about than the latest Cubs box score.

Remember Madalyn Murray O'Hare?  She won a case in the supreme court to eliminate bible reading in public schools in 1963, and founded something called American Atheists, and just generally raised hell against religion for about thirty years.  She was a wretched person, I saw her on tv a couple times and it seems like mainly she liked to argue, and in that Donald Trump manner where she just called everybody who disagreed with her idiots and never really responded to questions she didn't want to answer.  She never wrote much, but sometimes I wish she had so that I could go on and on talking about her writings whenever somebody started talking the bible to me.

So anyway I keep wanting to get back to 1957 in Gage Park, and how it seemed like there was a powerful force to not be different, to not make trouble.  We were all well-fed, well-housed, and though a lot of our education sounded like propaganda they did teach us math and reading well enough.  You know I hated all that authority that the school held over us, but anymore I don't mind it so much.  We were really too young to do much thinking, and probably it's best to do your thinking when you get out of school when you can choose your own books and you're not dependent on getting some grade.

You know the author, Ehrenhalt, expresses nostalgia for that time, and even though I would hate to go back there, I feel it a little bit.  Maybe we were better off somehow believing in something, even if it was wrong, then the way it is now.

Well that's all pretty vague, but I am going to ask you what do you think?

Go to the Source

The blue jean travesty at Sawyer wasn't a general election of all the students, it was a voice vote of the student council. The teacher called for the "aye" votes, but she didn't call for the "no" votes. When I called this to her attention, she reluctantly agreed to call for the "no" votes, but told us that she didn't want to hear any because she wanted the motion to pass unanimously. I know there were other council members who opposed the motion, but I was the only one who loudly expressed my "no" vote. The teacher then proclaimed that my vote didn't count because I had been out of order all through the meeting, and she instructed the secretary to record in the minutes that the motion passed unanimously. Democracy in action!

One difference between the Catholics and the Methodists was that the Catholics said the Methodists were going to Hell, but the Methodists did not say that the Catholics were going to Hell. The folks at Elsdon told me that it was not our job to judge people, that was God's job. When we did Holy Communion at Elsdon, all baptized Christians were invited to participate, while the Catholics reserved theirs only for Catholics. Another difference was that the Methodists encouraged their members to read the Bible, while the Catholics did not. They had allowed the Bible to be translated into English by then but, for centuries, they had insisted that it only be printed in Latin. John Wycliffe, the first guy to attempt to translate the Bible into English, was burned at the stake for his trouble. Over a hundred years later, Martin Luther finally had it translated into German, but he had to get himself excommunicated and start his own church before he could do it. I don't know when the Catholics allowed an English translation but, by the 1950s, they still weren't encouraging their people to read it for themselves.

The reason I keep referring to the Bible is that you keep asking me religious questions, and that's where the answers are. I am not asking you to believe any of it but, if you want to know what Christianity has to say about something, that's where you have to look. I specified "Biblical Christianity" last time because what the Bible says is sometimes different than what you are likely to hear from the average church goer. Some religions believe that every single word in the Bible is literally true, while others allow that many of the stories are probably allegorical. You can argue about interpretation until the cows come home, but it seems to me that you should read something yourself before you try to interpret it. Of course you don't have to read it, or interpret it, or believe it but, if you don't want me to reference it in these discussions, don't ask me any more religious questions.

questioning authority on the southwest side in 1957

So I guess it  was courtship that you thought should be done honestly and responsibly.  I was hoping to hear something about sex, but I guess you don't think it is a sin like, oh cannibalism.  And here I am veering into a different kind of sin, not the ftpotd sin, but that kind of religious taboo sin.  That stoical, religious, thou shalt not, kind of sin, where the sin is in the act itself.   Let's call that the stoical sin.  And since I am mentioning that, I will have to include the utilitarian sin where you have to determine the consequences of action to determine if it is a sin.  So now we have three kinds of sin, whereas the Catholics only had the venial and the mortal. 

Jimmy was right on the beam.  St Nicholas didn't want anybody to go around examining the meaning of any of the words because they might get it wrong, and worse, they might think they didn't need the priest at all, and maybe they would get to thinking they were even smarter than the priest, and there you go getting into heresy and leading people straight into hell.  By the way, who told you that you wouldn't go to hell for not being a Catholic?  The Methodists?  What the hell did you expect them to say?

It's all about authority, you obey it, you don't question it.  You got the pope and then the cardinals and the bishops, right on down to the priest and then Sister Rita with the ruler ready to rap your knuckles and enjoy doing it (the author is pretty hard on the nuns, but what I gathered from our catholic pals, they were pretty fearsome).  And then you had the president, and the mayor, right on down to the cop on the street or maybe the teacher at Sawyer who didn't approve of jeans no matter what the majority thought (I don't quite remember the story, but didn't she hold some kind of election and when it came out in favor of jeans, she overruled it?  Why did she ever allow an election, and why didn't she stuff the ballot box?). 

I don't recall that there were any rebels, back in those days.  You had like Elvis Presley, but it was all a pose, he acted all snarly and sexy, but he never did anything rebellious, and when the army called he went in without a peep.  You had the hoods, and they were reputed to do rebellious things.  Stealing hubcaps seemed to be something that they were always being accused of, but I don't know anybody who did that.  Well not that I knew any hoods, hanging out in those stupid honor classes.  I tried to look and act like one, but there was nothing tough about me.

And for all that the hoods never really questioned authority, they maybe didn't want to obey it, but they didn't much care whether other people did or not.  It seems like the first people to come along and challenge authority were the civil rights guys.  And you know they didn't come out of nowhere, they followed the same code that America pretended to believe (all men are equal), and tried to enforce it, but the authorities, fearing the loss of authority, successfully fought them down.  You know there is a parallel in Lost City between Father McDonagh and Father Flynn.  A parallel even in young Beagles who seemed like an upstanding young man, but became disillusioned when it turned out that not everybody was upstanding.

Authority pretends to a sort of nobility as being the upholders of high ideals, but since it is composed of fallible men, it is often just concerned with maintaining itself.

You say according to biblical Christianity, but what you are really giving me is according to Beagle's interpretation of biblical Christianity, because according to the catholics, who are also based on the bible, you can get into heaven by good works, and really everybody interprets that book every which way, and like you said, even you don't believe it.  So why does it keep coming up?  Are you like neighborhood Jimmy who has memorized something and likes to just keep repeating it?

"The Truth Shall Set You Free."

That's in the Bible somewhere, and I'm probably quoting it out of context, but it certainly has a nice ring to it. Don't you think?

I meant to answer your "honestly and responsibly" question yesterday, but it seems to have fallen through the cracks. The act itself is pretty straight forward, which is probably why I liked it so much. Other than failing to use birth control, there isn't much you can do wrong in that respect. It's the social bull shit that goes with it that requires honesty and responsibility, and that can be a challenge. Most of the guys I have known who were really successful with the ladies were deceitful and manipulative, and I decided early on that I wasn't going to play that game. It really is a game, you know, the girls expect it of you, and most of them can dish it out as well as they can take it. Nevertheless, I would rather be right than successful. I have to live with myself 24/7, which is more time than I spend with any woman, or any man either for that matter. If I am not happy with myself, how can I be happy with anybody else?

I always thought the Catholics were kind of strange myself. I got along with them okay, but I didn't want to be like them when I grew up. My mother said that Catholicism is a good religion for people who don't want to think for themselves. One day Jimmy next door came over and recited his catechism to her like a machine. He was so proud that he had finally memorized it all. When he was finished, Mom asked him if he could explain the meaning of all that in his own words. Jimmy replied laconically, "Oh, we don't have to know that."

I liked the people at Elsdon much better. If there was anything that you didn't understand, they would try to explain it to you, unless, of course, it was about sex. That was no big deal because nobody expected adults to honestly discuss sex with a kid anyway. The first question I asked any of them was if I was going to Hell because I wasn't Catholic. I believe it was another kid my age who quickly reassured me that I wasn't because Jesus had already died for my sins. Decades later, I came to conclusion that it didn't make a whole lot of sense but, at the time, it was a comforting thing to hear.

I have tried to explain this to you before, but I don't think you understand it yet: According to Biblical Christianity, you don't get to Heaven by racking up enough good points to overcome your bad points. That belief comes from the Persian prophet Zarathustra, who predated Christianity by at least a thousand years. In Christianity, your salvation depends on your acceptance of the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Sin, with a capitol "S", is not an act you commit, it is a state of alienation from God, and only God can overcome it. I suppose God could overcome it without your cooperation, but He chooses not to, you have to ask for it. Hey, don't shoot the messenger! I'm not so sure anymore that I believe it myself, which is one reason I no longer go to church. I am not comfortable standing up in front of God and everybody proclaiming that I believe something when, truth be known, all I can  say with certainty is that anything's possible.

St Nicholas, 1957

I have been waiting all day since yesterday morning to find out what the honest and responsible position was but I guess that is not to be revealed.  I guess you just meant that one should go about having sex in an honest and responsible manner, as one should go about everything in life, as Beagles always does, and as I always say I do.

Let's catch up then.  The bible is pretty useless as far as finding advice to run your life.  Money can't buy you love and it is too bad because money is easy and love is hard. 

I had read the story about the Michigan congressman claiming he was being blackmailed by a male prostitute to somehow obfuscate the affair with the congresswoman, and there was some kind of annoyed whistle-blower staffer involved.  I don't know why this story is not getting bigger coverage.  I love these kinds of stories.

In other matters, I believe we agreed that cannibalism is ok as long as you think there is nothing wrong with it, but not if you think there is.  Rationalizing and reasoning are two entirely different things.

So let's go to St Nicholas in 1957.  We both turned twelve that year.  I would vaguely put that as the year I started thinking about things.  The Catholics, you know I always felt that it was their world and we were just living in it.  Those big old churches were everywhere, and they were portals to a whole mysterious code of right and wrong and eternal life.  They were like the part of the museum where they keep the mummies, not that I ever stood foot in one of them, they scared me to death, those nuns in those big black habits and those priests in their outlandish display of hats, omigod the hats.  And all we had was that dinky little Elsdon Methodist church singing The Old Rugged Cross off key in the shadows of the cathedrals.

But for all that, outside of not knowing all those arcane laws, which truth be told our Catholic pals didn't seem to think much about, except to remember it was Friday before Uncle Ken could talk them into getting the pepperoni pizza, we didn't seem to think that differently from them.

The mid fifties on the southwest side were a time of rules, there was a rule for everything and it was up to you to pay attention to them and follow them and nobody would think you were a weirdo, and you could lead a pretty good life with a nice wife and a tv and a car.

You know morality, and here i mean something deeper than do onto others, which comes straight from the heart and is more a feeling than a philosophy, gets pretty complicated pretty quickly if you think about it, and then if you throw in that list of don'ts, no sex (outside of procreation), drinking, cannibalism, graven images, etc, and things like the nature of god, well it just gets really hard for a feller to figure out how do you keep out of that fiery lake.

That's what you have a priest for, to take on that heavy burden, not unlike Christ on the cross.  You know i always thought that part was way overblown.  Christ knew he wasn't going to die, he knew he was going straight back to Heaven.  It was probably painful, but three days of pain, what are they against eternity? 

Anyway you didn't have to worry your mortal little head about that, there was a rule for everything right down to that slice of pepperoni on a Friday night, all you had to do was follow the rules, which were a little constricting.  Why were all those things you wanted to do against the rules?  Why had God crafted you in such a way that you wanted to do all these things that were against the rules?

"Do As I Say, Not As I Do."

I don't know the origin of that quote, but my father used to say it from time to time. I don't think he really believed it, though, I think he used it as a sarcastic joke. Be that as it may, that quote pretty well sums up what most adults told us about sex in the 50s. I don't know what they really did in their own lives because adults didn't like to talk about sex at all in front of the children. The boys talked about it a lot among themselves, but not in front of the girls. All I ever heard the girls say was that you shouldn't do it until you're married. I have no idea what they said to each other when the boys weren't around. Looking back on it now, I think we may have gone too far with our sexual revolution in the 60s, but we had to do something, what they had in the 50s was totally unacceptable.

Like I said, I didn't find the Bible to be much help. There are passages in there that seem to confirm what the adults and the girls were telling us, but only if you quote them out of context. If you read the whole thing, there are lots of examples of people doing it all kinds of ways, and some of them weren't very nice. Like I also said, the Biblical concept of marriage was substantially different than it is in contemporary American culture. It seems like it would be a lot easier to wait until you're married when you could look forward to being married at the age of 12. Well that was the girls, I think the guys had to wait until they could come up enough livestock to purchase a wife, with enough left over to maintain her in the manner to which she was accustomed.

I used to read a lot in those days: books, magazines, newspapers, cereal boxes, whatever I found lying around. Anytime I came across something about sex, I paid special attention to it because I was interested. Then there were the movies and TV shows. They were full of sexual innuendo, although it was much more subtle in those days, so you really had to pay attention. By the time I first got my hot little hands on a copy of Playboy, my mind was already made up, but it was nice to see that somebody else agreed with me. It wasn't just the pictures either, I read it cover to cover, every single word of it. I didn't agree with all of it, but I read all of it just to broaden my perspective.

I was just kidding about wishing I had pursued money instead of sex. I ended up with plenty of money anyway without hardly trying. I only wish the sex had come so easily.

Speaking of sex, you know those two goofy congress persons who are involved in that big sex scandal? Well, it turns out that the guy tried to weasel out of it by claiming he was gay. Apparently it's more socially acceptable these days to be gay than to be adulterous. And you say that they haven't taken over the country!

rationalizing vs reasoning

I think children do know which is which as far as right or wrong in the sense of do unto others, they seem to know right away if somebody is being treated wrongly and they don't like it.  Not that I am endorsing it, but I don't see what is intrinsically wrong with cannibalism.  Killing people is wrong, but eating them afterwards doesn't make it any wronger.  It's kind of icky and that's why I don't think we see it in more advanced countries, but I don't see it as any kind of sin at all, except maybe ftpotd if you thought it was wrong and did it anyway.  i suppose it would be a sin for you, but it wouldn't be one for me.

Rationalizing is wrong first of all because it is lying, it is bending the truth, and you know how I hate that.  It is bending logic to serve some personal desire rather than seeking out the truth, it is warping the crucible.  The regular person, the good member of the St Nicholas flock, would go out and sin, say go out and get drunk and spend a good part of his paycheck buying drinks for floozies, and the next day, would realize that he had done wrong and would work overtime the next week and use the money to buy his family a new tv.  The not so good member, the rationalizer, would think, well the boss had been riding him unfairly and that had built up a bunch of stress and rather than go home after work and take it out on his family, he went to the bar so that the floozies could comfort him, so really he did the right thing, and there would be no new tv for the family.

I don't know about your rationalizing before the fact.  It doesn't sound like you were actually rationalizing if you couldn't find a clear path to what you were trying to do.  That sounds more like reasoning, for which I can only applaud you.  And I guess this only strengthens the fact of your being without sin.

So the stories you heard about sex were inconsistent and contradictory so you went to the bible, the stories of polygamy and slave girls and rampant sleeping around, and dare I say inconsistency and contradictions, and you came away with nothing,  And then you say you read everything you could get your hands on (is that another little joke like slipping in the back door?), and then you decided that sex was a good thing.  Was it possible that it might have turned out to be a bad thing?

I've heard of the missionary position, but I have never heard of the honest and responsible position.  Of course we should be honest and responsible in all our relations with other people, but I don't see where it relates to sex.

You think it would have been preferable to be celibate and rich?  What would you do with all the money in Beaglesonia?  Would Beaglesonia be even bigger, would you be eating caviar instead of deer and fish?  I expect you could have funded your campaign and become mayor or something and ruled over Cheboygan with your enlightened philosophy so that it would be a wonder for all to behold.

I've got the Lost City open to page 112, and I was going to go on about the St Nicholas flock, but it's already a little late in the morning for me, so maybe tomorrow.

Preemptive Rationalization

The reason there is no Social Contract (capital "S" capital "C") is that there is no Society with a capital "S". There are, in fact, lots of societies and they each have their own social contract. My committee was allegorical, but the members of each society collaborate with each other in some fashion to develop their social contracts over time. Then there are societies within societies. There are probably some things which all Americans believe to be wrong, although sometimes I wonder anymore. Then there are other things that are considered wrong in one American subculture and not in another, and you will find even more moral diversity if you go international.

While human children may have an inborn capacity to understand right and wrong, they don't know which is which until somebody tells them or shows them. If an American or European child were to be kidnapped at a young age and raised by cannibals, he would grow up thinking that cannibalism is perfectly normal. I'm not talking about starving in the wilderness cannibalism, I'm talking about tribal cannibalism where they eat their fallen enemies as a religious rite. I'm not sure how young the kid would have to be, but I'm guessing under the age of five, because most of us can't remember much about our lives before that. If the child had any memory of his former culture, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the cannibals to condition him to their way of thinking.

I don't know a lot about infants either, but my impression is that they are pretty self centered. I think you're right that language has a lot to do with their eventual socialization but, for the first year or so, they aren't very good at it. They probably pick up on non-verbal clues, and will attempt to communicate but, until they can speak in complete sentences, you can't really reason with them. You can teach them simple commands like a dog, but that's about it.

8/22/15: I've given it some thought, and I think I've got this sin thing figured out. What you said about rationalization put me on the trail. I know that rationalization is supposed to be a bad thing, but I don't know why. Maybe it's because people tend to rationalize their actions after the fact. They believed it was wrong before they did it, and now they want to justify their behavior rather than repent of it. Looking back on it, I think what I used to do was rationalize the thing before I did it. If I couldn't convince myself that it was right to do, then I just didn't do it. Of course, if you want to do something bad enough, and you really put your mind to it, you can probably rationalize it eventually.

The best example I can think of is sex. Even before I became aware of my own sexuality, I heard other people talking about the subject, but they didn't seem to be making a lot of sense. As my awareness developed, they still didn't seem to be making a lot of sense, probably because the stories I was hearing were inconsistent and contradictory. So it came to pass that I searched the Bible for answers, because the folks at Elsdon had told me that the Bible had an answer for everything. When my Biblical search proved inconclusive, I read everything else about the subject that I could get my hands on. It took me a few years, but I finally convinced myself that sex was a good thing as long as you did it honestly and responsibly. Convincing the girls proved to be much more difficult than convincing myself, so I finally had to leave town and find some different girls who didn't need convincing. All told, I spent the better part of a decade on this project and, to this day, I wonder whether or not it was worth it. If I had spent all that time and energy learning how to make money, I might be a rich man today.

Has Beagles ever sinned ftpotd?

What is this ur committee on sin somewhere in the mist of time deciding the rules of morality?  Sounds like the social contract, wasn't that a favorite of Locke, and isn't Locke a big figure in deism and in libertarian theory?  But anyway he knew the social contract never actually happened, in the sense that people got together and made an agreement, it was just a figure of speech, so to speak. 

Likewise you surely don't believe that some committee long ago hammered out some kind of list and passed it around, and bingo there we got our morality and we have been living it, or variations of it, ever since.

Of course the concept of right and wrong is inborn, how could you think otherwise?  We are a social animal, it is in our genes.  I have had precious little experience with newborns, but there have been those experiments where they display bad behavior to babies and they don't like it.  Just from being around pre k's I can tell that these kids have an instinctive feel for right and wrong.  It's like language.  If people are isolated from their societies they develop their own languages.  We are born to talk and we are born to distinguish between right and wrong.

Not that we don't also talk about morality, not that we don't analyze it and come up with different formulations, but there is a simple kernel, something like do onto others that all the big religions contains, that simple altruism which highly socialized species such as ours requires for survival.  And stuff can be twisted around, and people do that, and self interest is always there, and there is that great enemy of progress, rationalization, where you already know what you want to believe and you just make arguments that lead to that conclusion and pretend that you have thought it through.

But you know what?  We have reason, which is a result of language which comes in our genes, and we can figure things out.  People can make up all these rules and lists and whatnot, but we don't have to accept them at face value, we have reason and we can put them into the crucible and decide whether we accept them as true or not.  People do this all the time.  It's why we don't believe in witches and demons anymore.

You seem to think that the only reason that people think anything is because they heard it somewhere, and I say no, no, no.  You seem to think that whenever public opinion changes it is the result of Them Who Rule Everything pulling some strings, and I say crazy man crazy. 

I didn't accuse you of being without sin, I thought you clearly implied it by questioning why anybody would ever do anything that they thought was wrong, and if you couldn't understand that it rather followed that you had not, and you certainly didn't confess to any, and even in last night's post, you admit that you might have done wrong, but only because you didn't realize that it was wrong at the time, so therefore it would not be sin ftpotd.

Why would anybody commit sin ftpotd?  Back in my wayward days when I used to shoplift books I did it so that I could take them home and not have to pay for them.  I did it for personal gain.  That's generally why people commit sin ftpotd.

Okay then I am taking The Lost City down from the shelf and putting it somewhere where it will be in my way, so that I will reread that part of the book over the weekend, ah, here it is, Part 2, Chapter 5, page 111.  And maybe in tonight's post Beagles will answer the question of whether he has ever committed sin ftpotd.

Definitions, Definitions, Definitions

I don't think that homosexuality is a sin, I just think it's wrong. Why do I think it's wrong? Because I am repelled by the very idea of it. If other people like it, I suppose it's none of my business, but that doesn't mean I have to vote for it. I would be willing to live and let live on this issue if they hadn't brought gay marriage into the equation, I think that was just a step too far. Marriage is a contract between two people, with the government putting their stamp of approval on it. I do not approve of gay marriage, so I voted against my government putting their stamp of approval on it. Would it have been more logical for me to have voted contrary to my own beliefs?

 In keeping with your definition of sin, it's not a sin unless you think it's wrong and do it anyway. I think homosexuality is wrong, but I don't practice it myself, therefore it's not a sin for me. I don't know if the people that do practice it think it's wrong, probably some of them do and some of them don't. If they don't think it's wrong, then it isn't a sin for them to do it. It appears, then, that it's a sin for some people and not for others. Going back to the religious context of sin, if your religion says it's a sin, then I suppose it's a sin for you to do it. If I am not a follower of your religion, then what your religion says about it is irrelevant to me. Since neither of us are religious, our concept of right and wrong must come from somewhere else.

Since newborn infants don't seem to understand right and wrong, the concept must be acquired rather than inborn. Well they might be born with a genetic predisposition for it, but it still takes some kind of outside influence to bring it to the surface, and that influence seems to come from other people. This raises the question of how do those other people acquire their concept of right and wrong. From different other people of course but, if you follow the chain back far enough, you should come to one person who started it all. Where did that person get it from? Without bringing religion into it, can we solve this one? Well, maybe it wasn't just one person who started it all, maybe it was a committee or something like that. Could a committee come up with something that none of it's members would have ever come up with by themselves? My experience with committees suggests that one member usually kicks out an idea and then the others toss it around and see where it lands. A single person, therefore, might have come up with the idea that, if we have a list of rules for our people to follow, it might make it easier to resolve disputes without resorting to violence. Then the committee would generate nominations for the list and discuss each one until they decide to either add it to the list or forget about it. When the list is complete, the committee would then have to find a way to get the rest of the tribe to accept it. They might vote on it, or they might just impose it by power of their authority. Either way, the list would become binding on all tribal members. You don't like it, leave the tribe and go start a tribe of your own, if you can persuade anybody else to join you. (I don't know where I'm going with this, I'm just speculating.)

Okay, back to real time: You have accused me of being without sin, as if that was a bad thing. I, on the other hand, can't understand why you would deliberately do something that you believed to be wrong. Not just you, anybody. Why would anybody deliberately do something they believed to be wrong? Don't forget, I didn't say that I've never done anything wrong, just that I believed it to be right before I did it. Of course it doesn't always turn out to be right and, when it doesn't, I add it to the list of things that I regret doing and vow to never do again. If I do indeed repeat the mistake, it's usually because I forgot what happened last time. A certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age, you know. Another way I might repeat a mistake is if it's not exactly the same situation and I don't realize that the same rule should apply. There are probably other ways a guy can screw up like that, but screwing up is not the same thing as saying, "I know this is wrong, and I'm going to regret it later but, fuck it, I'm going to do it anyway." How does that work?

Beagles the illogical tempter

It was probably late in July when I wanted to talk about the difference between the stoics and the utilitarianists with conservatives being stoics and liberals being utilitarianists where the former tend to think of a sin as being in the act  itself, that is certain acts were sins regardless of the circumstances or consequences, whereas the latter judged acts on their consequences to determine whether or not they were sins. 

But sin, an unfortunate word, so many different interpretations, but then all those words, those ethical words, those the difference between right and wrong words, they are all, well so loaded.  We could have a discussion on oh, baseball or hunting, whether or not this guy was a good shortstop or whether this or that was a better rifle, and perhaps it would evolve eventually into heated words, but not necessarily, but if it was some ethical question, emotions would quickly rise.

That whole ethical thing is close to the bone for us big apes with the enormous brain.  Little kids, even before they can talk, react to it, have a sense of what is right and wrong, religion and politics quickly grafted morality into their systems, and it's just big with us big apes.

I thought maybe it would be an aid to a logical discussion of morality if I could come up with a pretty good definition of sin.  I thought that defining it as doing something wrong even though you knew it was wrong, would be a good start.  But I didn't realize that Beagles was without sin, had never done anything he thought was wrong in his entire life. 

Frankly, I was a little suspicious of this, it just didn't seem likely, more frankly, I suspected rationalization, which I hate more than sin because sin is a logical thing whereas rationalizing twists logic into a mobius strip.

And then we were back into gay marriage.  Probably my fault, probably I brought it up.  Well I thought it was a good example of the difference between the stoic (homosexuality is a sin period.) and the utilitarian (homosexuals are no threat to the well being of the nation so let them have the same rights that straight people have). 

See you tempt me Beagles.  Sometimes you say that you will believe something is wrong until you can be convinced that it isn't.  And I foolishly take you at your word, much like Charlie Brown racing towards that football, present my meticulous logical case, and then, like Lucy pulling away the football, say you don't care about any stinking facts, you think it is wrong because you think it is wrong and that is your right and there is nothing to be done about it.

See here you have the discussion well framed 

By giving the same benefits to gays, the government is saying that gay marriage is just as good for the country as traditional marriage, and I disagree with that assertion. 

and then at the end you disagree.  One would well expect that this would be followed by a because, but there is no because because it's just because you think so.  So how does one discuss something with someone like that? 

This is kind of like gun control which I almost never discuss with you any more either.  The difference there was that you used kind of a shotgun approach, throwing out all these arguments from the NRA playbook whether they made any sense or not.  In this case you just say this is my belief and I am sticking with it come hell or high water or any hot air from anybody.

Fine.  I won't mention it again.  Quit tempting me by pretending to be a logical man.

The weekend is fast approaching and I have been meaning to reread that Lost City thing about sin.

"I'm Against It"

That's what Mark Twain said when somebody asked him what he thought about sin. I think the reason this is funny is that the person who asked the question was hoping Twain would launch into an elaborate discussion about the subject, and he didn't want to do that at the moment, so he just said, "I'm against it." and went on to talk about something else. While I don't mind launching into an elaborate discussion about anything, when it comes to sin, I think Twain's statement pretty well sums up my position too.

The reason I launched into that Bible study last night was that you asked me what the folks at Elsdon thought about sex. I don't remember them talking about it much, but I got the impression that they were against it. I, on the other hand, was very interested in exploring that subject in depth, so I looked it up in the Bible, which is what the folks at Elsdon told me I was supposed to do when I had questions about moral issues. Quite frankly, I was looking for a loophole, but it turned out that I didn't really need one because, while the Bible prohibits certain kinds of sex, I was unable to find where it said that sex, in general, is a bad thing.

I seem to remember that the part about Mary and Joseph came up at least once in a Sunday School class, and that's where I got the idea that they weren't completely married at the time Mary became pregnant with Jesus. Our instructor explained that marriage and divorce did not mean exactly the same things in Biblical times as they do today. This accounts for Joseph resolving to divorce Mary when he found out she was pregnant. If they had been truly married, Joseph wouldn't have been so concerned because he would have had every reason to believe the child was his.

Now you have asked me what the folks at Elsdon thought about sin. Well, I'm pretty sure they were against that too but, if you want to understand the difference between the Catholic and Protestant views on sin, I will have to go beyond the hallowed halls of Elsdon to give you a complete answer. The short answer is that Catholics confess their sins to a priest, while Protestants skip the middle man and talk directly to God about their sins. Will that answer suffice, or do you want me to elaborate?

I suppose you're right that I should try to be more logical about that gay marriage thing, so I'll try. As I understand it, one reason gays wanted to get married in the first place was so they would be eligible for certain tax and insurance benefits. I believe those benefits were designed to encourage people to get married and make it easier for families to stay together. Somebody must have decided that traditional family life was good for the country, and that it was the government's job to encourage it. By giving the same benefits to gays, the government is saying that gay marriage is just as good for the country as traditional marriage, and I disagree with that assertion.

Another reason was so that gays could adopt each other's children. I have never believed that gays should be allowed to adopt children, or be given custody of children produced by a marriage they were in before they discovered that they were gay. I guess studies have been done that indicate children growing up in a gay household are no more likely to turn out gay themselves than kids growing up in a straight household. While that may be true, they are surely more likely to approve of the gay lifestyles of others, and I'm against that too.

ill tempered sinner Uncle Ken

I meant doing wrong by your own definition was what sin was.  Somebody elses's idea of what sin was would have no bearing for the purpose of this discussion (ftpotd).  Of course our opinions of what is right or wrong is subject to change especially for those of us who examine our lives periodically.  So what if you had been raised in a cannibal cult, and partook of the butchering and eating in your young years?  As long as you truly believed in cannibalizing at the time, I believe you haven't committed any sin ftpotd.

My example with the pizza thing was that if my Catholic pals didn't know it was Friday they could have devoured that pepperoni with no repercussions because they didn't know they were eating meat on a Friday.  Actually they don't believe it anymore, but that's not important for this discussion. 

Of course it would be wrong to trick them into ordering the meat pizza, that is kind of the point, you get to eat the whole pizza, and they get none ftpotd assume that they have to pay for the pizza up front.  We are not all as pure as Beagles the stone caster, who turneth away whenever sin rears its ugly head.  God what a goody two shoes.  You know some of those Catholic kids would have eaten the pizza anyway.  I assume they would have admitted it the next time they went to confession, and done something to atone for it.  See that's what I like about the Catholics in the book.  When they sinned, they knew they had sinned and they would atone for it, they had a nice little sin bookkeeping system. 

What was the advice of the young methodists on how to deal with sin.  Well of course you should avoid it, but we can't all be as pure as Beagles, so what do you do when you have sinned?  Do you have to atone?  Is it a chain around your neck that you will carry to the grave and I assume St Peter, oh wait we didn't have St Peter.  I'm sure we had somebody, probably some modest clerk would say hey, what is that black mark on your soul and you would have to explain it.  Just my guess I never made it to those heights of theological discussion.

Again I guess that vote on gay marriage, that is never going to happen anyway, is what this blog has been revolving around for the last couple weeks.  You say if I can convince you to change your mind you might change your vote, but then you also say that your vote is not based on logic, it is something you want to do because you want to do it and you will never change your mind, so who is the fool here? 

And then you go off blathering on about what the good book says about things, or rather what you think it says about things, because everybody who reads the damn thing comes away thinking something different.  And I don't believe a word of it, and I think you believe much of it, as being the inerrant word of that god who you don't really believe in either, so why is so much of this blog taken up with fucking bible study?  There are a lot of holy books, you could pick any one of them and it would have something to say about something.  Who cares?

I'm a little pressed for time this morning and maybe that's why I sound a little ill tempered, but I guess ill tempered has a place in this blogU

Getting Along by Going Along

I accept your definition of sin, for the purposes of this or any other discussion. What I'm not so sure about is: How do you know it's wrong? We all get our ideas from other people but, at some point, we either internalize them or abandon them. Once you have internalized a belief about something, the fact that somebody else believes the opposite should no longer matter. You may respect his right to believe it, but that doesn't mean you have to believe it. I don't think they even believe this anymore but, if a Catholic tells you that it's wrong to eat meat on Friday, and you're not a Catholic yourself, you are under no obligation to agree with him. I think it would be wrong to try to trick him into eating meat on Friday, but it's certainly not wrong for me to eat meat on Friday. I might even agree to order a meatless pizza to share with those guys, but that would only be out of respect for their beliefs, and there would be nothing wrong with me ordering a hamburger to go afterwards. If we had all forgotten that it was Friday, I would offer to reimburse the others for their share of the pizza so that they could buy something else for themselves. If eating my share of the pizza in front of them bothered them, I might order something else for myself as well, and take the pizza home with me. Well, were getting into situational ethics here, but my original point was that something is not a sin for me just because somebody else says that it is. When I said that I don't remember ever doing something that I believed was wrong, I meant something that I really believed was wrong, not something that somebody else believed was wrong.

As for putting aside my "irrational" belief about gay marriage and voting for it, that's not going to happen. You can put aside your irrational beliefs at election time if you want to, but I don't want to and I'm not going to. The purpose of voting is to express my opinion, not somebody else's opinion. I don't vote the way I should vote, I vote the way I want to vote. If you can convince me to change my mind on an issue, that's fine, but don't expect me to change my vote without first changing my mind.

We didn't talk about sex all that much at Elsdon. I think that the rest of them just accepted that it was wrong, but I had to find out for myself. The Bible prohibits adultery, homosexuality, beastiality, and rape, but it doesn't have a lot to say about premarital sex for teenagers. I don't think they even had adolescents in Biblical times. You were a child until you turned 12, and then you were an adult. Kids were promised in marriage younger than that, but they didn't consummate until they were at least 12. It doesn't appear that Joseph and Mary were married at the time Mary became pregnant with Jesus. She is referred to as his "espoused wife", which I think means engaged to be married. When Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant, "being a just man, he resolved to divorce her quietly", but I think that means to break off the engagement, for an angel appeared to Joseph and told him not to hesitate to make Mary his wife, "for she is with child of the Holy Spirit."

What the fuss was all about was the rule that a Jewish man should only marry "one of the virgin daughters of Israel." I don't think that rule was about chastity as much as it was about ethnic purity. Moses was concerned that his people would be assimilated by the Canaanites after the coming invasion. That's why he told them to show no mercy and take no prisoners. He also laid down other rules that were designed to prevent his people from adopting Canaanite cultural customs, and he certainly didn't want them marrying or even fooling around with the native girls. He could have just told them to marry a nice Jewish girl but, by adding the "virgin" part, he insured that the first child born to the couple would have a nice Jewish father as well as a nice Jewish mother. Funny that the Christians focused so much on the "virgin" part and not the "Jewish" part.

casting the first stone

Oh it's a time honored practice in philosophical and other thoughty essays to begin with a definition of terms, I believe that book we just read did a lot of it, you generally take a word like, oh, sin, that has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people, but then you say for the purposes of this discussion when I say sin will mean doing something that you know is wrong.  I did leave out that phrase, in the future I shall include it.

Discrimination is probably one of those words like, oh, gay, that has been appropriated to include another meaning.  It happens all the time, it's no big deal.  You can still use it in an earlier meaning, if you say you are a discriminating beer drinker, as I, ahem, am, yellow beer indeed, nobody will think that you are a beer drinker who doesn't like Jews or whatever.  And there is still some of that old meaning in the new meaning.  I'm sure those cigar and brandy gents thought that keeping what they considered riff raff out of their club was being discriminating.

We have our thoughts and we have our actions.  We don't really have control over our thoughts, they pop willy nilly in and out of our heads.  But we can control our actions.  Well not quite, but basically it's true.  So like I have my disapproval of hunting, but when it comes time to vote on allowing you hunters to marry, I have to set aside that disapproval and vote to allow it because it is only fair after all.  And of course I think you should likewise set aside your equally irrational disapproval of gays to allow them to marry.

I believe that is the center of the orbit we have been circling for some weeks now.  I suppose it is okay to avoid them in social situations, but I assume you were civil to that former boyfriend of your daughter's and that guy who does your taxes, and I don't think you have a lot of social activities anyway.

In the book sin was used in relation to the Catholic Church, and I think you would agree that those folks know their sins.  They did invent original sin, and they had all kind of sins, well they had venal and mortal, and I don't if there are other kinds too.

Remember talking to the Catholic kids on the block when they got to talking about their religion and all the different kinds of stuff in it, and realizing our turning the page to psalm 362, and reading the Sunday Pix (is that what it was called, that little two or four page comic strip of biblical stories?) Methodist Church was pretty bland dishwater indeed?  I'm surprised I didn't convert right then and there, except that there was always something spooky about those Catholics, like you never knew when you were going to trip over some little detail and end up burning in hell for the rest of eternity.

We Methodists had the ten commandments, and I think we had the big sins down, but I don't think we had the little ones down like covering your head in church or eating meat on Friday.  It seems like we were against drinking and gambling, I think.  Because I left about the time I became a teenager, I never heard where we stood on sex. I imagine we were against adultery and heavy petting.  Whatever happened to heavy petting?  You never hear about it anymore.

In the case of that parish in the book, those guys were told by the Catholic church what was sin, so because they accepted the teachings of the church, and knew the church called what they were doing sin, they were sinning.

Remember the apocryphal story about how you are out with your Catholic friends on a Friday night, and realizing that they have forgotten it's Friday, you urge them to get the sausage or the pepperoni pizza, and then when it comes you remind them that it is Friday and then you get to eat the whole pizza by itself?   

So that's what I mean, it has to be something you know is wrong, and you have to do it knowingly.  And you are telling me that for the purposes of this discussion you have never sinned?  Back in your youth, you never let your sister get the blame for something that you did, you never lied to get out of some chore, you never maybe cheated someone on a deal by pretending whatever you were selling was worth more than it actually was?

Damn, I better beware of you casting the first stone.

You know that casting the first stone thing, if nobody is without sin than nobody stones that poor woman, but if there is a sinless Beagle in the crowd once he casts the first stone I assume anybody can cast the second, the third, the forty-second.  Maybe we are better off all being sinners, or at least that poor woman is.

I should probably go on to examine this, but it's late in the morning and I don't want to bother.  See starting the day with a sin, the way of the sinner.

Who Says So?

I don't usually like to argue about definitions, but I feel constrained to point out that you are not using some words the way I have been accustomed to seeing them used. That doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means that some people might misinterpret what you're saying.

To discriminate generally means to distinguish one thing from another. A discriminating beer drinker, for instance, would recognize the difference between lawn mower beer and craft beer, and would likely express a preference for one or the other. An indiscriminate beer drinker would say that all beer is the same, so you might as well buy the cheapest brand. Some types of discrimination have been made illegal, but not all types. You can still choose your beer, but you can't choose not to admit someone into your public tavern because of his race, color, or nationality. Persecution generally means to pick on someone, "to harass or punish in a manner designed to injure, grieve, or afflict". I can see where there is some overlap here, but it's possible to discriminate without persecuting. I do not believe that gay marriage and traditional marriage is the same thing, that's discrimination, but it doesn't become persecution until I throw rocks instead of rice at a newly married gay couple. I can refuse to attend a gay wedding but, if I was a county clerk, I could no longer refuse to sell a marriage license to a gay couple. When I said that gays should not be persecuted, it doesn't preclude my disliking them and avoiding them in social situations. Truth be known, of all the stuff that you said is better now than it used to be, gay marriage is the only thing I disagree about.

The word "sin" is usually used in a religious context, although it wouldn't necessarily have to be. I could live with your definition, except that I would discriminate between breaking your own rule and breaking a rule that has been laid on you by somebody else without your consent. I think the reason you resisted religion in your youth was that it was imposed upon you by your parents, who dragged you, kicking and screaming, down to Elsdon. My parents sent me to Elsdon too, but that was different. I had been asking them questions that they couldn't answer, and they said that I might have better luck asking those questions in church, so I was happy to be sent there. The Catholic kids on  my block still said I was going to Hell. In their view, it was just as much of a sin to attend a Protestant church as it was to attend no church at all. Of course the people I met at Elsdon didn't believe that, and they impressed me as being nicer people, so I chose to believe them instead of those mean Catholic kids.

I still have a little trouble understanding the concept of knowing that something is wrong and doing it anyway. Do you know it's wrong because you actually believe it's wrong, or do you just mean that somebody else told you it's wrong? I don't think I ever did anything that I believed was wrong before I did it. I have done lots of things that I thought were okay at the time, but came to realize that they were wrong after the fact. I don't call that "sin", I call that "screwing up". When you stole those books, did you have conflicting thoughts, like in cartoons when the little angel and the little devil are hovering over you arguing about whether you should do it or not? I could understand that, but I don't understand how you could have believed it was wrong and did it anyway merely because you wanted the books.

defining sin

We toss these words around, discrimination, persecution, i suppose if you are discriminating against someone you are persecuting them, that is if you are the people who have all the money and own all the property, and you won't let another group who has neither buy your property or earn your wages.  Way back when we were lads, an upstanding straight white man was expected to discriminate against nonstraight, nonwhite, nonmen.  When you went to that snooty club for cigars and brandy you certainly didn't want to rub elbows with gays, blacks, or women.  Anymore all those people can smoke and drink together.  I heard they even let a swamp Bohunk in, but the people there were not up to his snuff, and he was sure they would disappoint him somewhere down the line so he he went back to the swamp where he could be disappointed with them from a distance.

You are always going on about how things have changed since we were lads, but you know things have always been changing, time is a river, blah, blah, blah.  Change is kind of like winter, you may like it or you may hate it, but it's always going to be there, and it's perfectly fine to complain about it to your friends and neighbors, but these complaints become a little tiresome in a high class blog such as this one. 

And anyway things were wrong back then, blacks couldn't vote or buy property in the nice parts of town or get those good jobs, gays could go to jail for practicing the love that dare not speak its name, and women had a hard time becoming doctors and lawyers.  Surely you admit that that was wrong.  Now it's better, quit complaining.

What i meant by sin, and this is pretty much my own definition, is knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway.  I was going to trot out some examples. but not many came to mind, not that I am sinless, but I just don't do much of anything anymore.  I used to steal.  Way back in my hippie days I used to shoplift books.  I suppose I had some halfass theory where I was liberating them from the corrupt establishment, but I knew in my heart that what I was doing was wrong, but I wanted the book and so I took it.  Anymore my sins would be something like treating somebody unfair because I didn't want to take the time to treat them right, or not recycling something because it was too much bother.

And there is guilt there when I know I have sinned.  I suppose that keeps me from doing it very often and that makes me a better person, and I suppose when somebody else sins it makes me more tolerant of them, so long as they admit they sinned and vow to try to not do it again, even though we both know we will because we are imperfect vessels. 

Wow, sounds like I have bought into that original sin thing that I am always declaiming about.  In my case I think it is more about putting yourself first, giving yourself a bit of an advantage in an unfair manner over somebody else.  That's what I think of as sin.

The Guilt Trip

The more I think about it, nobody slipped gay marriage in the back door, people have been arguing about it for years. By the way, I never intended that "back door" statement to be a joke. It occurred to me while I was proof reading that it might be interpreted that way, but I decided not to change it. Like Pontius Pilate said, "What I have written, I have written." Anyway, as I have already stated, I don't think that gays should be persecuted, but you said "discrimination", which is not exactly the same thing. That's another word that they have changed the meaning of in our lifetimes. Time was that a person of discriminating taste was admired, but now it has come to mean denying somebody his due because of his race, gender, religion, or one of several other distinctions. Homosexuality was not one of those distinctions originally, but now it apparently is. I suppose this could go on indefinitely until even Bohemian swamp dwellers are added to the list, but I will vote against that too. I don't want to be part of any special interest group, I just want to be a regular guy. Why can't everybody be like me?

Of course everybody is not like me, in spite of the fact that you keep saying I have an ilk. There may be an ilk out there, and I may vote their way because I dislike them less than I dislike your ilk, but I don't consider myself to be one of them. My parents were joiners, like the folks in Elmhurst, and I was too for awhile but, the older I got, the less of a joiner I became. That's because every group I've ever been in has eventually done something I didn't like, so I got out. I don't join anything anymore because I know they will disappoint me sooner or later, and I don't want to spend what little time I have left on this earth being disappointed.

As I have said previously, I believe there is a difference between right and wrong, but I don't think I believe in sin anymore, if indeed I ever did. There are two definitions of sin that come to mind. One is living in a state of alienation from God, but I don't think that's the one you're talking about here. I think you mean something like breaking the rules. Of course different cultures live by different rules, so what might be sin in one culture may be deemed as virtue in another culture. in the Judeo-Christian culture, the purpose of sin seems to be to make you feel guilty, not guilty enough to prevent you from doing it in the first place, but guilty enough that you feel the need to be forgiven or redeemed after you do it.

The Jews used to sacrifice animals to atone for their sins, but they haven't done that since the last time their temple was destroyed in 70 AD, and I don't know what they do about it now. Other ancient cultures sacrificed animals on various mountain tops, but the Jews were only supposed to do their sacrificing in the temple in Jerusalem. I suppose the reasons for that were to provide job security for the priests and direct traffic to the shopkeepers of Jerusalem. Christians don't need to sacrifice because Jesus has already done that for them, all they've got to do is acknowledge it and repent of their sins. The Catholics have to go through a priest for that, but the Protestants can cut the red tape and go directly to God. Instead of priests, they have ministers who will help you find your way to God, but it's up to you to make the actual contact. At some point it occurred to me that God already knows what I have done and whether or not I'm sorry about it, so anything I say to Him on the matter will just be a redundant waste of time. Well, I suppose God has more time than I do, but that doesn't mean he should be frittering it away trying to make me feel better. That's my job.  

slipping something in the back door

Being a cat man I never felt the allure of the noble wolf.  I guess it depends on how much of a nuisance it is.  Usually those cattle guys are the ones who get fired up about this because they lose some cattle.  Sometimes though they blow it up out of proportion. I guess it would depend on the case; I would have to put it into the crucible. 

You know even though I disapprove of hunting, I know that disapproval is irrational, so I disregard it and think it is perfectly fine for you guys to bag a meal or two a few times a year, and i don't mind your hunting rifles.  But there is an unmistakable allure of guns.  Every gun nut I know has more than he needs and speaks about them like old and treasured friends, and that's a little strange, but that's ok.  Well I am just creeping up on the old gun control argument and let's not go there on a warm summer morning. 

I believe I have already made my case against discriminating against gays several times.  I don't see why having had an opinion first means you don't have to defend it.  I don't know why you want to have years of argument, but I do like argument.  Not to crazy about a civil war though.  One Ken Burns special is quite enough for me thank you.  Was that slipping something in the back door 'crack,' a little Beagles sly humor?

I suppose in some circles you could get into trouble for that, like if you were running for some office or if this blog was widely read.  Oh that whole thing is just crazy.  Like someone posted on fb this sign, one of those things that faces the street where the owner can put in black letters and usually they are like announcing somebody's birthday or welcoming home the local conquering football team, that some local tradesman had spelled out something like it has been a year since Michael Brown (the Ferguson victim) has committed a crime.  Which is kind of stupid, one could as well have put up a sign that it has been a year since Darren Wilson (the cop) had shot anybody.

Anyway the sign could have just sat there and folks could have snickered or snorted, but somebody had to put it on fb, and then there are all those messages pro and con, and I suppose I have too much time on my hands and I read through some of them, and one guy was particularly vocal on the anti Brown side, so I clicked on his page, and there was a posting of that Calvin character from Calvin and Hobbes pissing on Obama's head, and that was it, no words or anything.  I suppose the guy has a right to do that, but why would anybody?  Oh just venting I suppose.

One of the things about Lost City that I liked was where the guys were going to the bar before or maybe it was right after, or maybe it was instead of, church.  And they knew they were sinning, and they knew that they would have to do something to make up for it, and that they would probably sin again, because that is the way the world was.  What I liked about it is the owning up of the sinning.  It seems to me that anymore people are all like, I was under a lot of stress, and blah blah blah, and circumstances forced me into it, so it is really not my fault at all, and so I haven't sinned.  I don't like the way people don't own up to things today.

That's what I remember.  I'll have to reread it.  Well we have a long summer weekend do we not?

Bingo!

Yep, that's it, I feel approximately the same about homosexuality as you do about hunting. The analogy breaks down, however, when you talk about voting to allow hunters to marry. The difference is that hunters are already allowed to marry, and we don't need your vote to do it. Now if there was a ballot initiative proposing to prohibit hunters from marrying, it would be different than the time I voted to ban gays from marrying, and here's why: Gays were not previously allowed to marry in Michigan, and we voted to keep it that way. Some other states had already allowed it, and there was concern that, if a gay couple had been married in one of those states, and then they moved to Michigan, we would have to recognize that marriage under the "full faith and credit" clause in the U.S. Constitution. I said at the time that what we needed to do was amend the federal constitution, but that wasn't put on the ballot, so I voted for the Michigan proposal as better than nothing. If a majority of the states had done the same thing, it would have sent a message to the feds that gay marriage was unpopular, but they didn't. Since the majority of the states eventually voted to allow gay marriage, the Supreme Court was actually ruling with the majority for a change. Well, it's a done deal now, and I don't see any way to undo it, the same as if you guys voted to prohibit hunters from marrying. What would you do about all the hunters that are already married?

I was surprised when you said that only four or five percent of the people in this country are gay, but I was also surprised to find that out about hunters and Indians. I seems like there should be way more people in all those groups because they make so much noise and command so much of the public's attention. It would be wrong to allow 95% of the people to pick on 5%, which is why we have safeguards against that in our laws. My ilk is fond of pointing that out every time someone brings up majority rule as an argument, so it would be hypocritical of me to argue against it. I never said that we should persecute the gays anyway, just that we shouldn't allow them to get married to each other. We have now given them something that they didn't have before, which is kind of like rewarding bad behavior, but I suppose you could say the same thing about expanding hunting opportunities for people like me. A controversy has been raging for decades about taking wolves off the endangered list and allowing limited hunting of them in areas where they are starting to be a nuisance. If you disapprove of hunting, you are bound to disapprove of adding another species to the list of legitimate quarry, regardless of the effect it might have on the species or the people who live around them.

Of course there are a lot of things that used to be legal and are no longer legal, and I suppose a certain amount of that is bound to happen as time marches on. What bothers me about homosexuality is the seemingly arbitrary way it has been legitimized over the years. You have challenged me to defend my position on the matter, but I feel that my position was here first, so you are the one who needs to justify your position. When slavery was abolished it was first argued about for decades, and then they finally had to fight a civil war to settle it. This gay thing seems to have slipped in the back door while nobody was paying attention, and now we're stuck with it. If it's really only 5%, I guess it's not the end of the world. Maybe they will quit crying about it now that they have what they want and we can all get on with our lives.

I finished "The Lost City" some time ago, so we can discuss that if you want. I agree that the author doesn't seem to have a plan to restore community life in America, although he does talk about the pendulum swinging back some day of its own accord. The book was a trip down Memory Lane for me, but I can't think of anything about the 50s that I would like to see restored. Maybe that's because I was pretty young then, and I never did like being a child. If I could turn back the clock, I wouldn't go back a day before March 1, 1967, the day I got out of the army and started my real life.