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{A last minute preface as prefaces should be and usually are: Monday evening, February 4, 2008, after the 20th revision and rewrite of this segment, the Railing Curmudgeon considered deleting certain of the more outrageous examples of what Dr.Laura continues to denote as those foolish things people “do to mess up their lives” with their blatant disregard for God’s Commandments and common sense. Could it be that some of these descriptions of acts of human depravity are a bit too much? Then I watched an hour of Tru-TV’s “Ocean Force” series, one of those “reality” shows that have proliferated during the TV writers’ strike. “Ocean Force,” another derivative of FOX’s long running “Cops.” shows on-the-scene police issuances of warnings, citations, and arrests to reveling malefactors on California beaches during holiday celebrations. A routine traffic stop in Hermosa Beach revealed two adult men drinking beer in the front seat of a Camero coupe, a teen mother of two in the back seat, quite drunk, and her two children without either seat belts or car seats—a violation of the law and apparently in California a more serious crime than open containers (of alcohol) in a motor vehicle! The two young gentlemen explained that they were helping her move out of her boyfriend’s place. Since this monograph addresses the Ten Commandments and what Dr.Laura and I have observed about those who disregard the Commandments share in common, namely a total absence of commitment to clearly delineated correct priorities in their lives, I decided, “Just go ahead and say what you planned to say!” This is today’s postmodernist society in that world we Christian believers—and other monotheists too—are indeed in (temporarily), but most thankfully, not of. There was also the matter of the mother who was stopped by police for having a full case of beer carefully buckled in by the seat belts on the front passenger seat, but her two infant children in the back not belted in at all. Occasionally in previous decades, I articulated and published parallel observations concerning the human condition, and was as a result criticized for being “intolerant.” It’s not a fellow named R.C.Beck who’s intolerant, no more than a radio talk show hostess who’s intolerant either. Even though many persons are in denial over it, it’s the Holy Scripture of God’s Inerrant Word that’s “intolerant”—by those same persons’ standards. So let the Railing Commence! First railing, paraphrasing Mr.T., = “I pity the” unrepentant/reprobate who demanded a free will to decide what takes precedence over what, and got it}
The Elderly Elder Railing Curmudgeon’s Latest Ranting Critical Observations re. Dr.Laura’s Observations re. Approximately Ten Commandments, and an Accompanying Literary Review: With a Few of “the Usual” Digressions and “Off the Wall” Jonathan Swift Style Suggestions and Modest Proposals .
Please remember that the opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of the PCA, Cornerstone Church, its trustees, staff, members, and friends. Exodus 20:1. “Then God spoke all these words saying,” Exodus 20: 18-19. “And all the people perceived the thunder and the lightning flashes and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood at a distance. “Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen, but let not God speak to us, lest we die.’” (NAS) “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will stand by and be devoted to the one and despise and be against the other. You cannot serve God and mammon [that is, deceitful riches, money, possessions, or what is trusted in]. (Amplified Bible) {“Mammon” is also frequently used as a metaphor for materialism.}
Laura Schlesinger, The Ten Commandments: the Significance Of God’s Laws in Everyday Life, New York, Harper-Collins, 1998. “… my radio program… has been a broadcast … with a format some (have) termed (as) ‘shrink talk’ (but) what I have termed (as) a ‘moral health’ program. I “preach, teach, and nag’ about morals, values, ethics, and principles …” (p.ix) “I have been encouraged by the strong and touching support I have received from the Christian community for my program as well as for my personal religious growth. … It proves that people sincere about their love and awe of God are ultimately of one mind.” … (p.x) “Each day we make innumerable, seemingly minute decisions about things that don’t seem earth-shattering. So what if we broke a promise? Lots of promises are broken, and people get over it and get on with it. So what if we find passion in another bed while we or they are still married? We’re entitled to derive pleasure and self-fulfillment. So what if we are too focused on work, TV, or clubs to spend time with family? No one has the right to tell us what to do. So what if religion is not a big deal in our lives? … “When one adds up all the ‘so-whats,’ one ends up with a life without direction, meaning, purpose, value, integrity, or long-range joy. What many people haven’t learned about the Bible is that it’s filled with wisdom and direction for all ages to elevate our lives above mere, frantic, animal existence to the sublime levels humanity is capable of experiencing.” … (pp.xiii-xiv) “I have always considered myself a rational, scientific, intellectually oriented and independent person. It may seem like an odd leap for someone like me to accept external authority, especially without specific explanations from God on His motivation for each commandment. I have discovered that, although we do gain wisdom from the exercise of analysis and discourse on God’s commandments, we gain character from our decision to obey in spite of our limited human capability to understand.” (p.xxv)
commitment: (4) a promise or pledge to do something New World Dictionary of the American Language.
^ A brief recapitulation of the previous segment in this series. Brief? Yeah, right! The previous installment in this series, “Dr.Laura re. Christian Conduct and Behavior,” involved a rather rambling book review of Dr.Laura: a Mother in America… by Ray McClendon, a Christian clergyman, and submitted for your consideration the thesis that those behavior patterns that she terms as “stupid” in nature, i.e. certain specific behaviors, actions, and attitudes that we serious Christian believers who have been led to function in the thought-mode of what C.L.Williamson, in his discourse on altar calls, identifies as “the Biblical view of truth”—as opposed to postmodernity and anything and everything it represents—would also be characterized as sinful in substance and content. That review used some somewhat subtle Socratic Irony to describe and paraphrase, in reverse order, the Biblical Ten Commandments, and assumed the pretense that the general public has never heard of the Decalogue (which can certainly seem a quite valid assumption in these days of postmodernity), and it also speculated as to how the average expert in psychology would, upon hearing of them, disapprove of them, deplore them, and deprecate them. (Maybe the Socratic Irony in this case was too subtle since we never got any feedback from it.) Quoting and paraphrasing from that article, “What she says re. the topics she addresses is compatible with Biblical Christianity”—even if she has been educated in the secular sector and is affiliated with the persuasion of Orthodox Judaism. Her insights, as she has expressed them in her books and speeches, and on her radio broadcasts, articulate astonishingly Biblical answers to questions raised by believers, seekers, and even “the lost,” although the lost aren’t remotely at all happy with those answers, but then, that’s their problem, and not Dr.Laura’s nor the Bible’s nor the answers’ problem. A couple typical interchanges on a January 2008 Dr.Laura radio broadcast substantiates the unhappiness of that latter group of callers: a single mother phoned re. a problem she had with the two fellows she was currently “dating,” but before she got any further into the nature of her personal quandary, Dr.Laura asked the age of the child, then informed the mother that she, as a mother of a child, should not be “dating” or “seeing” men—until the child was fully grown up and was functioning on his or her own as an adult; “end of discussion!” (This is what I would define as a “So there!” moment.”) Dr.Laura did get around to asking another single mother on that same broadcast if her child had met the various men she had “dated,” and when answered in the affirmative, Dr.Laura lambasted her, and that particular philippic diatribe included the information that this mother was teaching the child that the only way a man ever relates to a woman is to “love her and leave her and forget her,” Twenty-first Century postmodernity rides again! When she addresses “dating” or “seeing someone,” she’s using the terminology in the postmodernist sense: partying, “doing the club scene, “going out dancing at honky-tonks and hot spots (as my ancestors would term it)—although Dr.Laura dances, not that I approve of it, but her son is grown up and deployed in Iraq—, cruising the bars, looking for Mr.Goodbar,” and all the other specious clichés that the “sophisticates” use these days, all of which serves as a preliminary for “intimacy without seriousness” (as one of Judge Judy’s defendants termed it, sex solely for physical pleasure, without commitment, or “zipless” as it’s “fashionably” termed in postmodernist social circles. There is Biblical sanction and mandate for a widower and a widow to marry so that their children might be raised in a “nuclear” two-parent family. Abraham Lincoln’s father and step-mother followed that mandate, as did my own grandmother and my step-grandfather whom my father consistently identified as his father-figure and role-model, “the most honest man I’ve ever known.” My relatives who bear the name of my father’s step-father are my blood family, (and it was interesting to see a family reunion of my step-father’s descendants where he, my father, was the honored historian of his step-ancestors, step-siblings and half-siblings and the family history in general—demonstrating that that’s what family is all about!) It’s the divorced custodial parent and the never-married custodial parent who has freely rejected all other options and chosen to raise a child or children in a one-parent home, even though they never thought of that at the time, while they were “making the baby”; so that parent is on a “double-duty” for eighteen years, and has no time for a social life since he or she has the primary obligation to raise the resulting offspring and everything else goes onto the back burner! As both Dr.Laura and say—almost daily—“If you’re old enough to make a baby, you’re old enough…” to take care of all resulting responsibilities, and that number-one and prioritized as first is to do what is best for the child and nothing less! But they just don’t want to hear about it. Dr.Laura also says that only a grown and unmarried person, a non-parent, a person who is totally self-sufficient through his or her making a living fully compatible with a family’s personal and life-style needs by way of a sufficient income from gainful employment, and has no outstanding debts should date. Those who lack such qualifications—shouldn’t date, or do anything remotely resembling it either. (Just think how many night-clubs and honky-tonks and other idle pleasures would go out of business if that were enforced!) It was indicated previously that in the Greater Youngstown, Ohio, area, and in Western Pennsylvania, WPIT Pittsburgh 730 on the AM dial broadcasts her program from 12:05 p.m. to 2 p.m., weekdays. It’s seldom that we can “get” her program on any radio in our home, so I mostly listen to her if we’re out in the car or truck during those hours, and even then we don’t do too well at hearing it if we’re near any electric wires. (I recall listening to Jerry Falwell and also “Brother Dan and Sister Ann” on WPIT back in the 1970s, and not having such problems with reception—which makes me wonder about the electromagnetic fields we’re being exposed to in this post-modern technological era.) It is interesting to note that our vehicle radios can pull in WPIT in the Holmes County, Ohio, “Amish” tourist area which is much further away from Pittsburgh than our home in the Mahoning Valley is, but that bucolic locale doesn’t have nearly as many electrical lines as we do. This reminds me that I do not advise looking up Dr. Laura on any unauthorized websites on the Internet! She has achieved more sites devoted to hating her than anybody else of current contemporary notoriety! Some people will take up vast amounts of time in order to sit up nights to hate her specifically and intensely, and to use the Internet to say what they have to say. Calling up any such dubious postings of anti-Dr. Laura blogs et.al. could make your computer vulnerable to all sorts of viruses, cookies, spam, trash, or whatever you call it these days—and could lead to your paying out a three-figure dollar amount for your computer’s convalescence in a computer hospital facility. (This writer found in a recent Sherlock Holmes literary biography a listing of a number of web-sites devoted to the study of the famed fictional detective, but one of them turned out to be a disguise for a pornographic website devoted to some deceased porn star with the same last name as the Baker Street celebrity, and when vividly graphic photos of that fellow’s anatomy flashed on the screen, I didn’t panic, thanks to Providence, but deleted it instantly, and then called my wife to run through our computer every junk-purging program we had available to us. There are some really militant reprobates and criminals (redundant word usage) who resent anybody who calls attention to their unique status of reprobation and active evil-doing, and especially the consequences thereof, so that they invent viruses designed to “punish” anybody and everybody who embrace Biblical perspectives and points of view on personal and public morals—or in the Holmes matter, they want to jerk the chain of anybody who reads books. Maybe that website was posted by one of my former students. There is an official Dr. Laura website, DR.LAURA, that I found through Google, and apparently it offers streaming broadcasts of her radio show, available between noon and 3 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, but I think there may be some “subscription” involved. I ain’t into “pod-casts”; according to View Master green-bean “pods” were what the Prodigal Son was feeding to the hogs, and was considering eating. The hogs didn’t want to eat them either. But be careful! The official site is followed by more than a few thousand of “stop Dr.Laura” sites, labeled as “anti-hate” sites, just about as ridiculous a misnomer as can be manufactured. All of which takes me to a related subject re. those who go out of their way to hate Dr. Laura—and to hate monotheistic morals in general. I had mentioned previously that one can see amazing parallels between the woeful tales of Dr. Laura’s clients and the whining mantras of Judge Judy’s litigants. With Judge Judy, about 70% of the time, the plaintiff and/or somebody on the plaintiff’s side has slept (intimately) with the defendant and/or somebody on the defendant’s side at least once and probably multiple situations of pairings on both sides, situations that have usually occurred beyond the parameters of monogamous marriage relationships. (I could state the case somewhat more briefly and explicitly, but if I didn’t euphemize it, the Cornerstone website would be a parking lot tomorrow, and while we’d like to enlarge our parking lot, we cannot do so without jumping through a number of “zoning” hoops first,) Early in 2008, a typical Judge Judy litigant was suing her own daughter because this eighteen-year old had moved out of her mother’s house because she, the daughter, didn’t get along very well with her mother’s live-in boy-friend of the past fourteen years. When asked by Judge Judy why she hadn’t married the boy-friend after divorcing her daughter’s father, the mother replied, “I didn’t want any more commitments.” Parental role-models in these post-modernist days don’t want to be examples of any commitment to their offspring, commitment being so passé and unfulfilling to the “bright young things” of all age-groups in the Twenty-first Century. Please don’t get me going on the Broadway show, Mama Mia in which a modern and sophisticated single mother, who doesn’t know or particularly care which of three possible men is her teenaged daughter’s bio-father, upon learning that her daughter wants to marry her teen “hunk” boyfriend before taking up official cohabitation with him in a mutual housing accommodation and arrangement, laments, “Where did I go wrong?” And from there the rest of the plot goes down hill towards a certain place in a handcart—and condones adultery along the way. The music is by somebody called ABBA—and when some several years ago, I assigned a student a grade penalty for writing “ABBA” along with “Aerosmith” and “Blue Oyster Cult,” all over her English textbooks and notebook, and in indelible ink all over her hands and arms and legs, and had carved these same obscenities onto her desktop, her parents came in saying (“roaring” would be more like it) that I had “over-reacted” in the matter, and they asked me, quite seriously, “Didn’t you do things like that when you were her age?” “No.” (Because if I had done so at that age, either one of my parents would have merely ended my miserable existence—with the nearest and handiest heavy blunt instrument.) Hearing my answer, they left the country for a more “reasonable” homeland (England) where their darling daughter would be far happier, and free to express herself and be herself on her own terms. I can’t make this stuff up! I suppose I could tell lies if I wanted to, but thanks to Providence, I don’t have to. A couple days after Dr. Laura had told the single swinging mothers that they most not “date” as long as any of their offspring are still children, Judge Judy Scheindlin excoriated a crack-cocaine and/or methamphetamine-addicted single mother whose five-year old son had, since his birth, been inflicted with three consecutive and successive live-in boyfriends of his mother, none of whom was the boy’s bio-father. Judge Judy called her, among other things, “dumber than a bucket of rocks!” She has such a wonderful way with words. This defendant was being sued by another single mother, with her own current crop of live-in studs, suing to recover damages done to her apartment’s carpets and walls and plumbing done by the defendant while she and her herd were living with her—and not paying rent. Both postmodernist litigants were totally clueless as to the impropriety and unsuitability of such an environment for their children. A couple days later, a doltish defendant had borrowed $4700 from the plaintiff, the mother of his second child, to buy a used expensive pick-up truck because, “I wanted the truck.” Judge Judy retorted, “When I was a struggling law student, I wanted an air-conditioned three-bedroom apartment with a formal dining room, a library and study, a rec-room, two bathrooms, a Jacuzzi-spa, and a balcony overlooking Central Park, but I had a studio apartment with one room and a bath!” It was obvious from the fellow's doltish facial expression and body language that he couldn’t see the inference here at all! Judge Judy then yelled, “There’s something wrong with you!” Psychologists would protest that such an allegation was not conducive to his having a positive image of himself—and self-esteem too. It’s a matter of priorities, and some of us have been led to seek the correct priorities and to make the right commitments, spiritual and material, while others lead themselves into the priorities of immediate solely-self focused and self-absorbed sensations, aware only of the pleasures of the “flesh,” and how to gratify those pleasures. Worldly persons want nothing less than instant gratification, immediately or sooner. Psychologists call such persons, “sociopaths.” To the next defendant, she screamed, “You’re a fool!” I forget what for, but she was certainly on a roll that day. Far too frequently, I discerned a clear necessity to inform and explain to high school students why and how they should and must specifically determine and identify the important and correct priorities in their (secular) lives in terms of what they must focus on and do, as opposed to certain minor, trivial, and unimportant matters of interest that can and should be “put on the back burner.” That first and foremost list (of primary virtues) included school attendance, getting to school on time, and getting to class on time (thereby indicating to future prospective employers a willingness to report to work and on time); preparation for college and other available educational opportunity after high school; necessary communications skills in reading and writing and speaking; and the work-ethic in general, each of these a necessary survival skill in human society. Then, I went on to identify those specific “back burner” lesser priorities and concerns (the counter-productive vices), of secondary or no importance to anybody’s well-being, as the boy/girl friend; the dead-end go-nowhere after-school job; riding around in cars acting foolishly; loitering (AKA “hangin’ around) shopping malls acting foolishly—and getting into fights in the parking lot (another recent Judge Judy series of case loads); “partying (as it is called) along with other general profligate idle pastimes and vagrancies termed as “hangin’, hangin’ out, or just chillin`” while listening to dubious music; painting graffiti on overpasses and other base depravities, deplorable debaucheries, and general evil-doing; and active un-chastity. Such matters as these can and must remain “on the back burner,” and addressed (if at all) only after everything on the first list has been taken care of thoroughly and completely. (In my study halls, I actually rebuked students for claiming they had no assigned studying to do, and any second such offense warranted a detention—technically a detention for prevarication. “Lying to yourself is still lying.”) This was seen by many in the community which I served as a direct challenge to their value system. (It’s hard to fathom how the absence of values can be defined as a value system.) It didn’t help matters any when I added “taking work home” to that first list. The fact that I took work home was described as “being a poor example” to my students. In response to this, I saw fit to require students to take their books home after serving after-school detentions, without going back to their lockers, and thus being seen by their peers bringing books back to school the following morning. This got termed as a “cruel and unusual punishment.” I allowed as to how it was certainly “cruel,” but by no means “unusual” since I myself had frequently seen students taking books home from school—in other parts of the world—and I said so too, causing even more uproar. (Some would toss their books into the river and pay the resulting fines, rather than be seen outside the school building with books.) Another response to my recommendations and examples involved, “That’s you!” (I’m not sure what that meant, but it sounds suspiciously on the order of what non-believers say, patronizingly, to Christian believers: “Well, if it works for you.”) Also I was told that I should not impose my arbitrary “bourgeois” and middle-class moral code on others—and this most especially was in reference to the idea of getting to school or class or work on time. What experts are currently terming as “the culture of work very hard,” as found in China and Southeast Asia, has been and is foreign to most American students and workers. (Again, my observations and Dr. Laura’s observations do not reflect any official policy of Cornerstone Church or the PCA.) Individual persons as these with such attitudes as these are not remotely “seeking” anything, either material—or spiritual. They’re “lost”—by their own free will. In their view, anything material they do seek and get—must be obtained by cheating, and by no other way; the only commitment they have is cheating. Spiritual concerns are inconsequential—unless it’s expedient and convenient to use and exploit some religious or charitable institution to obtain advantages in garnering material resources, i.e. getting something for nothing. (We’re not denying that there are those unfortunates who certainly do need material assistance, but there’s such a lot of freeloaders who sneak into line with them for the handouts. Detecting welfare cheats has been for many decades a difficult—and troublesome—problem for magisterial authorities, and most of them, as school administrators do, find seeking a solution to be far more troublesome and time-consuming for them than it’s worth; those in oversight over faith-based charities face similar dilemmas of responsibility and accountability, and in their case, we who support their efforts should be charitable when they make occasional faulty judgment calls. I wouldn’t want to be the one making such decisions, either as a civil magistrate or as an overseeing steward of a congregational body of believers, as to whose claims are or aren’t legitimate. As I see it, most government bureaucrats tend to go overboard in one direction, and I fear that as a radical reaction I would tend to go overboard in the other direction—“bah-humbugging” any petitions presented to me. Burnt-out and disillusioned school teachers don’t make very good charity administrators; we’re too cynical—and Calvinistic too.) Another manifestation of such “postmodernist” attitudes towards, and definitions of, commitment would have to be this here new “reality/humor” TV series on the Country Music Television cable network entitled “Redneck Wedding,” a presentation that I, an avowed ethnic disadvantaged Appalachian-American “born south of Route Fourteen” myself (thanks to an act of Congress in 1964 designating me as such), have judged as blatantly offensive to my sensitivities and sensibilities—and I discern it to be occasionally blasphemous too. On this show, couples in all cases have been living together (AKA “shacking up” as Dr. Laura terms it) for varying periods of days, weeks, months, years, or decades, and the bride and groom and their loved-ones are shown arranging for their wedding ceremonies and receptions by trucking in large barrels of beer, getting tattoos on their private parts, giving each other nude photos of themselves as wedding presents (and proudly displaying them at the reception), the bride’s losing her false teeth just before the ceremony, having the bride “given away” by the bride’s rather haggard and tired-looking father who has already done this with his daughter a half dozen times, brides and bridesmaids coming down the aisle dressed in camouflage and/or blue denim and riding a tractor, a horse, or an ATV accompanied by a jackass or a Basset hound as the ringbearer, and having a gay clergyman who recently got ordained while in state prison perform the ceremony, having the wedding and the reception at a flea market “because the Wal-mart’s already booked,” and everybody’s chain-smoking cigarettes and being generally “drunk and disorderly” throughout the proceedings. At the reception, the menu includes “candy corn, pork rinds, corn-bread and pinto beans, and pickled everything.” (Earlier in Redneck history, we served deep-fried breaded steak, pork-chops and chicken at the reception, but it’s been discovered that there are fewer serious injuries when fights break out in postmodernist Redneck events with the softer corn-bread and pinto beans.) Other entertainments include hog huntin’, mud wrestling, and something called mattress surfing which involves riding a mattress towed by an ATV with rope through a recently occupied cow pasture. The “reality” y’all got here is the 21st Century postmodernist attitude toward the sanctity of the covenant of marriage. i.e. what one theologian has termed as “modern American morality,” best articulated by one philosophizing bride in that CMT series who commented that in the case of this, her most recent marriage, that the commitment stated by the phrase “till death do us part” indicated to her that “one of us has gotta die to end this marriage,” implying that, pragmatically speaking in the postmodernist era, murder was significantly less of a legal complication than divorce—and that she knew this, empirically, from practical experience. This mocks the whole concept of a sanctified marriage. As has been stated before, the observations, interpretations, and views expressed in this series in no way officially represent any policies of the PCA or Cornerstone Church and its elders, deacons, members, and friends. Evangelism is directed towards “seekers” as we term them, and it is not we who decide or designate who are “seekers” as opposed to “the lost”; God has already in His wisdom determined that. Even though “the lost” are irreparably irretrievable, they themselves bear the responsibility and culpability for their own willful and conscious decisions to be “lost,” not God. As the Westminster Confession has observed, He “is not the author of evil”; don’t blame Him—even though “lost” philosophers like Robert G. Ingersoll and Bertrand Russell and others have been doing so for a few thousand years, and will continue to do so. It’s their fault and their self-created problem, and they need to “own up to it”—but they won’t—so therefore they demonstrate their situation and status by their conscious and willful disobedience to the Biblical Ten Commandments, and all of the corollaries to those same Commandments. While we believers are enjoined to “be all the more diligent to make certain about His calling and choosing you…” 2ed Peter 1:10 (NAS), or as the KJV states it, “…make your calling and election sure…”, the Holy Spirit graciously offers to us daily reassurances of our (elect) status as believers, and due solely to God’s Grace through His Holy Spirit we choose to notice them. “The lost,” or as I call them “losers”—indicating their own desired and requested free choice in the matter—exercise their perceived freedom of choice not to notice the Spirit’s presence among believers, most especially when we through Grace obey the Ten Commandments—and they really get bent out of shape if we would post and display them publicly. That’s even more annoying to “the lost” than our obeying the Ten Commandments. And it is a sad fact that many professed Christians share with those beyond the pale of any Godly influence an unwillingness to commit themselves fully to God—or anything else either. Total commitment is just not part of the postmodernist culture of handling all matters in terms of immediate physical expediency, and the most immediate expediency always comes down to self-gratification—worship of “the great god Self” which we’ll discuss further in the next segment in mid-April. (That chapter’s already one-third written.) Choosing to hear and heed the Holy Spirit’s call comes up every Friday when Mrs. Beck and I sit on our pastor’s children for a few hours while their mother runs some errands, and while our pastor hides somewhere to put the Sunday sermon together. It seems that every time one, or more usually both, of the one-year old twin boys sees fit to be fed (or calls attention to some other related alimentary need)), I am in the midst of an engrossed and enthralled deep and undistracted study of what Poe’s “Raven” calls, “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,” which in my case might be theology and doctrine, or more likely church history—which can indeed be quite “quaint” at times and rather “forgotten” too—and I gotta make a free and conscious choice in the matter! Do I feed an infant or two, or do I ignore his or their laments and continue my studies—impassive and uninterrupted. My own preference would be the studying, but I feed the kid his bottle or some baby food (yuk!) anyway, putting a bookmark in the book. (The boys like Mrs. Beck’s home-made macaroni, but one insists upon being spoon-fed directly, while the other insists upon eating it from the tray with both hands—and if I give it to him on a spoon, he spits it back out at me. I’m still trying to find some metaphor in this projectile macaroni. There’s also the unique situation when their noses are running: one produces an excellent multi-viscosity 5W40, but the other one produces quick drying shellac! But it’s handy when needing to tell them apart.) Seriously, there is this little fact that we, Mrs. Beck and I, together made a commitment to care for these children for a reasonable number of hours each week. (We’ve felt bad—and unfulfilled—when we’ve been gallivanting around the world and couldn’t be there with these “surrogate great-grandchildren”—especially on Fridays. The pastor has observed that the quality of his sermons suffers when we’re away.) Not everybody views commitment in the same way as we’ve been led to do. We can neither make nor keep promises and obligations on our own, but only through the Providential guidance of the Holy Spirit. We could insist on deciding by ourselves whether to choose to honor promises—or not—on our own. The down-side of that scenario the fact that, if left to our own fallible decision-making capabilities, we’ll consistently and unwaveringly decide to do the wrong thing, and that includes deciding to avoid making any promises to begin with, and if the promise can’t be avoided, there’s always the obvious and viable choice of neglecting to keep it. Many of my own students could work out such freedom-of-choice issues on their own. They faced choices of feeding their own children or smoking a cigarette. No problem! “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette! Smoke, smoke smoke till you smoke yourself to death. Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate that he’s just gonna have to wait, cause I gotta have another cigarette.” A choice between reading and studying and learning assigned information in the textbook, or causing a pregnancy? No problem at all. A choice between fidelity and promiscuity? The Beastie Boys got the answer: “Ya gotta fight! Fer yer right! Ta parrrrrrrrrrty!” Choosing to be a parent or a murderer? It’s obvious—in terms of self-fulfillment and self-identity. Ya just gotta do what’s best for yerself. (We were over in Holmes County recently, and one Amish-owned business enterprise was showing a videotape about Amish lifestyles and attitudes, and the commentator said that the Amish view of “being fulfilled” by the age of 22 was to be baptized in the church, making a living, married, and raising a family. Focused commitment on the earthly level is currently best exemplified by investigation and law enforcement dogs trained to sniff out narcotics and other contraband. They love their jobs! If only humans were inclined to show the same enthusiasm in serving our Creator and each other, how wonderful it would be! (The same standards of work ethics hold true for the Iditarod Alaska sled racing dogs. They can’t believe they’re actually getting paid to do this, and say so all the time. What joy!) During my professional career, whenever I put an “F” as the final yearly grade on a student’s report card, I consoled myself with the knowledge that in each instance, the student made the wrong choices through his or her own free will. Frequently, I found myself writing on Interim Progress Reports to be sent home to be studied by parents that “So-and-so is an idle person, and consorts with idle companions.” That was just about the absolute worstest thing I could say about a student. I knew another teacher for whom the worst thing she could say about a student was to say that this particular student “eats in the kitchen.” She was an Episcopalian.) Summing up so far: postmodernists deny the validity of commitment in virtually the same way that they deny God’s Sovereignty in spite of the objective fact (to us believers) that having been born and granted life involves commitment; having been empowered to accept God’s offer of Eternal Life involves and requires commitment; having a family and loved ones involves commitment; heeding the Ten Commandments requires commitment—no matter how troublesome and annoying it may seem. The trouble is that too many people have chosen to eschew and reject any and all commitment. As a literary and social scholar and critic, I honestly don’t know which aspects of the free-will chosen route of postmodernity is the cause of the disease, and which is the symptom of this disastrous degeneration of humanity into this current moral morass of infidelity , but I do know what the “cure” is—an en masse acceptance of the Holy Spirit’s call to return to the metanarrative of the Bible. (Ironically, “metanarrative” is the term the postmodernists coined to denote the Scripture and what God says through Scripture, and after coining the term, and noticing how the word itself denotes Authority, and their sentiments that their postmodernist world has no place for any authority, they applied—as an afterthought—the word to other so-called “scriptures” of other peoples, i.e. the Koran, the Karma Sutra, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, and various other non Judeo-Christian writings. And again I’ve “digressed”—maybe. And as long as we’re “off” on another digression—again—let me tell y’all what I really think. (Uh-oh.) I was at the dentists’ office a few days ago to replace a filling. Both dentists are former students of Mrs. Beck. The waiting room’s TV was on, a soap-opera was being broadcast, and the TV screen showed two naked people, one gal and one guy, on a sofa under a very thin bedsheet. I asked the receptionist for permission to change the channel. On my way to “C-span,” I encountered another soap opera on another channel with another naked couple in bed under a very thin blanket. I yelled, “There’s nek-ed people everywhere!” This morning (Saturday February 10th), the news included the fact that a mother in Anderson, Indiana, (allegedly) provided for her daughter’s 11th birthday party to her daughter and all her guests copious amounts of beer and marijuana. She’s pleaded “not guilty” to contributing to the delinquency of minors. On this same Saturday, while I was watching NASCAR practice from Daytona Beach (where I partly grew up), SPEED-TV featured an advertisement for a product “guaranteed to get your girl to take her clothes off,” something called a “pajama-gram.” This elderly elder has been devotedly bah-humbugging Valentine Day for nearly 60 years so far—along with Ground Hog Day (unless it’s about sausage, AKA “ground hog”), Mardy Grass, and St. Patrix Day too. Throw Halloween, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day into the equation too. Just another pretext to pick your employer’s pocket every first day of January—double bah, and humbug too! Then too, there’s the advertisements on TV for viagra and its derivatives which provide all sorts of explicit information overload. “Ask your doctor if your heart can stand …” certain matters of concern that decent people wouldn’t be inclined to discuss with anyone, whether acquaintances or total strangers. Medical staffers are already too quick to ask impertinent questions. (When my physician asks me, “How are you?”, I respond, “That’s for me to know and for you to find out. What do you think I pay you for?” ) Personally, I don’t expect such information and entertainment in the Hereafter. I’m not sure, in any specific sense, what the Heavenly media will provide, but just between us, I’ld suggest that the Elect be provided with, among other amenities, streaming audio of Lum and Abner rebroadcasts from my childhood memories of radio entertainment. There was no nudity on Lum and Abner----or adultery or “affairs” although Lum was accused of having one in 1935—a matter of unfortunate confusion during which time, he hid in the barn. In the world of Lum and Abner, every household had a barn to hide in, a much more comfortable accommodation than the doghouse. Later on the same 15-minute sequence, including commercials for “Postum” (do you remember “Mr.Coffee Nerves”?), due to an exacerbation of the misunderstanding, Abner is falsely accused by his wife of having adulterous liaisons with the same woman. The matter was resolved in the next broadcast. In that world, worldly adventuring was innocuous, although the Burma Shave signs, rarely, had some occasional double-entendre word plays. In that world, I was not only forbidden to read Winnie the Pooh—I was forbidden to say it! If Paradise doesn’t provide such restraints and joys, there’s no doubt that even better joys will be available. (I remember when “Ben Gay” had no pejorative associations, and “Peter Pain” always got what was coming to him. And the villains’ mantra of “Curses! Foiled again!” And “again” is rhymed with “gain.”) The above was intended to summarize—briefly—Dr.Laura’s views and also to be a segue into the specific review of Dr.Laura’s book on the Ten Commandments, and as usual, it “got carried away” by examples of how postmodernity sees itself as serving as an essential counterpoint to the antiquated “metanarrative” of Biblical truth—AKA just plain advocating evil. I knew we were in trouble when I got carried away over Mama Mia! My wife has been warning friends not to get me going over it for the past couple years or so. So we’ll let y-all-uns mull over this for a couple months, during which I will ponder further over what Dr.Laura has to say about Exodus 20: 2-7—while we’re sitting on the balcony of our stateroom of Star Princess cruising the Antarctic between visits to various penguin colonies. In early spring we’ll be visiting the barrier islands of Virginia and the Eastern Sound and estuaries of North Carolina through the auspices of Elderhostel, and then in mid April, I hope to submit to the Cornerstone webmaster further musings from Dr.Laura and myself re. the first few Commandments. Hopefully, this writer will be enabled to refrain from asking the younger penguins, “Why aren’t you in school?”—in Spanish—as he’s been wont to do in earlier travels in Latin America. But the penguins should be warned in advance that the Becks’ most recent exotic foreign travels were in Italy, and if any penguin dares to approach me trying to sell me a rosary, a crucifix, a wristwatch, postcards, hologram pictures of Jesus’ face that look astonishingly like NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon, head scarves, photos of a pope, or pornographic neckties that would make a blind gynecologist blush—these being products vended throughout Italy—I will personally present that penguin to the ship’s head chef to be returned to me at dinner—roasted and stuffed with breadfruit dressing. Tolerance of local cultural customs can only go so far. These alarming final couple paragraphs indicate that this writer would certainly like to get some feedback from these observations.
For comments, you may contact Mr. Beck via this address: webmaster@cornerstonepch.org |