Good and evil

Our daughter has been getting into flipping light switches the last week or so. She can carry her chair to a switch, stand on it, and flip the switches. And she loves it!

A couple of weeks ago, we had an enormous fan installed in our ceiling, and for various reasons we don't want Evadel to turn it on. So now there's a switch plate with three switches, and she is not allowed to flip any of those switches. We had to take her around the house last night and show her all the switches she could flip, and then we reminded her of the one set of switches she can't flip.

It was a sad reminder of the futility of prohibitions dating all the way back to the first prohibition. It felt very formulaic: "You are free to flip any of the switches in the house, but you must not flip the switch of the knowledge of good and evil . . ."

Concurrent prognostication

For a while, I've had a distaste for the media's micromeddling in the state of the economy. They do influence the economy by trying to buoy confidence, but that prevents cause and effect from providing true consequence for policies and activities. (The same goes for the so-called bailouts.)

I finally figured out what troubles me about this. It's the practice of "concurrent prognostication." Journalists, pop economists, and politicians are all trying to foretell the future so they can manipulate something today so that the future will fit their vision so they can be heroes. Okay, maybe that last part is a little too dramatic. But they are afraid to let the world/economy/history/culture breathe. They put everything into understanding in the present what normally takes years or decades to discover. And when they intervene based on that hasty knowledge, I think it compounds the negative effects they were trying to avoid.

I'm not sure what the best fix is. In such an integrated world, it is probably smart to take steps to prevent collapses. Unfortunately, it seems we waited til we stepped just over the edge to start considering ideas to keep us away from the precipice.

Love and (versus) justice

The two most talked about traits of God these days are love and justice. Or love versus justice. This most often crops up in the bipolar discussion of whether God will save everyone in the end or whether he will punish some endlessly. So religious pundits call out their reasons for one or the other understanding of God.

I follow the Hebrew understanding that they are part of an integrated whole. But does one spring from the other? If so, I can certainly see justice springing out of love—a desire for the right treatment of those around me because I love them. But in no way do I see love springing out of justice. It just wouldn't happen. So to those who claim that at the most fundamental level God is just—more so than loving—I would encourage them to consider whether the kind of love that God displays toward his creation could ever originate from their conception of his justice.

In the end, God may punish certain communities endlessly. My proposal that God is love first does not negate the fact that he could bring retribution. But we need to (lovingly) quash logical fallacies before they twist our thinking further.