Frozen Toothpaste

And now, the immortal words that began two of the five books in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quintilogy. In case you were wondering they’re The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever.

For the Bible Tells Me So, a recent documentary by Daniel Karslake is an interesting beast. Through at least the last twenty minutes, my eyes were wet and my nose was running. And though that’s surely a sign of something that’s emotionally resonant, I’m not without reservation in recommending it.

After the obligatory footage of traditional views of homosexuality, the film introduces a number of people. People who are easily understood as the ones we’ll soon find out are gay. There’s Gene Robinson, the man who has become the Anglican church’s first openly gay bishop. There’s Jake Reitan, who was raised in a Lutheran home. And Chrissy Gephardt — the daughter of Dick Gephardt, who was raised Catholic as per her mother’s parents wishes. And there’s Tonia Poteat whose parents are both ministers — if their faith was made clear I’ve forgotten it.

All of this goes through the typical patterns of denial, grief, acceptance, and love. And as I said earlier that did make me quite emotional even if it was a bit schmaltzy. And I enjoyed the lesson in liberal Bible scholarship that the film’s bank of scholars and theologians offer in a gentle and friendly way.

But at some points the film overextends this gentle friendly discussion of liberal Christianity and love and gets so preachy as to be off-putting. The first example is a clip — among the literally hundreds of clips from everywhere used in the film — from The West Wing. Despite being a fan of that show, Aaron Sorkin’s smug dialogue is hardly gentle. A fictional President Bartlett berating what has to be seen as a fictional Dr. Laura about the other wacky things the Bible says aside from Leviticus 18:22 — the clip’s on YouTube — is not exactly a natural fit with the detached gentleness that gave me such high hopes for the film.

This sin would be completely forgiven, did the film not then do the same thing again. Dropped in the middle of the otherwise live-action film is friendly cartoon in the style reminiscent of of The Fairly OddParents and narrated by that deep, in-every-cartoon voice of Don LaFontaine. It’s purpose: to answer the question “Is homosexuality a choice?” (The clunker of a clip is also on YouTube.) Though the point may need to be made in the film — a proposition I would tend to doubt — the way it’s made disrupts the whole flow of the film.

Nor does it help that the narrator gives a stern talking-to to an ignorant straight boy named “Christian,” who is flanked by two hip-looking and knowledgeable gay people. The whole thing, aside from feeling deeply out of place, can be easily interpreted as condescending.

And that sin reduces to the film to the one thing it didn’t need to do: comfort those already on the “right” side of the issue. To say that those ignorant people — who don’t know that Sodom and Gomorrah, as the film ably points out, probably had nothing to do with homosexuality — are really uneducated and need to be smartened up and rehabilitated.

One of the films many intelligent talking heads made the point perhaps as well as I can. The Right Reverend Richard Holloway warns that we should be careful about being “prejudiced against the prejudiced.” And if the film — and these segments in particular — are guilty of one sin it’s that they have the distinct feeling of being just that.

There’s certainly value a film that encourages those on the right side of any fight to keep fighting. My hope for For the Bible Tells Me So — and it’s stated goal — was that it could do more than that, that it might sway people who condemn homosexuality to if not change, at least think critically about their views. Having watched the film, I think it could do that, but has handicapped itself unnecessarily. Surely those who agree with the film’s message of love and liberal Christianity will be moved, but I fear that those who disagree may bristle at a few of the film’s rather ham-handed and strident bits. Certainly For the Bible Tells Me So is a good and perhaps necessary film, but I fear it’s not a great one.

This last Monday, this country celebrated — to the extent that it celebrates any federal holiday — Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. In honor of the occasion, the New York Times ran an interesting essay by Sarah Vowell that I couldn’t help but agree with.

Here’s what Dr. King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

Go ahead and re-read that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

The Bible is a big long book and Lord knows within its many mansions of eccentricity finding justification for literal and figurative witch hunts is as simple as pretending “enhanced investigation technique” is not a synonym for torture. I happen to be with Dr. King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount’s call for love to be at the heart of Christian behavior, and one of us got a Ph.D in systematic theology.

When you look around at the world, it’s easy to be angry. There are socio-political problems all over: Darfur, Myanmar, Iraq, China, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Somalia… the list could go on and on. There are also the scourges of poverty and hunger that never seem to leave us. And the more mundane but pervasive problems of theft, violence, and murder. And this is not even to mention the lower-key but no less troubling problems of racism, (hetero-)sexism, ageism, religious intolerance, general carelessness, ignorance, and outright selfishness. In short, “man’s inhumanity to man.”

And though I don’t think anger at these things is bad — after all, these are ugly things — I’m not really convinced it’s wise to spend your life angry at forces you cannot control. Any single man or woman, despite their dedication, power, and time available, cannot end any single force listed above. Even the American president — arguably the most powerful man in the world — requires a large bureaucracy and a number of allies to change anything in a noticeable way.

This is not to say that you cannot work to change things on a small scale. You can, for example, share your conviction that the rest of the world must act to end the conflict in Darfur. If you share this widely and well, you’ll probably convince at least a few others of that fact. But if you set out with the impression that you alone will end the conflict, you’ll only end up disappointed.

One of my favorite reminders of this is the Serenity Prayer. Regardless of how you feel about the Christian God, the use of the prayer by Alcoholics Anonymous, or the controversy over it’s authorship, I think everyone can learn something from it. The version I commonly hear says:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Interestingly, Wikipedia cites the original version as follows:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

I think there’s a subtle and important difference between the two, but both are cogent explanations of the way one should act in the face of seemingly insurmountable problems. Surely other people, religious or not, have said the same thing, but if they ever said it with greater brevity or beauty, I’ve not seen it.

One could rightly critique both versions of the prayer for not being completely clear about what distinguishes between “things I cannot change” and “things I can.” That would be “things that cannot be changed” and “things that should be changed” if you use the second version. I think that “things that should be changed” is a more useful idea on this account, though it is also less clear about the distinction between what one should and should not get angry and worked up about.

Certainly, you alone cannot end racism, but it’s a problem that should change, and one you can work on. I would find it impossible to defend the idea that you should permit it. Parents shouldn’t let their kids be (overtly) racists, friends shouldn’t let friends be racists, and maybe strangers shouldn’t let other strangers be racists. But trying to end overt racism is not going to immediately end racism everywhere, and maybe racism will still remain just under the surface. But you must keep trying to change the things you can.

I think there’s a troubling possibly, after hearing this prayer, that one could begin to accept all behaviors. After all, the behaviors of others are necessarily beyond my control. But by expressing a conviction that certain behaviors should not be tolerated, I can influence how some act. Only those who will let my opinions influence their behavior will change — but I’d be changing the things I can.

You alone will not change the world, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to change what you can. That is the valuable reminder of the Serenity Prayer.

Today’s “Other People’s Worlds” is about the age-old question of belief versus atheism. It’s also a rather oddly cited quote, for which I apologize. It comes from the philosopher William James’s “The Will to Believe,” one of the most famous Christian apologetics. In it, James argues that belief (in God) is a choice that one must make, and by equating agnosticism with atheism, he says there are essentially two choices. As an apologist, James argued in favor of belief.

However, in this passage, James is quoting Fitz James Stephen who talks about the religious choices that underpin a person’s life. (I have taken some liberties with the formatting.)

I began by a reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation from him.

“What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world? … These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them.

“…In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark. … If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril.

“If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him.

“We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one.

“What must we do? ’ Be strong and of a good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. … If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.”