Raising 21st Century Children

So the conversation in the car yesterday with my 6-year-old...

L: Mama, I wish my brain was a computer, then I would know everything.

Me: (after laughing) Are you really sure that computers know everything?

L: Yes! If you don't know something, you just put it in the computer, and the computer answers it for you!

Me: Uh-oh.

Very Old Fashioned Feminism

Reading Chesterton seems to be an inspiration to blog. Yesterday, reading a few more essays, I came across some of his statements on Victorianism and feminism which were extremely enlightening. Earlier this year I read a wonderful book, The Feminization of American Culture, by Ann Douglas, where she showed that 20th century feminism came straight out of Victorian sentimentalism. Chesterton clearly agrees with her, so now I know that she's right:

"This humourless hammering on one note is like the worst Victorian fads; Temperance or Feminism. It is especially like that very old-fashioned Feminism that hated to be feminine....It means that women dress like men; not that men dress like women. Now that is sheer stark, stale, dead Victorianism. That is the only original Woman's Rights Woman, who deliberately made herself hideous with bloomers and goggles." [emphasis mine].

Chesterton, himself, was the child of Victorians, and was born towards the very end of Queen Victoria's reign, so he saw what he was talking about. If you're saying to yourself, now that doesn't sound much like Victorianism to me--even by his adult years the definition of Victorianism had warped. Check this out:

"While the world has been talking about removing Victorian taboos, I have been resolved from the first to remove that one Victorian taboo; which really was a senseless and strangling taboo; the taboo on the topic of real religion, and its real and inevitable place in practical life. Most of the things the Moderns call Victorian taboos are about as Victorian as the Ten Commandments or the maxims of Confucius. But this really was Victorian, in the sense of having arisen recently in a vulgar, commercial and cowardly social system. It is not the notion that it is right or wrong to be a Moslem; it is the notion that it cannot really matter even to a Moslem that he is a Moslem. What is totally intolerable is the idea that everybody must pretend, for the sake of peace and decorum, that moral inspiration only comes from secular things...and cannot possibly come from spiritual things..." [emphasis his].

It looks as though as far as our age despises and scorns Victorianism, we are despising and scorning ourselves.

Chesterton for President

I had a rare find this weekend--Borders in town is going out of business, and I found a compilation of G.K. Chesterton's essays that I hadn't read yet! This one is called The Well and the Shallows and it is one of the last things he wrote, just before World War II. I know the guy was a journalist, not a politician, but I still would have voted for him--if I ever could have. Here's some of the gems:

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent those mistakes from being corrected."

"The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school."

"Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion."

Good News in the Middle East

So if Egypt and Tunisia sound like the last place you want to be, check out this that happened this past week. Of course, it is barely mentioned on major news networks. Southern Sudan is nearly entirely Christian, while the north is predominantly Muslim.

Thought for the Day

What worries me is that smart people can get smarter with the internet, ‘cause they can tell reliable sites from those that are not. But for the dumb people… I think the internet is just making them dumber and dumber.

--Brian Regan

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

So I took my Segundus on a rare trip to McDonald's today to bring lunch to Papa at work. I haven't ordered a Happy Meal in a while and when I did they offered "would you like milk or juice with that?" What? "Um, do you have Coke?" I asked. They did, and I also ordered a nice, big burger meal for Papa as a treat.

When I got my receipt I realized that I had to pay $1 extra to get a Coke with the kids' Happy Meal, whereas the adult combo meal came with a Coke! Hmmm...now if you want to be healthy, by all means, be healthy; but what's the deal with letting adults have a Coke and forcing the kids to have milk or juice? I think McDonald's should just switch everybody to milk or juice and see how long it takes for the adults to have a fit--when they do, the management should just stand back and ask them how they think the kids feel.

I go to McDonald's for fun, certainly not to be healthy, but what exactly is fun about milk or juice?

The End of Hope

My husband was listening to some church chants the other day and one line in the chant struck me, "Our God alone is great." Recent materialist atheists have tried to insist that God is Not Great, which makes you wonder, with a title like that, why they're atheists at all.

Anyway, along with Christopher Hitchens' book, there is also Sam Harris and his presumptuous book title, The End of Faith. Now although Sam Harris likes to pretend he's a materialistic scientist, his book is actually quite full of superstition and Buddhism. The last chapter, in fact, argues that Buddhism is somehow a true materialist religion (if that were possible). Now I have known some real materialistic scientists in my day, and their reasoning is marginally more logical than Harris'. One professor I had actually believed that all scientists should be agnostics; as if the scientific method should govern your whole life if you are a scientist (scary the implications that might have for childraising)! However, if the material world is all we see, and there is no God, or possibly no great one, than why continue to function as human beings at all? The end of faith inevitably leads to the end of hope.

Hope is only possible in a universe with a good God. It is not possible in a universe with no god, and it is not possible in a universe with an evil or capricious god. To trust that any action we do could possibly be of any value to any other human somewhere, is to function on the principle that God is Great. When this is seen through the light of the Incarnation, God's goodness and greatness are staggering. Words fail me, but a friend of mine wrote this when reflecting on an insignificant colony of ants:

We could say He cares nothing for our pain. We could say He is not good. We could say we don't understand why the sky isn't all rainbows and why the common cold exists. But we would be fools. And somehow, He would still like us.

How much do I care for these ants? I think I care. I'll stop to watch their wars. I'll buy my children documentaries--insect tributes. I won't crush them when I can help it.

But, if given the chance, would I be willing to become one of them? Would I be willing for them to drag me to the place of execution, taunt me, mock me, ridicule the gift I offered, a gift entirely beyond their comprehension? Would I be willing for the earwig, executed beside me, to add his insults to those of the ants? Would I be willing to die?

Hell no. Never. I have more self-regard than God does. I have less love for the characters beneath me.

--N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl


Happy Advent.