The problem I see with current transitioning rhetoric

I have no idea how I got here, but somehow this morning I ended up reading a story in the Atlantic by Jesse Singal entitled When Children Say They're Transgender. I actually didn't read all of it. It's a very long article. But what I did read resonated with me and the questions about this issue that have been bubbling in my head.

When a person says they feel like they're not the gender they were born as, how do they know? Especially if they're a teenager and things are in flux. What I've been hearing lately is basically, whatever sex they feel like they are, that's what they are. That sounds like a recipe for disaster for me. Feelings change, but things like gender reassignment surgery are a lot more permanent. Some changes cannot be undone.

I was heartened to learn that there are many reputable organizations that don't advocate for jumping right into hormone therapy or surgery. But there is definitely an element out there that not only seems to advocate for that, but definitely know how to use their words to attack anyone who says different. I get the fact that there's a reaction because trans people have had a hard time getting people to believe that gender dysphoria is a thing, and having to deal with all the other junk that gets thrown at people that aren't heteronormative. But in the end, they may be causing more harm than good.

Outrage and culture wars

I decided to google "culture of outrage" and see what I found. I actually found more than I bargained for. It's Time for an Outrage Armistice on Slate went past the outrage itself and hit most of the political landmarks. I think all the things it said were correct. I feel like the only shortcoming was what it didn't say. It described Woke culture and listed racism as their main issue. I would say that the issue is bigger than just racism. It also has to do with sex and gender, as the #metoo movement illustrated.

But the point is, if we continue in outrage and tribalism, demonizing each other and talking past each other and never trying to listen, we are headed to a really bad place as a nation. Really. Bad.

I was looking for posts that had to do with living a meaningful life. I found this one: 9 Things to Start Doing To Live a Purposeful Life. I found some others too, but all of these seem to be pretty good.

Moral Education

I went looking to see where we are as a nation in terms of educating our students on morality. I came across this article in the Atlantic by Paul Barnwell entitled Students' Broken Moral Compasses. The tab shows Why Don't Schools Teach Children Morality and Empathy?

How did I get here? I'm seeing that unity is important to me. And social harmony. How do we get along together? And I am realizing that we need to have a common ethical and moral framework to get there.

I've been floating around this topic before. The article hit some points that I've discussed recently. Here's one:

A reluctance to teach about religions and value systems is coinciding with a steady decline of teen involvement in formal religious activity...And while attending church is only one way young people may begin to establish a moral identity, schools don’t seem to be picking up the slack. 

Here's another:

Narcissism is on the rise, especially in the Western world, as more teens concur with the statement: “I am an extraordinary person.” If empathy is crucial to developing a moral identity, then this trend should be troubling to parents and educators who hope that students foster the ability to see the world through others’s eyes.

So what I'm understanding is that young people aren't learning morality or empathy in school, and most aren't getting it at church either. So are they getting it at all?

What you lose

So I was looking to alternatives to Christian community, and I found this article by Kristi Harrison titled 4 Specific Things You Lose When You Leave Christianity. Wow, this is a great article. I went through the comments, and it looked like many people couldn't relate to it, but I can almost 100%.

Spanish Words of the Day: Spanish slang and vulgarity

One of my friends got a Facebook post that came from Canal Teleport: Frases Mexicanas traducidas al Inglés... Literal. This post embarrassed me, because I went through the first four, and I didn't understand any of them. And then I took the time to go through them, but now I think I've forgotten them again. So this time I'm going to put it all here.

Ya te cargó el payaso. Literally, it translates to the clown has carried you. Hey, I do remember this one. It had to do with rodeo. If you aren't doing well against the bull, the clown comes out to distract the bull. If the clown has to carry you out of the ring, that means you're basically done, you failed.

Me lleva la verga. Literally, it means the dick takes me. But verga can mean different things in different contexts. In this particular context, it means a person is fucked or pissed off.

A huevo. The site translated this as to egg. Huevo does mean egg, but it is also used as slang as balls or testicles. But in this context it is an affirmation, like simón or hell yeah.

Me caga. The site hilariously translated this to it shits on me. So cagar does mean to shit, and this does kind of capture the right tone, but not quite. It means something more like, it really pisses me off.

Qué pedo. Pedo means fart, but in this context is means something like what's up, or what's your problem.

Te va a llevar la chingada. Literally, the fucked will take you, but it's more like saying I'm fucked or screwed or in a world of hurt.

God is NOT (all) good

When I went to college, I took a philosophy class. We spent time talking about the Philosophy of God. One of the things we learned is that God is characterized as being all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, or all-PKG for short. I was somewhat taken aback by this. In church, we were taught something similar, but not the same. We were taught that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. There was overlap in two of the big three, but instead of God being everywhere, now God was all good.

The thing that bothered me about this is to me that seemed terribly subjective. Obviously we can't measure anything that has omni in front of it, but we have developed ways to measure power, and to estimate intelligence. But goodness isn't something that can be measured. I think collectively we have a similar idea of what it means to be good, but no one person's definition is the same as anyone else's.

Of course, the bible talks about God being good. As a child, we used to sing a song titled, "God is so good", and this phrase was about 90% of the song. Now as an adult, I realize that we basically measure goodness by how we treat each other. So by saying God is all-good, we are basically saying that God has man's interests at heart at all times.

I've been reading American Church History. Around the time of the Enlightenment, the doctrine of election, which stemmed from Calvinism, began to fall out of fashion because it made God seem unfair. It made it seem like God was not good. And I've read so many accounts where people lost their faith because they got to the point where God didn't seem good to them anymore. When they stopped believing that God was good, they stopped believing that there is a God.

I definitely understand this from the Jewish point of view. In Judaism, God isn't just God, he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He chose the Hebrew people as his own. They belong to him, and he belongs to them. So it makes sense to me that they would be disillusioned after the Holocaust.

But God is NOT good. That is, God doesn't always have man's interests in heart. He has has own. God is looking first and foremost to please himself, not us. God does not play by our rulebook. By virtue of being our creator, he can also destroy us with a thought. If he wanted to do it, then it would be good by his definition, because it would please him. But from our perspective, it would not be good.

So it actually is a true statement to say that God is all-good, but it depends on whose definition of good we're talking about.