Cara

I’m writing this blog because it’s a rock in my shoe. It’s a pebble, knocking around my brain and leaving me unable to focus on anything else. You see, I just finished a book called Pure, by Terra ElanMcVoy. When I first saw the bright yellow cover with the big symbolic daisy on the front I was skeptical. By the time I finished reading the back cover I knew I was going to leave it on the shelf. The teaser was about a group of five young high school girls, all with big, blingy purity rings, and the deep, heartfelt, syrupy promises they made to each other and to god. Naturally, the central conflict in the book revolves around the challenge to this promise represented by one girl’s decision to date. Every other book I’ve ever read about these kinds of promises has been too preachy to bear. I never went in for purity rings, even when I was a Christian. I put the book back.

Ten minutes later I pulled it off the shelf again. Thirty minutes later I left the library with it in hand. I finished the book just over an hour ago.

SPOILER ALERT.

THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION REVEALS THE MAJOR PLOT POINTS OF THE BOOK.

It wasn’t what I expected. The main conflict wasn’t over dating, or even some reckless sexual decision made by the token “bad girl.” It was the thoughtful decision of a supporting character which threw the delicate world of these high school girls in peril. After discussing it for weeks, Cara and her long-term boyfriend, Michael, decide to have sex. It a safe, consensual act; an act that only brings them closer as a couple. But it involves Cara breaking her promise to abstain from sex until marriage, symbolized by the purity ring her brother presented to her years ago.

One of her friends shuns her, unable to condone even friendship with a girl who has “broken her vow.” The friendship group splinters. Most tragically, one of the girls tells a youth group leader, who in turn tells her parents. Her eldest brother, the one who presented her with the purity ring, is “crushed.” Together he and her other two brothers smash up Michael’s car with baseball bats, and spray-paint a threat to “castrate him like a horse.” Cara’s parents announce that she has broken their trust and until further notice is under complete lockdown. She can only go to school and back home. She may not use the telephone, her cell phone is confiscated, and her computer privileges are terminated. She is also forbidden to see Michael again.

As with most star-crossed lovers, things end badly between Cara and Michael. Michael, who is also a young teenager, is too scared to fight for Cara in the face of property destruction and physical threats from three older guys known for physically punishing people who get on their bad side. Cara is disappointed in Michael for not trying harder to reach out to her in the aftermath of her parent’s judgment. Their relationship, one which only days ago had held naïvely sincere promises of marriage, effectively fizzles out.

The story ultimately isn’t about Cara and Michael. It’s about the girls. It’s about the meaning of purity, and the significance of the promises we make to ourselves, to one another, and to god. It is also about how people grow and change, and how occasionally their promises must change with them. The girls are reunited, and ultimately decide that their promises about their bodies are separate from their commitment as friends.

The story is refreshingly nuanced and ends beautifully, but I can’t appreciate it because all I can think is “What about Michael?”

Michael isn’t a man. He’s a kid, a kid who loved a girl and who dared to express that love physically. Having been threatened with violence, and stripped of any opportunity to see his love again (he goes to a different school), it’s not surprising he fades out of the picture. You can’t really blame him. They’re too young to marry, too young to run away, there’s nothing to be done. Cara’s brothers and parents effectively accomplished their goal of separating them, what I can’t understand is why?

Why was it so important that Cara never see Michael again? Why was it so heartbreaking/enraging/disappointing to her brothers and parents that Cara chose to have sex? What do they hope to accomplish by removing their daughter from a loving, supportive relationship? What are they so afraid of?

When I was younger the answers to these questions revolved around disease, pregnancy, the innate sexual immorality of men, and abortion; but now, with my knowledge of fluid bonding, birth control, and feminism those reasons don’t cut it anymore, and the whole story surrounding the early termination of what was a beautiful first love seems brutal, unnecessary, and sad. I suppose this story really hits home because I know it isn’t “just fiction.” I know Cara in in real life. She is a grandmother, an acquaintance, and a childhood friend. I know that in at least one case, she never found another Michael, just cheep imitations who were strong enough to hold her, but never loved her quite as well.

♦♦♦

There’s a moment in the book where the narrating character is talking with Cara about the girl who shunned her. Cara displays a surprising level of insight:

“She’s still mad at you, though.”

“Well, she probably should be.” This takes me by surprise, and Cara sees it. “I did something she thinks isn’t just, you know, bad, but is totally immoral and against God,” she explains. “Totally unforgiveable.

“But nothing is—”

She shakes her head. “That’s according to you and me. But to my brothers in their way, to Morgan in hers, to a lot of other people, it’s not. They’ve got their rules—whatever they are. They need them. And even though I’ve seen it differently, I can’t necessarily ask them to change their own worldview. The way that makes things work for them.”

This was the first time in the story when I felt compelled to have any sympathy for Cara’s brothers, for her parents, and for Morgan, the friend who shunned her. Perhaps some people—people like Cara’s brothers, parents, and ex-friend—need absolute worldviews to make sense of the world, even if the only “absolute” is that in this moment, they are right. Perhaps for some people, to be stripped of certainty is to be stripped of the ability to function. Perhaps their minds protect them from complete world-collapse by resisting certain ideas, and this is okay. Is thinking of them this way an exercise is empathy, arrogance, or hopelessness? On some level, am I this way too?

Pure created a lot of feelings for me which I’m not sure I can wrap up into a neat conclusion:

I’m angry at how many young men and women have been hurt by (to my mind) misguided parents and guardians who do not trust them to make important decisions about their own bodies (body shame, slut shame, and the manhood myth take many forms).

I’m remembering my own Cara moment—much less tragic, since I was twenty at the time and there was really nothing my parents could do but express disappointment.

I’m intrigued by the suggestion in the book that for devoutly Christian girls, prayer and Bible study were unable to provide clear-cut answers about sexual purity.

I’m recalling a time when my school’s sex education furnished me with negative, fearful notions about men, which despite great progress, continue to haunt my marriage.

I’m thinking about the kind of parent I want to be one day, and what I will teach my own children about love.♦

“There is a God”: My Disappointing Introduction to Antony Flew

I recently finished reading There is a God by Antony Flew (HarperOne, 2007), at the suggestion of my dad. I don’t usually read books in defense of god because I find that they tend to rehash the same arguments, and I find them unconvincing each time. But this book by Antony Flew was supposed to be different. Flew, who passed away in 2010 at the age of eighty-seven, was not an apologist, or even a Christian for most of his life. He made his career as an atheist philosopher, wrote several books and essays in defense of rationalism, and even engaged in public debate with theists on a number of occasions.

His notable ideas include “No True Scotsman,” the term he coined for the ad hoc logical fallacy. He also coined the term “death by a thousand qualifications,” a phrase drawn from a section of his essay, Theology and Falsification (1950), commonly known as “the parable of the gardener.” In this parable, Flew describes a claim that must be qualified so many times to guard against contrary evidence, that it entirely loses its original meaning.

But after more than a half-century of dedicated rationalist advocacy, Flew reversed his position, declaring that he had become a deist. There is a God: How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind was published three years later drawing bewilderment, frustration, and even vitriol from prominent atheists, and smug, almost giddy delight from Christian apologists. (Christianity received a couple unsupported shout-outs throughout the book, which frankly, came across as pandering to a group he explicitly failed to join with his 2004 declaration, but which was all too willing to defend him from newly made enemies in the rationalist camp.)

When my dad suggested the book it was clear to me that it would not be an ordinary trip down the catalogue of apologist mainstays. I borrowed it at once and finished it in three days. I was disappointed.

Flew drew a lot of criticism for what some termed a Pascalian death-bed hedge bet. Some people even went so far as to suggest his reversal was the result of his declining state of mind (Flew eventually passed away from dementia), or that the book was the fruit of his co-author’s efforts to take advantage of him. All of these accusations seem a bit too easy to me. It is a convenient bit of rhetoric, when the elderly leader of a movement takes leave of his role, to claim he has also taken leave of his senses. If nothing else, these claims were made by people who did not have access to any special knowledge of Mr. Flew’s mental health, and frankly, are often delivered in such poor taste as to make me question their motive: cool analysis of a shocking situation, or the emotional lashing-out of spurned admirers.

I am too young, both in years and to rationalist philosophy, to have developed an attachment to Antony Flew’s previous body of work. My reasons for being disappointed with his arguments for god are simple: they aren’t very good.

The book itself is little more than a trip down memory lane wherein he repents of his former works, some musings on the burden of proof, a rehashing of the fine-tuning argument, and a long-winded reminder that science has not yet discovered what preceded the big bang and the question of “first causes” remains as relevant today as it was in the days of Aquinas. He takes the time to contextualize the question of god’s existence as a philosophical one, claiming that it is a question beyond scientific answer, but his philosophical argument for god’s existence is lackluster at best.

On the Limits of Science

Antony Flew is not the first person to assert that the question of god’s existence is unanswerable by science. This is one point on which I have yet to form a comprehensive opinion. On hand, the gods posited by theists are mystical entities, outside of and beyond the laws of nature. Given that science is the process by which nature is observed and described, theist gods definitionally falls outside of its purview. Similarly, one might argue that because god exists outside the universe, and science has not yet developed a method of seeing “beyond the universe” (whatever that may mean), the realm of god is thus beyond science. The boundaries of the universe are impenetrable from the inside. Another argument asserts that god affects the universe on a spiritual plane, not on the physical plane, and thus the impact of god’s intervention cannot be scientifically measured.

On the other hand, if by ‘god’ we mean not a trans-cosmic personality, but the “first cause,” or the original spark which made the universe bang into existence, scientific inquiry could yet lift the veil on the beginning of time. What we find there might be another natural system, or an intelligence, or a paradox. It may provide the final answer or simply introduce a new set of questions. It is difficult to imagine an ultimate beginning which does not beg further explanation.

Whatever we find before time, I believe it will demand our respect but be no more deserving of our worship or servitude than the earth, the laws of physics or the rainclouds.

On Fine Tuning

Many other people have written more clearly and comprehensively on the challenges to the fine-tuning argument than I wish to at this time. I’ll link some of their work below. To me, however, the most immediately compelling argument against an intelligently fine-tuned universe is a story my friend Jodi told me to explain why animals seem to suit their environments:

“Imagine a sentient puddle,” she said. “Stay with me…imagine that after a rainstorm there is a puddle in a pothole that for reasons unimportant to this story has achieved sentience. The puddle looks at its pothole and says, “Wow, this pothole is perfect! Every crack, every crevice accommodates my shape perfectly! What are the chances that I just happen to fit here? Why, it must have been designed just for me!”

The puddle thinks it exists apart from the pothole, and that the only way it could fit is if the pothole were designed for it. But we know it was the puddle which was made by the pothole. It’s shape is defined by the shape of the pothole. Likewise, animals, over millions of years, are defined by their environment. Nature is not suited to life, life is suited to nature, or it ceases to be.

It is easy for me to extend this argument to the universe. However improbable a life-sustaining universe may be (and sure, it is quite improbable), it logically follows that the life which thrives in the universe is that which is best suited to the conditions of the universe, or else it would cease to be (if it ever were at all). It is not the universe which is made for us, but we who were made by the universe.

I also wonder, though I’m no scientist, if life as we understand it is necessarily the only variety which could have existed. Perhaps a universe with different rules, while entirely precluding life and a world like ours, would hone natural wonders of its own.

More on Fine-Tuning

• Counter-apologetics from Iron Chariots Wiki
• The Many Problems of the Fine-Tuning Argument by Francois Tremblay
• Problems with Fine Tuning by Jonathan MS Pearce

On the Sense of the Order of the Universe

Attendant to the fine-tuning argument is the notion that the universe operates in an organized manner. It makes sense to us, appeals to our intellectual sense of order, and it follows that something which appeals to our intellectual sense of order must be the product of an organized intellect: hence “intelligent design.” I’ve never been very impressed with intelligent design, perhaps because most of its proponents are unwilling to concede its limits. It is not science; it is not a testable hypothesis but a philosophical argument. As a philosophical argument it is worth some consideration, however, there are other worthy ideas which also deserve consideration.

Let’s consider for a moment that humans are hardwired to see patterns. The ability to notice repetition, draw lines between cause and effect, and make predictions based on those lines have aided our species’ survival. Let us also consider that these abilities are at the foundation of what we consider logic.

Several different conclusions may now be considered:

Perhaps the universe seems logical only to those creatures which thrive in the universe. Perhaps our less-suited forbearers died in confusion long ago.

Perhaps the universe is not objectively ordered (in the realm of all possible universes), but our minds impose order upon the universe as we continue to flex mental muscles originally furnished by evolution as we caught onto the rhythm of the waves or learned to predict the next sweep of a crocodile’s tail.

Perhaps the universe makes sense to us precisely because we are a product of the universe. Just as we are physically suited to an environment possessing the exact natural laws as the one we inhabit (Why would we develop any other way?), perhaps we are intellectually suited as well. Perhaps every species senses a greater harmony with the cosmos precisely because we are of it, and it is in us.

♦ ♦ ♦

There is a God did one thing for me for which I am very grateful: it made me stop and think about my position. Flew’s reputation provided him with enough credibility in my eyes for me to approach the question of god’s existence with a fresh mind. With each page I expected to be challenged, to have my world upended. I awaited the brilliant arguments which had turned around this career atheist with eager anticipation. I was disappointed when they did not come, but the time I spent waiting was honest and more open-minded than I have allowed myself to be for awhile. My views may not have undergone any drastic changes, but my reasoning was refreshed.♦

Religious Liberty and the Affordable Care Act

Yesterday, on July 30, the Supreme Court issued it’s final ruling on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. In summary, this case involved a clash between the mandates of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, requiring all businesses with a minimum of employees to provide  with comprehensive health insurance, including no-cost access to twenty different kinds of contraceptives. The owners of Hobby Lobby, self-proclaimed “born-again Christians,” have moral objections to four of the twenty listed methods of birth control. Amy Howe, a reporter for SCOTUSblog, summarized the subsequent legal situation well in “Birth control, business, and religious beliefs: In Plain English“:

Because they believe that human life begins at conception, the families therefore believe that if the corporations were to cover those four forms of birth control, they would in essence be “complicit in abortion.”

The families and the companies went to court, arguing that the “birth control” mandate violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a 1993 law that Congress enacted as a response to a 1990 Supreme Court decision holding that an individual’s religious beliefs do not excuse him from having to follow a law that applies to everyone…

The Supreme Court narrowly ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby. Justice Alito, delivering the Opinion of the Court, concluded:

The contraceptive mandate, as applied to closely held corporations, violates RFRA.

This ruling seems to put a loosely defined subset of corporations on the same plane as individuals with regard to religious freedom. For many people, myself included, this language is troubling, as it seems to suggest that some corporations, at least those which are “closely held,” can opt out of laws which offend the sensibilities of the owners.  These fears have been expressed through a variety of internet memes and posters:

 (https://twitter.com/bakerbk/status/483642132750553090/photo/1)

These images touch on several different fears that result from this ruling, including:

• That as the rights of the fetus and the corporation are expanded, the rights of women are being curtailed
• That the health of thousands of women will suffer as their employers withdraw health benefits for the treatment of dozens of health problems treated by birth control
• That “closely-held corperation” is such a vague and legally amorphous term that this ruling will open the door to all manner of religiously based discrimination and interference in employee (read: everyone’s) life
• That Americans everywhere could find themselves unable to shoulder the costs of other medications or procedures in the future, because of their employer’s personal beliefs
• That unwanted pregnancy and abortion rates will rise

Hobby Lobby has rejected four methods of contraception, two of these are emergency contraception (“day after”) pills, vital to women who have been sexually assaulted or have experienced primary birth-control failure (such as condom breakage, a diaphragm tear, or antibiotic interference with the pill). The other two are hormonal and copper IUDs (Intrauterine Devices), one of which may be used as emergency contraception. The non-hormonal “Copper T” is a popular choice among women who cannot or prefer not to take hormonal contraceptives, who are allergic to latex or spermicides, or who simply want to rest comfortably in the knowledge that they will not get pregnant for 10 to 12 years unless and until they have their contraceptive method removed.

The impact of this decision on women workers is huge. The majority of Americans receive their healthcare entirely from their employer, and while two of the birth control methods rejected by Hobby Lobby may be obtainable for between $30 and $80 (a significant barrier to economically lower class women), the other two may cost between $500 and $1,000 (a significant barrier to lower and middle-class women, i.e. the majority of the American female workforce). Removing coverage for these methods of birth control effectively bans their purchase by Hobby Lobby employees unless they are able to save for them over time, the very kind of arrangement the Affordable Care Act was intended to make unnecessary, and an impractical expectation for at least three of these methods, since the need for emergency contraception, by nature, tends to be a surprise circumstance.

It’s worth noting that the Green family’s objection to three of the four banned contraceptives—namely that they induce abortion—is medically without merit, even if ‘pregnancy’ or ‘life’ are defined as the moment sperm fertilizes egg. Both emergency contraception pills and the hormonal IUD option prevent pregnancy by delaying ovulation (removing egg from the equation). There is no evidence that these contraceptives harm or in any way disrupt the implantation of a fertilized egg. Research on how the copper IUD prevents pregnancy is inconclusive.

There are, of course, many other concerns to be had with this ruling. It’s worth your time to read the dissent written by Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg (hyperlink contains compelling excerpts and access to the complete document, the table of contents is your friend).

And while you’re at it, watch this songified version of some of its most poignant passages (the chorus takes some editorial liberties):

I also found these articles and documents to be informative and compelling:

• More Equal Than Others by Jason Hines (TheHineSight.blogspot.com)
• How to understand Hobby Lobby by Marty Lederman  (SCOTUSblog.com)
• Under a straight-forward reading of constitutional text and history and fundamentals of corporate law, Hobby Lobby’s claims fail by Elizabeth Wydra (SCOTUSblog.com)
• Brief amici curiae of American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, et al. in support of the Government filed. VIDED. OR “Medical Professionals Explain why Ruling in Favor of Hobby Lobby is a Bad Idea”
  (The actual argument is contained in numbered pages 8-37, heavy footnotes and wide margins make these 29 pages equivalent to ~10 standard Word Document pages)

As a skeptic and a woman, I echo many of the concerns expressed above. Specifically, I wonder if this ruling represents yet another way in which the religious majority may enforce its values through American law and politics. I think all religious minorities, and especially secularists—whose sexual ethics often have little in common with the Abrahamic religions—have particular reason for concern. Christians comprise approximately 78% of the American population, it follows that the majority of non-Christians are employed by people of differing worldviews and convictions. For the atheist who works at Hobby Lobby, or the Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Jew who is gainfully employed at any “closely-held corporation” decisions about their personal life and healthcare may now be financially determined by their (probably Christian) employer’s religious convictions, instead of being solely governed by their own medical needs and personal desires.

In other words, because of this ruling, religious minorities across the nation may be compelled by their employers to make decisions that differ from what they would have chosen were their healthcare strictly personal matter between themselves and the medical personnel they choose to consult. It would appear those days of private decision making are over.