I pity the fool!

Warning: I am in a Mood. This will be a Rant. It's unlikely to be understated.

Mind you, it won't be a rant about what's put me in this mood, which is actually not that interesting. It's about an entirely different subject that's irritated me for quite some time and recently popped up again. My current state only lends impetus.

At least I'm writing.

I put fingertips to keyboard tonight to protest (no doubt to no avail) the over-sexed nature of damn near everything, but in particular popular media and its audience. Seeing as how I have relatively little contact with popular media, I am able to leave it gladly in the box marked "beneath my notice". Yet sometimes out springs Jack to slap you across the face with it, and it is truly vile.

Caveat: I'm certainly not saying that the treatment of sex and sexuality has no place in public content. I'm not even talking specifically about the use of sex as a blunt instrument to sell, sell, sell whatever you happen to be shilling, although that cheapening of sex is worthy of a rant in its own right.

I'm talking about how sex appears to have saturated everything, to the point where audiences, by and large, have lost any discernment or sophistication to understand a deep relationship of a kind other than sexual. They actually seem uncomfortable with the notion, and automatically infer sexuality where there is none. They often actively want the erotic element; just take a look at fan fiction and discussion forums.

Paul, writing to the Ephesians, files it under "futile thinking" - "They are darkened in their understanding and seperated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more." (Eph 4:18-19, my emphasis, duh. Italics were invented like fifteen hundred years after the New Testament was written.)

It is a wretched existence to be always seeking yet always unsatisfied; it's hard to know whether to have more disgust or pity for them. It's very easy to have a humongous level of irritation.

In the chapter on Friendship in The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis has this to add: "It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.

"The dangerous word really is here important. To say that every Friendship is consciously and explicitly homosexual would be too obviously false; the wiseacres take refuge in the less palpable charge that it is really - unconsciously, cryptically, in some Pickwickian sense - homosexual. And this, though it cannot be proved, can never of course be refuted...

"Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair."

(Lewis doesn't bother to spell it out for the hard-of-thinking, but since there are so many more on the web than reading his books, I'll point out that there is a significant difference between a "Friend" and "friends". I invite you to figure that out for yourself if it isn't immediately obvious. And don't you just love the term "wiseacre"?)

I first really noticed the phenomenon as bothersome on an otherwise very enjoyable night of my life, namely going to watch a Lord of the Rings movie marathon at Mac centre with several Friends. Return of the King had only just been released, and I hadn't seen it yet, and we spent the night in one of two cinemas packed to the brim with nerds giddy with excitement and fancy dress. (Not all of us. Not even most. But apparently some couldn't resist.)

I'm sure you know to what I refer. The titters at the intensifying relationship between Sam and Frodo as they travel to Mordor struck me as so sad and puerile. Evidence that the beauty of a devoted friendship of comrades under fire cannot be portrayed in any substantial, emotional way without being completely misunderstood and even ridiculed. Coming from the comfort and security of padded seats in climate-controlled cinema in a peaceful first world nation only makes it despicable, too.

That people would generally rather be stupid and childish than trouble themselves to grow the hell up, I'm kind of resigned to, at least in a broad sense. That their level of understanding may actally inhibit the telling of more sophisticated stories - that they may eventually remove an entire lexicon of relationships and impoverish the vocabulary of Story, holding us permanently hostage to innuendo - drives me up the wall.

Frodo and Sam are hardly an isolated example. I should stay off the internet, really, as reading idiot opinions only either wastes my time or gets me worked up, and you have to navigate very carefully to avoid them. I could go on, and on... but at this point I can't be bothered. Railing against stupidity is a magnitude of futility beyond comprehension.

However, just to let off that final squeak of steam:

Attention, idiots!

i) "Very good friends" is not just a euphemism for "boink buddies". Sometimes it means "very good friends".

ii) A person may have deep motivations that have nothing to do with being in love or in lust, even if they happen to share a scene with someone of the opposite sex.

iii) Tension that is not sexual, repeat, not sexual, can exist between characters (and people).

iv) Hatred ≠ secretly desperately in love.

v) Casting attractive actors with good chemistry in the roles of close siblings is not an attempt of the part of the movie/tv show makers to indicate lustful undertones. I mean, wtf?

vi) Seeking such titillation rather than valuing any kind of non-sexual relationship is, frankly, repulsive, and only demonstrates how deeply corrupt our society's priorities really are.

vii) Grow up or shut up.

in the top ten at least

Pants.

oh, so that's where the world is...

I see that my plan of not writing until no one checks my blog anymore (and thus relieving me of any perceived pressure to write anything, anytime, ever again) has worked perfectly.

In the meantime I have been amusing myself by discovering just how little I know about where countries are on their continents (and that they even exist, in some cases). I have found a series of games. Map games. Fun map games, if you're as nerdy as me.

So I thought I'd share - on the off chance that one of my nerdy friends drops by - and hasn't already known about these sites for ages and ages, or just wants to play again since it's been such a long time since they first discovered them. Little tip, though: use a mouse if possible, not a trackpad.

Africa

Middle East

Europe (bloody annoying music though; you've been warned...)

yup, still about

Either I've been missing something or nothing has been going on.

- Karen Elizabeth Gordon

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.

- Plato

... Obviously I'm like totally wise and stuff.

Oh, and also: Soup!

don't worry;

I'm not dead.

from macro to micro

Whee! Full lunar eclipse tonight!

Totally unrelated, and by way of Things that Should Be, all electronic equipment that come with remotes should automatically come with an inbuilt pinging device. Just a simple button on the big, stationary, unlikely to be lost for days under piles of stuff except in the most extremely untidy environments, main component that causes the remote to beep discreetly, and possibly a small light on it to flash. In this day of modern technology, is that so much to ask?

repentance theory

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters. - Margaret Halsey

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience. - Doug Larson

Something that has caught my attention rather often is how many people seem to misunderstand forgiveness. I don't claim to be an expert myself, although I've had plenty of practical experience on both sides of the equation, but there are some things which I assumed were obvious (silly me).

My bugbear in this particular arena - the circumstance that seems the most common - is the notion that the person who apologises has thereby done something righteous, and is somehow entitled to forgiveness. Even more extraordinary is the idea that if they don't receive it, they now occupy the moral high ground!

That one just boggles my mind. The only way I can make sense of it is that these are the assumptions of people who simply haven't thought their situation through logically, and are operating on the self-justifying auto-pilot that is in-built to human nature. Understandable... perhaps... but certainly not impressive.

Maybe I'm wrong - it's not out of the question - but as far as I understand it, forgiveness is an act of mercy. Therefore, by definition, it cannot be earned, bought or in any other way deserved. The one in the wrong has utterly bankrupted themselves in this respect.

That's how it goes, isn't it? One person wrongs another, and in doing so not only bankrupts themselves but incurs a debt against the other. The wrongdoer (remember, I've just said this twice) is bankrupt, through their own actions; they have no way of paying their debt to the one they have wronged. An apology is an acknowledgement of the wrongdoer's iniquity - a repudiation of what they've done and a desire for restoration, also known as "repentance" - and nothing more. It is in no way some kind of hard currency that goes toward paying off the debt. It does not move the wrongdoer one iota closer to righteousness!

Addressing those who, with furrowed brows, are currently quibbling sotto voce that an apology is surely the first step toward being right with one you have wronged: it's not. Perhaps you could consider it the first thing you have to do (and that's debatable), but if we're talking in the metaphor of taking steps, you've walked away from being right with the other person, and repentance (signified by the apology) simply means you've stopped walking away and have turned 180˚. On the spot. All that's changed is that the possibility of restoration now exists, where it didn't before; the fulfillment of which still lies entirely in the power of the other person.

I don't know how to say it any more clearly. It is the wronged one's choice, the wronged one's mercy, which determines whether the wrongdoer is restored. The wronged person is entitled to choose not to forgive.

Do I need to say that again? It's unpalatable, perhaps, but it's true: the wronged person is entitled not to forgive. They don't have to. The wrongdoer has severed the relationship, and the one they wronged is entitled to leave it that way. That is just. Forgiveness is not just; it is merciful. Additionally, if they weren't so entitled, the choice to restore has no meaning.

All very black-and-white so far, isn't it? I can hear the grey-world objections already: "But we're told to forgive, as God forgave us!"; "No one's perfect, fair go!"; "What if both sides were in the wrong? The other person started it anyway! They should apologise too/first!"; "It can be so hard to apologise, surely that counts for something?"; "But you can make it up to them!" and, of course, "If I apologised, they'd just rub it in my face for months. No, thank you."

Those are the main ones I can think of so far, none of which having any validity, to my mind. If any strike a chord with you, I invite you to think it through for yourself before telling me off - if you still think it's valid, you're most welcome to say so. I'm not going into any of them here, though, since I think they have more to do with human nature than the nature of repentence and forgiveness; besides which I should probably post this before something else happens to cut me off from the internet for days at a time.