Everyone knows what I'm talking about

McCall's has a new dress pattern up, called simply "Princess dresses". It doesn't have the Disney mark on it. It does not use the word "Cinderella". Clearly it must be 'not' the dress worn by the live-action Cinderella in the new movie. McCall's has a habit of doing this, and to be honest, it makes me giggle. Last year, we had 'not' Elsa, a dress with a sheer upper bodice and a train that started just under the arms. Before that, we had 'not' Merida, a princess-seamed green dress with white elbow and shoulder puffs.

Well, I'm about to do it to you guys. I am about to make one of those posts where everyone knows what I'm talking about, but I am going to get pretty far before identifying it plainly, and I am not going to delve into the details at all. Frankly, I don't need the details to make my point.

King David, despite being described as a man after God's on heart, did some pretty dreadful things. He lusted after a woman who was not his wife. He sent for her and had sex with her. Then he got her husband killed, when her husband refused to help cover up for her pregnancy. That is arguably pretty dreadful stuff with pretty permanent results. Of course, he did not escape punishment. God sent a prophet to explain why he had done wrong, and the child died. Was this 'enough' punishment? Was it within the statute of limitations? Should God have allowed King David to learn his sin through a prophet he already knew, instead of, say, sending in someone who was unconnected to the King? What about their second son, Solomon? Was God wrong to have given Solomon the kingdom? Was it a sign that David had not 'repented enough'? King David and his son have been dust for thousands of years.

Should we forgive King David? What crime has he committed against us?

There is another man who has been dust for slightly less time. His name was originally Saul of Tarsus, but he was renamed "Paul" after his conversion. He wrote an awful lot of the New Testament and spoke clearly on a variety of sins and evils, including most of the New Testament verses against homosexual behavior. Although he did not engage in homosexual behavior as far as we know, he did hunt down Christians and kill them before his conversion. He considered himself the very best Pharisee of Pharisees at a time when that was basically the most pious thing you could be. He was even celebrated for his piousness. He had to understand that he was doing wrong, and change his ways.

Does Paul's sin make his lessons on sinful behavior irrelevant? Should we take his writings seriously?

Both of these issues are making the rounds in recent days, due to the revelation of actions committed by a young man when he was a teenager. This should indeed be a controversy, but it should be an entirely different kind of controversy than the one I see floating around article comments and chat rooms. This should be a dialog about the problems that lead to inappropriate sinful behavior and the proper criminal justice system response when the perpetrator is underaged. Instead, it has become a two-prong argument, and both prongs seem geared specifically towards targeting Christianity rather than the actual sinner.

The "King David prong" can be summed up as a movement I have seen in recent years geared towards punishing people for the 'sin' of "Not Living Up To Our Expectations". In it, someone is judged, not by whether he acknowledges his sin as wrong or tries to justify it as right, but whether he has dared to hold himself to a standard that he has violated with his behavior. In this 'brave new' situation, you are better off to keep your (and others') expectations low, to ensure that you do not fail, than to aim high and miss your mark - even if your actual shot lands much higher than it ever would have managed were you to keep your expectations small. These are the people who excuse the sin of people like Bill Clinton and Lena Dunham because the perpetrators maintain that they have committed no crime, but do their best to drive out any pastor who has admitted to adultery, acknowledged his error, and asked for forgiveness. This is the exact opposite of what Christianity should be about.

Think about yourself for a moment. Never mind other people's sins. Think about your expectations of yourself. Think about other people's expectations of you. Because I am a Christian and because my sins are generally not severe in modern society and not obvious to a casual onlooker, some people have this notion of me as this perfect sweet excellent woman, and I hate it. If I try to note that I'm not really all that wonderful, they take it as modesty. In this present day, I am downright afraid to have people take that view of me. I never know if they are going to turn virulently upon me, if I should have a sin revealed that actually horrifies them... not for the sin itself (and utterly regardless of my response to it), mind you, but for the new, manufactured 'sin' of "Not Living Up To Their Expectations".

Why do you think God used King David? Why do you think God went after Saul of Tarsus? Why do you think God chose the Israelites, a group of such unruly, stubborn, imperfect people that they kept getting showed up by pagan Romans who had more faith in Christ than the very people who had been awaiting His arrival? Do you think maybe God wanted to teach us that He can make perfect where we stumble? That God can use people who don't "Live Up To Expectations"? Christianity is not about a bunch of perfect people talking about the way we should live. Christianity is about a bunch of sinners finding out that God is patient and loving, and that His laws come from Himself. That leads us into the other prong.

We could call the second prong the "Saul of Tarsus prong". In this particular case, it centers around homosexual behavior, but it could really be used for any convenient sin. Unlike the "King David Prong", this one primarily springs from non-Christians, and it, too, misunderstands what Christianity is for.

Paul's writings show that he was very aware of his own sins and failings. Despite that, he wrote an awful lot about what was sinful and what wasn't, and what was proper behavior for a Christian and what wasn't. Did anybody ever question the appropriateness of a man who used to drag off Christians to their death in saying that the 'stronger brother' should not burden the 'weaker brother' and the 'weaker brother' should not condemn the 'stronger brother'? Why would anybody listen to someone with a "thorn in his flesh" when he says that all have sinned and that eternal life comes through the grace of God? We certainly hold people up to a similar standard today. Should a man who committed adultery (and repented of his sin) be allowed to teach about marriage? Should a woman who had an abortion be allowed to run a pro-life organization? Should a teen who got out of a gang be allowed to tell other teens how to stay out of gangs?

The whole point of being a Christian is that you are holding yourself to God's standard. You are failing to live up to God's standard. You are repenting and receiving forgiveness for your sins against God's standard. Here's another way of putting it. Would you go to a dentist who has cavities? Well, perhaps instead of looking at his mouth, you should listen to his words. If he tells you that the American Dental Association recommends that you brush twice a day, should you decide that the American Dental Association is wrong because he doesn't brush twice a day and he has gingivitis? Of course not! In fact, making that conclusion is, in debate, called "ad hominem" - it is what happens when you attack the bearer of news rather than the originator. So should someone who has engaged in sexual sin and repented of it be allowed to become the bearer of God's news about homosexual behavior? Of course! (And here I finally drop the name.) Josh Duggar does not speak against gay 'marriage' according to Josh Duggar's authority. Josh Duggar speaks against gay 'marriage' according to God's authority. Of course, it's so much easier to pound Josh Duggar into the ground than to go up against God... but you must be aware that Christianity is a place for sinners who repent, for people who miss the mark and wish they hadn't, for people who know that they are sick and are seeking out the Physician. If you want a religion of "perfect people" who are telling you "how to turn yourself perfect", go seek out Scientology. God's Law is about what works. Christianity is about what happens to you when you realize that you can't do it by your own power.

And eventually, when you stand before God and He says, "Why didn't you listen to me?" it will do you no good to say, "Because I didn't like the looks of the bearer of Your message."

Get out of the way and let us work

Let's talk about washing machines for just a moment. What kind of features do washing machines have? They let you choose your cycle. They let you customize your cycle if necessary. Then you start 'em up and off they go. Many washing machines are advertised as being "quiet". The quietest machines tend to draw the most interest. Imagine if someone tried to market a washing machine that sent alerts to your phone and beeped a tone for each part of the cycle, so that it notified you when it was rinsing, spinning, agitating, rinsing, spinning... How many people would buy it?

I don't want my washing machine to tell me what it's doing! I use a washing machine so that I can freakin' dump in my load and press two buttons and walk away! It tells me when it's done, but since my laundry area is down in the basement, I usually don't even hear it. My washing machine is my servant. I want it to shut up and do its job so that I don't have to.

How about operating systems? I'm a definite computer geek (used to work as a software engineer, actually), so I know operating systems. One of the biggest mistakes that Microsoft made at one point was integrating Internet Explorer too deeply into Windows. It complicated the use of the machine and hurt people who wanted to choose a different web browser. Microsoft had to back off and understand what an operating system is for. Users don't want to have to think about their operating system. They don't want to have to fiddle with it. They don't want it distracting them from their work. They don't want it choosing their productivity applications for them and penalizing the applications it doesn't think you should be using. We just want the darn thing to work - quietly - in the background - and leave us be.

Our government could take a lesson from the appliance and operating system markets.

This morning, I read an article talking about "what women want" in the context of government programs and government issues. What do women want from government? "Equal pay" for "equal work"? Free daycare programs? Free contraception? What do they want? One of my favorite webcomic authors, RH Junior, explains 'what women want' exceedingly well in a comic featuring a feminist character who is fed up with all of the expectations placed on her. "What you want ain't complicated. You want what everyone wants, male or female -- to be treated decent."

When I hear the question of what women want from government, the question I actually hear is, "What's your price?" It seems that liberal Democrats particularly are simply interested in more and bigger government, in bigger government regulation, in higher government taxation, in more control over our lives. That's why they bother to ask what "women" want from the government, rather than simply seeing us as people. What do blacks want from government? What do Hispanics want from government? What do parents want from government? What do the poor want from government? What do all of us have in common? We just want to be 'treated decent'.

In short, they aren't asking, "What do you want?" They are asking, "What can we give you to convince you to let us control your life?"

What we want is for the government to not have so much control over our lives that we could possibly need it to treat groups of people differently from each other. What we want is what we want from our operating system and our washing machine. We want a government that operates in the background and keeps an environment for us in which we can choose what we want in life and make our best try for it. We want a government that we don't have to deal with on a regular basis. We want a government that gets out of our way and does its job. We don't want pop-ups, we don't want "app suggestions", we don't want integrated crap that gets in the way of the programs we like to use... we just want it to be background, uncomplicated, and working properly.

Remember this as we launch headlong into this election year, and people start asking you what you want the government to give you in exchange for running your life for you.

Who keeps your brother?

So the news is buzzing about Obama's dealings with this organization called "My Brother's Keeper", which has something to do with tutoring black teenagers. The phrase was used by Obama himself in a call for the government to interfere in our lives as much as possible 'for our own good'.

Of course, his use of this phrase and his support of this group is horribly funny for several reasons.

1. The very phrase "my brother's keeper", as Obama pointed out as a misguided attempt to justify his point, was spoken by Cain to God when God asked Cain where his brother Abel was. Of course, Cain had ample reason to know where Abel was, having just killed him in anger. However, all that aside, assuming as Cain did that God did not know about the murder, it could have been a valid question.

"Am I my brother's keeper?"

What he meant by it was this: My brother is a grown man, an adult. He doesn't need someone to hold his hand. He doesn't need me to always know where he is and what he's doing. He doesn't need someone else making all his decisions for him as if he was a child. My brother doesn't need a 'keeper'. In short, "my brother's keeper" was a sarcastic barb meant to make the point that adults don't need other people living their lives for them - the exact opposite of the way Obama used the phrase.

Shorter version: Obama took seriously a sarcastic phrase spoken by a liar and murderer.

2. Obama hasn't been his own brother's keeper. Barack Obama still has a half-brother in Kenya who still lives in a hut made of garbage because it's the best he's got. Despite the fact that the average monthly salary in Kenya is 1% of Obama's presidential salary, Obama can't seem to spare a single dollar for his own family. Of course, that's just his half-brother. He also has an aunt living on government welfare funds in Massachusetts, despite being an illegal immigrant.

Even if we play the sarcastic phrase straight, as Obama did, isn't it telling that he cares more about making other people help strangers than about helping his own family with his own money?

3. Obama doesn't treat black tutors very well when they don't fit into his political agenda. Now, my first two points may make it seem as if I object to people tutoring black teens. Far from it. I've done it myself (I am willing to tutor those in need and many of them have been black and teenaged), and I think it is a solidly good idea to do what we can, as a personal and Christian care for those in need rather than a government program or presidential guilt-trip, to alleviate some of the burdens caused by the rampant fatherlessness in the black communities.

However, one of the men well-known in his community for tutoring black teens in need as part of his many contributions to society was nearly killed by a criminal whom Obama identified as a metaphorical son. Protecting tutors of black teens seems to mean nothing to Obama when he can use an incident to inflame racial tensions and ensure that the only people able to safely tutor black teens are blacks who have not "gone white", "turned Oreo", or "become Uncle Toms" (I'll spare you the Uncle Tom pet peeve today), and therefore are likely even less qualified to aid these people than the people they are supposed to be aiding.

Then again, with Common Core coming into full swing especially in the big cities where underprivileged black teens tend to live, who will know how to tutor them anymore?