Lighten Up, Francis

It was a Friday night and I saw a lame joke on Facebook that had been posted by one of my more Conservative friends.

I reposted the joke, because it struck me funny. And it was late.

Moments later I got an abusive response from someone I used to know.

It's a joke. The reason why the joke works is that the race card has been overplayed for the last 5 years.

Any time anybody has said anything critical of that half-white fellow who lives in the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue, or noted the similarity of the US economic performance to that during the decades of FDR's administration, the response has been a charge of racism.

I do my best to be indifferent to politics. The only politicians worse than Democrats are Republicans. I want a government that I can safely ignore.

Yet the above pattern of rhetoric ires me because it is like the little boy who cried wolf. Think of it like quantitative easing. The coin of moral outrage is debased by overuse.

Getting angry about that debasement won't do anybody any good, so I choose to respond with humor.

After the abusive response, I replied "Lighten up, Francis."

This produced even more abuse. I realized the fun-loving person I had known and laughed with decades ago had been replaced with a humorless scold who thinks "shut up" is persuasive argument.

Maybe some invasion of the body snatchers scenario was responsible for draining away this person's humanity. More likely something else. All I know is that this was not the person who I used to know.

I had not realized it at the time, but I was administering an anti-Turing test.

My Faith Has Found A Resting Place

I'm having breakfast with my friend Ed and after we'd finished eating, we went outside and sat in the lawn chairs in front of the restaurant to finish our conversation. The topic included Soren Kierkegaard's teleological suspension of the ethical as well as a more general discussion of the character of deity.

Then I made mention of the leap of faith.

You see, you can see the chair and you can believe the chair will support your weight, but you actually have to sit in the chair and put your weight on that chair. This is a key distinction in believing Christ and believing in Christ. That matter of head knowledge versus heart commitment that us Evangelicals go on about. If you've been around Baptists like me for any length of time you may have heard this.

And slowly, gently, the back legs of the chair collapsed and I tipped back. I ended up resting on my back with my feet sticking up in the air. I was trapped sort of like a turtle until I could extricate myself with Ed's help from the chair.

I hope deity, or the ghost of Kierkegaard, or my old philosophy prof at least gets a chuckle from this story.