Perceiving What Is Real

Sunday morning, while I was getting ready for church, I had BYU Radio playing, and there was a short clip of a 2014 talk by Dieter F. Uchtdorf. I looked up the whole thing later, but here’s the transcript of the clip I heard[i]:

It was less than a century ago that most astronomers assumed that our Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy in the universe.[ii] They supposed all that lay beyond our galaxy was an immense nothingness, an infinite void—empty, cold, and devoid of stars, light, and life.

screenshot from here

As telescopes became more sophisticated—including telescopes that could be launched into space—astronomers began to grasp a spectacular, almost incomprehensible truth: the universe is mind-bogglingly bigger than anyone had previously believed, and the heavens are filled with numberless galaxies, unimaginably far away from us, each containing hundreds of billions of stars.[iii]

In a very short period of time, our understanding of the universe changed forever.

Today we can see some of these distant galaxies.[iv]

screenshot from here

We know that they are there.

They have been there for a very long time.

But before mankind had instruments powerful enough to gather celestial light and bring these galaxies into visibility, we did not believe such a thing was possible.

The immensity of the universe didn’t suddenly change, but our ability to see and understand this truth changed dramatically. And with that greater light, mankind was introduced to glorious vistas we had never before imagined.

He then introduces the main question of his talk:

It seems to be a trait of humanity to assume that we are right even when we are wrong. And if that is the case, what hope is there for any of us? Are we destined to drift aimlessly on an ocean of conflicting information, stranded on a raft we have poorly pieced together from our own biases?

Is it possible to find truth?

He then uses the earlier telescope observation as a metaphor:

Scientists were struggling to understand the breadth of the universe until instruments became sophisticated enough to gather in greater light so they could understand a more complete truth.

The Apostle Paul taught a parallel principle regarding spiritual knowledge. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" [1 Cor. 2:14]

In other words, if you want to recognize spiritual truth, you have to use the right instruments. You can’t come to an understanding of spiritual truth with instruments that are unable to detect it.

That got me thinking. Because I am able to perceive spiritual things even when many in the world don’t—and further, claim that I don’t.

I was thinking of another analogy. We had some books when our children were young, called Magic Eye. There would be a picture of apparently chaotic color. But if you stared at it long enough, and relaxed your eyes a certain way, suddenly a three-dimensional image appeared.

It took some practice. For us,, in our family after we’d figured out how to see the image on one page, we’d get quicker at seeing it on the next.

Not everyone can manage to see the image. But it’s there, whether a person perceives it or not. As an aside, there’s a half-decade-old lecture by Jordan Peterson, called “Reality and the Sacred,” in which he discusses how miraculous it is that we can perceive anything. Sight, for example, is so far impossible for artificial intelligence; there’s too much complexity involved in perceiving and understanding what we see. 

Anyway, it’s hard to explain the process of seeing that extra-dimensional picture exactly. You stare. You relax your eyes a bit, let go. And it happens. That’s not very exact. And it’s not very helpful to those who are struggling to see and cannot.

Those of us who have spiritual experiences, who can see the metaphorical additional-dimension image, encourage the non-see-ers. There are methods and steps that work for many of us:

·        Suspend disbelief and be open to the possibility of something beyond your five senses.

·        Pray.

·        Read spiritual texts that have record others’ spiritual experiences and lead many to have spiritual experiences from reading them.

·        Listen to the thoughts, ideas, impressions, or feelings that come in answer to prayer, or as inspiration even in between prayers.

·        Act on these promptings.

·        Record the promptings and results.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time listening to debates between believers and atheists. The atheists are not persuasive to me, because they dismiss my experience simply because they have not had those experiences. [Writing on this theme is adding up. See here, here, here, and here, for example.] 

I don’t know why they don’t get them and I do. Sometimes it might be due to willful blindness on their part. Sometimes they’re decent people just not looking at things in a way that allows them to see the extra dimension that I see. But their not seeing something I’ve experiences doesn’t convince me that I’m somehow mistaken. The evidence is in my favor.

image from Wikipedia

Remember the children’s story Horton Hears a Who, by Dr. Seuss? This elephant, with enormous ears and excellent hearing, and a kind heart, hears the sounds of the people on a world that exists on a dust speck on a clover. He knows they’re there, and so he protects them. But the non-hearers all around him, while they could simply ignore him and let him do his thing, are determined to stop him from believing he hears something. They threaten, and connive, and work to destroy. Why? Does Horton’s belief (knowledge that they can’t perceive) harm them?

In the end, Horton is able to convince the Whos down in Whoville, the people on the speck, that they need to rally and make enough noise to be heard. The final addition of one small child is enough to make them heard by the ears of all the others in Horton’s world—similar to the development of telescopes so we could see distant galaxies.

What if the Whos hadn’t been able to muster enough noise? Would they have still been there? Yes, Horton knew it, whether the others knew or not. (It’s fiction, I know, and therefore not actually real. I’m talking within the realm of this story.)

The inability to perceive does not determine whether something exists. This is particularly evident among believers in God and those who don’t.

It is not limited to our day; this has happened many times in history. But today, again, there is a vocal segment of nonbelievers that act like those conniving bullies in the Horton story. If believers commit to live better lives than they otherwise would—more honest, more committed to family, more hardworking, getting rid of corruption and trying to remove evil tendencies from their hearts—why should that garner the ire of nonbelievers?

Yet that’s what is going on when the attack companies like Chick-fil-A, or Hobby Lobby, or small business owners like florist Baronelle Stutzman or baker Jack Phillips.

Then there’s this story about a Christian charter school in Maryland that was eliminated from the voucher program for holding biblical views on sexuality. 

There’s this story about Amazon discontinuing selling books by a Catholic psychologist, with a large body of work spreading over decades, because of pressure from LGBT lobbyists. 

This isn’t confined just to America. Canadians, a supposed freedom of religion nation, just passed a law prohibiting public employees from wearing religious symbols or clothing at work—no Christian crucifix, no Jewish yarmulke, no Sikh turban. 

Further in that same story, the Ontario Court of Appeals has ruled that all doctors must give up their religious beliefs or get out of medicine:

Doctors must abort, euthanize, provide transgender interventions or any other legal medical procedure—or find a doctor who will, called an “effective referral.” In other words, Ontario forces doctors to take human life or provide services he or she might consider mutilating, even if the doctor considers it an egregious sin—either that, or be ghettoized into areas of practice such as podiatry in which no such requests are likely to be made. And if they don’t like that, as one judge put it, they can get out of medicine altogether.

Elsewhere in the world, such as Syria, Christians are persecuted to the brink of extinction, making everything I talk about here seem minor. Still, I believe we need to address the relatively minor attacks while that is what they are.

We mentioned Chick-fil-A above. They’ve been persecuted for years. Recently, during a gay pride parade in New York, a Chick-fil-A restaurant was vandalized, and the vandals ironically accused Chick-fil-A of being the haters. 

There are sparks of goodness, still, because so many people want to be good and are trying to figure that out for themselves. One man tweeted this response to the Chick-fil-A attack: "I’m gay. I eat Chick-Fil-A. I love Chick-Fil-A. They have different beliefs than I do. We can agree to disagree on things. Doesn’t mean I hate them. Not seeing tolerance. Not seeing love."

Another good story is that the near-century-old Bladensburg WWI Veterans Memorial, in the shape of a cross, is being allowed by the Supreme Court to stand.

Bladensburg WWI Veterans Memorial
image from here

The odd question is why there would be so much hatred against a religious symbol in a country that is founded and dedicated on Godly principles—including, and maybe especially, the freedom to believe as we choose.

Like those bullies in the Horton story, I’d like them to stop with their screed long enough to explain why they are so desperate to stamp out the possibility that other people perceive something they have not.

---

[i] The entire talk is here, with both video and transcript. There’s an additional video within the text of a shorter clip, with illustrations, which I used for screenshots.

[ii] See Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe (2009), xii.

[iii] See Moses 1:33,35 in The Pearl of Great Price, and note that this was revealed in June 1830, nearly a century before Edwin Hubble announced his discovery of distant galaxies.

[iv] See, for example, the Hubble Heritage Image Gallery at heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/gallery.html.

Suppression of the Opposition

Do we know what fascism looks like? Because we're seeing it.

We have some educating to do.

You’ve probably seen some of those interviews where a guy with a microphone and a camera goes on a college campus, or on the street, and asks basic questions, and hardly anyone knows the answer. Like this one on free speech. And this one on “How Well Do Americans Know Their Presidents?”

The Berlin Wall fell in 1991, marking essentially the end of the Cold War with its existential threat. Everyone born that year turns 28 this year. Let’s add five years to that and say anyone 33 or younger was born too late to be personally aware of the existence of the Iron Curtain.

I remember the first time I saw the movie Gandhi, in 1982. I was out of college, recently married (we saw it together). And I was stunned that I’d never heard his story before. What was wrong with my history courses? It’s because world history always started way way back in time, and worked its way forward. And the closer to the present day, the more likely the school year would end before we got to the material. We were lucky to get as far as World War II.

I was interested in history, and good at remembering things, but I knew nothing about some major world events. So I had to educate myself as an adult. (Homeschooling helped.) But for students who aren’t interested, and also happen to have schools fail to provide the material, are in a state of ignorance we shouldn’t be surprised at.

So, for the sake of education, today we’ll cover some -isms.

According to my favorite nearly 40-year-old dictionary, totalitarian has two definitions:

1.    Designating, of, or characteristic of a government or state in which one political party or group maintains complete control under a dictatorship and bans all others.

2.    Completely authoritarian, autocratic, dictatorial, etc.

As a noun, it’s a person who favors such a government or state. And totalitarianism is the noun form, or name for such a government.

In the same dictionary, fascism has three definitions:

1.    The doctrines, methods, or movement of the Fascisti [elsewhere defined as an Italian political organization under Mussolini from 1922-1943].

2.    A system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under centralized governmental control, belligerent nationalism, racism, and militarism, etc.; first instituted in Italy in 1922.

3.    A political movement based on such policies, or fascist behavior. See also Nazi.

To be thorough, the definition of Nazi is “designating, of, or characteristic of the German fascist political party (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), founded in 1919 and abolished in 1945; under Hitler it seized control of Germany in 1933, systematically eliminated opposition, and put into effect its program of nationalism, racism, rearmament, aggression, etc.” A Nazi can also be a support of this or any similar party; fascist.

Will Witt (right), screenshot from here

One of those on-the-street videos by Will Witt’s asks the question, “What does holocaust mean?” And a surprising number didn’t have a clue. There are holocaust museums (a very good one here in Houston, another in Washington, DC). It’s a word synonymous with genocide. And even though more individuals were killed under Soviet communism and other socialist regimes, we as a world are pretty aware of the six million Jews killed in fascist Germany’s holocaust during WWII.

The world has said “Never again!” But if young people don’t know what this is, then they’re susceptible to the same forces that allowed it to happen before.

I’d like to focus on the behaviors of totalitarianism, and its synonym fascism, rather than on the “government” aspect of the definition, which is certainly related—but we know that politics is downstream from culture.

So I’d like to look at the “forcible suppression of opposition,” which leads to “authoritarian, autocratic, dictatorial”—essentially tyrannical governments.

A person who is in favor of—or actively pursues—forcible suppression of opposition is fascist.

A person who seeks to control the behavioral freedoms, the economic freedoms, and even the social thoughts of others, to stamp out opposing viewpoints it totalitarian. Such people, in power, seek to destroy opposition, doing away with a second party, or even a second choice. Elections in such regimes are a joke: “Do you vote for the supreme leader? Yes or No? Only Yes votes are counted.”

It’s possible that people who have grown up in a milieu of freedom might not realize what their forcible suppression of opposition inevitably leads to. So maybe we’ll hold off calling them totalitarian until they have some statist power. But they are nevertheless fascist.

It’s time for some examples, in no particular order (unless I go back and edit).

Strange Planet

Strange Planet birthday

There’s a four-panel cartoon, called Strange Planet, of aliens doing normal human things and describing them in absolutely literal ways, which turns out to be pretty hilarious. These have been showing up on my Facebook feed often, and I enjoy them a lot. Many young people have been enjoying them, but, as they say, #canceled. The online magazine Nylon, which I had never heard of, let out the news that, Nathan Pyle, the writer of this funny and non-controversial comic, is pro-life—and therefore no one should ever share or even look at his funny comics again! 

For those of us conservatives who have tolerated Hollywood for all these decades of ridicule, we think never enjoying a comic strip again because the creator has gone so far as to support his girlfriend for attending a pro-life rally (but hasn’t publicly ever even talked about pro-life issues) is narcissistically intolerant. And any person who not only boycotts based on such a small disagreement but insists on spreading the word so that all others within their influence will also boycott—that is fascist.

Chick-fil-A

As I mentioned recently, the San Antonio city council refused to allow Chick-fil-A to have a concession in the airport, supposedly because of the bigoted homophobic beliefs of the company owners. Added to that, Buffalo, NY,airport was about to get a Chick-fil-A, but after complaints from a city councilman, reversed their permission.   

Have those owners, or the company, spoken out against homosexuals or refused to serve them delicious chicken sandwiches and amazing lemonade? No. They are avowed Christians—like 70% of the US population—and therefore one can extract from this information that they believe marriage is between a man and a woman (as has been the belief of all humanity for all the millennia of history up until about five minutes ago). And therefore they should not be allowed to do business? That’s fascist.

Attacks on Chick-fil-A have been going on for quite a while. Fortunately they produce a very good product at a better-than-practically-anyone efficiency, and non-fascists tend to appreciate that and support them even more.

Oculus

Blake J. Harris, author of History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality, was on Glenn Beck radio recently. He told the story of Palmer Luckey, the teenager who started a virtual reality company, which was acquired by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. It looked like things were going great for the young man when word got out somehow, shortly before the 2016 election, that he was a Trump supporter. Zuckerberg stepped in personally and insisted that Luckey sign a declaration that he was not a Trump supporter, but was instead voting for the Libertarian candidate, which was not true. Despite giving in and signing, he was then put on leave for six weeks—with people being told he had asked for this personal time. Then he learned, during a conference call at the end of that imposed vacation, that he had asked for another six weeks off—which of course he hadn’t even considered. Shortly after that he was let go, severed from his creation. Because he liked Trump’s free-market ideas.

Author, Harris, was a fan of Facebook and Zuckerberg going in, which is probably why he had such great access to all the players, and watched what happened first hand. The book is about more than the maltreatment of Luckey; it’s about the rise of virtual reality. But that episode is part of the tech world. And it’s definitely fascistic.

I’m a Facebook user, although rarely political online. But most weeks I have political friends who announce that they’re back on after being put in Facebook jail for a day or a week, or have had materials deleted. As far as I can verify, none of these has been for profanity, lewd conduct or language, inciting violence, or anything you might want Facebook to protect you from; they have been for political content that Facebook deems unacceptable.

Meanwhile, Facebook friends who have Zuckerberg’s political leanings spew uncalculable amounts of lying trash (my words, but I think this is a somewhat expert opinion) without so much as a warning.

“Forcible suppression of opposition” is what’s going on. That’s the definition of fascist.

Human Rights Tribunal in Canada

This headline is from Vancouver, British Columbia: “Court orders Christian to pay $55,000 to trans politician for calling him ‘biological male.’” 

The Human Rights Tribunal ruled that it’s unlawful discrimination not to accept transgender people as the gender they claim to be. Also, “there’s no room for any public debate in the matter.”

Bill Whatcott had dispersed flyers that referred to NDP candidate Ronan “Morgane” Oger as a biological male. His defense, which was not allowed to be presented, was proof of Oger’s biology, but the judge ruled “the ‘truth’ of the statements in the flyer is not a defense.”

The flyer compared Oger to another man, Walt Heyer, who had gender dysphoria, had undergone hormone and surgical transformation to “become” a woman, but eventually realized that was a lie and transitioned back, now again identifying as a man. Making this comparison cost Whatcott $35,000 for injury to the “dignity, feelings and self-respect” of the man presenting himself as a woman, and also $20,000 for alleged improper conduct (not sure from the story what this entailed).

Truth is not a defense? There is no room for public debate? I’d call that forcible suppression of opposition: fascism.

Artificial Intelligence Ethics Council

Here’s another from this week: “Google Cancels AI Ethics Council after Employees Demand Removal of Conservative Heritage President Kay Coles James.” It’s worth noting that, in the group identity politics of the opposition, James checks a lot of boxes; she’s a black woman of a certain age. But being conservative—which is about beliefs and ideas rather than surface details—is unacceptable at Google. She opposes transgender activism—not people with gender dysphoria, but the imposition of the transgender agenda on society. That means the controllers of the largest and most used search engine, controlling our access to information, is about the forcible suppression of opposition; Google is fascist. 

Yale Law School Blacklists Christian Firms

Yale Law School has decided not to do business with any Christian law firms. Also, Senator Ted Cruz has announced an investigation into discrimination at the Yale Law School, which receives federal funding and is therefore prohibited from this sort of discrimination. According to Cruz, “Public news reports indicate that Yale Law School has recently adopted a transparently discriminatory policy: namely, that Yale will no longer provide any stipends or loan repayments for students serving in organizations professing traditional Christian views or adhering to traditional sexual ethics."

Not long ago, there was loud protest about VP Pence’s wife getting a part-time art teacher position at a Christian school, purportedly because this school went out of its way to exclude gays or transgenders. In actuality, the school simply asked for an affirmation of belief in the millennia-old definition of marriage and that sex should only be between married husband and wife. That was considered radically offensive?

If all Christians are to be ousted from the public square, and refused employment, or education, or any of the normal opportunities of society, that leaves far above half the population in unemployed status, dependent on government, meaning the non-Christian (or possibly non-religious) remainder would be required to support those they have disenfranchised. You can see why the labeling of such outcasts as subhuman for the sake of taking their lives with impunity has been the path taken by fascist dictators historically.

The stories of fascist suppression of the opposition are ubiquitous. And they are one-sided. Let’s look at the Spherical Model to see why.

Freedom of people, markets, and ideas is a northern hemisphere (on the model) characteristic. Control of people, markets, and ideas is a southern hemisphere (on the model) characteristic. You don’t find people who strive for freedom, prosperity, and civilization—the northern hemisphere—trying to suppress ideas, because you can’t be northern hemisphere and do that. So all the suppression is done by those who favor control over others, or tyranny.

If you think you have an example of conservative suppression of discourse, you’re wrong. Freedom of speech is an element of the north. If a religious person is suppressing truth—or the legitimate expression of what one thinks is truth—that so-called religious person is acting in a controlling manner, using coercion rather than persuasion. It’s not possible to conserve civilization with coercion. They are incompatible.

So you’re not seeing any religion stuffed down anyone’s throats unless it’s done by people trying to wield power over others. Tyrants. Or fascists. By the way, secularism is a religion, and it is being stuffed down the throats of non-secularists by fascists.

Let’s be clear about definitions, so we can identify exactly why fascist suppression of opposition is so wrong. Then we can see clearly why we need to stand up against it. Now, on our watch.

Eat Mor Chikin

We have been a Chick-fil-A family since our oldest, Political Sphere, turned 16 and got his first job—at Chick-fil-A. And not just any Chick-fil-A, but the third most successful of the about 5000 restaurants nationwide. The only two that rate higher have a double drive-thru—which this one is getting during renovation this summer. All of our kids and one daughter-in-law have worked there. We’ve had kids working for Chick-fil-A almost continually for over a decade. For a family that wants their kids to learn hard work but also wants them to come to church with us on Sundays, Chick-fil-A has been a great answer.

Out local Chick-fil-A
photo from KTRH.com traffic, August 1

The owner has two stores, the other one just a few miles up the same northwest Houston road. And that second store is where Political Sphere works now, as his second job. He works the daytime rush, and then comes home for a bite to eat (usually Chick-fil-A food he has brought home with him) and then heads out for his full-time swing shift job. So he was there yesterday during the onslaught. This second store is always busy. While not in the top three like the one down the road, it is consistently in the top 10%. They handle a huge rush crowd for every meal. They rarely take more than two minutes to get your food in hand after taking your order. Efficiency and good food is what they do. And they have a loyal clientele.

They’re located on a busy corner, adjacent to a Wal-Mart parking lot, across the street from a Kroger and Kohl’s. And neighborhoods are nearby. They have a drive-thru setup where they merge traffic coming in from two directions. There’s often a line at lunch and dinner rush, but it hardly ever takes more than ten minutes to get through with your food. Wednesday, Political Sphere reports, wait times were as long as an hour. At one point they had to stop taking orders, because the system was overwhelmed. (I think that means they couldn’t cook fast enough to meet the needs.) When they made the announcement, the crowd cheered. Giving Chick-fil-A the absolute maximum amount of business was the goal.

The ice machines couldn’t keep up with demand. The need was immediate—no time to make a call and wait for a delivery. So they sent personnel across the parking lot to Wal-Mart to bring back three shopping carts full of bags of ice. The Wal-Mart parking lot was crowded, but not with Wal-Mart shoppers; it was packed with people in line for Chick-fil-A.

The next day Political Sphere got the rest of the story. The store has been prepared for 40% increase daily because the other store is under renovation, so traffic comes to this one. And they thought that a marginal increase over that would do the job yesterday. But they weren’t ready for a 100% increase. At about 8:30 they had to announce that they would run out of chicken in half an hour.

The story today was that all of the Houston Chick-fil-As either doubled or tripled their usual business. About half closed early after running out of food. The one where Political Sphere works doubled, but when it starts with such high volume, that’s still significant. In the hour they had to shut down, they did $4500; they had three $3000 hours during the dinner rush.

By the way, they overwhelmed the system again Thursday. And they’re gearing up for the supposed protest tomorrow—because in our area that is much more likely to mean more of what we saw Wednesday (people supporting the company because of its willingness to stand up for its beliefs) than a group of peace disturbers. Down in the Montrose area things could be more troublesome; we’ll see.

Social Sphere
ready for work
Cow Appreciation Day 2010

I had intended to go to Chick-fil-A yesterday. I was up north, and needed to get a salad right at 6:00 and then drive across town to a meeting by 7:00, somewhat against rush traffic, but while traffic is still heavy. So we had strategized and identified two stores near where I would be, and chose the one closest to the freeway. But I checked my email as I got to my car, and a text had just come in from Political Sphere: “Don’t go to Chick-fil-A.” If I’d waited in an hour-long line, I’d have never made it to my destination. I saw on a nighttime news broadcast that the one I had chosen actually closed at 8:00 PM, having run out of food. So, while Chick-fil-A gets my business pretty often, and my support always, yesterday I had to miss out on the community get-together.

I have often thought that the Chick-fil-A marketers are clever; I love the cows with spelling problems, and the apparently endless ways that idea can be used. (I get a Cowlendar for my kitchen wall every year.) But I don’t think they could have come up with a plan and put it into action that would have accomplished what this spontaneous outpouring of support has done. There are several clear messages sent by the clean, orderly, patient, pro-business throngs:

·         We like your chicken, waffle fries, and the rest of your really good food—and the quick service and good prices we’ve come to expect.

·         We support your willingness to stand up for what you believe.

·         We are against the bullying tactics of those who blacklist and marginalize anyone who doesn’t agree with their opinions.

For your listening pleasure, please take a couple of minutes to hear Christian comedian Tim Hawkins’s latest Chick-fil-A song: