All posts by M.J.

Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning

#115: Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #115, on the subject of Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference.

I am aware that it is “politically correct” to regard homosexuality as normal, and to assert that homosexuals are born that way and cannot help being as they are.  It has already been established that I do not believe that, and if being politically correct means pretending that lies are true I am going to have to be politically incorrect (a phrase I was using before it was commandeered by a comedian for his talk show).  Opinions are fairly set on this issue, and the battle is going to rage for most of the next generation.  I don’t mind that people disagree with me.  There are facts on the other side, just as there are facts on this side.  What I dislike is when people ignore the facts that support the position with which they disagree.

img0115lesbian

I was moved to consider this by a television show.  It has become extremely common for television shows to give us likeable homosexual characters, in an effort to make homosexuality seem normal.  It’s a mistake, I think, but people in media recognize that they have a lot influence and attempt to use it.  I remember that my wife had a favorite television show featuring a favorite actor, and then the lead character’s girlfriend got pregnant and (over his objections) chose to get an abortion.  My wife never watched the show again, because she could not look at a woman who would do that to her baby without crying, and so the show lost its entertainment value.  It must not have been only her, though, because within a season the girlfriend, a regular from the beginning, was written out of the show, and the series failed by the end of the next season.  People were offended.  I tried to continue liking Buffy the Vampire Slayer after they decided to make Willow homosexual, but I it just upset me too badly that her life was being so destroyed, and the more so that it was done for a political message.  There was a show launched a year or so ago which sounded really interesting and I started watching it rather faithfully, but I couldn’t get past the excessive homosexual sex in it despite the truly fascinating ongoing mystery that was the primary plotline.  If you want to lose audience for an entertainment show, make a bold statement that is bound to offend a large number of viewers, and stick to it.

In the particular show which inspired these current thoughts, there is tension between an elderly widow and her homosexual daughter.  The resolution of the show came about when the mother came to understand that her daughter’s sexuality was not the mother’s fault, that it did not work that way but she was simply born homosexual.  Maybe she was; the jury is still out on that.  However, a picture had been painted of her parents as a couple who possibly never loved each other, the mother terrified of the father for their entire marriage.  How can this not have impacted the daughter?  We are wrong to imagine that our future marriages will be just like those of our parents, but we do it anyway even when we want to make it different, and a girl growing up in such a house would stand a very good chance of being conditioned to fear men and turn elsewhere for affection.  I don’t mean to blame the mother–“fault” for harming someone when acting with the best of intentions but limited knowledge does not always mean “culpability” for the outcome–but I think we’re ignoring a lot of facts when we assert that the environmental factors were irrelevant.

Of course, it’s only a television show, and in fiction the writers can always tell us that things are the way the show says they are.  That the daughter of this fear-filled loveless marriage becomes a lesbian proves nothing, because it’s only what the writers decided.  Still, just as the characters in the story seem to be ignoring the obvious fact that the child grew up to fear men, those who assert that homosexuality is entirely genetic and not at all environmental seem to be ignoring similar facts in reality.

Decades ago I worked with a young man who in his spare time often visited lesbian hangouts and got to know the girls.  He said he never met one who had not been badly hurt by a man at some point–a father, brother, husband, boyfriend, rapist, someone who left her fearful of or angry at men.  There are easily a thousand plausible explanations for that.  He might simply never have met one who didn’t fit the pattern, or he might have assumed that those who didn’t tell him of such a history did not want to discuss it.  Yet it is data:  many lesbian women appear to have rejected men because of abuse or hurt in their past.  It is at least plausible that environment, and not heredity, is the cause of their homosexuality.

I agree that there might be hereditary factors.  As with alcoholism, some might be born with a genetic predisposition to this particular temptation, and as with alcoholism experimentation might trigger it more quickly in those who are more susceptible.  But when those who want it to be entirely hereditary attempt to deny that there are any environmental factors, that those who are sexually attracted to members of the same sex could not possibly not have been, it is almost certainly because that is the answer they want, not the answer the evidence supports.

Believe what you think the evidence supports; defend your position.  Don’t suppose that you can ignore evidence and still make your position credible.

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Bible and Theology, Logic and Reasoning

#114: Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #114, on the subject of Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles.

You probably have already heard that the woman known to most of us as Mother Teresa is now officially Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

The first I saw it was in an article critical of the Roman Catholic Church, in the Salt Lake Tribune.  My initial glance at the piece noted that it somehow connected the canonization of this world-respected woman to the issue of pedophilia among the priesthood, and I thought it was going to say that an organization which so poorly handled that situation had no business making people saints.  I was musing on that, but I hate it when people criticize my articles without having read them, so I went back to read it completely and discovered that his complaint, while I think just as wrong-headed, was much more subtle.

img0114teresa

It is of course rather easy to criticize the church for its handling of these pedophile cases, but difficult to see from their perspective.  After all, they’re older and larger than most countries, consider their priests something like diplomatic envoys to everywhere in the world, and have a long history of handling their own problems internally.  Add to that the necessity of balancing justice with mercy, the concerns for the sinners as much as for the victims, and the awareness that the quickest way for an ordinary parishoner to remove an unwanted priest is to make sexual allegations against him, and you’ve got a very difficult situation.  It is thus easy to say that they handled it poorly–but not so simple to be certain that any of us would have handled it better.  That, though, was not what the article was addressing.

It is also a mistake to think that the Roman Catholic Church “makes” people Saints.  Canonization is rather more a process of identifying those who are.  There are few people in the world, perhaps of any faith, who would say that Teresa was not a saint.  She certainly fit the standards most Protestants hold:  she loved Jesus so much that she abandoned all possibility for a “normal” comfortable western life in order to bring the love of God to some of the most impoverished and spiritually needy people on earth.  Many ordinary Catholics were pressing for the Vatican to say officially what they believed unofficially.  The problem was that the Roman Catholic canonization process has a requirement that to be recognized officially as a Capital-S Saint an individual must have performed miracles.  At least two must be certified by Vatican investigators.

As one of my Protestant friends said, she should be credited with the miracle of getting funding for so unglamorous a work, and probably also for doing so much with what she had.  Those, though, are not the types of miracles considered; there has to be an undeniable supernatural element involved.  The author of the critical article is unimpressed with the two that they certified, but his argument is rather that miracles do not happen, and the events cited in support of her canonization were not miracles.  He then argues, seemingly, that if miracles really did happen, if God really did intervene in the world, then certainly God Himself would have acted to prevent those priests from abusing those children.  No loving father could have permitted that kind of treatment of his own children; how can the Church assert that God is a loving Father, if that God did not intervene on behalf of these victims?

We could get into a very involved conversation about why the writer supposes the conduct of these priests to have been “wrong”.  Certainly it was wrong by the standards of the Roman Catholic Church.  However, the Marquis de Sade wrote some very compelling arguments in moral philosophy in which he asserted that whatever exists is right.  On that basis he claimed that because men were stronger than women, whatever a man chose to do to a woman was morally right simply because nature made the man capable of doing it.  The same argument would apply to this situation, that because the priests were able by whatever means to rape these children, their ability to do so is sufficient justification for their actions.  I certainly disagree because, like the Roman Catholic Church, I believe that God has called us to a different moral philosophy.  The question is, on what basis does our anti-God critic disagree?  If he asserts, as he does, that there is no God, why does he suppose that it is wrong for adults to engage in sexual acts with children?  It seems to be his personal preference; the Marquis de Sade would have disagreed, as would at least some of the men who do this.  To say that something is morally wrong presupposes that that statement has meaning.  We fall back on “human rights”, but the only reason Jefferson and the founders of America could speak of such rights is that they believed such rights were conferred (endowed) upon every individual by the God who made us.  No, they did not all believe in the Christian God (many were Deists), but they did found their moral philosophy on a divine origin.

However, let us agree that the conduct of those priests was heinous.  We have a solid foundation for holding that position, even if the writer who raises it does not.  The question is, why did God not stop them?

It is said that during the American Civil War someone from Europe visited President Lincoln at the White House.  During his visit, he asked whether it were really true that the American press was completely free of government control–something unimaginable in Europe at that time.  In answer, Lincoln handed his guest that day’s newspaper, whose lead story was denigrating the way the President was handling the war.  It was obvious that such an article could not have been written if the publisher had any thought of the government taking action against his paper for it.

If God is able to work miracles, why does He not miraculously silence critics like the op-ed piece in the Salt Lake Tribune?

Perhaps the writer thinks that even God would not interfere with the freedom of the press in America.  Why not?  There is nothing particular about the choice to write something which is offensive to God that would make it less objectionable than the choice to do something which is offensive to God.  God could perhaps have prevented many atrocities–the development of the atomic bombs that devastated two Japanese cities, the rise of the regime which exterminated nearly six million Jews and even more Poles plus many other peoples, and we could fill the rest of this article with such acts.  Yet these are all choices made by men, and just as God chooses not to prevent one writer from criticizing Him in the Salt Lake Tribune, so too He has not prevented billions of other hurtful actions by everyone in the world.  He allows us to make our own choices, and to hurt and be hurt by those choices.  If he prevented all of them, there would be no freedoms whatsoever.

Two footnotes should be put to this.

The first is that we do not know and indeed cannot know whether God has limited human wickedness and disaster.  We can imagine horrors that never happened.  The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union never “went hot” into a nuclear battle despite the many fictional scenarios describing how it might have happened.  We do not know whether God prevented nuclear war, or indeed whether He will do so in the future; we only know that it did not happen.  Our perspective of the “bad” that happens in this world lacks perspective because, apart from horror stories, we measure it against itself.  Be assured, though, that if the worst thing that ever happened in the world was the occasional hangnail, someone would be asking how God could possibly allow the suffering that is the hangnail.  We complain of the worst wickedness in the world, but do not know what might have been or whether God saved us from something worse than that.

The second is that God, Who is the only possible foundation for any supposed moral law to which we could hold anyone accountable, promises that He is ultimately fair and will judge everyone.  He has made it His responsibility to see to it that everyone who has caused any harm will be recompensed an equal amount of harm, and anyone who has been harmed will be compensated an appropriate amount in reparations, so that all wrongs ultimately are put right.  The writer of the article does not want there to be ultimate justice, but present intervention.  However, I expect were we to ask if what He wants is for God to remove from the world the power to choose what we do and have our choices affect each other, he would object to that as well.  There will be ultimate justice, and may God have mercy on us all.  Meanwhile, we are given freedom to act in ways that are either beneficial (as Saint Teresa) or baneful (as the priests), so that we may then be judged.

How there can be mercy and justice at the same time is something I have addressed elsewhere, and is much more than this article can include.  It is perhaps the problem that the Catholic Church has in handling its errant priests.  The bishops are not God, and neither are we, and we all do the best we can, which often is not as good as we might hope.  We all also fail, hurt others, and need forgiveness and correction.  God offers that, and that is the true miracle.

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Books by the Author

#113: Character Movements

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #113, on the subject of Character Movements.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than those for the previous novel, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.

These were the previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering this book:

  1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole),
  2. #78:  Novel Fears (which continued with coverage of chapters 10 through 18),
  3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
  4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
  5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (which continued with coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
  6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (which continued with coverage of chapters 46 through 54),
  7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63),
  8. #100:  Novel Settling (which continued with coverage of chapters 64 through 72),
  9. #104:  Novel Learning (which continued with coverage of chapters 73 through 81),
  10. #110:  Character Redirects (which continued with coverage of chapters 82 through 90).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

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History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in those earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

Chapter 91, Hastings 73

The early obstacles to teaching Bethany may illustrate the principle that the more clearly God indicates His intended direction for you, the more problems you are likely to encounter along the way. Lauren is pretty sure that she is here to teach Bethany—she even told Pack Mother Ferenna as much—and so she realizes that she is ill-equipped for the task, Bethany’s father is resistant, and Bethany knows very little initially.

Chapter 92, Brown 31

I wanted Derek to leave the compound, but I had no idea where he was going to go.

Meesha was, I think, based on a character of that name (or one very like it) played by Margaret Morano in the Gamma World game from which Starson and Qualick originated. It was with Meesha that we learned the limitations of the game’s version of telepathy—she could not “speak” to us without being “heard” by anyone within range, but if we sent her ahead to scout she could not call to us once out of range.

I got the name Holger from someone who wrote to me about time travel theory in the early days of the temporal anomalies web site. The character was invented. We had had the practice in those early games that humans always had given names and surnames, but mutants, whether human mutants or animal mutants, had single names.

The name “Cavalier” was probably because we played a Gamma World adventure in which we sought, found, and captured a compound known as “Samurai”. It, though, was partly under water, and the name was a pseudo-acronym for something I no longer remember.

Chapter 93, Kondor 73

I found my next step for Kondor: his raygun got attention, and he was being investigated. It was a hook to move him forward into something else, which still needed some detail.

I think I had some vague notion that “N.I.B.” stood for something like “National Investigations Bureau”. The thing is that FBI agents never identify themselves as “Federal Bureau of Investigation”, so all I really needed was the letters that the agents would use assuming that anyone would know what they meant.

Chapter 94, Hastings 74

I had a side problem. In the first book, Bethany implies that she and Lauren had fought vampires in the past, and now I was in that past and had to make that a reality—but Bethany at this point is the teen daughter of a widowed father who wants to see her live an ordinary life, and Lauren doesn’t know where the vampires are. I did not see them attacking Wandborough—apart from the fact that I would be repeating a scenario I’d already run, there was no logic to the raid deep into werewolf country, and less with rumors of the famed sorceress in the area. I also had to stage an encounter that Bethany would survive, even if Lauren were killed. So I was exploring options, trying to work out for myself where the vampires were and how to make this happen.

The comment on the verse about the fool is another of those that I included because people get it wrong. The psalmist did not mean that all fools are atheists or that all atheists are fools. Rather, some people are foolish enough to act like there is no God because they don’t really believe that there is a God, or that God matters, or at least that’s what they think. Thus they do things God would condemn, because they don’t really think He knows.

I knew by now what was going to happen with Merlin, in the broadest sense. I did not know when, where, or how it was going to happen, but I knew the major pieces.

Chapter 95, Brown 32

None of the creatures in the encountered group came from anything I remembered. Gamma World had a multi-legged horse, which is the nearest thing to a source for the six-legged bull. The “porcuperson” was my own idea here.

Again, as I did with the magic coin in the first book, I buried the one item that mattered in a batch of others—this time the porcuperson. The others are all mutants, but I gave them very little thought, using them primarily to fill the group.

I might have ended Derek’s time in this world here, but it would have felt like an abrupt interruption and I wanted to resolve this part of the story, not merely make it feel as if I’d moved him out of the school so I could kill him.

Chapter 96, Kondor 74

The “blue card” was based on a “green card”, which I assume has a different name but is generally just known by its color. I figured they would have something like it in this world, but that it would defy the odds for it to be the same color.

Federal investigators pursuing a claim by a military surplus store manager that someone showed him a ray gun was a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but I tried to accept that it seemed unlikely and give it some plausibility.

Chapter 97, Hastings 75

There were a number of things that were in the first novel as things Bethany learned from Lauren, or things Bethany knew that she must have learned from Lauren, and now I had to find a way for Lauren to pass them to Bethany. The anti-aging spell is first.

This is also when Lauren tells Bethany to meet her in Philadelphia. It’s a predestination paradox, but it works.

If memory serves, the part about Lauren blocking memories was back-written. In a later chapter Lauren causes someone to forget she had entered a room, and she does it casually and easily; I needed to lay the groundwork for that, so I found a reason for her to learn and use that ability.

The road trip was created to give me some action in this story, and to move Bethany to the Camelot area for the longer story arc concerning Merlin.

Chapter 98, Brown 33

I had thrown some new characters into the story, and I needed to characterize them. I decided that Holger, the crack shot with the laser rifle, would be the kind of person who objects to attributing something to luck that was the result of good planning and skill.

Gamma World had sects of various kinds with their own philosophies about the world. I don’t remember the names, and invented this name, “progressivists”, to fit the philosophy of those who think mutation is the path to the future.  I was not writing political articles at the time, and did not see a connection to the “progressives”, the liberal wing of the modern Democratic party; I leave it to the reader as to whether such a connection might be made.

When I gave Derek the darts, I wanted him to have another weapon for the final scenario; I did not realize how significant the darts would become in the third novel.

Derek was also going to need tools, and a compact futuristic toolkit was just the thing.

I think this is the first time I’ve mentioned Derek using the tent and sleeping bag he got from Bill; it suggests that he used it regularly on this trip, though, and this really is the first chance he’s had to do so.

Chapter 99, Kondor 75

Kondor’s simple explanation for having gotten the gun on a spaceship and then wound up here omitted the part where he was the one who picked up the vorgo all those centuries ago; that was a complication he had not considered when he went for the short and simple version.

It might be stretching the concept, but it seemed not unreasonable for a government agency sending a team to investigate the possibility that someone had a ray gun to include on the team someone who might be able to recognize such a device if he saw it.

I decided to give Einstein’s work in this universe to my artist friend Jim Denaxas (who did the cover of the first novel) because I needed an uncommon name. The names “Sabrins” and “Cordikans” were created to sound like nationalities.

If the government really believed someone had been in contact with technologically advanced aliens, that would be a security concern and they would be at least sequestered until some determination could be made of what they knew. Thus I think it reasonable that they would take Joe into custody here.

I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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Logic and Reasoning

#112: Isn’t It Obvious

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #112, on the subject of Isn’t It Obvious.

I keep a beverage cup on my desk–usually root beer, usually Barq’s® (I joke that I once had a terrible Coke® habit–two to three liters per day).  It has a lid so that when I inevitably upset it any spill will be minimal.  I recently acquired a replacement for a worn cup, this one with a threaded lid and an airtight stopper.  Twice, maybe thrice, when securing the lid I managed to force beverage out through the threads down the side of the cup and over my hands.  I thought, there must be a way to avoid that–and then I immediately recognized what caused the problem and how to prevent it, and implemented the solution.

A few days later someone was visiting who fancies himself rather intelligent, and he poured some of our coffee into a very similar cup, tightened the lid, and squirted coffee on his hand and the counter.  Helping him clean it up, I gave him the solution to the problem.  To my surprise he responded, “I don’t think I ever would have thought of that.”  Then I recounted all of this to someone I think intelligent (who also has the same kind of cup and admitted having the same problem), who replied, “I don’t think I would have thought of that, either.”

I thought the solution obvious, but I’ll delay telling you what it is in case you want to think about it for a moment.

img0112Tumbler

When I was in law school, sitting in Professor Lipkin’s Jurisprudence seminar (I have mentioned him before, and have since learned that he has died), he asked a question, and immediately pointed at me and said I was not permitted to answer.  The question was one concerning a problem consistent with my experience, so maybe it’s just because the other students, almost a decade younger, did not have the same experience.  That experience was an enigma about whether or not to hold a door for a girl (or group of girls).  Some girls at that time still believed that gentlemen ought to hold doors for ladies, and were very offended if you were rude enough not to do so; others believed that it was chauvinistic for a man to give special treatment of that sort to a woman, and would be very offended if you did.  The question was how to avoid offending anyone.  When the class was stumped, I provided the same answer he had found.  It just seemed obvious to me.

I have spent a lot of time answering questions about time travel and writing analyses of time travel movies over the years, and sometimes I simply don’t understand why a correspondent or reader does not understand.

When I was about twelve or thirteen I met a kid who wrote songs, and I learned how to write songs from working with him.  I eventually became very good, but I have always had this attitude that anyone can learn to write a song if they apply themselves to learning how to do it.  That might be true.  I think I write some very good songs; I think I’ve written some very bad ones, and that through practice I got better.  Writing music and lyrics seems easy.

I realize that this might sound like I am saying, Look how smart I am.  I don’t feel smart.  I think it was Freeman Dyson who once when asked if he ever wondered why he was so smart answered not exactly, what he wondered was why everyone else was so stupid.  I’ve not had that experience.  Rather, I recognize that there are some things which come quite easily to me and others which I cannot do well at all.  I am awed by people (like my sister) who become fluent in multiple languages, because I struggle with languages despite my grasp of English and of grammar and syntax in the abstract.  I have no skill with the visual arts; my drawings are always warped and out of perspective, and when people ask my opinion of their work I always tell them they are asking the wrong person, they should talk to one of my artists.  I have also learned over time that for all of us, the things which come easily to us we suppose are easy, and the things with which we struggle we think are difficult.  Math is a good example.  Someone–a machinist at a factory where I worked as a security guard–once suggested to me that I could with very little practice add a column of two-digit numbers in my head.  I’d never tried, never even imagined that I could do that, but it wasn’t really that difficult once I got it in mind to do it that way (instead of adding the right column, carrying, and adding the left column).  Simple math seems simple to me; I have no experience with calculus and none worth mentioning with trigonometry.  Yet many people struggle with math, while others enjoy it and like to play math games.  (I don’t like math games; they feel like busy work to me.)

That is, it is easy to think that the things which come easily to you are simple things anyone could do.  It is not necessarily true, and it is not necessarily true that the people who easily do that at which you struggle are smarter than you.  They simply have a abilities and practice in those things.

What seems obvious to me might be completely opaque to you, but I would wager that there are things that seem obvious to you that are just as opaque to me.  I actually am as smart as all that, but there are many things I can’t do, and probably you can do many of them far better than I.

The reason the beverage is pushed out through the threads as the lid tightens is that the pressure in the cup is increasing and has nowhere else to go; if you leave the plug open while tightening it, the air (and possibly the beverage if it’s really full) will come out through the top of the lid instead of through the threads.

Hold the door for everybody.

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Bible and Theology, Music

#111: A Partial History of the Audio Recording Industry

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #111, on the subject of A Partial History of the Audio Recording Industry.

In a previous post, #109:  Simple Songs, I said that I had some criticism of Christian record companies that I would defer to another article.  This is that.

I avoid criticism, generally, so I am approaching this more as an attempt to understand and explain why things are as they are, that is, how they got that way, by going back decades and looking at the relationship between the artist and the recording company and a few other entities that were involved in that relationship.

Thomas Alva Edison pictured with his invention
Thomas Alva Edison pictured with his invention

Audio recording of course began with Thomas Alva Edison, who invented the phonograph and subsequently founded the first record company.  His early recordings were cylinders; his competitors forced him to change to disks, which had worse fidelity but were easier to store and use.  They spun seventy-eight time each minute, were usually ten inches in diameter, and had one song on each side.  I have little knowledge and less experience of that time, so I can’t tell you too much about it other than that there are some recordings of a few nineteenth century musicians which have survived.  The invention of audio recording was followed by motion pictures and radio, both of which impacted the music business.  In the early days of radio, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) objected to broadcasters airing prerecorded music, except in the case of concerts that were aired live but recorded for rebroadcasting later.  Then beginning in the nineteen fifties television began its ascendancy, and the FCC was considerably less interested in radio; record companies saw this as the opportunity to sell records by getting airplay, and the connection between record companies and radio stations became the lynchpin of the music industry.  (This was the age of “payola”, when record companies paid people to air their records, recognizing intuitively what was later demonstrated scientifically:  that what makes a recording popular is the perception that it is popular.)  Recording technology improved, such that it was possible to put more information on a disk by using narrower grooves and more sensitive needles.  This gave us the Extended Play (EP) disk with two or three songs per side, the “forty-five”, a smaller seven-inch disk that ran at a slower speed, and eventually the Long Play (LP) album, which ran at thirty-three and a third turns per minute and squeezed over twenty minutes on each side.  Along the way, better needles began to be able to detect and distinguish vertical as well as horizontal vibration, and stereo records took over.

At this time, record companies tended to buy a recording outright.  It was possible then to use a small quarter-inch width seven-inch-per-second tape recorder with one microphone and record a single which had the potential to become popular on radio stations and sell a lot of copies.  The model in the book publishing industry had long been that a publisher paid an author for the right to print a specified number of copies of his book; the risk was then on the publisher to bet that he could sell that many at a price that would recoup his investment.  Copyright law arose to protect publishers, and indirectly authors, from others printing copies of books for which those others had not paid anything–but it did not cover audio recordings.  Thus once a record company had paid for the right to sell the recording, all the proceeds from sales went to the record company, but there was no protection against “song piracy”.

This changed in the sixties, for a couple reasons.  One was that copyright law caught up with technology, and it was possible to protect an audio recording separate from the songs it contained (previously only covered as songs when they were printed and sold on paper).  Now there was a shift toward revenue sharing–the artists began to get a percentage of the gross.  However, they signed recording contracts, which in essence meant that they worked for the recording company–they had to perform concerts as directed by the company, record and perform the songs the company said they should, and produce product on schedule.  Even The Beatles had to record songs which were not theirs, because the recording company thought they would sell.

The next big change is generally agreed to be the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The Beatles were by that time a phenomenon–they probably could have reached the top of the chart with a recording of the four of them snoring.  They told the record company that they would sign a new contract and make another record if, and only if, they had full creative control of it.  With trepidation–after all, the company thought they were the professionals who knew what would sell and what wouldn’t–the company agreed, Sgt. Pepper’s was a huge success, and thereafter music aimed at the youth market (about thirteen to thirty) included giving creative control to the artists, on the assumption that they were all young and in touch with what the young wanted to hear.  Record sales of successful musicians were good, and companies had capital to spend on new artists (which would be money lost if the artist failed).  Records made a lot of money, and record companies put a lot into promoting them.  Concert tours were in essence promotional efforts to sell records:  a band would lose money on the tour in order to make it back on the sales of records, and the company paid part of that cost.

However, as technology advanced in the recording industry, the demand for quality increased.  No longer could someone record a hit single in his garage.  Chicago‘s song Twenty-five or Six to Four was about paying for recording studio time when it was twenty-five dollars an hour or twenty-five dollars to use the studio overnight, plus the cost of recording tape–and three-inch width recording tape at fifteen or even thirty inches per second was not cheap, but it was only the beginning.  By the late seventies and early eighties, recording studios that produced the kind of quality product record companies wanted cost sometimes thousands of dollars an hour, and it took many hours to lay the tracks, check them, re-record problems, do the mix, and process the final product.  Vinyl was a petroleum product, as were most of the substances used for recording tape, and with the appearance of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) these were becoming more expensive.  The cost of making a record was rising; the profit from selling one was falling.  Record companies were paying a lot of money in promotions and advertising.  Contracts started shifting away from percent of gross to percent of net, so that artists would not get paid for their recordings until the company had recouped all the expenses.

In the film industry contracts for major headline actors sometimes include a percentage.  Ed Asner (once President of the Screen Actors Guild) has been quoted as saying to make sure it is a percent of gross, not a percent of net:  the major studios have a system by which a movie never makes any money, but always owes the studio for production and promotional costs.  The same thing has been happening in the recording industry.  If you sign a contract today, it usually says that you will be paid once all the costs of producing and promoting the album are covered, but those costs include printing copies, buying advertising, shipping product, and paying the salaries of everyone involved at the company.  As the return on investment on records fell, the balance shifted:  by the early nineties, concert tickets were outrageously high because artists got no money from selling records, and thus making a record for them was a way of promoting a concert tour.  By the dawn of the third millennium, record companies were being hit by file sharing–and many artists did not care, because they never expected to make a dime from their records and file sharing brought people to their concerts.  Record companies compensated by changing the terms of contracts so that the record company owned all rights to all performances by the band, and could get a cut of the concert income.  Artists often find themselves very famous but not very wealthy.

Meanwhile, record companies are struggling because the model has changed drastically at the sales end but has not caught up at the production end.  Artists still think in terms of recording albums; the majority of consumers don’t buy albums, they buy tracks–if they buy anything at all, rather than pirating copies from YouTube® videos and file sharing programs.  The quality that goes into making these now digital recordings is in the main wasted on an audience that listens to low quality recordings on low fidelity equipment.

The impact on the Christian market has been somewhat less, because Christians tend to do less pirating and are more likely to buy whole albums of bands they follow.  However, Christian record companies have not escaped the crunch despite the rising popularity of Christian contemporary music.  A recording contract is no longer a mark of success in the music world; in many cases it’s a badge of slavery.  It buys you a lot of help with promotions, but at a very steep price.  It is probably the right choice for some musicians, but is becoming less and less so as it becomes more and more possible to produce your own recordings and promote and sell them over the Internet without such professional assistance.  The main things that a recording contract gets you are funding for production which you will have to repay, and possible radio airplay which only happens for a few.

The problem with Christian record companies is that they are becoming obsolete and see no clear path to reinvent themselves.  I have no advice on that, I’m afraid, despite having worked in Christian contemporary music radio and done some recording myself.  The world changes and old industries fail; it is doing so now.

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Books by the Author

#110: Character Redirects

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #110, on the subject of Character Redirects.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than those for the previous novel, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.

These were the previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering this book:

  1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole),
  2. #78:  Novel Fears (which continued with coverage of chapters 10 through 18),
  3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
  4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
  5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
  6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (chapters 46 through 54),
  7. #94:  Novel Meetings (chapters 55 through 63),
  8. #100:  Novel Settling (64 through 72),
  9. #104:  Novel Learning (73 through 81).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

img0110Village

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in those earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

Chapter 82, Hastings 70

I brought Lauren to stage three at this point, although I didn’t get into details.  That is, she realizes that she is awake; she has been awake but didn’t know it.  Also, I’m going to step her backwards in a future world—that can happen, but it’s unusual, but I need to do it for the beginning of the fifth novel.  But the idea of becoming accustomed to dying seemed significant at this point.

Again we have the idea that she has to choose a direction, and even with only two directions she is opening some possibilities and closing others with the choice.  She resolves her concerns by making as rational a decision as she can—keeping the sun out of her eyes for a while—and trusting that God will get her where He wants her to be.

Once she confronts the familiar place name, she needs a way to identify whether it is the right place in the right universe.  Getting to her cave is the easy way; it stands a good chance of being pretty much the same after only a few centuries.

Chapter 83, Brown 28

It becomes a pattern for Lauren, that she gathers people around her, gets them working together with her toward some goal, and then she gets killed but they keep going.  She thus changes worlds by creating something self-perpetuating before she leaves them.

The word Derek uses for the head of the school is of course “principal” and not “dean” because he went to schools that had principals.

Chapter 84, Kondor 70

We have reached the reveal:  Joe has solved the mystery.

Kondor starts talking before he knows what he’s going to say, honestly because at this point I wasn’t sure what he was going to say.  I’d written myself into a bit of a box here, following the logic of the conversation, and now I had to find a way out of it.

Both of my adversaries here were good, each trying to outmaneuver the other.  It was difficult to get it to come out with Kondor as the winner, because Krannitz really was a smart illusionist expert in misdirection.

Chapter 85, Hastings 71

Figuring out what would change and what would be the same in a wood that stood undisturbed for some unknown number of centuries took a bit of thought and some tapping into my experience.

The idea that the woods would be a terrible waste of space if no one lived in them is in one sense a bit silly, but it really is in another sense perceptive.  The woods must be there for a reason; the best reason is to be a place for someone or something to live.  Extrapolating the existence of forest people doesn’t necessarily follow, but a good case can be made for it—and in that universe, it happens to be correct.

I knew, and perhaps the reader knew or should have known, that this was the time when Lauren would meet and begin teaching Bethany.  However, it was important to me that it happen naturally, that is, Lauren is not looking for Bethany and not really expecting to find Bethany; she finds a young girl who impresses her with her insight, her intelligence, and offers to teach her something, and then discovers that this is the girl she met in the future.

Chapter 86, Brown 29

I wanted time to pass without spending a lot of the book talking about it, and leaping in with the idea that everyone else had aged ten years and Derek looked the same covered that adequately.  It would include however long Lauren was there, which was maybe three or four years, but would give Derek plenty of time to become quite proficient at his interests.

The explanation about Lauren and Derek being versers is not really necessary for the reader, who already understands it, but helps in giving some form to Derek’s own understanding of it.

I eventually would need to move Derek to another world, and barring another classroom incident I was either going to have to have him kill himself on a botch, probably with some kind of high-tech equipment, or get him to move out of the compound into the more dangerous world.  The latter had more interesting story possibilities.

Chapter 87, Kondor 71

With the arrest, I needed to make it seem like a modern world without making it the same as our world.  I had some advantage in having watched British television, particularly A Touch of Frost, and so had heard the different version of what in America are called “Miranda Rights” (after the defendant in the case in which the Supreme Court affirmed them), but I didn’t want them to be the British version, either.  So I thought about what might be said in my other world, and came up with a plausible statement.

Kondor’s problem was my problem.  I had envisioned a continuation of the game in which he worked as a magician’s apprentice (and later when I ran this part of the game for Graeme Comyn, he did exactly that).  I didn’t have another next step for him, and having Merrick suggest he come by to discuss a possibility was a stall on my part—I had nothing in mind in that direction.

Chapter 88, Hastings 72

As I came into this scene, I wondered how Lauren proves her identity to people who only know her legend.  The answer presented itself:  she knows the name of the wolf whom she taught to walk the twilight, who is the ancestor of the present pack mother.  Since Garla was not the pack mother at the time, there is no other reason why Lauren should know the name but that she was the teacher.

Chapter 89, Brown 30

One of the problems with versing is that even people who believe it have trouble understanding it.  Dorelle asks obvious questions that completely misunderstand the problem.

I’m beginning to work on an adventure, but I don’t know how I’m going to do it—which is fine, because it makes the feeling of uncertainty all the more palpable in the character discussions.  They don’t know how to find a place to explore, either.

Chapter 90, Kondor 72

I had set myself up for the possibility that Merrick would have an idea to help Kondor figure out what to do next, but I didn’t have any such idea.  So I took Merrick away for a few days, figuring I could fill in story details and maybe have something else by the time he returned.

I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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Bible and Theology, Music

#109: Simple Songs

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #109, on the subject of Simple Songs.

I find myself in the awkward position of defending a practice I don’t particularly like.  Someone criticized Christian record companies.  I think that there are serious problems with Christian record companies, but I don’t think that the particular problems suggested in the supposedly satirical video were the real problems.  I will probably write more on this subject, but first I want to talk about the problem of simple, that is, simplistic, music.  The video (undoubtedly facetiously) suggested that record companies demand that all Christian songs use the same three chords.  That’s not something record companies ask or expect.  What they expect is that songs be marketable to the people who are expected to want them, and for a certain kind of Christian song that inherently means simple.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not impressed by simple songs and I do my best not to write them.  I had an argument with a piano player who insisted that the B# I wanted him to play (in a G# major chord with a minor sixth added–I know, ugly chord, but the song needed it) did not exist.  I cringe sometimes at the fact that so many of the songs I wrote on the piano when I was in high school and college are so similar, and eventually made a point of not writing songs on the piano unless I could do something really different.  I could probably be a lot more prolific if I weren’t so insistent that every song had to be distinct.

Worship band Hillsong United
Worship band Hillsong United

I also remember being horrified when I was in high school when someone I knew casually told me that he had been baptized in the Spirit on Friday night and over the weekend God had given him five hundred songs.  I approached skeptically, and discovered that he knew three chords, stopped the music to change between them, and sang very nearly monotone.  There is nothing wrong with the miraculous happening in connection with the Holy Spirit; this I don’t think was that.

The temptation is to think that all the musicians who write such “simple” three-chord songs with simplistic melodic lines are like my high school friend, unable to do better or even to know they are doing poorly.  The fact is they are not doing poorly; they are writing the kind of songs needed for their ministry.  One thing that helps me not judge other ministries is understanding what they are actually trying to do and why, and how that is different from what I am doing, and why that different objective requires different methods.

We talked extensively about Christian ministries.  Of particular relevance here, the 1960s and 70s were dominated by evangelist music ministry, which meant music that would catch attention of unbelievers and cause them to listen to the message.  It was frequently interesting, often intricate, always performance-oriented material.  Today, we noted, the dominant stream in music ministry is pastoral, music that benefits the sheep, with participatory worship music at the top of the list.

Don’t misunderstand.  Many great professional composers from Michael Praetorius and J. S. Bach through Charles Ives and Randall Thompson have written some great worship music to be presented by professional musicians, and there is a worship experience in which the worshipper listens and is overwhelmed by the beauty of the music and the presence of God.  However, that is not participatory worship.  When men like Luther and Wesley wanted to get people involved in worship, they took simple songs that their audience knew–usually from singing in taverns–and wrote Christian words to them, because the majority in the congregation are not musically literate and can only sing simple songs that they know or can quickly learn.  The typical congregant can’t handle complex melodic lines, intricate syncopation and time signature changes, modal and key transitions; those are for professional musicians.  Thus songs for participatory worship are best if they are simple.

Further, when someone records a song intended for worship, the expectation is less that you will listen to the recording–which is certainly part of the intention–but more that churches throughout the world will learn to play it and use it in their worship.  Johnny Smith who got a guitar for Christmas and has been trying to teach himself to play has to be able to stand in front of Little Country Church and lead half a dozen worshippers in a song they might never have heard.  If it isn’t simple, it isn’t going to succeed.

There is complex and interesting Christian music out there, because there are still musicians doing non-pastoral ministry, and pastors using music for aspects of their ministry that go beyond corporate participatory worship.  The primary forms on Christian radio though are songs of worship which ordinary people can learn easily and sing along while driving; the primary songs that get played in churches are the simple songs of worship which the congregation can embrace quickly.  They are the kind of music most Christians are buying; they are important in the scheme of music ministry; they are not the totality of it.

Returning to record companies–well, I probably have more to say about the recording industry, but for the moment to give them their due, they have to be interested in the bottom line, in producing recordings that people will buy.  That means songs that will be played on the radio and sung in churches.  That means, primarily, simple worship songs.  Sure, they produce more than that, but since songs for participatory worship are the most popular in the Christian market, they dominate product.

If you want to do something different with your music, that’s a good thing; just understand that you are not looking to reach the present core Christian market if you aren’t doing simple worship songs, not because of the record companies but because of the audience.

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Law and Politics

#108: The Value of Ostentation

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #108, on the subject of The Value of Ostentation.

As sometimes happens, one of my political web log entries got me involved (I hesitate to say “embroiled”) in a discussion.  This time the post was mark Joseph “young” web log entry #105:  Forced Philanthropy, and the argument was carried on Facebook.  In that discussion, someone said

I would just rather live in a world in which people don’t starve while others walk around with $5000 purses and $25,000 watches.

My gut reaction was to agree with that–but then something in my brain started nagging at me.  Why?  That is, what does the one have to do with the other?

The half million dollar Audemars Piguet Diamond Fury ladies' wristwatch
The half million dollar Audemars Piguet Diamond Fury ladies’ wristwatch

I got to thinking about that expensive purse and that expensive watch.  The very definition of “expensive” means that our ostentatiously wealthy person parted with a large amount of cash to obtain it.  I expect that somewhere there are designers who themselves are becoming ostentatiously wealthy from the sales of their products, but ultimately someone–undoubtedly several someones–is getting a paycheck.  I don’t know that it matters whether that money is funding a few very healthy paychecks of skilled craftsman or a lot of factory wage checks for employees–it is moving the money from the bank accounts of very rich people to the wallets and pocketbooks of ordinary working-class families.  It is creating jobs.  That expensive bauble is proof that that wealthy person parted with a large sum of cash.

So it seems that in some sense the purchase of those expensive purses and watches is money going to feed someone other than the very wealthy owners of said baubles.  It is in that sense communicating exactly the opposite of what the critic perceives–not money wasted that could have fed people, but money spent to provide paychecks so people can eat.

Sure, some of it goes into nonsense like all those diamonds that stud the watch, but ultimately we’re still talking about money moving away from the wealthy bauble purchaser toward the working classes.

The objection seems rather to be that the wealthy person is showing off how much money he has by spending it on severely overpriced merchandise.  Why should anyone spend that much money on a handbag?  Indeed, our wealthy person could have walked into Walmart and purchased a perfectly functional handbag for under twenty dollars.  My wife does so frequently.  It seems that the only reason to spend more than that is to have something that will say, “Look at how much money I wasted on a handbag, because I am so incredibly rich that I can.”

Of course, the makers of those expensive products will argue that the price is justified by the quality.  The purchasers, likewise, will say that the products they bought are genuinely better in real ways than the ones everyone else buys cheaply.  After all, “cheap” generally means both that something doesn’t cost much and that it isn’t worth more.  What we have a hard time imagining is that the expensive handbags and watches and other baubles are really worth what the wealthy pay.

That may be something we cannot genuinely or fairly assess.

I have never played a Stradivarius; I have heard a few of them played, but only reproduced over computer sound systems.  They’re said to be priceless, and those few people who have the opportunity to play them believe them to be worth every penny paid for them.  How can I know?  I’ve played a few violins of varying quality, and would say that some are worth more than others, but I cannot really imagine one being so much better that it would be worth as much as that.  I have played a couple of Fender Stratocaster guitars.  They’re good guitars, but I’ve always had the feeling that they were way overpriced–you can get a decent electric guitar for a tenth of what some Strats cost.  Yet there are professional musicians who won’t play anything else, or at least who insist on having one in their collection for use when they want it.

I agree that some instruments play better than others.  When I was in high school, tenor saxophone was one of my instruments.  I often wondered whether I could play alto, and one day I saw an alto sax lying around and tried it, and was impressed with how nicely it played so I looked at the stamp–and discovered that it was the band director’s instrument.  I once picked up a Rickenbacker bass, and it was also very nice.  I’m not sure what these instruments cost, and I’m not sure I could justify spending that much on one.

On the other hand, when I was in The Last Psalm I purchased recording tape for every concert.  RadioShack® then had three grades, and I bought the cheapest for the first few years–and told the sound engineer that as soon as I could hear the difference, I would upgrade to the better grade.  I did so for the final years of the band’s run, because my hearing was better.  I wonder today whether the costs of producing high-quality recordings are worth it, because most people listen to low-quality mp3 copies on low-fidelity equipment.

The point is, an assessment of the quality of a product and the value of that quality is an essentially subjective question.  I can’t imagine a watch being worth as much as that, but some people see it as a quality issue.  If someone puts that kind of effort into producing a product that is in some way better than the norm, and can persuade wealthy people to pay that much for it, that is probably overall better for the economy than having the wealthy people buy the ordinary quality products at the ordinary price.

And the rich person who spends five thousand dollars on a designer handbag instead of twenty dollars on a practical Walmart model has parted with an extra four thousand nine hundred eighty dollars that has gone into paychecks that feed ordinary people somewhere.

So what is it that bothers us about these ostentatious baubles?  Perhaps more precisely, what is it that we want instead?

Some of us want there to be no wealthy people in the world.  Of course, as one of the people in the referenced conversation reminded, half of everyone is below average.  He was speaking of intelligence, but it’s true of wealth as well, and so is the converse:  half of everyone has more than average.  I might feel it unfair that Donald Trump owns his own hotels or Hillary Clinton can jet to Europe on a moment’s notice without checking her bank balance, but I might as easily object that my neighbor could afford to install automated lawn sprinklers or an enclosed garage.  Some people will have more, some will have less.  It is the nature of such differences that they form a bell curve, and it is the nature of natural bell curves that the extremes are extreme–fewer and fewer people having more and more (or less and less).

We can, of course, try to alter that unnaturally–perhaps create a tax that takes 100% of all income or assets over a certain amount.  That is problematic on so many levels.  A fixed amount means that the inflation which drives down the value of a dollar correspondingly drives up the amount of money that is needed for the same standard of living, and so more and more people will hit the ceiling.  It is also detrimental to the economy:  if after this point I am not making any money, why should I work?  That also applies to questions like why should I invest–I won’t hire the people to build the new hotel if once it is finished I make no additional income from it.  No, putting a ceiling on income is not a good plan for the economy; the fact that people can become incredibly wealthy is one of the incentives that drive economic progress.  It is also one of the incentives that drive technological progress:  people invent new devices in the hope that it will make them rich.  It also drives people into popular culture, giving us movies and music and other art forms, as well as star athletes.  You can’t both have the incentive that people work hard to make a lot of money and the limit that no one can be ostentateously wealthy.  That part does not work.

Perhaps we feel like there shouldn’t be anything we, ourselves, cannot afford if we want it.  That is, if I admire your car, I should be able to afford to buy a similar car–maybe not today, but within a few years if I work at it.  Everyone should be able to afford a basic standard of living much higher than everyone can afford–a car, a house, a college education for his children.  What about a boat?  What about an indoor swimming pool, a private indoor gym, a personal jet?  What defines this minimum standard of living?  The reality is, and has always been, that some people will have more than others, and those who have less will be envious of those who have more.  It does not really matter, as we just noticed, how much more or less; the envy exists because it is never exactly equal.

Perhaps that aspect of things we cannot afford goes the other direction:  handbags and wristwatches should not cost that much, no matter how good they are.  How much, though, should they cost, and how do we decide this?  If I can sell the rights to a song I wrote for thirty dollars, is there a reason why I can’t sell the rights to a song I wrote for thirty thousand dollars?  J. K. Rowling sold the rights for the first printing of the first Harry Potter book for a paltry sum; by the time she finished selling the movie rights for the seventh book, she was (literally) richer than the Queen.  Can it be said that the books were not worth that much money?  Obviously the movie producers thought they were, and presumably made much more on income from the movies than they paid her for the rights.  Would we be screaming that she got shorted if they paid her a lot less?  And why, then, should it be different for a handbag or a wristwatch?  Pricing is not arbitrary:  it is based on what people are willing to pay.

So why are wealthy people willing to pay so much for baubles which perform functions suitably managed by considerably less expensive items?  Perhaps that is our objection:  they do it to get attention, to display their wealth, in essence to be ostentatious.  Is that what bothers us?  What is interesting about that is that it only bothers people who care about it.  I would not know the difference between a five dollar pocketbook and a five thousand dollar handbag.  I might be able to tell if I examined it closely that one was better made than the other, but at a glance it means nothing to me.  It only means something to two groups of people:  those who can afford such expensive objects, and those who wish they could and so read about them and drool over them.  The cost of these baubles only matters to people who want to show off and to people who are impressed by them.  The rest of us don’t really care how much it cost.  If I knew how much the handbag cost, my impression would be that had I that much money, I would spend it on something I would enjoy a lot more.

But then, I don’t have that much money, and I don’t really know what I would want to own if I had it.  Would I buy a Stratocaster?  A Stradivarius?  And that raises the question of what we want these wealthy people to do with their money instead.  Should they hide it in storehouses like King Midas?  Should they spend it on armaments or their own personal armies and fortresses?  Should they buy companies, and so make more money?  However they spend their money, it is going to be ostentatious in the eyes of someone.

We would rather have them give it all away to people who have less.  Even when that doesn’t mean “including me”, it is still asking them to spend their money for our benefit:  if they give their money to aid the poor, we don’t have to part with so much of ours and don’t have to feel bad about not being able to do more for the poor without suffering more ourselves.  We don’t have “enough” money for ourselves.  However, a long time ago I learned about the concept of rising aspirations:  the more money you have, the more things you perceive as necessities.  Does anyone really need two televisions?  Two cars?  Two warm coats?  We complain about ministers who own their own personal jets, but these are people who have to travel to the places they have been asked to speak and arrive comfortable and refreshed, so they see these as needs.  No one has “too much” money; everyone can think of what he would do with a little more.

And if we get wealthy people to spend money on ostentation, we get that money into the hands of poorer people as surely as if we were to tax it or coerce them to contribute it to charity.  We get them to part with that money voluntarily, not under compulsion; and we do so in a way that creates jobs instead of making more people dependent on our generosity or pseudo-philanthropy.

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Bible and Theology, Music

#107: Miscellaneous Music Ministries

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #107, on the subject of Miscellaneous Music Ministries.

This continues our miniseries on what it is to be “called” to “music ministry”.  Our first installment was #95:  Music Ministry Disconnect, making the point that most Christians are not what we call “ministers” and most musicians are “entertainers”.  In #97:  Ministry Calling we examined how to know whether you are “called” to be a “minister”, based largely on who you are, what motivates you and how you relate to others with needs.  Following this we identified five specific “ministries” in #98:  What is a Minister?, and addressed each of these individually in its own article.

Someone is undoubtedly saying that I missed something, because he knows that he is called to music ministry but does not fit into any of those.

It is certainly plausible that there are ministries Paul did not happen to mention in that passage; he does not specify that it is an exhaustive list of possible ministries.  On the other hand, they do provide comprehensive coverage of most of what we can identify as the spiritual needs within a congregation.  If you have a spiritual ministry, what does it do?  Does it bring the gospel to people who have never heard it and launch churches, as the Music Ministry of an Apostle?  Is it focused on bringing God’s specific direction, timing, and confirmation to His people when they need it, and thus a Prophetic Music Ministry?  Is it about bringing unbelievers to faith, an Evangelist Ministry?  Are you drawing believers closer to God and each other, the Music Ministry of the Pastor?  Are you enabling believers to understand the truths they have embraced, as a Teacher?  If you are not doing one of these five things, what are you doing that constitutes spiritual ministry?

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On the other hand, there are other positions in the church, and we speak of other kinds of ministry today.  The Ephesians list gives us a rather sweeping collection of spiritual servants, but as we previously noted there are other kinds of service within the church, and our use of the word “ministry” has been in a sense selective for our purpose.  You might serve by playing the organ, conducting the choir, singing the liturgy, and be quite correct that God has put you in a place where you are using your gifts for His service.  Some of those ministries have names; the degree to which music can be involved depends very much on how the position is understood.

In some ways the simplest of those named positions is the previously mentioned diakonos or “deacon”.  In Acts 6 there was a problem concerning the distribution of food–members contributed food to the church which was delivered to widows, among the poorest with the worst prospects at that time.  The Apostles decided to have the church choose seven people to become “servers”, to deliver the food fairly to the women.  Paul later discusses in letters to Timothy and Titus how to select such “servers” for the local church, and we assume that they have much the same function, of overseeing the in-house charitable assistance.  We have expanded on that, but our expansions have gone in two distinct directions.  In one direction, deacons have become the business managers of the church, because they handle the assets and spending; in the other direction, deacons (and particularly deaconesses) have become the charitable arm of the church, because their original assignment was to attend to the poor.  Because of the tension between these two in some ways disparate objectives, the office has tended to become whatever the particular denomination or congregation wanted it to be, or even what the appointed individual made of it.

It should be noted that being a server does not preclude being some other kind of minister.  The Philip named among the seven servers is the one we discussed as Philip the Evangelist.  It is also certainly possible that music can be incorporated into service as a deacon, as for example entertaining in a mission or soup kitchen, or at a concert to raise money for and awareness of the homeless or otherwise impoverished.

The “presbuteros” or “elder” is more difficult.  We know that there were elders in synagogues, and they were quite simply the old men who had been in attendance for many years.  They had learned much and accumulated some wisdom, and so were sought to provide insight and direction.  Nowhere are we told how they are selected or identified, but in I Timothy Paul suggests that they are in charge of “ruling” the church, and that they get paid for this (“double honor” refers to what we would call an honorarium, money given as thanks, and that it is “double” for those laboring in preaching and teaching suggests that those “elders” who are not preaching and teaching are still paid for “ruling” the church).  He also suggests that some of them are involved in preaching and teaching–but that some are not, and thus again we have the suggestion that some elders also have other kinds of ministries, and also that some who do not have ministries of the sort we equate with standing in the pulpit are still very much involved in serving the church as leaders.  That might sometimes include using musical gifts at church gatherings of one sort or another.

Also unclear is the office of “episkopos”, a word compounded of “atop sight” giving us the concept of “overseer”.  It is often rendered “bishop”, derived indirectly from the Greek (Greek “episkopos” becomes Latin “ebiscopus” becomes English “bisceop” and eventually “bishop”).  We know that there is a selection process and qualifications; we don’t know what these people did.  The title has become part of the hierarchy in many denominations, ranging from the head of a local church to the head of a denomination.  It has something to do with ruling and caring for the house of God, but whether that means financial management or spiritual oversight is pretty much a guess.  It thus also makes it difficult to suggest how music might fit into service in so uncertain a job.

Some speak of a “healing ministry” and identify some persons as “healers”.  The nearest word for that in the New Testament is “iatros”, which properly means “healer” but is almost always rendered “physician”.  In most occasions it is used rather generally or often metaphorically about medical doctors.  (The familiar metaphor is “Physician, heal thyself,” which is more poignant when we replace “physician” with “healer”.) The only specific individual ever said to be “iatros” is Luke (in Colossians 4:14, in passing as a way of identifying him).  It is not impossible that Luke was a “healer” in the sense intended by those who use the term, but tradition has always maintained he was a medical doctor, and his writing supports this contention in several ways.

Meanwhile, there is an interesting exegetical issue in I Corinthians 12:9.  It is in the middle of a list of gifts the Spirit gives, immediately after “faith” and before “effecting of miracles”.  We are very uncertain what many of these gifts are, but the quirk with healing is that it doesn’t say “healing” as a gift, but lists the gift as “gifts of healings”, as if perhaps this person received a package from God that contained healings he was to distribute to those who needed them.  This person is not really exercising a gift of being able to heal people; he is working as a deliveryman who has been given these healings to give to others.  That does not make it not a position of serving God and the church; it does significantly alter our perception of it.  Yet as important as such physical healing is, our perception is that healings in the New Testament were always connected to bringing people to God.  Thus those who have gifts of healing are probably also exercising one of the Ephesian ministries, enabled by these gifts, whether apostolic, evangelistic, pastoral, or one of the others.  If music fits the “healing” ministry, it will be because it fits in the way that is appropriate to the ministry which the healing is supporting.

Music is part of life, and has been from the early chapters of Genesis.  It has been used in worship and in ministry, but was not invented originally for that purpose.  We can have Christian entertainment, which is good, and we can use music in many ways within the church.

I hope this series has been helpful to your understanding of ministry and the place of music within it.

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Bible and Theology, Music

#106: The Teacher Music Ministry

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #106, on the subject of The Teacher Music Ministry.

This continues our miniseries on what it is to be “called” to “music ministry”.  Our first installment was #95:  Music Ministry Disconnect, making the point that most Christians are not what we call “ministers” and most musicians are “entertainers”.  In #97:  Ministry Calling we examined how to know whether you are “called” to be a “minister”, based largely on who you are, what motivates you and how you relate to others with needs.  Following this we identified five specific “ministries” in #98:  What is a Minister?, and began looking at individual ministries with #99:  Music Ministry of an Apostle followed by #101:  Prophetic Music Ministry and #102:  Music and the Evangelist Ministry.  Last time we considered #103:  Music Ministry of the Pastor, including worship leading.  We previously established that pastor and teacher are not the same ministry, but jointly important in the local church.

The fact that I am a teacher both simplifies and complicates the effort to explain the ministry–simplifies because I know it intimately, complicates it because first it is always difficult to see what makes yourself different from others, and second because it is easy to confuse personal experience with that which is generally true of a group.  I was a Boy Scout, but I did many things as a Boy Scout that probably most other Scouts did not do, and there are many things that were done by many Scouts which I never did.  My experience as a teacher is in some ways unique, and in some ways general, and so the difficulty arises in identifying that which characterizes all teachers, as distinct from that which is specific to me.

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Where the pastor is most concerned with people and relationships, the teacher is most concerned with knowledge and understanding.  Our theology and doctrine is laced with the concerns of teachers, and contains a lot of trivial minutiae that is, in ultimate terms, inconsequential.  To pick on one of the biggest issues, questions of the nature of God as three persons but one God, the doctrine of the Trinity, are not essential to salvation:  even most seminary graduates have trouble with the concepts, and one of the details is one of the major points of disagreement between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox denominations.  People are saved and go to heaven every day with no clue as to how there can be only one God but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all that one God and are in some sense also distinct persons.  It is better to understand aright than to misunderstand, but what we call the Apostles Creed is not found in the writings of the Apostles.  It is an effort by teachers to make sense of what we know, which is valuable but not essential.  Understanding what you do not believe is worthless; believing what you do not fully understand is sufficient, although understanding helps undergird belief.  Developmentally handicapped and autisic persons who understand almost nothing but trust God through Jesus Christ go to heaven; seminary graduates who do not believe the God about whom they learned exists do not.

Yet the teacher explains things.  It was probably Paul’s calling as a teacher that was behind much that was in his letters.  We see how he takes the facts he knows–that Jesus has come to save not the people who were working hardest at keeping the law as perfectly as possible, but ordinary sinful commoners, and recognizes from this that keeping the law has nothing to do with pleasing God, but trusting God is what really matters.  His application of reason to build significant explanations of soteriology, ecclesiology, sanctification, eschatology, and more, are all efforts to enable us to understand–because understanding is the foundation for both believing and acting.

A teacher is thus someone who is always explaining, always instructing, always trying to help others understand what it is that he has learned.  It is most valuable when he is explaining scripture, doctrine, Christian life and conduct; it expresses itself through his character in that he is always explaining everything.  Just as we cited Tom Skinner’s comment that he would have been a great used car salesman had he not been an evangelist because he is that kind of person, so, too, the teacher is marked by a seemingly irresistible urge to teach, to explain and clarify and help others understand.  Others often find this annoying because they don’t really want to understand, certainly not at the depth and level that the teacher does–because the teacher is driven to learn, to study, to contemplate, to grasp everything as completely, thoroughly, and deeply as possible, and (because we all suppose that everyone is more like us than otherwise) assumes that the student has the same hunger.  Teachers thus want to know, and try to explain, everything in much greater depth and detail than anyone really “needs” to know.

Yet that depth and breadth of knowledge is important within the church.  It is easy for congregations to wander into error simply from failure to understand simple truths–the basic understanding of how the gospel frees us from the law without making us immoral scoflaws; the importance of the concepts of tithing and Sabbath-keeping as they point us to God’s total ownership of all our money and time; the types of ministry within the church, what each accomplishes and how they work together.  What teachers bring to the church is essential.

As mentioned, teachers are focused on truths and facts and explanations, not on people.  We can seem a very uncaring bunch, not because we don’t care but because our concerns are more about whether you understand than anything else.  A teacher presented with someone with a problem will answer with teaching, answers to theological questions, expositions of scripture.  If he remembers to pray with the person, his prayer will probably reflect a belief that understanding these truths will solve the problem.  That is sometimes the case–the prayers in Paul’s letters are nearly always on the order of “God, may my readers understand the truths I am about to explain to them”–and there is a degree to which God brings people to that minister best able to help them.  Such explanations are often the answer to difficult problems, particularly when someone is hearing questionable claims or struggling with challenging issues.  At the same time, such teaching does not replace pastoral ministry:  learning about God and the message is important, but learning to live in relationship with God is not gained by absorbing facts and doctrines, even when such teaching is pointing in the right direction.  One of the truths I had to learn very early in my ministry was that the closeness to God and divine warmth I observed in some of my fellow students was not the result of some truth they had learned, but of time spent in prayer and meditation, communing with God.  Teaching is of great value to the students, but we confuse knowledge with relationship, and we teachers are partly to blame for that.

I observe with my own music that I am often incorporating lessons into the songs, from apologetics to instruction in Christian life and truth.  Songs which answer the questions about being Christian are the heart of the teaching music ministry.  They can be used as introductions to spoken lessons, but can also take advantage of that aspect of music we noted for both the evangelist and the pastor, that people will learn the songs and sing them, reinforcing the lesson long after the concert has ended.  If you leave one of my concerts singing “Lord, you’ve got me convinced”, or “Passing through the portal to the new world”, or “And I’ll trust Him again”, or “How can they hear if we don’t tell them?”, you’ve carried the lesson with you.  That’s the objective.

That completes our consideration of the five ministries identified in Ephesians 4.  The series will continue with some consideration of other ways of serving God that may use music but do not seem to fit these categories.

 

Last entry in the series: Miscellaneous Music Ministries