Catholicism, maturity, and other people
Et Tu? has an interesting post entitled “why I’m a better person now that I’m a Christian”:
http://et-tu.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-im…
…Back in college a professor asked us to come up our personal motto, a short phrase that summarized our outlook on life. With a smirk I realized that the best I could come up with was, “People suck.”
Even going back to early childhood, a salient characteristic of my personality was the ease with which I became irritated with the people around me. Though I was usually empathetic to people in difficult situations and was mostly nice to friends and family members, I did not have any kind of fundamental love for “other people” as a general concept …
I think that I’m at least as big an SOB as a Catholic as I was before hand.
Maybe more so, because (coincidentally) I’m now also somewhat economically literate, and much (but not all) of what passes for charity strikes me as useless, immoral, or crazy.
However, it may be that age, and the general waning of 20-something-craziness, has given me a bit of maturity, which bears a passing resemblance to “being a good person”. For example, hearing somebody say something idiotic, and choosing not to immediately explode in a very public way, and belittle them for their stupid statement might look like “being a good person”. But, in fact, it’s often just pure selfish calculation: despite my hopes to the contrary, pointing out in excruciating detail the intellectual incoherence of someone on the other side of a political debate on, say, the Arlington list NEVER results in either that person, or anyone else being educated.
And it takes me 20 minutes.
So:
* Catholicism: no impact on my general SOB-like nature.
* Maturity decrepitude and slightly declining testosterone: no impact on my general SOB-like nature, but it does result in it being expressed less often, so folks might be fooled into thinking that I’m somewhat less caustic than I used to be.
I’d love to love people (in aggregate) – I mean, it is spoken of in good terms lots of places, and not only that, but we’re commanded to do it. I just don’t see how that’s compatible with understanding people. The answer, I’m sure, is that I only think I understand people, and there’s some whole other level of grokkage that I don’t get.
… In which case, let me restate: I’d love to have any desire what-so-ever to learn about that level, and acquire that skill. But I don’t.
Or, in a nutshell, an interaction from a few days back:
NZC: Look, that book is titled “Taking Time To Listen is the Ultimate Love”.
TJIC: Wow, that really distills down to the essence two things I don’t have for almost anyone.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:04 am
You don’t have to like people to love them: you can fervently hope that they’ll turn out to be happy, well-fed, warm, dry, and comfortable – no matter how dedicated they seem to be to making sure that things turn out otherwise, not only for themselves but for you, too.
Shorter form: loving someone isn’t at all incompatible with wishing that they’d stop being so f-ing stupid and self-destructive.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:27 am
I’m going through RCIA, so I guess I can ask. Since such a major part of the Catholic Church is about charity and basically about helping the less fortunate, how is your view that charity is “useless, immoral, or crazy” compatible with church teachings?
I mean, bad things happen to people that leave them in a unfortunate position. You are fortunate that you have never been in that position. But I’m guessing you, like me, are one major illness, disaster, or unfortunate event away from needing help.
I’m just wondering, because I’m pretty sure if I held that view of charity and expressed that opinion in RCIA, I’d be asked to leave.
November 20th, 2007 at 1:28 am
[quote comment="104226"]I’m going through RCIA, so I guess I can ask. Since such a major part of the Catholic Church is about charity and basically about helping the less fortunate, how is your view that charity is “useless, immoral, or crazy” … [/quote]
I’m going to have to insist that if people misquote or badly paraphrase me, they do it at a remove greater than about 4 inches of vertical screen height.
What I wrote was
much (but not all) of what passes for charity strikes me as useless, immoral, or crazy.
I think that very few people in the US qualify as poor, in any sort of global or historic sense.
I think that the vast majority of the “poor” in the US could be not poor if they worked, say, 40 hours per week on average.
I think that many people don’t want to be saved from their habits; they want to be more comfortable IN their habits (habits like: alcoholism or drug addiction, picking bad boyfriends or girlfriends, having children out of marriage, working intermittently, etc.).
I think that truly disabled people, children, and animals are worthy of charity.
I think that the lazy, the self-afflicted, the addicted, etc. are (a) usually not helpable; (b) without a strong moral claim to help.
Additionally, a lot of charities out there help people who are not all that poorly off. Scholarships to middle class kids. Jobs programs for people who wouldn’t need them if they got off their asses. Food banks for people who should take a shower, shave, and get jobs, etc.
Also, a lot of charities spend a lot on overhead, “outreach”, or other idiocies.
Thus, the only charities that I think are moral and useful are those that:
* serve severely disabled adults without other options
* serve children
* serve animals
* serve the truly poor, outside the US
Look at the list of charities registered with the IRS: http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=96136,00.html
Of the 694,836 charities listed, 6,857 of them contain the word ” arts “.
I’m not convinced that “3 Ring Circus Arts Education Center Inc.”, or “Yuma Ballet Theatre and Performing Arts Company”, or “Windy City Arts League” or
“World Martial Arts Research Institute Inc.” are charities in any reasonable sense of the word.
4,239 of the entries contain the word “museum”.
Is the “Art J. Robinson Transport Museum” a real charity, that Catholic teaching compels me to support?
How about the “Arkansas Band Museum” ?
How about the “Atlanta Masonic Library and Museum Association” ?
Or the “Arkansas Historic Wine Museum Inc.” ?
Now, let’s get away from the arts and museums.
Does Church teaching compel me to support “International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics Inc.” ?
Or the “Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival”?
Or how about “San Francisco Sex Information”?
Let’s move away from sensitive issues.
Must I support the “Louisiana Hiking Association” ?
Is it truly Christlike to give money to the “Oregon Bicycle Racing Association” ?
Does the Pope have a preference between me buying a new handplane, and donating my money to “Caddo Bossier Foundation for Sword Sports Inc. ” or “Japanese Sword Society of the United States”?
Or how about any of the 577 different opera-related charities ?
Or how about any of the 79 different charities that have “yacht” in their name?
There are 8,474 different charities that have the word “scholarship” in their names.
Given that my incomes is pretty mediocre right now, is it there a moral compulsion for one lower-middle-class person to donate money so that other middle class people can go to college?
Is the “Chicago Institute for the Study of Architecture & Const Technology” a charity, or is it a trade group?
Is the “Center for Psychoanalytic Study” a trade group, or a bunch of witchdoctors?
To pull a statistic from thin air, perhaps 95% of all the charities out there are useless, immoral, or crazy.
…which is pretty much what I said in the first place.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Hmm. That would explain the overabundance of pointless “charity clubs” at my school. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that the programming club I helped start is doing more work than most of the other clubs combined.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Of course, being a charitable person, or giving charitably, in what I regard as a Christian sense (though maybe erroneously – perhaps you’ll correct me?), need not involve any such ridiculous organizations. I think you’re missing the forest for the trees on this issue.
November 20th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Hmm, I did cut and paste from your original post. But I can see that the context that most charitable groups are useless was lost, I will quote the entire sentence from this point forward. But it was pretty clear I was asking this from Catholic standpoint and not an arts, sex, hiking, or biking standpoint. It was clear I was referring to a people in need.
And I completely agree that most charities, certainly the ones you listed are bogus. So I see from your response that you only support charity for disabled children and animals. How do you feel about Catholic Relief Services and Feed the Poor, both Catholic charities (or at least supported by the Catholic Church)?
It just seems to me that the teachings I have been learning are quite at odds with being, and I am inferring this from your post, a mean sob. There are several parables about helping the less fortunate and being thankful when helped. You also didn’t answer the question of yourself accepting charity if something went wrong in your life.
The Catholic Church has pretty wide tent on what its members believe. But charity seems pretty universal. And I’m talking real charity not charities on an IRS list and I think you know damn well what I mean.
Lets limit it to charities your church supports, or do you believe 95% of those not Christlike either?
Do you believe I am wasting my time feeding people at tent cities who have a job but don’t make enough to afford a place to live? Some of these people or going through a hard time and will return to normal life. Yes, some are scammers, moving from group to group or being homeless without helping themselves, but some are not.
I think we tend to give ourselves too much credit. We both come from families with money that sent us to good schools. Unless I was a complete idiot I would have pretty much succeded. And I think giving others a chance results in more sucessful people. These people pay taxes and contribute to the economy. It seems like a win for the person who is helped and win for society. I just don’t like the blanket statement that those is need are all lazy and deserve what they get. Some, maybe even perhaps most do, but a large percentage deserve at least one chance if not two. You got one.
November 20th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
In his defense, I point out that 1) TJIC isn’t quite as bad in reality (IMO) as he makes himself sound here and 2) he does acknowledge that this (his general misanthropy) is a flaw and seems contrite about it. He did do work for Habitat for Humanity some years ago.
To TJIC, I would say that one thing you could do to improve in this regard is not to carry out internal or external harangues where you re-iterate or affirm your misanthropy. That would at least allow for some extinction to take place, which might be the first step.
November 20th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Having met Travis I do realize this. I’m just challenging him on some of his writings. In person, I do find him a quite different person. And I mean that in a positive way.