Here’s a great article on the soft near-porn of magazines like Maxim, which convince men that they’re only admiring the aesthetic of the feminine form, rather than stewing in their lust.

[These magazines] exist to allow men to look at women’s bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.

The downside to such manufactured people is that they’re all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn’t pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They’re all white. They all have long hair and they’re almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on - her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.

Ah, and there it is.  Sin is almost always the result of a weak imagination.  Unable to imagine a better way of doing something, unable to imagine a God who’d care, unable to imagine a richer experience, human beings follow the path of least resistance.  A good article.

This recent column at the Times suggests that fibbing - or exaggerating the truth, rather than inventing a wholly new fiction - is way easier to do than lying, and way less stressful on the body and mind and soul.  I know, I know.  The legalist in me wants to say that fibbing is lying, no matter how close to the truth.  And that’s true, strictly speaking.  But it happens, and it happens more than lying, and it’s easier to do.  So, come clean: what have you fibbed about this week?  I’m thinking.  Let me think.  Ah, yes.  I fibbed to my wife about the color of paint she chose for the new baby’s room.  It’s called “Pale Daffodil,” and is a plain yellowish hue.  She asked, last night, if I liked it.  I said yes.  I don’t hate it.  But it does look a little plain, a little too much like the color of an elementary school hallway.  But I didn’t say that, because I don’t care.  And if I had said it, she’d have spent another week looking for paint and painting - and she’s pregnant, and she needs to paint and be done with it.  So, I fibbed.  Did you?

The study of morality, once only the province of people who actually believed in it, is now the new new thing in the materialistic universe of science.  This is a good thing (science should study everything it can study, knowing its limitations) and a bad thing (science can only let itself make proclamations about material causes, and so can be counted on to be wrong much of the time).  Anyhow, at least the author of this leviathon piece from the Times magazine understands the difficulty of saying that every moral judgment is a matter of evolution and chemical reaction: “If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded.”

Indeed.  After some interesting thought experiments and facts and non-facts, the author, Steven Pinker, gets down to brass tacks about the origins and purposes and operations of morality.  In the passage below, when he says “the scientific outlook,” he’s talking about the worldview that refuses to consider any non-physical phenomena as actually real.  In other words, love, joy, right, and wrong are chemical reactions and nothing more.  Notice how he dances around the implications of what he’s suggesting, all the while seeming to acknowledge it: 

The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

His answer is not very convincing.  What do we do when we recognize (as materialists, which I am not) that everything is meaningless matter and that morality is nothing but a vapor?  According to Pinker and just about every other materialist since the Enlightenment, we can do nothing but ignore the implications of the horror of the idea we won’t let ourselves not believe.

Doesn’t it make you mad when you think you have to do something slightly immoral to obtain some desirable end, and then it turns out, five minutes after the dirty deed, that you would not have had to do it after all — and could have kept a clean conscience to boot — if you had only waited and trusted?

Don’t you think Isaac’s wife Rebekah felt that way after the deceit she perpetrate to secure the birthright for her favorite son? Jacob was a shoo-in for the blessing anyway, and look at the mess his mom caused by her underhandedness, now having to rush her darling off the plantation for protection, never to lay eyes on him again.

Don’t you feel bad for King Saul, so touching close to glory, but forfeiting the whole thing because he wouldn’t trust just a little longer in God’s word that Samuel would show up on time? His logic in 1 Samuel 13:11,12 is so persuasive and heart-rending, you know you could have made the same fatal choice.

Or Nikabrik in Prince Caspian. Don’t you wish he had just trusted in the solution on the side of the angels — as Caspian, Doctor Cornelius, and Trufflehunter did — rather than enlisting the Hag and Wer-Wolf to win the battle?

Wouldn’t you be mad at yourself if you’d been in the chorus shouting that we absolutely positively need to destroy human embryos in order to help people with Parkinson’s disease? I wonder if you would have trusted just a little bit longer in that childlike gut certainty of the sanctity of human life if you had known that on November 20^th researchers would announce a breakthrough: human stem cells can now be made from skin cells.

In a culture proud of its tolerance, it’s old news to say we are afraid of meaningful words like good and evil.  Daphne Merkin asks in the Times:

What does evil - a term that came into general use only in the 15th century, originally referring to the overstepping of proper limits - look like these days, when so many of us are wary of reductive terms, unsure of our own convictions and easily persuaded of the moral relativism of our values? (The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word is “little used in modern colloquial English.”) Does it have a particular smell, like teen spirit? Does it come wearing a hood, as in the movies? Or, again, does it look like you and me, sitting over dinner and enjoying a glass of vintage Bordeaux?

This is a sad question.  She asks it like a little girl asking her agnostic daddy where grandma’s going after she’s buried.  It’s a question that looks visionary to many, but comes off like some courtier asking Queen Isabella, upon Columbus’s return, “What if the world is round?”