Nobody Cares About My Religious Opinions, Part I

If you suspect there will never be a Part II, you are correct. I doubt there will be a simple Part II to my political post, either. That’s what comes from having too many interests and a schedule I force myself to adhere to like a crazy person. I’m a crazy person. Digression on being a crazy person below. It’s wrapped in asterisks so you can skip it if you choose and get to the point.

***It’s crazy to adhere to a schedule so tightly that I allow for no movement in my life. How can I move, though? I had my eyes on specific end goals, and what happens when I change to another end goal? I leave unfinished projects and unmet goals. When I do that, I cease to trust in my ability to follow through. I become a failure.

But what if God is asking me to do something else, and I won’t budge from my goals because I’ve had them for so long? I have three, count them, 1-2-3, fiction books in process; I’ve purchased a $4000-dollar accordion and therefore must play it every day; I can’t stop studying Spanish because I’m addicted and want to be truly fluent; I’m also trying to reach that elusive 100% fit state instead of simply accepting that it’s not necessary to have rock-hard abs.

At a certain point, the tension inside built up so much last night that I couldn’t cope with it any longer. I thought about talking it out with someone but quickly rejected that idea. Instead, I prayed for resolve, drank two shots of vodka, and fell asleep. Vodka alleviates tension — temporarily. Today, though, I sat down to work on what I thought God wanted me to work on and now the tension inside is erased. Of course, it’s a holiday weekend. What will happen when I’m back at work tomorrow, rising before six a.m. to meet my goals?

The truth is God is not asking me to give up my goals. Instead, he’s telling me to do something purposeful and necessary. I just don’t want to do it because it’s more hard work on top of all the other work in my life.***

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I wanted to return to contract law and its moral significance. In my last post, I discussed Scripture and the morality behind debt forgiveness. God commands it. He commands it because, otherwise, no lender is going to forgive debts. Why would he? When people could be indentured servants to pay off their debts, the lender had a laborer he didn’t have to pay. In our modern system, people pay their debts off through any means of work possible, and they are in a sense operating as indentured servants if their earnings are going only toward debt repayment and basic living costs. In a broader sense, it was more beneficial to society in Old Testament days to have a debt jubilee so that all the people in debt slavery could now earn an income and take part in the economy, even paying those pesky little things known as taxes. Times really haven’t changed that much, except in the modern system, when people get overwhelmed, they drop out of the system and cease paying their debts back, as well as not paying much in the way of taxes.

So, God commanded a way for people to be released from their contracts when those contracts were overly burdensome. From the perspective of a debtor, yes, that person should always honor the contracts they sign, and they should consider it a true mercy if their debts are forgiven. Still, God gave a way out of onerous contracts.

It’s a bit crazy to me that in our modern day we are more willing to allow people out of their marriage contracts than we are willing to give them debt relief. In both instances, the contracts should have been signed with utmost seriousness, with an understanding that it’s a grave matter to violate contracts. Again, God did make a way for married people to get out of their marriage contracts through a bill of divorce. Jesus has some strong words to say about that, though: He said it was only for the hardness of men’s hearts that Moses allowed divorce at all. He had more to say than that. Go look it up for yourself, if you don’t believe me.

To reiterate, God commanded a debt jubilee, something we believe is completely wrong, or at the very least unconstitutional, in our modern day, as we believe that people should honor the contracts they entered into. On the other hand, we engage in marriages and divorces and hardly anyone bats an eye over the breaking of contracts. And yet, God didn’t command divorce as he did a debt jubilee. He allowed it; he didn’t command it. Do you see the difference there. I suppose many Christians will claim they’re hardliners on marriage, just as they are with debt, and don’t believe in divorce. I don’t see that around me, though. As a Catholic, I know the official position is that divorces aren’t allowed by church law at all. Catholics are true hardliners…in their words and dogma only. They change the word divorce to annulment and pretend the words mean one and the same thing, while many, many Catholics still get divorces through the court system long before they seek an annulment through the church. They take it just as lightly as the rest of the world in actual practice.

What am I to make of this? It appears we care more about money than we do about marriage. There are a few ways to destroy a society, and an entire population strapped to debt is one of them. When people can’t buy houses, cars, or educations without going into crushing debt, it makes them feel hopeless. They might very well reach a point, as they already have, where they know they will never be able to buy a house and they no longer believe an education is valuable compared to the wages earned at the end. There are still some jobs where the wages earned are commensurate to the amount of university debt, and I don’t mean being an MD — a computer scientist or a nurse, maybe — but not everyone is cut out for that kind of work. So, education no longer makes sense to many young people. I see that in my four children, the two eldest being millenials who have degrees, and my two youngest being zoomers who show no inclination towards college. What will they do? I don’t know.

Another way to destroy society is to no longer value marriage. That one is actually much, much worse. A poor, uneducated society with intact families is more stable than a society in which the young people no longer value marriage and have stopped getting married, even as they’ve stopped hoping to buy a house or improve their lot through higher education. Along with the mix of too-much debt, no hope for improvement, and no faith in marriages, is a complete lack of care or interest in having children. All of these issues plague us, they are all knotted up together in a complex web we’ve created ourselves over the last sixty or so years. And I can guarantee you that the ease of breaking a marriage contract and the ease of signing a debt contract are two big contributors.

Because of the time we’ve spent getting in this mess, I don’t perceive an easy way out. I spent a lot of years in the homeschool community, where many idealists thought they could find a way out by going “traditional” or “patriarchal”. The problem with that is nobody really knows what traditional or patriarchal means any longer, and the manner in which they try to reinvent a system they don’t understand ends up destroying their own attempt at an intact family! It’s truly heartbreaking. By the way, speaking of Catholicism, I’ve seen a new popularity for the patriarchal family system in traditional Catholic circles that mimics the Protestant fundamentalists. Given the state of our society right now, I understand it. It gives purpose to the idea of family — it gives purpose to the man, to the woman, and largely keeps them out of the debt system. From what I’ve seen of families that went this direction, I just hope and pray that the Trad Caths can pull it off. Or do I hope that? I’m not sure. The patriarchal lifestyle is the last-ditch effort of a drowning man, clinging to a phantom life raft and pulling his family down with him.