Dec. 31: Do people change?
If I was there
I'd stroke your hair
until you fell asleep
And in your ear
I'd whisper "Dear,
the Lord your soul will keep."
I wrote that Hallmark sentiment in the late 90s for a friend who was going through a hard time. We've since lost touch but that hasn't stopped me from quoting it, or cut and pasting it, for a bevy of other people who have waltzed in and out of my life over the subsequent 15 years. I used to be friends with a girl from Ottawa named Linda. Once I pasted it to the bottom of an email I sent her. She replied that she appreciated the sentiment although she was not comforted by the implicit theism in verse two. Linda was an agnostic/atheist who found the idea of a creator god to be terrifying rather than comforting.
My response, as a person who had just entered his 30s, was to apologize. I rewrote the second verse to something more inoffensive to her infidel ears. She thanked me for it and then went to bed.
I'm in my 40s now.
Now I would not rewrite the verse. If Linda couldn't accept it, that would be her problem.
I changed.
-
I went to acting school with two young Christians who were slated to be married that summer. How young were they? Nineteen, I think. Maybe 20. They were "professional winners," which was the name I ascribed to those mercifully all-too-rare people who seem to succeed at everything they do. The professional winners scored the two leads in that semester's play. They were both beautiful, talented and intelligent people. I imagine that if one of them decided to start writing a novel on Monday, he (or she) would have secured a lucrative five-book publishing deal on Friday.
I ran into the girl about 15 years later at some function or other. She told me that she and the other professional winner had gotten divorced and that she was no longer a Christian.
About a year later, I ran into another performer who used to give me a hard time for believing in Jesus (or any God for that matter.) Now his tune had changed.
"I've been through some things in my life that definitely convinced me that there's something out there," he told me. "I don't what it is, or who it is, but I pray to it and it gives me peace."
So yes. People do change.
-
But people don't change because of debates.
Debates are almost entirely useless. The Internet has thousands of debates on the existence of God but I bet not one of them features a speaker saying: "You know what? My opponent has just convinced me that I am clearly in the wrong. I want everyone here to know that I renounced my former views and I align my new perspective with that of my former adversary."
Just doesn't happen.
Ever since I can remember, my father and my Uncle Den have wasted countless hours arguing politics over the phone. My dad is a social conservative and my Uncle Den is a bleeding heart liberal. Try as he might, my dad can't convince his older brother that he's wrong and my Uncle Den will never admit that he is wrong.
But get this. My dad used to be a liberal. He grew up in Toronto, after all, and what better place in Canada to indoctrinate a child with leftist ideology?
Dad says he started shifting to the right after he moved out west to take a job at a radio station in Saskatchewan. His new employer was a conservative and his politics began to affect my dad, whose life was in a major state of flux. Very soon he would get married and have a child (me) and the liberalism he espoused in his youth suddenly seemed woefully idealistic.
Solzhenitsyn, it is said, came to conservatism after witnessing the cruelty of Stalin's brand of communism at the Gulag. My hero, David Mamet, recently wrote a book called The Secret Knowledge, in which he skewers the liberal precepts that he once held to be dear and true.
And yes there are plenty of examples of conservatives shifting to the left, of atheists gravitating to faith, of abortionists adopting pro-life philosophies. What of it?
What of it indeed?
People do change but there's only one thing that will change them.
It's life experience.
-
Earlier this year, in one of these notes, I said that I still believe the same things I believed when I was 10. That statement was hyperbole. I know I stopped believing in Santa Claus around that time. I don't believe in him anymore. I believed in Jesus when I was 10. I still believe in Him.
When I was just out of high school, I went to a small Christian theatre guild school in east central Alberta. I met plenty of young Christians there. Today, many of them are middle-aged agnostics. Or atheists. Or deists. Or pluralists. Maybe one or two still believe in that great yet terrible doctrine of justification by faith. It is great because it teaches that Jesus Christ paid the price for our sins when He rose from the dead after His crucifixion. It is terrible because it also teaches that everyone who hasn't put their faith in the risen Christ will not inherit eternal life.
I sent an email to one of these folks to ask if he was still a person of faith. His reply: "Let me just say that I believe in a higher power but not a christian one... Simply too much evidence to the contrary to support christian dogma anymore."
-
We age. We mature. We experience. We meet people. We fall in and out of love. Our friends and our family members die. We read books. We travel the world. We stand at the foot of the Pacific Ocean and we feel small and insignificant. We read the works of Shakespeare or we listen to the music of Mozart and we tremble at the prospect of unmitigated genius.
These things shape our worldview. When we say we are liberal or we are conservative, we know we don't feel that way because we read Ann Coulter or Karl Marx. We embrace these labels because of our upbringings or because of something that happened to us on a backpacking trip in 1999.
-
People change but they don't like to credit other people for forcing them to change or, even worse, for showing them that they are wrong. If you change your worldview, you'll likely rationalize it by saying: "Well, I used to think that way but then I got a little older and I saw what life was like in China and then I realized I could no longer subscribe to XYZ..."
I knew a very sweet albeit naive girl once. She believed I hung the moon. Ten years later (and after an unfortunate death in the family) she is a different person. She no longer believes I hang the moon and is perfectly willing to call me on my bullshit whenever I am trying to bullshit myself (which is fairly often.)
-
I used to believe that women were selfish creatures who only wanted men who were tall and handsome and rich. I believed that until I was 24, which is how old I was when I met my first real girlfriend.
I used to believe that hard work would always pull you through. Now I am not so idealistic. Luck - or providence, if you prefer - plays a role.
I used to believe that the belly button is the sexiest part of a woman's body. I still believe that.
I used to believe I'd be an awful father and then another girlfriend let me be a surrogate father to her son. I've also served as surrogate father to a few other children and now I have a child of my own. I still believe I am an awful father but that it the Calvinist in me. I believe everything I do is depraved - a filthy rag in the sight of the Lord.
I will believe that forever.
-
I need to end this note soon because 2014 is drawing to a close and I have a whole bunch of things I need to do before it is 2015 and people everywhere start screaming Happy New Year! By my estimation, I will be driving my car down SDG 34 toward Alexandria when the new year hits. I will eat cheese Bugles and drink water and probably Prince will be playing on my iPod. For a little while, all will be right with my world.
-
I guess I need to talk about note-a-day. I wish I could say this 365-day journey has changed me but I don't really think it has. I know I have some regular readers, most of them never comment or even "Facebook like" what I have written. So do me a favour, will you? If you're reading this on Facebook, like this note. That may give me an idea as to the project's readership.
It's been fun but I don't think it's much more than cotton candy. I don't think I ever said anything profound in these notes. (And I think of the great gospel preacher who said it was better to preach the gospel than to think great thoughts.) Will I do it again? Maybe I will. But it will be sometime in the future when I have more time and when I am not obsessing over Dr. Pepper and belly buttons and Amanda Marshall and pretty blonde actresses from Apple Hill who - if I ran the world - would be as famous as Anne Hathaway.
Thank you for reading.
God bless.
I'd stroke your hair
until you fell asleep
And in your ear
I'd whisper "Dear,
the Lord your soul will keep."
I wrote that Hallmark sentiment in the late 90s for a friend who was going through a hard time. We've since lost touch but that hasn't stopped me from quoting it, or cut and pasting it, for a bevy of other people who have waltzed in and out of my life over the subsequent 15 years. I used to be friends with a girl from Ottawa named Linda. Once I pasted it to the bottom of an email I sent her. She replied that she appreciated the sentiment although she was not comforted by the implicit theism in verse two. Linda was an agnostic/atheist who found the idea of a creator god to be terrifying rather than comforting.
My response, as a person who had just entered his 30s, was to apologize. I rewrote the second verse to something more inoffensive to her infidel ears. She thanked me for it and then went to bed.
I'm in my 40s now.
Now I would not rewrite the verse. If Linda couldn't accept it, that would be her problem.
I changed.
-
I went to acting school with two young Christians who were slated to be married that summer. How young were they? Nineteen, I think. Maybe 20. They were "professional winners," which was the name I ascribed to those mercifully all-too-rare people who seem to succeed at everything they do. The professional winners scored the two leads in that semester's play. They were both beautiful, talented and intelligent people. I imagine that if one of them decided to start writing a novel on Monday, he (or she) would have secured a lucrative five-book publishing deal on Friday.
I ran into the girl about 15 years later at some function or other. She told me that she and the other professional winner had gotten divorced and that she was no longer a Christian.
About a year later, I ran into another performer who used to give me a hard time for believing in Jesus (or any God for that matter.) Now his tune had changed.
"I've been through some things in my life that definitely convinced me that there's something out there," he told me. "I don't what it is, or who it is, but I pray to it and it gives me peace."
So yes. People do change.
-
But people don't change because of debates.
Debates are almost entirely useless. The Internet has thousands of debates on the existence of God but I bet not one of them features a speaker saying: "You know what? My opponent has just convinced me that I am clearly in the wrong. I want everyone here to know that I renounced my former views and I align my new perspective with that of my former adversary."
Just doesn't happen.
Ever since I can remember, my father and my Uncle Den have wasted countless hours arguing politics over the phone. My dad is a social conservative and my Uncle Den is a bleeding heart liberal. Try as he might, my dad can't convince his older brother that he's wrong and my Uncle Den will never admit that he is wrong.
But get this. My dad used to be a liberal. He grew up in Toronto, after all, and what better place in Canada to indoctrinate a child with leftist ideology?
Dad says he started shifting to the right after he moved out west to take a job at a radio station in Saskatchewan. His new employer was a conservative and his politics began to affect my dad, whose life was in a major state of flux. Very soon he would get married and have a child (me) and the liberalism he espoused in his youth suddenly seemed woefully idealistic.
Solzhenitsyn, it is said, came to conservatism after witnessing the cruelty of Stalin's brand of communism at the Gulag. My hero, David Mamet, recently wrote a book called The Secret Knowledge, in which he skewers the liberal precepts that he once held to be dear and true.
And yes there are plenty of examples of conservatives shifting to the left, of atheists gravitating to faith, of abortionists adopting pro-life philosophies. What of it?
What of it indeed?
People do change but there's only one thing that will change them.
It's life experience.
-
Earlier this year, in one of these notes, I said that I still believe the same things I believed when I was 10. That statement was hyperbole. I know I stopped believing in Santa Claus around that time. I don't believe in him anymore. I believed in Jesus when I was 10. I still believe in Him.
When I was just out of high school, I went to a small Christian theatre guild school in east central Alberta. I met plenty of young Christians there. Today, many of them are middle-aged agnostics. Or atheists. Or deists. Or pluralists. Maybe one or two still believe in that great yet terrible doctrine of justification by faith. It is great because it teaches that Jesus Christ paid the price for our sins when He rose from the dead after His crucifixion. It is terrible because it also teaches that everyone who hasn't put their faith in the risen Christ will not inherit eternal life.
I sent an email to one of these folks to ask if he was still a person of faith. His reply: "Let me just say that I believe in a higher power but not a christian one... Simply too much evidence to the contrary to support christian dogma anymore."
-
We age. We mature. We experience. We meet people. We fall in and out of love. Our friends and our family members die. We read books. We travel the world. We stand at the foot of the Pacific Ocean and we feel small and insignificant. We read the works of Shakespeare or we listen to the music of Mozart and we tremble at the prospect of unmitigated genius.
These things shape our worldview. When we say we are liberal or we are conservative, we know we don't feel that way because we read Ann Coulter or Karl Marx. We embrace these labels because of our upbringings or because of something that happened to us on a backpacking trip in 1999.
-
People change but they don't like to credit other people for forcing them to change or, even worse, for showing them that they are wrong. If you change your worldview, you'll likely rationalize it by saying: "Well, I used to think that way but then I got a little older and I saw what life was like in China and then I realized I could no longer subscribe to XYZ..."
I knew a very sweet albeit naive girl once. She believed I hung the moon. Ten years later (and after an unfortunate death in the family) she is a different person. She no longer believes I hang the moon and is perfectly willing to call me on my bullshit whenever I am trying to bullshit myself (which is fairly often.)
-
I used to believe that women were selfish creatures who only wanted men who were tall and handsome and rich. I believed that until I was 24, which is how old I was when I met my first real girlfriend.
I used to believe that hard work would always pull you through. Now I am not so idealistic. Luck - or providence, if you prefer - plays a role.
I used to believe that the belly button is the sexiest part of a woman's body. I still believe that.
I used to believe I'd be an awful father and then another girlfriend let me be a surrogate father to her son. I've also served as surrogate father to a few other children and now I have a child of my own. I still believe I am an awful father but that it the Calvinist in me. I believe everything I do is depraved - a filthy rag in the sight of the Lord.
I will believe that forever.
-
I need to end this note soon because 2014 is drawing to a close and I have a whole bunch of things I need to do before it is 2015 and people everywhere start screaming Happy New Year! By my estimation, I will be driving my car down SDG 34 toward Alexandria when the new year hits. I will eat cheese Bugles and drink water and probably Prince will be playing on my iPod. For a little while, all will be right with my world.
-
I guess I need to talk about note-a-day. I wish I could say this 365-day journey has changed me but I don't really think it has. I know I have some regular readers, most of them never comment or even "Facebook like" what I have written. So do me a favour, will you? If you're reading this on Facebook, like this note. That may give me an idea as to the project's readership.
It's been fun but I don't think it's much more than cotton candy. I don't think I ever said anything profound in these notes. (And I think of the great gospel preacher who said it was better to preach the gospel than to think great thoughts.) Will I do it again? Maybe I will. But it will be sometime in the future when I have more time and when I am not obsessing over Dr. Pepper and belly buttons and Amanda Marshall and pretty blonde actresses from Apple Hill who - if I ran the world - would be as famous as Anne Hathaway.
Thank you for reading.
God bless.
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