Dec. 17: Division

 In elementary school, you always learn division last.

You start with addition because that's easy. 

Teacher: "If you have two apples and I give you another apple, how many apples do you have?"

Shteevie: "I don't like apples."

Teacher: "Well then if you have two Luke Skywalker action figures..."

Shteevie: "R2D2 is my favourite."

Teacher: "Fine." (Rolls eyes.) "If you have two R2D2 action figures and I give you one more R2D2 action figure, how many do you have?"

Shteevie: "Three."

Teacher: "Good boy. Here's a gold star."

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From there, you move on to subtraction, which is just addition but in reverse. Then there's multiplication, which is just doing addition over and over again. In Grade 3, we mastered the multiplication tables. Those tables ended at 12x12. I memorized that answer, which was 144, so I could be math champion whenever our teacher, Mme. Di Batista, did the flash card challenge. The one that always messed me up was 12x11. That's 131 but I could never get that one in time. Helene Martin beat me once. Blahh, Helene Martin.

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But division?

Man, that was a whole new planet. That wasn't adding or subtracting or adding over and over again, it was its own beast operating under its own rules. I grouped division with subtraction because, I reasoned, that that was making numbers smaller while addition and multiplication was making numbers bigger.* 

Also, subtraction and division don't behave the same way addition and multiplication do. Like, if I take five numbers as random - 4,7, 22, 47, and 104, and I add them or multiply them, I always get the same total (or product) no matter what order they are in. Let me illustrate:

4+7+22+47+104= 184

also:

22+104+47+7+4= 184

Let's do the same thing with multiplication:

4x7x22x47x104= 3,011,008

also

22x4x104x7x47 = 3,011,008

But that does NOT happen with subtraction or division. Observe:

104-47-22-7-4= 24

now

22-4-104-47-7=-140

Division behaves the same way

104/47/22/7/4=.00359etc..

and

4/104/22/7/47= .00000531835** 

It bothers me a great deal that math behaves stupidly like that. I can't be the only one out there who has noticed this.

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I suspect that Alex Cumming, who gave me this title, was not thinking about mathematics when he gave it to me, nor was he wondering how the adolescent version of me was dealing with his daily math class. At the time, I was just a stupid kid who thought math was boring. I had no idea that math would one day play a pivotal role in my day-to-day life. But as movies like Vice Versa and 18 Again*** teach us, youth is wasted on the young.

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In my old town, Stettler, Alberta, there were two Baptist churches. That seemed a bit odd for a town of less than 4,000 that is not located in the southern United States. Were there really so many Baptists in this rural community that two Baptist churches were needed?

Well, no. Stettler had an impressive collection of churches. There was an Alliance church, a Pentecostal church, and a storefront church on Main Street where, I think, the pastor spent most of the time screaming and his congregants spent a lot of time rolling around on the floor. There were also the "mainstream" churches like the Uniteds and the Anglicans, and, to a degree, the Catholics.

But the Baptists were the only denomination that had TWO separate buildings, TWO separate congregations. I asked why this was and one of the pastors told me that, a while ago, there was one congregation and then there was a schism over some peripheral doctrine. Despite several meetings, the two parties could not agree. One said the Bible was crystal clear on XYC. The other insisted the Bible was not crystal clear on XYC. And so the split happened. 

The pastor was mildly embarrassed when he told that story to me. "It's not a good witness to the community," he said. "It makes us look like petulant children. And now we're expecting people to come to us, be discipled by us, and learn things like self-control."

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I'm going to talk about Donald Trump now.

My Facebook feed is constantly giving me memes about Donald Trump. Most of these memes are from people who want to talk about how bad he is. These people wonder why American Christians embrace him so much when his personal life seems so devoid of what the Apostle Paul might call the fruits of the spirit.

I think the answer is that American Christians don't view Trump as a solid Christian role model. Certainly, if Trump was a pastor rather than a president, he would have been asked to step down from the pulpit. The problem is that in American politics, your leadership choice is pretty much binary. Yes there are a number of third party contenders who want to make it to the Oval Office, but pragmatically speaking, you can choose red or blue. Christians in America have long been enamoured with the Republican Party - this might have started with Ronald Reagan - because their policies best line up with the way they think Christianity should be practised and, more importantly, protected.

But several of the conservative evangelical Christians that I follow on social media were quick to take Donald Trump to task for his immature ranting following the murder of film director, Rob Reiner. He lost a lot of street cred over that. 

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I wonder how divisive Donald Trump is in American churches. 

And I am uneasy about Christian nationalism, and mostly for theological reasons.

I mean, if we live in a society where it's just easier to be a Christian, is that really a good thing? Like... does that bring about the aforementioned fruits of the spirit?

If you're a student of church history, like I am, then you'll know that the early church had its fair share of martyrs. In the first three centuries, Christians were heavily persecuted in the Roman Empire. The Diocletianic Perscution, or the Great Persecution, was about the worst. Believers had their tongues ripped out, were decapitated, flogged, and even roasted to death slowly over open fires. 

They probably could have saved themselves if they just stopped believing.

So in a society that is the exact opposite of a Diocletianic**** one - and make no mistake, I don't want to live in a Diocletianic society - can believers truly think that society is helping them become more like Christ? I guess what I'm saying is that if it's just easier to act like a Christian and identify as a Christian, does it really make you one?

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I am blessed in that the churches I attend were not hotbeds for division. There have been problems, for sure. Sometimes I was one of them. But, I think, that church has been good for me and I think that it's been good for a lot of people I know.

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The 1995 movie, Kids, is not an easy watch. It's about teenagers who have absolutely no interests outside filling their needs for immediate animal gratification. They steal money, eat junk food, drink, smoke, do drugs, and have lots of sex, sometimes with young and naive girls who don't appear to be all that willing. I felt creepy watching it and I doubt it's a movie I will ever watch again. Still, even though that movie is now 30 years old, its message is still important and, I think, it's a film most young people should watch. The message was wonderfully articulated by the later American film critic, Roger Ebert, and I will share it here:

"You watch this movie, and you realize why everybody needs whatever mixture of art, education, religion, philosophy, politics and poetry that works for them: Because without something to open our windows to the higher possibilities of life, we might all be [like the kids in this film.]"

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I see that in this post, I have, once again, stitched the sacred and the silly into one sprawling Rube Goldberg of an essay. I'm not sure how appropriate all of this, but hey, that's just the way things go at the Rotating Pineapple. 

 

I am Diocletian. Fear me.

 *Shut up, math nerds. I was 10 years old and didn't even know what negative numbers were. Yes, I know that if I multiply 20 by negative 2, I get -40, which is smaller than 20. I am older now and I know more stuff. So blahh to you and Helene Martin would say blahh as well. 

** Coincidentally, this is exactly how many seconds I can watch a Hallmark Christmas movie before I get bored. 

***There was a slew of body-swapping movies in the 1980s, which also included Like Father Like Son, probably all inspired, in part, by Freaky Friday. They always consisted of a young man switching bodies with his father (or grandfather) or daughter with mother. There was never a movie where a man switched places with a girl. When I was 14, I wondered why that was. Now that I am in my 50s, I know it's because there's no way a movie like that could be made without it being really really creepy. 

**** Isn't that a cool word to say? Diocletianic. Rolls of the tongue, doesn't it? Sounds like a new model of Ford truck. "This fall, the new Ford Diocletianic. Complete with air conditioning and lots of room in the back seat for all your shortcomings. (See what I did there?)