The Things We Say! It's up for Discussion!

This might be a continuation of my last post.  There are several sayings that have their root in religious piety that are real conversation enders.  Primarily because they have no quick retort nor is it considered in good form to answer them in a contrary manner.  I have heard several of those this week and wanted to discuss a couple here.  

"God will never give you more than you can handle.":  This is a response to many of life's challenges including cancer victims and has been recently used in response to those who feel like they have been born gay and it is too much to be asked to stay abstinent.  Some might considered it to be a benign and sometimes spiritual saying; however, I see it as a conversation ender and a statement that is dismissive and is absent of any empathy.  If you are suffering and need to tell someone about it and they retort "God will never give you more than you can handle"  how do you respond.  If you on the giving end of this statement do you really want to share this persons pain?  Do you recognize the absurdity of the statement?

Absurdity:  If you are suffering from cancer and death is imminent, if you are a family member of the cancer victim, if you have lost a child, if your home has just burned down.... god is testing you.  If you loose faith you fail the test.   If the pain is too much and you blame god then the problem is yours because he knew you could handle it and you let him down.  Conversely if you are wealthy and have had no real challenges in life then god must think you were weaker and would not be able to rise to the test.  So you are punished for strength and  rewarded for weakness?

"It wasn't in God's plan for you": If you have tried and worked your heart out and it still hasn't happened its because this guy had a different plan for you and failed to tell you.  Again an opportunity missed to assuage the hurt feelings of someone who is in pain and demonstrate our humanity.  Instead a dismissive remark that invokes piety and hurts someone who may really need empathy is offered.  This was a common saying while I grew up and is kind of woven into the the idea that your existence on earth was preordained.  Now there was also the idea that you had free agency and so if your life was preordained then you really didn't have free agency.

Absurdity:  The saying brings into play two conflicting concepts.  You are free, through agency, to chart your own course but if you fail it is because "it wasn't in God's plan for you." If you follow God's plan for you then you give up your agency.  So it becomes "Your Mission if you Choose to Accept it" ?

"Pray like it is up to God, Work like it is up to you":  This is my favorite saying from annals of pious belief because at least it is an acknowledgement that your dream will likely be realized by your own hard work not divine intervention.

Absurdity:  I don't see this saying as absurd as much as I do the interpretation of it.  I interpret it as an acknowledgement that there very well could be a possibility that there is not a god up there that is really involved.  However, some may say that what you are asking for is too trivial to warrant intervention and therefore your success is up to you alone.  God is too busy to help.  So if you have cancer and you pray for a cure and that is not answered does that mean your life and your existence is too trivial for god to care about?  

So the question is is there a saying that is thrown around your circles that you find absurd or that is a conversation stopper?

Words and Their Meaning

Over the last several days I have given some thought to words and how we assign a value to them.  Specifically how we define swear words or words that are offensive.  George Carlin does a great and classic piece on the 7 words you cannot say on TV.  He also is good at pointing out our own hypocrisy when it comes to making rules about what you can or cannot say.  The video clip is below.  If you are easily offended don’t click on play.

Living here in Morridor there are several other words that are swear words for no other reason that they are assigned that weight.  My favorite Utah swear word is “Stupid”.  I have seen the swift retribution of mothers to their children who use this word toward their siblings.  The reaction is the same as is if they had used the “mother of all swear words”.

My second favorite swear word is “God” .  The way I understand this rule: If you use “God” in any context except a direct conversation with God then it is a swear word.  Here is where we have to engage in mental gymnastics to justify using the word in a manner that it is not offensive.  You can say “thank God”  because apparently this is an aside conversation with god.  You can say, “this is why God Invented”,  because apparently you are giving this ambiguous person credit in some sort of aside wink and nod. You obviously say  "pray to God” and request his guidance because you are talking to god.  However as soon as you say “Oh My God!”  you are taking “the Lord’s name in vain!?!?”  Now I thought gods name was Yahweh or Elohim if you subscribe to the Judeo-Christian texts.  God is a title!... kind of like Dr. or Mr. or PHD. or MA is it not?

If you are a word like damn you are automatically a swear word because of your association with the infamous word god.  Damn in Utah and its other form Dammit  are immediately censored as gateway swear words.  It starts with a damn and then progresses to a god damn and before long you will be saying Stupid!  Absurd?  Yes!

There is a reason we have developed language as humans.  That reason is because we needed a way to communicate ideas.  While some words in our language have terse meanings and they are abrupt and jarring when uttered… some times they are appropriate to the situation or to the context.  Our abhorrence  to using them sometimes gets in the way of ability to communicate.  I worked with a nice lady who rarely would use any of the “7 Words You Can’t Say of TV”.  She would say that sometimes there is no other word that is powerful enough to communicate the idea.  That is why we see content on TV, in the movies, and in our other forms of literary expression using language that is colored, textured, and multidimensional.

This phenomenon is not limited to the use of swear words. We avoid using words that are appropriate in many contexts and are the proper descriptors  to be offered.  In my last post I noted how Doug Wright could not say the words Oral, Anal, or Vaginal Sex on his radio program.  Why?  They were the appropriate descriptors.  Additionally, we fail to teach our children to use words that describe their body parts like penis or vagina.  Instead we treat them as dirty words and in our inability to to get over our 5th grade reaction we inhibit their ability to communicate with their physicians or healthcare providers.  We also inhibit their ability to have a healthy view of their bodies and in our effort to diffuse our own discomfort with the word we actually do harm to our children.  Our reaction to words ultimately taints the real value that word as in our rich language.

I am not an advocate of using course language in all settings.  I correct my children when they use language that is shocking or inappropriate for the situation but in Utah and in other fundamental communities in the United States; I think we have taken it too far.  I am not sure why?  I suspect that it is in part because of religious piety, in part because of political correctness and in part because we think that June and Ward Cleaver were normal representations of the American Family.  To take away the texture of our language is to relegate us an artificial “Pleasantville” existence that is not representative of the American or Human experience.  Dammit! Even Disney knows that!