It may take a bit to get to the point here. I have a lot of thoughts swirling around on this topic and as I write the facts and ideas coalesce into something meaningful. I think I’m starting to understand why people get so angry about concepts like gay marriage.
I was working with Myrlin Hepworth today and he was reminding my students about the difference between concrete and concept. As he talked it triggered a swirl of thoughts in my head. Love is a concept. Belief is a concept. Marriage is concrete. The Bible is concrete. These things are houses for what are essentially indefinable concepts. When I think about the idea of love and communicate that with figurative language I relate love to the concrete things and actions I define as love-related. Someone else may have the same conversation and pick a separate set of relational objects. One thing we are both supposed to agree on is the Universal Language of Marriage.
This is where things get tricky.
For a large portion of the religious population, marriage is defined by the bible (a concrete house for belief/faith) as the love-based binding of one man and one woman. Marriage then appears to be the concrete house for both love and faith for these people. On the other hand, people like me believe in marriage as the concrete house for love alone. There is no added component—no roommate named faith associated with that. As such, the idea of marriage between two men or two women is just marriage and doesn’t pull a big bad wolf on my house in any way.
Some Thoughts:
- Watched my son mail-in a practice today. He was very much the Allen Iverson of practice and this reflects negatively on him in the eyes of the coach. It reflects negatively on me as a dad who is supposed to prepare his kid and a coach who is supposed to expose his players to athletic rigor Clearly none of this surfaced tonight. Instead I watched a kid who was obviously checked out in the days leading up to his first home game. Speaking of that game, I can almost check ‘watch my kid play a tackle game’ off the bucket list. Everything following is about him and his (apparently limited) desire to play the sport. I didn’t (consciously) push him into it and I refuse to push him to continue if his head isn’t in the game. Then again, maybe he’s just having an off night.
- Napolean Bonaparte was elevated to commander in chief back in 1791. Earlier that year the Big Bottom Massacre in Ohio kicked off the Northwest Indian War. Rough year.