Matt’s Marvelous Mailbag seeks to provide marginally adequate answers to much better questions about politics, economics, social life, theology, or any potpourri you see fit to have answered. Send questions to mailbag.bereans@gmail.com.  

It’s a been a while, hasn’t it? Well, I will admit that there has been somewhat a dearth of questions for some time now, but we have reached a quota and shall commence with another mailbag. I suppose it’s natural at some level. One can only answer so many questions about the Donald before it gets wearisome. But I digress; to the mailbag!

Q: Daniel asks: Do I even need to stress how dangerous this is?

A: First off, my thanks Daniel for your patience on this question. Second, for those not inclined to clicking on links, the jist of the article is that free speech is swiftly falling out of favor, with an increasing number of Americans being inclined to favor increasingly punitive measures. I think I’ve made my position on free speech clear on here before, but just in case I haven’t, it goes something like this. In large part, I think you should be free to say most anything you want, provided you are willing to take the social hit for what you say. If you make a boneheaded statement, be prepared to be called out for your boneheadedness. I wouldn’t call myself an absolutist on free speech, but I trend in that direction.

Two more points I should mention here. First, I don’t think people just flip their mindsets the very second they hear a bad idea expressed. The way this issue gets portrayed in the media, you would think there is a grand army of super-soldiers just waiting to be activated when they hear the code words, and if we allow the wrong type of speech, they’ll be activated. Well, I’m sorry, but people don’t flip over to that over night. It takes not just a long time of repeated exposure to that kind of speech but also exposure in isolation of other voices, which ties into my second point. You are far more likely to witness your populace fall into trouble when speech is restricted as opposed to when it isn’t. Extreme ideas need isolated repetition to take hold, and the conditions for that come far more often in restricted societies than free ones.

Q: Marcus Aurelius asks: “For Christians, are tattoos ok or not?”

A: Honestly, it depends on the Christian. There’s not a lot of mention about them in the Bible outside of the Old Testament (we’ll get to that in a second), so I tend to file this issue under Christian liberty and conscience. If you want to get a tattoo, and nothing bugs your conscience about that, you go right on ahead with that. If you do have a problem with that in your conscience, it’s best to hold off on that. Now, with regards to the Old Testament passage, why do we treat that one as not applicable anymore? Well, for starters, do understand that Christians are not under the law; I think Paul makes that pretty explicit in Romans and just about everywhere he writes. We’re under grace, and we live with different prohibitions and directives than under the law.

But, I’ll give you something more to chew on than just that. When the prohibition is given to Israel, the context is religious, not just aesthetic. Some translations render the verse in Leviticus as saying that one should not make cuts on their body “for the dead,” which is a giveaway that some sort of cultic emphasis is in view here. Moreover, we have pretty solid sources that inform us that tattoos in general in those days were done with worship of certain deity in mind. In short, you didn’t go down to the tattoo parlor in those days because you thought a pair of crossed swords would look cool across your back; you went there because you were participating in some form of deity worship. It makes sense then why Yahweh would outlaw tattoos for Israelites. He desires them to worship Him alone, and the entire context of tattoos is worship of other deities.

Nowadays, that entire context has fallen away, and I see no reason why tattoos for merely aesthetic reasons should be frowned upon.

Q: Sergei asks: “What are your views on wearing headphones in public? Does it help to make the most of down time in transit by catching up on news, learning a language/history, etc, or does it make us more isolated and oblivious to the world around us and distract us from dealing with our own thoughts?”

A: Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t an avid user of headphones, particularly ever since I picked up a pair of Bluetooth earbuds that I can carry around on my neck all day long. Whether or not those are a pair of yokes upon my social capacity remains to be seen. In general, I am reticent to cast too much aspersion on a thing for causing anti-social behavior. Sure, perhaps it makes the path of falling into that behavior a little smoother, but I don’t believe the mere act of wearing headphones or earbuds everywhere is what cuts us off from others. We do that on our own; earbuds are just one of a host of things that can be misused in general.

For what it’s worth, I tend to observe the following two things: (1) Earbuds tend not to be a deterrent to people coming up to you anyway. Were this a reality, the office I work at would be much quieter. As it is, I often find that people will keep talking to me even if I have my earbuds, which is very perplexing to me. They have either grossly overestimated my capacity to listen to multiple conversations at once, or they are tacitly acknowledging that they don’t really care if I hear them or not. Like I said, slightly unsettling either way. (2) Earbuds tend to function more as an escape hatch for me than a barrier. Particularly if you work in a noisier environment, earbuds are a God-send of the highest order. All this to say, I am not that concerned about potential isolation stemming from headphones alone.

Now, the second point about needing to be alone with your thoughts is a different matter; that I will acknowledge is more of a necessity. I also tend to find that I slip into silent consideration without deliberately forcing myself to put the headphones away. Our bodies and minds, to some extent, self-regulate. In general, if you find the headphones are creating some kind of problem, cut back on your use, but I tend to be quite fine with them. I don’t find they separate people anyway, and the benefits of them are immense. Put me solidly in the pro-headphones camp.

Q: Kevin asks: “Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself?”

A: I think you know the answer to that one.

Q: Alex asks: “What do you make of Chick-fil-A changing it’s charitable giving structure?”

A: I probably need to dig more into this, but I think it’s really a non-story. People are making much hay about the fact that they won’t donate to certain groups anymore, but a good friend pointed out to me that Chick-fil-A is redoing its entire charitable structure because the old contracts are up. As far as I can see, there was no explicit “we are changing our giving because of a change in our stance on LGBT issues” statement; the focus being raised in the media is more incidental than causal. Maybe that’s an unspoken, motivating factor, but, honestly, I just don’t care, and I don’t think anyone should either. Chick-fil-A isn’t going to be forgiven by the left anyway, and it doesn’t do the right any good to get all riled up about how they spend their charitable giving. I mean…focusing on hunger, homelessness, and education ain’t a bad thing, folks.

A Final Reflection:

I won’t engross you all in the details, but I had a major prayer request answered this weekend, and it inspired some reflection on the nature of how God orchestrates events. Recently, I finished C.S. Lewis’s Miracles (highly recommend, BTW), and he makes some fascinating points about how God’s sovereignty coincides with our daily lives. For Him, something like favorable weather had its origin in the first day of creation, and if God had wanted the weather to be different that day, Lewis believes he would have changed the first weather event rather than specifically alter the weather that day. Lewis is perfectly happy to believe in bona fide miracles as well, but it was neat to see him considering how broad a scope God works with in orchestrating events.

All this got me thinking on the nature of how He answers prayer in particular. Particularly with prayers that take a long time to answer, during which I have some time to look back over the whole saga relevant to that prayer, I find myself at least thinking something along these lines, “Aha, now I see why God caused it to happen this way.” I suspect this is a fairly common way of looking at these answers.

I don’t think there’s an automatic problem with this line of reasoning; surely God causes certain things to happen in certain ways. I wonder, however, if it’s worth our time to consider a flip side of the coin. It may not always be such that God had caused certain things to happen in specific ways, but rather that He is just the sort of loving, creative sort who is able to pull something good out of a complete mess.

On the one hand, this ups the ante for us. Mistakes are real, and they have consequences. The girl you never asked out would have been the best possible wife; you missed your chance, and she’s gone now. Your monetary follies have landed you in real debt, and you have missed out on many opportunities as a result. The lies you told have broken that relationship; it won’t be healed in this lifetime. I suppose this is part of why the prophets, the Christ, and the apostles so strongly urged us to good works. The risk is real, the potential for failure is high. The game hasn’t been fully played for us; you may end up playing it quite poorly.

Yet, this highlights God’s redeeming and renewing side does it not? The self-imposed singleness was not necessary, but it can be used to good effect. The debt is troublesome, but character was built in paying it off. The broken relationship woke you from your slumber did it not? Perhaps it may turn out that our fall was not preferable in the Divine plan, but He will nonetheless make something better from it. Tolkien writes in the Silmarillion of Morgoth introducing strange notes into Eru Iluvatar’s original song, but Eru does not stop the song; he forms a new and richer song out of the distortion.

What do we make of this possibility? I don’t think we should take it to mean that God will always redeem every mistake we make. I suppose he is under no such obligation, and our requests must be balanced against those of others as well. Remember, the mistakes are real. I think what is really does is pose a question to us, “How big is your God?” Is he beholden to one and only one possible path, or he is fully and wholly able to blaze each and every single one with no less life and beauty than the next one? How you tackle his sovereignty will answer a large part of this question. Personally, I don’t think our own free wills and blundering mistakes pose one single threat to it.