Generation to Generation Quotes #2

Edwin Friedman, in his book Generation to Generation, relates the structure of families to an electrical circuit. Your family is either “wired” as a series circuit or a parallel circuit, or, more likely some combination of the two.

fig2_parallel-series-circuit-battery-light-bulbs

Notice in the series circuit, the electricity has to travel through each light bulb before completing the circuit, which means, that if any one light bulb burns out, the circuit will not be complete, the electricity will not flow, and none of the bulbs will light up. In the parallel circuit, however, there is a complete circuit through each individual light bulb, meaning that even if any bulb burns out, it will not effect the flow of electricity through the other bulbs.

If a family is like the series circuit, anytime a problem or crisis happens, the whole family breaks down. There is no one to take a leadership role to fix the problem. Friedman calls this “linear thinking.” Members of a family need to differentiate themselves from the others in order to create a more parallel system.

“Differentiation means the capacity of a family member to define his or her own life’s goals and values apart from surrounding togetherness pressures, to say ‘I’ when others are demanding ‘you’ and ‘we.’ It includes the capacity to maintain a (relatively) nonanxious presence in the midst of anxious systems, to take maximum responsibility for one’s own destiny and emotional being.” (Friedman, pg. 27)

In a family, when some problem occurs, often one family member will show the symptoms of that problem more than he others. That member Friedman calls the identified patient. “The concept of the identified patient … is that the family member with the obvious symptom is to be seen not as the ‘sick one’ but as the one in whom the family’s stress or pathology has surfaced.” (Friedman, pg. 19)

A mistake, according to Friedman, made by counsellors is to assume that the identified patient is the only one with a problem and then try to “fix” that one person. In reality, the problem is with the whole family, and the whole system needs fixing.

The identified patient is often diagnosed with some condition. Friedman criticizes this practice….

“Diagnosis in a family establishes who is to be the identified patient. It is inherently an anti-systems concept. It is linear thinking [series circuit]. It denies other variables that are present in the system. Existentially, it makes someone ‘other,’ and allows the remainder of the family to locate their troubles in the diagnosed member. It also disguises opinions and judgments; in an intense ‘congregational [church] family’ struggle, this hidden effect adds to polarization.

“Within the personal family, the labelling effects of diagnosis destroy the person. It decreases, in the diagnosed member, a sense of control over the situation, increases his or her dependancy, and thus lowers their pain thresholds. The effect on nonsymptomatic members is that it fixes their perception of the diagnosed person’s capabilities. Eventually a family member’s label will become confused with his or her identity. Diagnosis also tends to concretize. It makes everything and everyone more serious.” (Friedman, pg. 56)

~All quotes from Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue by Edwin H. Friedman

Generation to Generation Quotes #1

“Thresholds for both physical and emotional pain are lower when we are functioning dependently, and are higher when we are motivated to accomplish something. But there is also an interrelational aspect to this threshold dimension of pain. Where members of a family are too quick to spare another pain, the resulting dependency tends to make the other’s threshold fall. In addition, he or she will become addicted to having pain relieved through someone else’s functioning. Conversely, where families can begin to increase their threshold to another’s pain, the other person’s threshold is likely to rise, even though he or she may at first go through ‘withdrawal’ symptoms when the ‘addiction’ is taken away. Those who focus only on comfort, on relieving pain, or filling another’s need, tend to forget that another’s need may be not to have their needs fulfilled.”

~from Generation to Generation, by Edwin H. Friedman, page 48

The Gift of Translation

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With it being the Easter season, the photo on the right is what you’ll see on a typical atheist Facebook fan-page including the caption, “Read a history book Christians.” The argument being, I guess, that Christians are so stupid that they don’t realize they’re actually worshipping a pagan fertility god on Easter instead of Jesus. Well, if that argument is valid, then I could also say the same for atheists celebrating Christmas — “Those atheists are so stupid. They think they are celebrating a holiday time of giving and family, but they are unknowingly worshipping Jesus.” It’s a stupid argument.

My response to the Facebook post was this:
Christians co-opted pagan holidays and made them their own; made them Christian holidays. It’s similar to how secular culture has co-opted some Christian holidays. That’s what happens when one culture dominates another. Christians know the true origin of Easter, and they don’t care. They’ve changed it into a holiday to celebrate the resurrection of Christ.

And it got me thinking about speaking in tongues. In Acts 2, the disciples were given the ability to speak new languages so that all who were present at the temple heard the “wonderful works of God” in their own language. Tongues is best understood when studied in relation to Babel. At Babel (Genesis 11), God scattered the nations through the confusion of language. Directly after that, He called Abram and set him apart from the nations. From Abram came Israel, which was a nation of priests to the Gentile nations to act as a mediator between God and man. The mission of Israel was perfected and completed in Jesus through His death and resurrection — the old world died in Christ and a new world was born with His rising. Once the work of Jesus was complete, there was no more need for the nations to be separate, so God reversed Babel and brought them back together. He did that at Pentecost (Acts 2) through the gift of tongues… or a better way to say it: the gift of translation.

The gift of tongues/translation is manifest today in that wherever Christians go, they translate Christianity into the receiving culture. That starts with language, i.e. the Bible, but it doesn’t end there. Language has two aspects: the objective and the subjective. The objective is simply using words to pass along information. The subjective however, is poetry, novels, song lyrics, plays, movies, TV shows, etc… All that which creates a culture comes from the subjective.

We can call the before-Christ time the Old Covenant World, and the after-Christ time the New Covenant World. In the New Covenant world, Christ has all authority and that authority passes down to the Church. One thing Christians can do, which Old Covenant Israelites could not do, is choose their own holidays. In the Old Covenant, God strictly decided when Israel’s festivals and holidays would be. In the New Covenant world, Christians decide for themselves — the Christian calendar is much more arbitrary. Another aspect of the authority handed to Christians is the fact that Christians are commissioned to take over the world.

So, we can put this all together: 1) Translation; 2) Holidays; 3) Dominion. When Christianity is moving in on a new culture, it will translate itself into that culture, remaking the holidays, and taking dominion. That’s how it works with any dominating force moving in on another culture. We see it with non-Christian influences as well, such as the secular force in the west today.

In Cambodia, the biggest holiday of the year is the Khmer New Year, which is the Buddhist new year celebration. The holiday is celebrated by water fights — people in the streets throwing water at each other. It’s a good way to celebrate, since April, when the holiday falls, is the hottest month of the year. What would happen to Khmer New Year if Cambodia became a Christian nation? Would the celebration of Buddhism still stand? No. Would there still be water fights in April. Most probably. It would just be co-opted by the Christians. In fact, what a great way to celebrate Easter — with the living water of Jesus.

Thomas Sowell Quotes #7

“Moral condemnation is not causal explanation, despite how often the two have been combined in a politically attractive package. Despite the tendency of political, and especially ideological, explanations of economic disparities to combine moral and causal factors, the reason so many mountain peoples [for example] around the world have been poor has not been that others went up into those mountains and took away their wealth, but that the mountain peoples seldom produced much wealth in the first place…

“…it is staggering that some people imagine that they can take on the [large] task of righting the wrongs of the past, committed by people long dead, without igniting dangerous new hostilities among the living.”

~from Wealth, Poverty and Politics, page 271-272

Progressive Conservatism

I think the best definition of Conservatism is this: The conservation of the progress which has already been made. And when I write “the progress which has already been made” I’m not just referring to the last thirty years; I’m referring to the last five hundred years. When talking about individual people, thinking in terms of decades is fine, but when we are talking about civilizations, we must talk of centuries. Think of what the western world was like before the Great Reformation, and compare that to today. Would we ever want to go back?

Yet, it would seem some people in the western world today really do want to go back. Read this article entitled Want Equality? Curtail Free Speech. Yes, some useful idiot actually wrote that. Now, these morons would call themselves Progressive, but when one writes, “Our Government should look to criminalise not only Islamophobia, but racist rhetoric and the criticism of feminism and LGBTQAA+ rights,” that’s anything but progressive — it’s regressive.

In Canada, a motion (M-103) was passed recently which directs the government to investigate and act against Islamophobia. Now, when I type that word, Islamophobia, on my computer, my spell-checker red flags it. Why? Because it’s not a real word. And that is the problem with M-103 — it uses a term which is not properly defined. What exactly is Islamophobia? If we break the word down and define the parts, it means: an irrational fear of the ideas of the Islamic religion.

When I encounter those who defend M-103, every time I find that they are unable to distinguish the idea which is Islam from the followers of Islam (Muslims). That’s an important distinction — one is an idea, and the other is a group of people. If we want to live in a free society we must be able to criticize ideas. Martin Luther created a freer society when he openly criticized the state of Christianity in his day. It was not easy for him to do that, and because he did, we now live in a society where we are free to criticize. But, for how long?

Listen to Canada’s Heritage Minister defend M-103 in this video. She only gets confused…

Another good example is the exchange between Ben Affleck and Sam Harris on the Bill Maher show…

Once upon a time there was a political party in Canada called the Progressive Conservatives. That sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s actually a very good term. Progressive conservatism is the idea that, while we do want to progress socially, we do not want to do so at the expense of the progress which has already been made. What has made the western world the best society to live in so far in human history? Where does our wealth come from? What economic system has allowed us to become so wealthy? (Hint: free market capitalism.) Where do our freedoms come from? What system of government has allowed us our freedoms? (Hint: a system in which the rights of the individual are elevated over the group.) We need to conserve those things and protect them from those who would dismantle them while trying to create their utopia in which no one will ever be offended.