The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Things I Have Learned: Chapel Talks
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking
March 18th, 2009
The Law of Thermodorknamics
I’m such a dork. No, really. I am. If you haven’t figured that out already. It’s okay because my parents — as lovely and as lovable as they are — are dorks too. So I come by it honestly. And they love me.
Maybe everybody’s a dork and only a few of us admit it and embrace it. . . . Yeah, that’s the one I’m going with.
I found some more proof of my dorkitude today although, to be honest, it was Junior High and everybody’s a dork in Junior High.
I found the signatures on the inside fly-leaf of my Bible.
Now, in 1980, this was the thing to do if you were a fundamentalist child (a.k.a. dork). A famous preacher/speaker came to your church (probably also a dork) and you race up afterward (very dorkily) to get his signature in your Bible.
I loved this little Bible. It was my 12th birthday present from my parents. It was red and had a snap cover. Cambridge. KJV, of course. I didn’t have a Scofield (new or old), but my parents did. Frankly, my parents had every translation known to the English and French and Polish world, but that’s why I love them too!
So look.
Stop laughing at my dorky stickers. Stickers were soooooooo I.T. in 1980. They had whole sticker stores in the mall. And that pizza one was scratch-n-sniff!
And the second page:
First, isn’t my mother’s handwriting lovely? Dad’s is too. Steve and I must be a throw-back to some primitive inscrutable scrawl.
Notice all the women I got too! Yeah for me. My silent-but-rebel mom probably encouraged that. Or my loud-and-rebel dad. Or both. My parents are gems.
But look at the first signature I got up there at the top — Beneth Peters Jones. I remember when I got that signature. She was promoting her (then) new book Beauty and the Best at a neighboring church, and, of course, I bought a copy! I remember the sweater I was wearing. I loved that sweater. It was pink fair isle that I got at American Eagle which was really cool back then (read: dorky) and not slutty like it is now (read: cool). Also let me say that while that particular sweater is long-gone, I now know exactly how they are knitted (in the round from the top down) and where you can find the math to make your own (Elizabeth Zimmerman) and that kids in British Isles learn to knit such things as they are walking around (because they have this belt that they can shove one needle in). But I’ve never actually knitted one (DORK!).
I was elated that I got her autograph that day! Really elated. She said something very polite — and she is an extremely gracious and hospitable lady — about it being new and how she liked the snap covers and all that. Bless her. Bless her for being so much a gentlewoman to a dorky 12-year-old.
Weird. All that she and I would share in the years to come but could never predict at that precise moment of my fawning dorkitude and her polite conversation. That my husband and I would travel with her husband and her to Mexico for 10 days (we were the singing side-kicks). That she would barely pass my grad project because she was uncomfortable with the topic (feminism!). That I, like her, would have a first born who was born still. And the rest, of course. . . . All the rest.
Look at those names. If those were the celebrities in my Junior High life, is it any wonder I became who I was? Several names are my pastors. Most of the others are evangelists or just guest speakers.
I got out my High School Bible too. We wear out our Bibles quickly in fundamentalism! It was smaller and not as fine but still KJV (my college Bible was so small that I had to hold it up right next to my nose to read it and it was NASV). It does have my Wordless Book bookmarks still in it because I was a CEF missionary for two summers, and I was prepared (kinda dorky). It has no signatures. I s’pose I had figured out it was a dorky thing to do.
Except for one thing is exactly the same and in the exactly same place — across from Genesis 1. From my Junior High Bible:
and in my High School Bible:
I remember why I wrote it the first time. I was told to! And I can probably take you right back there on 11-mile and Schoenherr and show you exactly where I was sitting in the front row (DORK!). Why did I think it was so important that I transferred that alone from one Bible to the next? I really don’t remember.
I’m glad that my High School self caught my Junior High mistake of “conversation” instead of “conservation” in that First Law. Whew!
Now, I know why these where there in that place — because I was a reared a Creationist through and through. Heck — I still have my Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter upstairs, the text that is most often referenced for its fallacies. I remember Science class in 7th grade. Most of our time was spent being told how wrong Carl Sagan got it on Nova the night before. It was our assignment to watch him and to deconstruct him the next day. None of us in that class will ever forget when Andrea Cloud unwittingly said the exact. wrong. thing. in response to Miss Westray’s question: “Miss Cloud. Do you agree with Mr. Sagan when he said that the Earth is billions and billions of years old?” To which Andrea shrugged, “Well, yeah. He’s on TV. So he must be right.” Oooooooh! We all felt her pain.
But I got this in Sunday School, not in Christian Day School. And uh . . . it’s curious.
The first law of thermodynamics is actually:
Energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed.
Seriously, why did my teacher leave out the first part? She got it from her pastor/husband, I’m sure. Why drop that?
And the second law of thermodynamics has to do with entropy and is best summarized as:
It is impossible for there to exist any process whose only effect is to transfer energy from a system at a low temperature to one at a higher temperature. In other words, heat flows downhill.
Creationists reason from that that everything tends toward disorder and randomness, and, thus, evolution defies that law. I’ll let the believing scientists deconstruct the fallacies in that Creationist criticism. I don’t really much care about the Science per se.
I care more about how that idea of the inevitability of disorder affects and infects the conservative Evangelical ideology. Everything and anything — if left alone — will deconstruct into chaos. At least that’s what I was taught. Work hard — very hard — and you can resist the inevitable decay. Effort can trump entropy. And if it doesn’t, if you fail, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or right enough.
And if we get it wrong in our hoist-them-on-their-own-petard mudball we lob at Science, how could it possibly be correct in our misunderstood application of this 2nd law to the Christian life? We are so infected with this same effort-can-trump-entropy trope. We actually believe past generations’ goofs are a result of their not working hard enough or smart enough or biblical enough.
We think we’re better. But we’re just as big a dorks as we always were. Just with more and more appeals to misunderstood laws, more and more effort, more and more rigidity, more and more illusions that our way is “biblical.” So the Law of Thermodorknamics could be:
The amount of effort is directly proportional to the dorky destructiveness of that effort.
March 18th, 2009
Amanda Says :
I couldn’t help but laugh as I read this post. I, too, have the autographed-by-random-fundy-preachers Bible (KJV, of course, though I didn’t get my first Cambridge until I was out of that phase), and was taught the same variations of the laws of thermodynamics. You were hardly alone in your dorkiness! (Of course, the mentality behind the concept of autographing Bibles is a whole other issue.)
“We are so infected with this same effort-can-trump-entropy trope. We actually believe past generations’ goofs are a result of their not working hard enough or smart enough or biblical enough.” Ouch, but I think you hit this one on the head.
March 18th, 2009
Dan Keller Says :
Excellent post. I remember holding these people in such awe as if they were somehow closer to God than I was. Like you, I learned how evolution violated the laws of thermodynamics. I couldn’t help but notice the Frank Garlock and Hamilton’s names, also. I imagine you also learned about the evils of rock music from FG and learned all the pirate songs, too. (I’m a little too old for the Patch.) It’s really weird – it doesn’t matter how far apart we former BJU’ers grew up, we all have such similar stories.
March 18th, 2009
The Bard Says :
I do remember the time when, in high school, I had my Bible (KJV, of course) signed by a bunch of “famous” figures in the Fundy world. At least Garlock wasn’t one of them.
A fair point, too, about the shoddy logic in some anti-evolutionist circles. As a proud nerd myself, I am all for better logic and accurately stating what the Laws of Thermodynamics really mean.
But I’m not completely on board with your last couple paragraphs (no surprise), or, perhaps, I’d just express similar conclusions in a different manner. I do think that, when left alone, everything inevitably leads to chaos and disorder. I don’t need science to tell me that. I don’t even need Scripture to tell me that. History tells me that.
What I need Scripture for is to tell me *why.* It’s called the Fall, and all of creation groans. Scripture also tells me that one day, all things will be made new. All things. I’ve been reading through Isaiah recently, and am rejoicing in just how new that new is going to be.
I never really taken that application of the Second Law as a bad thing. More importantly, I don’t believe (and perhaps that’s why I don’t always notice) the message that if things fall apart, it was because you didn’t work hard enough. The whole point is that *it doesn’t matter* what you do or don’t do. Somethings, things just fall apart because the world is cursed.
Nevertheless, neither the Curse nor the inevitability of failure make life meaningless or excuse inactivity. Enter the Doctrine of Vocation.
March 18th, 2009
cklewis Says :
It’s not so much that if left alone, things will decay (although I think nature does prove otherwise in many ways). But that effort does *stop* the inevitable. That’s a weird twist. And I think it might explain the elaborate and legalistic efforts to stop “decay.”
Here’s another way of looking at it. They say that if a parent “trains” his child to crawl up the stairs properly, he’ll learn to do so, on the average, at about 15 months. If a parent does not train the child to crawl up the stairs (say their home is on one floor or something like that), the child learns to do so, on the average, at about 15 months. :/
All this parenting stuff I’m reading insists that *effort* to train the child (to sleep, to eat, to potty train, etc.) will stop entropy and will produce a perfect (and Christian!) child.
Hogwash.
That’s all I’m saying.
March 19th, 2009
TulipGirl Says :
“autographed-by-random-fundy-preachers Bible. . “
*L* Oh, my. . . sometimes I get a glimpse of how different my basically-Christian-upbringing was radically different than yours in Fundamentalism. I was a dork, too. . . but. . . dodn’t have the Bible sigs and stickers to prove it.
March 23rd, 2009
Will Says :
Yeah, I actually had my Majesty Hymns hymnbook signed by Frankie. Oh dear. I don’t think I’ve ever admitted that in public before!
Regarding the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: I was sold on the talking points, but never convinced by this particular argument. That’s not to say I didn’t use it, I just always used it thinking, “Something’s not right here.”
I think I’ll start using the Law of Thermodorknamics instead.
March 25th, 2009
TulipGirl Says :
btw, just had to come back to say I *heart* your dorkiness. . .
March 25th, 2009
Becca Says :
Interesting that you bring up the snarky anti-evolutionism thing now. I was just in my parents’ church a few weeks ago and they had just had Ken Ham in for a conference (how’s that for a big fundy name?). Overnight the entire church, none of whom have more than a high school class or two of science under their belts, had firm and sophisticated understandings of everything from geology to thermodynamics.
What I found sad about this is that’s how I heard Genesis preached all growing up–and that’s not what Genesis is about. The first time I heard a sermon about Genesis was from Tim Keller–and he never mentioned evolution once! I felt cheated. Genesis 1 tells a beautiful story about who God is and what He is like and how He relates to us, and all this time I had completely missed it, distracted by anti-evolutionism and armchair science.
April 4th, 2009
carey Says :
This is so funny! I used to get my bible signed by any and every one who came to my fundy church.
When I was home at Christmas my mom wanted me to got through an old box of my things. I found the old bible I had everyone sign and some notes from a bible class. (how did I go 8 yrs. w/o those) Apparently I had used that bible through college as well. (how dorky is that??) I looked in the front cover and was surprised to find that several guys from my prayer group had signed it. I got a good laugh out of that. They had life verses and everything.
And what is the purpose of picking one verse out as a “life verse?”
April 13th, 2009
Christy Rood Says :
I just found your blog via a friend (Kay Bonikowsky). I’ve enjoyed reading it, and my Bible looks like a carbon copy of yours – Ron Hamilton, Frank Garlock, Bobs Jr. & 3rd, and the rest. So funny how we didn’t see that as hero worship. Arrgh. My Seattle friends have no clue the level of dorkiness I was raised in.