Now and then another bud unfolds

Now and then another bud unfolds April 24, 2015

• New York City has just banned the Kafka-esque practice of using credit checks to evaluate job applicants. Now, in NYC at least, you can no longer be denied a job because you need a job.

The use of “credit scores” in hiring would be indefensible even if those scores were accurate. But those scores are not accurate — that’s the foundation of the credit-scoring agencies’ business model. If their “scores” were accurate, they wouldn’t be able to charge you a monthly fee for the opportunity to monitor and correct your credit score yourself.

• Kyle York’s “Lesser-Known Trolley Problem Variations” at McSweeney’s. Brilliant. Here’s York’s last one:

There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards Immanuel Kant. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley’s path so it hits Jeremy Bentham instead. Jeremy Bentham clutches the only existing copy of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Kant holds the only existing copy of Bentham’s The Principles of Morals and Legislation. Both of them are shouting at you that they have recently started to reconsider their ethical stances.

Yeah, maybe elaborately constructed and convoluted, semi-sadistic analogies aren’t always helpful for ethical reflection.

But the infamous Trolley Problem — and all of its variations — isn’t just for philosophers and ethicists playing a hypothetical chess game between Kantians and utilitarians. It’s also the stuff of evangelical sermon illustrations in which these academic what-ifs tend to mutate into urban legends presented as actual events. The point of those legends is always to suggest that God is the one working the lever, and that he switched the trolley’s path so that it struck and killed Jesus instead of you.

Gatsby
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Ugh. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to summarize the gospel as “God is a lethally incompetent railway worker.”

• “One of Monday’s Pulitzer Prize Winners Left Journalism Because It Couldn’t Pay His Rent. Now He’s in PR.”

• “Also, too, ‘fellowship hall’ still sounds like a sex room, if you think about it for a minute.”

Post-Hobby Lobby, the courts have determined that sincerity and honesty are irrelevant when it comes to legal religious exemptions. That invites and incentivizes the kind of disingenuous mischief-making we see here from the Tennessee swinger’s club attempting to reclassify itself as a church so that it can get by local zoning laws. It’s brazenly transparent nonsense — but if the same standard applies to them that was applied to the patently disingenuous religious claims of Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College, then these swingers should be allowed to swing away in their self-proclaimed “church.”

• “It’s Tinder … for Christians,” Hemant Mehta writes, charitably describing the new evangelical hook-up app “Collide.” I think “Grindr for Christians” might be more accurate.

This seems to really be a real thing, even though I can’t quite accept that it is. Collide lets users filter by age, location and denomination. And along with a photo, it provides the reference of a “favorite Bible verse” for each prospective partner.

Please, please, please someone get an account for this and list Ruth 3:4 as your favorite verse.

• “Judith on a Pasta Label” makes about as much sense as putting a picture of Jael on a carton of milk. “Organic tomato & porcini mushroom sauce” sounds delicious, but I prefer my pasta with a bit less of Holofernes’ blood in it.


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