Symbols and Identity

My wife and I worked hard for several months on various things without much of a break and we could get away for a day or so.  Utah is a beautiful state.  Little did Brigham Young know, when he said, "This is the place," that it meant five national parks, two of which are thirty minutes apart, Arches and Canyonlands.  They both deserve national park status.

Arches especially means hiking, because you've got to hike to see the greatest scenes.  They laid these out with well done trails.  My wife and I walked miles, people passing us, we passing people, people walking along side of us, and crowds of people together with us looking at amazing views.

I want to take this moment to announce a trigger warning.  Trigger warning to women.  I'm preparing to talk about women wearing skirts or dresses.  In all of those hours, besides my wife, I never saw another skirt.  Not a single other woman in the entire time we were at those two national parks did I see a woman in a skirt or a dress.

I did see many women in skin tight leggings or pants.  Loose ones too.  The temperatures were cool, so there weren't so many shorts, but there were even some of those worn only by women, none by men.

A big occurrence this Sunday night before my wife and I left on our trip was the Academy Awards in Hollywood.  My phone notified me that Will Smith punched Chris Rock.  It came with an unedited video.

The comedian Chris Rock, who apparently hosted the show, added an ad lib joke about Smith's wife, Jada, an actress sitting with Will Smith, who suffers from a hair loss disease.  She's essentially bald, and Rock sarcastically joked about her upcoming appearance in G. I. Jane, making fun of her hairless state.  Some might call this joke, tasteless, because it made fun of a woman's medical condition over which she has no control.  In other words, it's not funny to joke about that, or it shouldn't be.  It's off limits.

Whether you think it was right for Smith to walk to slap Rock onstage in what some might think a chivalrous manner, it's an issue of women's hair length.  Someone in Hollywood slapped someone else for making fun of a woman's hair length.  Being called a "G. I. Jane" was insulting.  None of this means anything if hair length on a woman isn't a symbol of identity, like a skirt or dress is a symbol of identity.

The Bible mentions visible symbols as they relate to identity.  People know they matter.  It's why you see a transgender "woman," biological male, wearing a dress.  The dress is a symbol, as is hair.  "Look at me, I'm a woman."

The girl, who wants to be a boy or thinks of herself as a boy, wants to get rid of her breasts.  Or she prevents them with hormone blockers.  The boy, who wants to be a girl or thinks of himself as a girl, wants those breasts.  Breasts are symbols, even if they don't function except as a symbol.  The Bible treats any kind of reversal of these symbols as an abomination and against nature.  It's also the view held by professing Christians through their entire history until very recently, and one never rescinded by God.

The symbols that speak of identity are not arbitrary symbols.  They aren't a social construct.  They are the "laws of nature and nature's God" of the Declaration of Independence.  Writing about this in 1762, Abraham Williams of Boston said:

The law of nature (or those rules of behavior which the Nature God has given men, . . . fit and necessary to the welfare of mankind) is the law and will of the God of nature, which all men are obliged to obey. . . . The law of nature, which is the Constitution of the God of nature, is universally obliging. It varies not with men's humors or interests, but is immutable as the relations of things.

Rebellion against the laws of nature is rebellion against God in a fundamental or root manner.  The person violating these laws involves himself in a personal offense against the nature of God.  In many of these instances, especially the ones I'm describing, they become an abomination to Him.  You can deny that, but you'll still face God.

Our world reacts to symbols.  The Swastika.  The Hammer and Sickle.  The Gay Flag.  Men wearing skirts.  The symbols mark identity in an elemental way.

The downfall on identity began first with the abdication and then the repudiation of symbols.  Identity confusion and chaos starts with renouncing the symbols.  If you think they're meaningless, then why do they trigger such strong reactions?