Doug Anderson: Embracing Imperfection

I knew it would happen sooner or later. Now someone is claiming that Mother Teresa was a bitch. I think that we create problems for ourselves when we imagine that there are perfect people. There are no perfect people. Saints are characters in religious literature.

The same with orthodox PC: we admire Aquinas’ philosophical mind and then are appalled at his stupidity about women. And so we dismiss him. We love the poems of Yeats and then we find out he liked Mussolini (as did Bernard Shaw and many others before they got what he was really up to).

What is true is that people can make great contributions warts and all, and some of the warts are considerable.

Nothing is more comic that a bunch of privileged white people sitting around trying to catch one another at some minor infraction of this or that PC code. They’re like the televangelist who gets busted in the back of the limo with a transvestite. Sooner or later the perfect will crash. Their other choice is to lock themselves up in a room somewhere so they won’t have to encounter life and thus be caught out doing something imperfect.

Jesus walked among thieves and murderers. And yet contemporary iterations of Christianity claim that we’ll go to Hell for masturbating. The morality police in Iran whipped a woman for “eating an apple too seductively.” The list is endless.

The solution is to embrace imperfection. That’s what we are. We forgive ourselves and get on with our day.

So be it.

PS we don’t have to forgive ourselves for masturbating.

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Copyright 2016 Doug Anderson.