Teaching Luxury

By now I'm sure you all know that I'm a giant nerd so I suppose I have nothing to hide.

Lately I've been watching Ray Mears' documentary series, "World of Survival." In this series he travels around the world and spends time with people groups that still live off the land and he learns about their survival skills. He covers a lot of ground; from the Inuit in northern Labrador to tribes in the Amazon, head-hunters in Indonesia, and the Aborigines in the Australian Outback. I think it's pretty sweet.

Anyway, I was recently watching an episode on a tribe of nomadic people in Siberia. You can watch the pertinent clip here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yicexqTSKi4 . As a parent I was intrigued by the section from about 0:20-1:30.
Ray's comment about the children only rarely crying really struck me. According to the prominent Western worldview you'd think that if anyone had something to cry about those kids would have it.

Just think about it... these kids live in SIBERIA. And then on top of that they have no toys, no 'home' (just a big canvas tent), nothing but the most basic of foods, and get tossed around on the back of a reindeer for hours/days at a time.

Yet they seem completely content.

That got me thinking. They have no sense of luxury and thus make no demands for it.

How often do I ask Kaleb, "What do you want?" By doing this am I giving him the opportunity for discontent?

To what extent should I, as a parent, say "this is what you can have" rather than "is this what you would like?"

Juanita and I have had a number of discussions around this topic even before we had Kaleb, but I'd like your take on it.

Do we teach/instill the concept of luxury on our children?
...on ourselves?


And here are a few pictures of my progress making Diamond Willow walking sticks. Below is a big staff parially stripped of its bark.
On the left is a completed Walking Stick that my dad gave me a few years back. In the middle is one of mine that has been completely stripped and partially sanded. On the right is the big staff stripped of all its bark except for the 'diamond' knots.

The Ethics of Camping.

Well, I'm back from holidays and ready for fall... or at least I hope so.

This last weekend Juanita, Kaleb, and I were in Alberta (Red Lodge Provincial Park) for a family camp-out/reunion. We actually had every single person from 3 generations of my mom's (Klassen) side of the family there. Good times.

Anyway, as I mentioned, this was a camping trip. I love camping. I love the simplicity of it: nature, close friends/family, camp fires, waking up with the sun and getting bacon and eggs going on the camp stove; I love the sound of crackling bacon in the morning... and then some good strong tea or coffee... ahhh!

So as we were driving out to Alberta this thought struck me: everything that I need to survive is with me here in my car. In our little Mazda Protege there was me, my wife, and my son and all of the things that we would need to live a simple but completely satisfactory life.

In North America there are millions of people like me who will, for fun, simplify their lifestyle for a week or two each summer. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the population of this earth lives like this (or far worse) out of necessity.

Maybe there's something wrong with my brain when I start questioning the ethics behind camping. I think maybe Juanita thinks there's something wrong with me...

What do you think? (about camping, not my sanity)

What do you love (or hate) about camping?

Oh, yeah... in my opinion RVing is completely different than camping. I say that small campers and tent trailers still count as camping but anything beyond that is just cheating (and taking up valuable campsites for me and my tent)!

While we were there we found some nice diamond willow and so as a little project I cut a good length and have been hand carving myself a walking stick that will, hopefully, end up looking something like these.

Rights vs Responsibilities

The comments from the previous post have taken us here:

I believe that our society is WAY out of balance. Everything is weighted toward the "rights" side of things with barely any emphasis on the "responsibilities" side.

Do you agree? In what areas of life do you see this?

Check out this section from the Canadian Bill of Rights (as taken from http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/showdoc/cs/C-12.3///en?page=1)

Recognition and declaration of rights and freedoms
1. It is hereby recognized and declared that in Canada there have existed and shall continue to exist without discrimination by reason of race, national origin, colour, religion or sex, the following human rights and fundamental freedoms, namely,
(a) the right of the individual to life, liberty, security of the person and enjoyment of property, and the right not to be deprived thereof except by due process of law;
(b) the right of the individual to equality before the law and the protection of the law;
(c) freedom of religion;
(d) freedom of speech;
(e) freedom of assembly and association; and
(f) freedom of the press.

[all emphasis mine]

Language is a delightfully (or maybe despicably) subtle thing.

We often speak of the "right of the individual" but where is the responsibility of the individual? I remember reading in Meic Pearce's book, Why the Rest Hates the West, how we usually state our rights in the first person ("I have the right to...") while responsibilities are stated neutrally...

ie) Instead of saying, "I have the responsibility to feed the poor" we might say, "the poor must be fed." Subtle linguistic changes like this create a culture where we can push aside our Biblically mandated responsibilities (like taking care of the poor) to someone else; I have rights, while responsibilities simply must be done... by who? I dunno, but not me.

Do you see this displayed in your life?

What other conflicts between rights and responsibilities can you think of?

How does our discussion around Wants vs Needs tie in?

How does Philippians 2:5-11 play into this?

Want vs. Need: human rights

"It is easy... to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it." (Krakauer 155)


Stop and think about that one for a moment.

How much of society do you think lives with underlying assumptions like this?
How many of us are guilty of thinking this way sometimes?

I think part of the cause of this is the Western world's over-emphasis on "rights." We live in a culture that emphasizes "rights" more than "responsibilities." This has taken us so far that we rarely consider the fact that it is almost impossible for us to exercise our "God-given right[s]" without us infringing on someone else's.

How do you see this truth (assuming that it is true; feel free to argue) displayed in the world around us?



Check out the United Nations "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" . Below I have included Article 25, point 1.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family [my emphasis], including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.


I think, as North Americans as a whole, we have replaced "adequate" with "superfluous" ... and maybe we could add, "and the right to remain blissfully ignorant of the consequences of us exercising our 'rights'; which are really mostly wants." Or maybe that's just me.

But enough of me rambling off on my (possibly ill-founded) opinions.

What would be a Biblical basis for human rights?

Just to start us off, I think the foundation for human rights needs to come from Genesis 1:27:
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them. (ESV)

What other scriptures can you think of that pertain to this whole discussion of human rights and needs vs wants?

Want vs. Need

I was talking with some good friends last night and as we were finalizing our plans to solve all of the problems in the world we were reminded of how brilliant Lesslie Newbigin was. He wrote some unbelievably profound critiques of Post-Modernism, Secularism, and Capitalism. He was, without a doubt, one of the most notable theologians of the recent past.

I don't know (I'd have to read more) that Newbigin was completely against all forms of Capitalism, but he diagnosed the problem of capitalism as coming from a shift from "distribution to production." When stuff is produced to fulfill the wants of one segment of society instead of fulfilling the needs of another segment of society simply because it is more profitable, we know that we have a problem; a serious problem.


Newbigin says that with much of Capitalism: "...growth is for the sake of growth and is not determined by any overarching social purpose. And that, of course, is the exact account of the phenomenon which, when it occurs in the human body, is called cancer. In the long perspective of history it would be difficult to deny that the exuberant capitalism of the past 250 years will be diagnosed in the future as a desperately dangerous case of cancer in the body of human society -- if indeed this cancer has not been terminal and there are actually survivors around to make the diagnosis..."

Is that overstating the problem (or understating it)?
Do you have difficulty discerning what is a NEED and what is a WANT in your life?
Have you ever had the desire to simplify your life?