All of us are in the Dollhouse…

Have you watched the show “Dollhouse?”

In terms of plot, I think it’s only fair.  I’m going to give it a couple more chances, but most of my faith in the show is rooted in the fact that creator Joss Whedon has done some pretty amazing work.

And also, beneath the level of plot, there’s some interesting stuff going on.

The premise of the show is that there is this organization called the “Dollhouse.”  It possesses a group of people (mostly attractive young women) whose minds can be programmed with whatever memories and personalities high-paying clients wish for.

It’s a little less dirty than it sounds.

Somewhere, (embarassingly, it might have been Entertainment Weekly) I read that Joss Whedon almost always deals in subtext and symbolism.  The writer said that “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” explored adolescent angst by turning our private demons into demons of the more traditional sort.  “Firefly” was an exploration of the broken nuclear family.  I don’t remember if the writer said anything about “Angel” but I’d suggest that this show turns Buffy’s adolescent preocuppations into a focus on young adult concerns about vocation, duty, and balancing friendships and morality against career concerns.

And so this writer was wondering about “Dollhouse”.  And I think I get it.

On some level, the show is really about how persuing our own destiny rather than fufilling the roles that others prescribe for us.   One of my early criticisms of the show is that it’s hard to root for a main character who is basically a different person on every episode.  But what  they are starting to explore is ways that elements of the main character’s original personality poke through thedifferent  memories and characteristics they give her on each episode.

The shows title cues us into this theme, I suppose.  Are these characters more than just dolls in a dollhouse?  The main character’s “name” also feeds into this idea: they call her Echo.

I think that might be the most clever aspect of the whole thing.   Because “Echo” could evoke the echoes of her own personality breaking through.  Or it could refer to the idea that all she can do is “Echo” the traits that she’s programmed with.

There are interesting questions about person-hood and our intrinsic worth running around in all this.  And this sub-text kind-of redeems the fact that the shots inside the Dollhouse look a bit like pages torn from Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar. 

Is redeems the right word?  I enjoy beautiful women, so one one level I don’t mind them all wandering around with empty expressions on their faces.

But perhaps this is the point.  I don’t want to feed into the “I’m so beautiful, pity me” idea.  But there is something to all that.

Attractive young women are the ones who lives are the most like Dollhouse operatives.  We have these expectations we project onto them.  We expect them to perform in a certain way.  We try to force certain personality characteristics onto them…

It occurs to me that this show actually returns to some of the ground Whedon covered with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The movie that kicked the series off was pretty crappy,  but I think what Whedon was trying to do was consider this character who society tried to force into an empty, meaningless existence.  She was told that she should be a cheer leader and put socializing at the top of her list of priorities.  What she discovered was that she can resist this programming and find a world that is deep and complex and infinitely more rewarding.

A Theology of celery and ice cream Sundays.

Sometimes, my kids will want to eat more junk food than I want them to eat.  One of the ways they attempt to justify this will be to say “But I’ll have something healthy later.”

It seems built into us, this flawed way of thinking.  While I no longer think I can justify having a big, gooey Sunday by chasing it with a celery stalk or something, I do engage in similar mental gymnastics.  I think so many of us do.

When I do something I know is wrong I’ll justify it by planning on doing something which is exceptionally moral.  Or sometimes, I’ll put a twist on this.  I’ll do something wrong and then I’ll use this to get some good result… I cheat on my taxes, perhaps, but donate the money to a good charity.

We keep these mental score cards.  We think, at the end of the day, if we’ve shown a profit of goodness that we are a good person.  Somewhere deep down, we even maybe believe that this balance sheet will either get us into heaven or keep us out of heavan.

It occurred me today: part of this is rooted in the idea that Good and Evil are equal and opposites.

If Good and Evil were equal and opposite then the whole object of life would be to end up closer to the side we identify as “Good”.  The way we would ensure that this is where we are would be to total up all of the good things we do, subtract from them all the bad things we do, and hope we end up on the right side of the dividing line.

  There’s a variety of decent reasons to think that Good and Evil are equal and opposite.  But I’m not sure that any of these reasons are in the Bible.  I think, in fact, that scripture implies quite a different view.

The two biggest reasons that it seems like Evil and Good aren’t equal and opposite:

#1) Satan is Evil personified.  And yet he is created. 

#2) We are promised Good’s ultimate victory over evil.

Being created is in some ways inferior to being The Creator.  In this sense, Evil and Good do not seem equal.  And it seems to me that if you can guarentee one side’s victory over the other, then, furthermore, they weren’t really evenly balanced.

The only way to make sense of all this– and a variety of other philosophical issues– is to suggest (I think Augustine held this position) that evil is a lacking of Goodness.  In short, Evil isn’t equal to Good.  Evil is a lacking of good.

Dark and light (which are often used in the bible to stand for good and evil) actually share a similiar relationship.  At first glance, it might seem that dark and light are equal and opposite.

Yet, we can’t flick a switch and have darkness cast by a dark-bulb.  Darkness is simply the absence of light.  It isn’t really equal or opposite to light at all.  Dark is simply what happens when there is no light around.

I used to feel frustrated when Christians spoke about how God’s standard is perfection.   There are passages of scripture which are taken to mean that the only way to heaven outside of Jesus is total perfection.

If Good and evil are viewed as equal and oppsites, this doesn’t make a lot of sense.

But if God is the ultimate good, it suddenly does.  Because I can never be as good as God.  And perhaps this is Jesus meaning when he asked why someone called him good.  He said that only God is good.

We have the potential to be Godly.  It’s not a theoretical impossibility that we might be good as God, in the same way that’s it’s a theoretical impossibility that we’d be as wise or powerful as him.

But is a practical impossibility.  On the ground, we never make it work.

And so let’s go back to the celery and Sunday mentality.  The bottom line of why it is so silly:

We began with the idea that we might do something evil or immoral.  It is a thing occupying the country far from God.  It is a thing which has nothing to do with God.   In the same way that a giant gooey Sunday is so far from healthy, so too is our action so far from God.

The issue isn’t that it’s evil, really.  Evil is simply a lacking of Godlines.  The issue is that it’s far from God.

And a celery stick?  It’s closer to healthy.  But a celery stick isn’t the ultimate act of healthiness.  We can’t, in practice, engage in one ultimate act of healthiness.   We’re closer to healthiness, when we eat the celery, and it’s generally smarter to eat celery than Sundays, but  so what?  Eating the celery doesn’t erase the ice cream…

Nor do our attempts at engaging in Godly acts erase our ungodly ones.  Even if we could truly become Godly, even if we could engage in one single, supremely healthy act, even if there was some sort-of super food that instantly met all of our dietary requirements, it still wouldn’t erase the ice cream.

And so as I’m writing this I realize that this even begins to drift into the realm of faith vs. works.  Perhaps our faith can come closer to Godly perfection than our works can?  Maybe the reason that our hearts condition is so much more important than what we’re doing on the outside, is that God’s image resides in our hearts…

Heaven in a Body

“Surprised by Hope” by NT Wright is doing more than playing with my head.  It’s exploding my brains. 

He articulates some things that I’ve been trying to put words to.  I’ve bumbled around with ideas about how embodied and physical Christianity is.  I’ve babbled about how  our traditional disembodied ideas of heaven don’t seem biblical.

He pulls all this together.  I’ll share some quotes later.

Today, I was reading a passage where he repeated one of his main points.

The idea is that Jesus didn’t actually defeat death if the afterlife is this nonphysical place.  He accomodated, death, perhaps, but he didn’t defeat it, if we wander around, ghost-like, after death.

Rob Bell, Wright himself, and others emphasize the idea that Revelations describes the final end that we were promised in the Garden of Eden.  The whole of human history was just a back-pedal, a delay, in reaching our final destination. 

This seems so dead on to me: Adam and Eve would have participated in the city described in Revelations.  They would have gotten to it much sooner than the serpent.

And so it struck me, as I was reading the book today:

We have no problem imagining an embodied, physical existence for Adam and Eve.   Many people agree that through Jesus we’re heading to the final destiny intended for Adam and Eve.  But people struggle with the idea that we’ll be physical beings in this eternity…

This all leads to the question: If Adam and Eve hadn’t fallen, at what point would they have lost their physicality?  If Adam and Eve are physical… if the final desination is non-physical… if Adam and Eve were supposed to end up there.  They’d have had to suddenly (or gradually, I suppose) become ghost-like and nonphysical.

“Dad, let’s explore over here!”

My youngest son is 7.  He was born to be outside.  I think he’d be so happy if we lived in the country.  If he could just wander, wander, wander, from sun up until sun set, he would be at peace.  He’s an active guy, a do-er, an athlete.  He’s not always cut out for the demands of life today, in America, living in the city.

We had an oppurtunity to go hiking, just him and me, today.  We went to one of my favorite hiking places, Broad Meadow Brook, an Audobon Refuge.  I’m a pretty enviromentally conscious guy.  And the Audobon Society doesn’t fool around about what they are about.

As a result, I usually stay on the paths at Broad Meadow Brook.  It’s really best for nature if you do.  Too many people walking off the paths messes everything up.  I haven’t always been a trail follower.  I was an explorer, at heart, once, like my son.  I always feel like a bit of a weenie staying on the marked paths.  But I feel like a nature-hater when I do things that I know are wrong, like tromping around off the path.

Today, though, the paths were nothing but ice.  It was fascinating.  There was no ice to the left of the path.  There was no ice to the right of the path.  It was like somebody color blind tried to remake “The Wizard of Oz” …’follow the white slippery road!’

In short, walking on the path wasn’t an option. 

If you know me you’re probably expecting some sort of attempt at a deep metaphor, here.  Or maybe you’re thinking I’m going to make some sort of theological announcement.

That’s not really where I’m going, though.

There was this perfect, golden moment.  My little boy, he said “Dad, let’s explore over here.”

Every word in that sentence was just so precious.  Every word was better than the last.  When they are not whining, I could hear my kids say “dad” all day and never tire of it.  So the word “dad” is a pretty good place to begin.

With the word “let’s” it’s us together.  He’s pulling me into it.  It establishes our togetherness.

And how I could I resist the third word in that perfect sentence?  “Explore”.  Explore?  I love exploring!  And I can do it with out any tree-huggers guilt, because the path just isn’t an option!

O.K.  So the last two words kind of go together.  “Over here.”  He’s already worked out where it’s going to be.  It’s his game and he wants me in it…

Sometimes, it’s good to be a dad.

What have you read?

I found this list over here.  I thought it was worth reading.  I’m interested to hear your take on the list.  Which have you read?  Which am I missing out on? 

(A disclaimer: I have this block about reading stuff written between 1700 and 1900.  I don’t know why.   But if you reccomend anything written in that time period I’m not sure I’ll make it through.)   

 1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally up the ones you’ve read and put the number at the bottom

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien 
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowlin +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee x
6 The Bible x +
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell +
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy x
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller  *
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Read all the poems and about 7 of the plays.)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger + 
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot x
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald  +
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy x
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams x
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck  x
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll *
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis  +
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell  + 
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez x
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving x
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood x
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding +
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert +
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare +
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I read way more of the books in the first half of this list.  I wonder if the order is random.  (It was apparently compiled by the BBC)

O.K., so if you’re into challenging reading, your homework assignment is to read 1984, Hamlet and The Bible.  (Actually, even if you’re not into challenging reading you should read the bible.)

If you’re looking for stuff a bit more approachable, your homework assignment is to read The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, and Catcher in The Rye.

So, which books (either on this list or not) should I read?

The Love Potion

When I saw you at the bathroom sink

in front of the mirror-medicine cabinet

with the vial in your hands

and the ruby stain on your lips…

When I saw you,

I knew what it was that you were drinking.

But I asked you anyway.

And I wanted you to lie to me.

So that I could half believe you.

 

But you told me what I already knew, damn you.

You spoke the truth in our cramped little bathroom.

You told me it was a love potion. 

And you shrugged your shoulders.

 

I didn’t say “If that’s a love potion,

then it was all a love potion.”

Because I new that you would not understand.

And this realization, it curdled my anger

into this heart sadness.

 

“What recipe did you use?”

I ask it because something terrible will happen in the silence if I do not kill it.

 

“Crushed fairy heart.  I mix it with sherry to cover the taste.” You say.

I know, as if in a dream how it happened.

 

You were always so good at seeing fairies.

And equally good at not believing in them.

When you saw one, frolicking perhaps in the garden.

And turned all your powers of disbelief on the thing.

It’s little body must have freezed up like a suddenly dead transmission.

I do not imagine how you disected the beautiful naked little thing

on the kitchen table.

I do not imagine how you plucked a tiny heart, still-warm, out of the chest.

In order that you might love me.

 

Instead I remember this time that we were laying in bed.

I remember how you laughed when I told you

about how I hated that you can buy muffin tops with out the rest of the muffin.

 

You said, “Muffin tops are a step in the right direction.”

“But the thing is this: It’s not the whole muffin top that is good…

It’s really the top of the muffin top… If somebody would just

skim off that upper skin…

If somebody would only sell me a muffin top-top….

That, I would pay good money for.”

 

I didn’t tell you about how there could be a whole mountain of muffin bottoms.

I didn’t tell you about how the Grim Reaper in a dopey chef’s hat

might disconnect the muffin top from bottom.

I could say that you would not have understood.

But the truth is I didn’t either.

 

Back then, before I caught you.

Drinking the love potion.

I did not understand why the muffin top thing,

it bothered me so much.

 

But now I understand…

That we don’t always pay in money for things.

But everything demands a price.

There are small prices and there are big prices.

But if you didn’t pay for a thing

then you stole it.

 

I try to explain it to you.

“It’s the muffin thing, don’t you get it?

I think that I enjoy the muffin top of a real muffin more than you do.”

 

“What are you talking about?” You say. 

You wipe the little red stain off your chin with a piece of toilet paper.

 

“I’ve earned the right to the best part of it by eating my way through the rest of it.” I say.

 

And you hold out the bottle to me. 

I think, absurdly, or Romeo and Juliet.

At the end.

 

“This is distilled love.” You tell me.  “I’d like to share it with you.”

 

“There is no such thing as distilled love.” I say,

but then I drink it because I have nothing else.

 

It is sweet.

Do you speak with with faltering lips?

Before today, I somehow missed something.   You know Moses?  He’s kind of whiny.

When he first meets with God, he whines until God is frustrated with him.  He lets Moses use Aaron to help him out.  And even after this, he continues to whine about his “faltering lips” on multiple occasions.

There are some who believe that Moses had a speech impediment, perhaps a stutter.  I don’t want to minimize the way that a disabality can impact your life.  I suffer from a learning disabality, and one of the few things that makes me want to punch other people is when they say hurtful or ignorant things about learning disabalities.

But contemplating this has lead me to some insight in areas that are our responsibility.

From a rational stand point, if the creator of the universe says he’s got a plan for us, doesn’t it make sense to think He probably knows about our limitations?

As I pondered all this, I realized how this must all look to God.  I realized that I complain about my faltering lips all the time.   A stutter or other speech impediment would not be under Moses control.  But many things which prevent us from serving God, these things are our responsibility.

I have made decisions which lead to who I am.  Some of the decisions are not the decisions God would have wanted me to make.  They have lead, to some extent, to me not being the person God wants me to be.  For example, I have not been as confrtonational in my life as I should.  When God calls me out toward bravery, my faltering lips is my cowardice.

I have made decisions which have put me where I am.  And I am not in the place God wants me to be.  For example, when God calls on me to give more financially, I have nothing to give.

When my students don’t do their homework, they inevitably aren’t ready for the quizzes.   They don’t learn the things I want them to learn.  When it comes time for the quiz, they say “I don’t know this.”  And they want me to fix it.  They want me to give them a hint, they want me to remind them.  They are complaining of their faltering lips. 

If I had done what I was supposed to do… if my students had done what they were supposed to do… we would be positioned to step up for God and continue his mission for us.

What about you?  What are some of the areas that God is calling you to and you’re claiming you have faltering lips?

Distorted

When they first began listening,

They heard this buzz.

Or perhaps detected this warmth.

Or registered this radiation.

 

(I do not understand the difference.

Those astrophysisists…

They have too much the poet in them.

Or not enough.)

 

Whatever it was.

It was not what they expected to be.

They hypothesized all sorts of things.

Even pigeon droppings on the radar.

 

(Addmitedly, it’s not a particularly poetic explanation,

the idea of pigeon droppings on the radar.)

 

They came

To understand

That this is the remnant-echo

Of the big bang itself.

 

This left over hang over

Distorted across the eons of eons.

The light years of light years.

But still, here.

 

There is something in me.

 

A buzz.

A burning.

A spike of radiation.

 

There is this background hue

To the color of my life.

 

There is this sadness.

 

It is an ancestral thing.

It is an omnipresent thing.

It is inescapable.

 

There was this garden once.

There was this fruit once.

 

They ground the flesh of the thing

They had been told not to eat

Between their virgin teeth.

 

What that fruit once was

Distorted.

And it entered into them.

It lives between

The X and the Y Chromosome.

 

And it is waiting.

Waiting

And waiting.

 

It is an egg.  Though.

And it will hatch someday.

And the bird inside will fly away.

When He returns. 

The difference between a tragedy and a comedy

I was reading a post over at Jeff Goins outstanding blog.  (See the blog roll.)

He was exploring the necessity and value of failure.  And it occured to me:

The only difference between a comedy, a tragedy, and an inspirational story is the last scene in the movie. 

Consider the story of Joseph.  If you ended the story with Joseph in jail, it’d be a tragedy.  If you ended it with the scene where he’s messing with his brothers, it’d be a black comedy.  If you ended it where the story ends, it’s inspirational.

Or think about Jesus himself.  If the scriptures ended with the apostles getting the temple tax out of the gut of a fish, it’d be comedy.  If they ended at the crucifiction, it’d be tragedy.  But it ends after the reseruction: it’s life-changing.

Our lives are not stories.  Except that they are.

And we can end them quite clearly and dramatically through suicide.  But we can also engage in psuedocide.  (Cool word, huh?)  Pseudocide is choosing to end the epic story even if our lives go on.  Pseudocide is giving up and giving in.

We can’t extend the story of our lives longer than we’re given.  But we can shorten it.   Moses could have resisted God’s call to return to Israel.  Elijah could have ignored God’s nurturning.  Joseph could have stayed in prison.

I am like you.  I have these frustrations and these challenges.  And so do you. If my story ended today, it would be a tragedy, I think.   Maybe yours would be too.

We can choose to end our stories.  We can choose for them to be tragedies.  But if we don’t, who knows what they might become.

“What a cute little baby” Says the genocidal maniacs

Chapters 1 and 2 of Exodus would be kind-of funny, if the stakes weren’t so high.

Joseph’s brothers and family had moved to Egypt.  They’d moved there after being promised by God that they would have countless decendants who would come to be important in the world.

When a new pharoah took power, all the things that Joseph had done were quickly forgotten.  The Egyptians began to fear the Hebrews as there numbers grew.

I’ve read secular history accounts about this time that state that Egypt had been an occupied power.  They’d been taken over and virtually enslaved.  When they got free they entered into this nationalistic, xenophobic stage.

I don’t remember the details.  I can’t cite a source.  And I have no idea how the Hebrew population in Egypt fared through this period of captivity.  So I’d be far from prepared to bet my life on any of this.  But this is all a kind-of interesting side-note, anyway.

The thing that’s almost funny is this:

The Egyptians couldn’t stop God.

Of course, that’s a ridiculously obvious sentence.  None of us can stop God.  But it’s funny, too, in a way.   Exodus states that they tried to turn midwives into collaborators.  They tried to beat them down through their slavery.  They engaged in the murder of the male children.

None of it worked: the Hebrew population grew, and grew, and grew.

And as they grew increasingly extreme in how they solved this “problem” one Hebrew mother engaged in a pretty interesting scheme.  She arranged for her baby to land in the laps of the Egyptian royalty.

I can only assume the queen and the princess new what was going on.  At the very moment they were speaking Hebrew babies were being killed.  Who knows if they were completely o.k. with this situation?  At the bare minimum though, they accepted it.

From the very first moment they set eyes on Moses, they recognized him as a Hebrew.  And they accepted him.  They raised him as their own.  There is no record as to whether they recognized the wierdness of their situation:

In the abstract, it was permissable to allow all of the Hebrew babies to be slaughtered.  But when they were confronted with one concrete little baby, he not only deserved to be allowed to live.  He deserved to be raised in the richest and most powerful house for thousands of miles.

The root of hatred, prejudice, and even genocide is in seeing other human beings as an abstraction.  When we are confronted with the concrete reality, the uniqueness of others, it becomes so much more difficult to hate.